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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue here is a corporate kind of mens rea. It’s seemingly fine under capitalism to incidentally kill your competitors in the process of making your customers happy. It’s not fine to set out with the explicit goal of killing your competitors. And so, any mention of your being aware that you’re killing your competitors, hints that you might be intentionally killing them while just feigning ignorance.

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Exactly this. Even though we were engaging in regular competition, us simply mentioning that we wanted to "kill them" or "wipe them out" could be falsely construed as us trying to use illegal means to do so, which we weren't.

And that's the point. Lawyers can twist things written in emails to be whatever they want. People who say "if you're not doing anything illegal, then you have nothing to hide" has never been at the hands of a witch hunt. I have a friend who lived in the US on F1 and H1B for over 10 years and was banned from entering the US over jokes with her ex-bf about marrying for a green card.

Yes. And discovery in these trials is performed via keyword matching so you have to assume that every email is going to end up on a giant projector screen in front of a jury who might not understand that Bob’s enthusiasm for destroying the competition is Bob’s quirky bombastic communication style rather than a business strategy.

> And discovery in these trials is performed via keyword matching

Don’t worry, soon it’ll get done by AI instead and it’ll match on “acceptable” language too.

> I have a friend who lived in the US on F1 and H1B for over 10 years and was banned from entering the US over jokes with her ex-bf about marrying for a green card.

That's insane, especially after her being in the US for 10+ years and having established a life there. Sorry to go off-topic, but I have a friend whose SO is on a work visa and they have joked about the marrying for a green card thing before (a very common joke it seems). How did the government find out about the joke? (in-person, through texts, etc.) I ask because I wouldn't want the same to happen to them and to caution them.

> It’s not fine to set out with the explicit goal of killing your competitors.

What? That's also fine.

I meant “in the implicit context of having successfully destroyed all your competitors [potentially by doing things other than just selling a better product, harder], and then being put on trial for anti-trust allegations.”

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