5 ms·

Inexcusable. Sad. Horrible. The two questions in my mind are: First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company

by cs702 6y ago

Inexcusable. Sad. Horrible. The two questions in my mind are: First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-by-night operators in a shady part of town. We're talking about a well-known publicly traded company that is a component of the S&P 500 with a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. Auntie Tilly would be delighted to hear her niece got a job offer at eBay after college. Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity") representative of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? Or is eBay just an exception, the proverbial bad apple in a basket of mostly good apples? I would hope it's the latter.

sunstone 6y ago
Corporations are psychopathic by nature, with few exceptions.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  had to vouch for this. there is a lot of truth here in what looks at first sight hyperbolic or inflammatory which isn't maybe immediately obvious. corporations are legally treated like a person. the problem here is (over and over again) that a person might do insane or criminal things that they are then held accountable for, while a company (not a "natural" person) acts as a collective and hence can be as psychopathic in its acts (on behalf of multiple people who get together for that act). e.g. imagine an individual acting as a company: they would always be considered a psychopath (or at least if not criminally insane would be suffering from a mental illness). it's the group that is allowed to hide behind the singular entity that allows problematic behavior almost by design.
arpa 6y ago
Sad? Horrible? How about batshit insane! C-suits going after nobodies is, well... this. I mean, that must have been some crazy amounts of coke and bad judgements all around, to get SIX seriously unhinged individuals to the top of eBay of all the places. How does it even happen? I mean i've seen some amoral corporate bullshit, and shady shit, strays into "not strictly legal" and "how can legal cover our ass?", but this, this is crazy in literal sense.
- __s 6y ago
  How does it happen? Someone passes around a blog. Someone else jokes "wouldn't it be funny if we...". Someone else says "Hey, I'm bored, we have loads of cash & free time, sounds like a fun prank!" Not hard to lose touch with the reality of what one's doing
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Article discusses how they were not joking but, instead, paranoid that she was getting funding from Amazon, their competitor.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Yeah, and just add some booze to that. The recipe is simple.
- setgree 6y ago
  Pity the person who takes their work so seriously they'd send a bloody pig mask in the mail for it -- for a faceless, corporate behemoth like ebay, no less.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Alcohol and drugs is always behind stuff like this.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  this is a world where the financial industry repeatedly gets caught doing fraud that causes worldwide recessions, where oil companies spend billions lying to people so they can keep polluting. companies acting badly seems completely normal to me.
  - meowface 6y ago
    True, but typically it's your standard white collar sociopathy, though, not literal horror movie-level obsessive stalking and abuse. Even aside from the obviously horrendous ethics, this sort of behavior is just incomprehensibly outlandish and grotesque. It's not only psychopathic but literally psychotic. >Angered by items that appeared in a e-commerce newsletter, six former employees of eBay sent the publishers, a couple living in Massachusetts, live cockroaches and spiders, pornography, a bloody pigface mask, a preserved pig fetus and a funeral wreath, and attempted to secretly install a tracking device on the couple's car, federal authorities allege in criminal charges unsealed on Monday. [0] As the prosecutor said in the NPR article, this is abject psychological terrorism against a random middle-aged blogging couple by eBay's former "senior director of safety and security" and "director of global resilience", among others. You couldn't write this shit. [0] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/877659807/feds-former-ebay-employees-sent-newsletter-writers-roaches-spiders-and-pornograp https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/877659807/feds-former-ebay-em...
an_opabinia 6y ago
> we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity The polite term for this is legal realism - “I am rich and you are not, so most of the time fuck you.” Certainly every executive, by the nature of their salary, their incentives, the world built around them, they perpetuate legal realism to the detriment of legalism or whatever you want to call opinions/moral stances like “you should not harass randos on the Internet.” It is zero sum for sure. You will never be on the wrong side of justice of a targeted harassment campaign, meaning you as a normal person will never conspire with your coworkers to do that - which is to say, of course this was blessed by eBay, in the same way that gang leaders bless the crimes their minions do - so presumably those laws should be as harsh as possible. Conversely you will sometimes be a landlord in your life, sometimes a tenant, so even in the most cynical rationalist reading we can reason about what justice looks like for both sides, even when it’s just about money. What then is the punishment for a corporation? In a bull market, little legal action has ever sunk a large cap company (pretty much only lying about cash balances). And you wonder, in a world where investors are buying the stocks of bankrupt companies like Hertz, will Wirecard even get its due? The business, not the person. BP made one of the worst environmental disasters in the world, a normal person will never do that. You will never be on the wrong side of spilling oil in the sea. Some DoJ employee decided what to do, in an afternoon, in a 15 minute meeting after maybe a few phone calls with the Louisiana governor and the president, “the outcome will be, BP will not be shut down.” Then 5 years of litigation parallel reconstructing that determination in the legal system, in a world where you have footage of BP spilling the oil, they did it, what is there to talk about? Lawyers will say a lot, but honesty I’m sick of hearing lawyers points of view on whether or not eBay did something wrong, of course it did, what is the punishment? In our country punishing a corporation is actuarial work. That is the problem. Maybe the law academy has an answer, it would be interesting to see “a official, parallel courtroom where poor litigants have a hope of succeeding.” Maybe law school is just minting new lawyers every year who are in denial of how predictive “what side of capitalism are you on?” is in terms of legal outcomes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zentiggr 6y ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ A group of sociopaths decided that their personal gratification was more important than outside factors, and then they got caught.
