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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I certainly sympathize with this patient, but at the same time I'm not a fan of the news media's quest to find some of the biggest outliers possible (preferably one that includes an incredibly sympathetic, tear-jerking protagonist) to somehow use that as an example of "Big Company Being Mean".

It reminds me of a bunch of articles recently that were like "Pregnant mom laid off from company!" I mean, when a company lays off thousands of people, of course you'd expect there to be at least one pregnant woman in the mix. Or was the article somehow arguing pregnant women should be immune from layoffs?

To be clear, I'm not commenting one way or another on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of Netflix's new password sharing policy. Just saying that finding these types of cases doesn't make me change my opinion one way or the other in how I think about the issue.

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> at the same time I'm not a fan of the news media's quest to find some of the biggest outliers possible

I don't consider being in the hospital wanting to watch Netflix to actually be that much of an outlier. It's pretty common and I know for certain that I'd want to do it (along with many many others) if I were in that situation.

Being in the hospital for 5 months straight, without ever having the capability to have your device synced with your home wifi, certainly is.

in germany, when doing layoffs, plans need to be submitted and in most cases when it exceeds a certain %, the company must rank people from most to least vulnerable, so pregnant women, people with dependents and older employees are not the first to get the boot

Huh, turns out even Germany has little confidence in their own state run social welfare systems. Makes sense I guess.

Or looked at from a different angle, Germany cares about its population enough to want to try to protect people in multiple ways rather than with a single point of failure.

> Or looked at from a different angle,

That's the same way of looking at it.

> Germany cares about its population enough to want to try to protect people in multiple ways rather than with a single point of failure.

Indeed, you're getting to the root cause of why the hallmark of government enterprise is incompetence, corruption, and inefficiency.

I thought in most countries of Europe laying off pregnant employees was just not possible. It's the case in France ah least.

It seems like that would lead to Schrödinger’s womb. You could always have a “miscarriage” after.

It's not based on whatever the employee says, we have doctors and certificates. That's also how the employer knows there have to give maternal leave, etc.

The trick is in not linking healthcare coverage to employment.

I believe trick in Germany is to formally tell them you are pregnant before they try to fire you / pass over you for promotions etc.

Tell them too early and you risk discrimination, tell them too late and you risk missing out on legal protection.

While the goal sounds admirable, it seems like it would inevitably mean discriminating against young, child-free employees.

The ones most likely to find a new job quickly, yes.

Unless they rush to have "safety" kids first, that is.

Didn’t work for Elizabeth Holmes. But maybe encouraging pro-natalism isn’t such a bad thing.

Also usually the ones doing most of the work in a company and have the most flexible schedule.

Germany is very unfavourable for (young) childless professionals. We see a massive brain drain of highly educated Germans to Switzerland.

But isn't a valid argument against Netflix's policy that there are a huge number of edge cases, which their previously policy automatically handled. Now they are trying to enumerate the good edge cases, which is bound to go poorly at first, and is thus a bad policy.

The media has one job: to define the Overton Window. You do that by reporting outliers.

It's a feature, not a bug.

<rant> Maybe the underlying theme of the story is that every tech monstrosity needs a real, live customer service department that contains real, live human beings who have the real, live time & motivation to address the needs of outlying cases. HN has had plenty of stories about people getting screwed over by robo-algorithms at tech monstrosities X, Y, and Z, and coming here to shout into the darkness, hoping that some HN reader can assist, because the tech monstrosity is just a mindless capitalist construct running on autopilot, vacuuming up revenue. </rant>

We are all AI, receptive to specific prompts.

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