7 ms·
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with
by notacoward 10y ago
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point.
My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.
- danenania 10y agoYou talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
- mk89 10y agoindeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)
- ryanlol 10y agoPossibly. However tax evasion and avoidance are often confused, for a public company not avoiding taxes would most certainly be an ethical violation.
- jrowley 10y agoWhile a public company answers to it's shareholders, it also has a responsibility to support the community it lives within, because often success can be directly attributed to where the company started. Aggressively avoiding taxes could very well be considered unethical by some parties.
- Phlarp 10y agoSome may consider avoiding taxes to be unethical, others might say not avoiding them would violate a fiduciary duty.
- reitanqild 10y agoFrom my very minimal accounting course I remember my teacher, who was serving as part of the tax appeals board at the time, telling us that we were allowed to use any opening in the law to save tax but we were not allowed to lie.
- Phlarp 10y agoThe intent of my comment was to draw attention to the other side of this coin. >You are allowed to use any opening in the law to save on taxes, but not lie. The other side of that is: If you (as a C(ETF)O of a company) do not use every opening in the law to save on taxes you may be violating a fiduciary duty to your shareholders.
- hguant 10y agoWell, by definition yes. Tax evasion and tax fraud are equivalent. I think you mean tax avoidance, which is quite a different matter. While there's a lot of debate on the matter, in the United States at least, the general rule of thumb was laid down in 1934, and is as follows. > Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes -- Judge Learned Hand
- pyrophane 10y agoYea, good point. We live in an age when a whole set of duplicitous practices are now just referred to as "growth hacking"
- busterarm 10y agoUgh, the number of dark patterns trying to cost me money just to purchase a damned ticket on Ticketbastards today. Seriously by not clicking the right boxes I could have agreed to pay an extra $42 in add-ons/services for a $15 ticket that had its own $6 in fees added.
- kbenson 10y agoFor Ticketmaster? That's odd, I deal with them quite a bit, and while they've definitely got a racket going on, usually they aren't opting you in for extra stuff (because you'll juts call to complain to their support and get it changed). I have seen them accidentally auto-select certain additions before, but that was a non-standard option on that event, and it was definitely a mistake.
- busterarm 10y agoThey like to do things where they offer you something with a yes/no option but don't explain that it's an offer (no call to action or question) and put the price of the service in the smallest text possible.
- kbenson 10y agoOh, I would believe that. They'll make it easy for you to add charges on, and make it confusing as to whether it charges you (if you aren't familiar with the page), they just don't generally have them defaulted to on in my experience (and I buy a lot of tickets from them). They're very good at being just annoying enough to use that you don't like them, but generally not so annoying that you'll refuse to use them, which combined with their existing market dominance keeps them on top.
- 10y ago
- toyg 10y agoOr rather "many big $biz_sector companies".
- amelius 10y agoThe problem is that when some manager asks to work on something unethical, the technical people fall over eachother in trying to implement it first. Lesson: not everything which can be implemented should. And elegant solutions to unethical problems are still ugly.
- flamingbuffalo 10y agoreminds me of this: https://deardesignstudent.com/in-praise-of-the-ak-47-a24cc8a46c13#.it9hnwo8q https://deardesignstudent.com/in-praise-of-the-ak-47-a24cc8a...
- e12e 10y agoWell, Total Information Awareness won't build itself, you know. Not yet, anyway.
- soheil 10y agoYou lost your appetite because you thought someone was a spammer? There are a lot of companies that perform much worse ethical behavior that spamming (e.g. LinkedIn's existence is thanks to unwanted invite request sent to all your contacts, SocialCam abused Facebook OpenGraph so heavily they had to shut it down.) Just because they get away with it in secrecy doesn't mean it's not happening. So you can pretend you live in a world where majority of people are saints or their crimes are not as bad as something that is demonized heavily in public like email spamming but then again we why would you.
- notacoward 10y agoDid you miss the part where I mentioned malware authors and identity thieves? They're far worse even than LinkedIn or SocialCam, but hierarchies of evil aren't the point. It doesn't matter whether spamming or spying or stealing is worse. I don't want to spend time with any of them, but the point is that they're not easily recognizable. I was refuting the "how could you not know" assumption that bad actors look or smell bad (or something) so that they're easy to spot. I'm not pretending anything, and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make up things for others to say just so you can disagree or condescend.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]