pjc50 6y ago
> Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity") representative of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? It happens a lot more than you might expect. Usually it's "just" a bit of sexual harrasment. But the combination of power, arrogance, and unacountability can cause all sorts of things to happen. Like the Suisse spying scandal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51411640 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51411640 Or Carlos Ghosn being smuggled out of Japan in an instrument case. Or Shkreli. Or Theranos, Enron, etc. Most boardrooms are boring, but there is a big fiasco every year or so.
- quicklime 6y ago
  By the time Carlos Ghosn was smuggled out of Japan, he had been gone from Renault/Nissan for almost a year. So it's not like this was organized by a team at Nissan working under Ghosn.
  - agency 6y ago
    Though amusingly he continued to squat in a Nissan-owned mansion in Beirut after his escape. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-06/carlos-ghosn-is-back-in-corporate-housing https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-06/carlos...
  - jariel 6y ago
    The Ghosn issue is much more complicated though. There are arguments that the judicial system was politicised in a manner. He was a foreigner who fell out of favour in a land that protects their own. See Olympus Camera scandal.
    - S_A_P 6y ago
      a grain of salt and all of that, there is at least some evidence that Ghosen was set up, or at least allowed to behave badly for the purpose of ousting him later... https://www.motortrend.com/news/former-nissan-ceo-carlos-ghosn-removal-plot-conspiracy/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/former-nissan-ceo-carlos-gho...
refurb 6y ago
First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? In my last job I had an opportunity to work very closely with the executive committee of a Fortune 50 company. Before I started the work I thought "wow, they must be so smart, I'm going to learn so much!". What I did learn is that the people at the top are really no different than the people at the bottom. Yes, there are some very smart and productive people. But there are also people that make you wonder how they got there. The fact the eBay CEO decided to harass the crap out of someone is not surprising in the least.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Usually it’s who you know. I did consulting work for a few CFOs whom I wouldn’t let near my kids lemonade stand till.
  - wegs 6y ago
    I'd say it's much more willingness to be a bit psychopathic. Most people wouldn't compromise their integrity to move into the C-suite. The competition is fierce, so the people who make it to the top are the people who /are/ willing to do anything to move into the C-suite. I've also done work at that level, and some people outwardly appeared as sleazeballs, some almost radiated charisma and integrity, but when you got down to it, at the organization i was at, all were evil, backstabbing bastards. Middle managers saw a lot of that, but tended to be decent people. And line employees never saw that -- middle management shielded them. Good books to understand these dynamics better: * Dictator's Handbook. * Power, by Pfeffer. Disclaimer, since I got jumped on this before: This refers to big organizations. If you're the CEO of a 5-person startup, this doesn't apply to you.
coldtea 6y ago
>First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-by-night operators in a shady part of town. How could something like this happen? Very easily. Also very often. And this is one of the lightest cases. Huge multinationals have people defamed, killed, politicians bribed and exhorted, and everything in between... Usually it happens with several layers, where the CEO or some exec gives a message like "Do what you have to do", and several layers of increasingly thuggish associates get the message. Remember the movie Insider, how the whistleblower got death threats? In real life many people get worse, including actual beatings and deaths. Especially in huge companies with subsidies, and factories in the developing world, this is par for the course... from Coca Cola to United Fruit Company to the Nike's of this world... And god forbid someone stands to hurt some multi-billion deal...
bigbugbag 6y ago
I'm not surprised. Online reputation is making and breaking, shaping people and businesses. This kind of behaviour is rampant, you even have individual resorting to harassment of people who disagree or said something they don't like. Facebook and twitter revolve around this behaviour, presidents and political figures engage in this behaviour and at least a dictator gained power using it (see duterte in philippines). Add to this that the larger the corporation and the higher in the hierarchy means the impunity is almost a given (see HSBC laundering scandal, facebook multiple scandals, etc.) To me the surprise here is that the information got out and that the authorities actually acted on it.

by cs702 6y ago

sunstone 6y ago

Corporations are psychopathic by nature, with few exceptions.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
had to vouch for this. there is a lot of truth here in what looks at first sight hyperbolic or inflammatory which isn't maybe immediately obvious. corporations are legally treated like a person. the problem here is (over and over again) that a person might do insane or criminal things that they are then held accountable for, while a company (not a "natural" person) acts as a collective and hence can be as psychopathic in its acts (on behalf of multiple people who get together for that act). e.g. imagine an individual acting as a company: they would always be considered a psychopath (or at least if not criminally insane would be suffering from a mental illness). it's the group that is allowed to hide behind the singular entity that allows problematic behavior almost by design.

arpa 6y ago

Sad? Horrible? How about batshit insane! C-suits going after nobodies is, well... this. I mean, that must have been some crazy amounts of coke and bad judgements all around, to get SIX seriously unhinged individuals to the top of eBay of all the places. How does it even happen? I mean i've seen some amoral corporate bullshit, and shady shit, strays into "not strictly legal" and "how can legal cover our ass?", but this, this is crazy in literal sense.

__s 6y ago
How does it happen? Someone passes around a blog. Someone else jokes "wouldn't it be funny if we...". Someone else says "Hey, I'm bored, we have loads of cash & free time, sounds like a fun prank!" Not hard to lose touch with the reality of what one's doing
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Article discusses how they were not joking but, instead, paranoid that she was getting funding from Amazon, their competitor.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Yeah, and just add some booze to that. The recipe is simple.
setgree 6y ago
Pity the person who takes their work so seriously they'd send a bloody pig mask in the mail for it -- for a faceless, corporate behemoth like ebay, no less.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Alcohol and drugs is always behind stuff like this.
gameswithgo 6y ago
this is a world where the financial industry repeatedly gets caught doing fraud that causes worldwide recessions, where oil companies spend billions lying to people so they can keep polluting. companies acting badly seems completely normal to me.
- meowface 6y ago
  True, but typically it's your standard white collar sociopathy, though, not literal horror movie-level obsessive stalking and abuse. Even aside from the obviously horrendous ethics, this sort of behavior is just incomprehensibly outlandish and grotesque. It's not only psychopathic but literally psychotic. >Angered by items that appeared in a e-commerce newsletter, six former employees of eBay sent the publishers, a couple living in Massachusetts, live cockroaches and spiders, pornography, a bloody pigface mask, a preserved pig fetus and a funeral wreath, and attempted to secretly install a tracking device on the couple's car, federal authorities allege in criminal charges unsealed on Monday. [0] As the prosecutor said in the NPR article, this is abject psychological terrorism against a random middle-aged blogging couple by eBay's former "senior director of safety and security" and "director of global resilience", among others. You couldn't write this shit. [0] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/877659807/feds-former-ebay-employees-sent-newsletter-writers-roaches-spiders-and-pornograp https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/877659807/feds-former-ebay-em...

an_opabinia 6y ago

> we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity The polite term for this is legal realism - “I am rich and you are not, so most of the time fuck you.” Certainly every executive, by the nature of their salary, their incentives, the world built around them, they perpetuate legal realism to the detriment of legalism or whatever you want to call opinions/moral stances like “you should not harass randos on the Internet.” It is zero sum for sure. You will never be on the wrong side of justice of a targeted harassment campaign, meaning you as a normal person will never conspire with your coworkers to do that - which is to say, of course this was blessed by eBay, in the same way that gang leaders bless the crimes their minions do - so presumably those laws should be as harsh as possible. Conversely you will sometimes be a landlord in your life, sometimes a tenant, so even in the most cynical rationalist reading we can reason about what justice looks like for both sides, even when it’s just about money. What then is the punishment for a corporation? In a bull market, little legal action has ever sunk a large cap company (pretty much only lying about cash balances). And you wonder, in a world where investors are buying the stocks of bankrupt companies like Hertz, will Wirecard even get its due? The business, not the person. BP made one of the worst environmental disasters in the world, a normal person will never do that. You will never be on the wrong side of spilling oil in the sea. Some DoJ employee decided what to do, in an afternoon, in a 15 minute meeting after maybe a few phone calls with the Louisiana governor and the president, “the outcome will be, BP will not be shut down.” Then 5 years of litigation parallel reconstructing that determination in the legal system, in a world where you have footage of BP spilling the oil, they did it, what is there to talk about? Lawyers will say a lot, but honesty I’m sick of hearing lawyers points of view on whether or not eBay did something wrong, of course it did, what is the punishment? In our country punishing a corporation is actuarial work. That is the problem. Maybe the law academy has an answer, it would be interesting to see “a official, parallel courtroom where poor litigants have a hope of succeeding.” Maybe law school is just minting new lawyers every year who are in denial of how predictive “what side of capitalism are you on?” is in terms of legal outcomes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zentiggr 6y ago

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ A group of sociopaths decided that their personal gratification was more important than outside factors, and then they got caught.

pjc50 6y ago

> Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity") representative of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? It happens a lot more than you might expect. Usually it's "just" a bit of sexual harrasment. But the combination of power, arrogance, and unacountability can cause all sorts of things to happen. Like the Suisse spying scandal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51411640 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51411640 Or Carlos Ghosn being smuggled out of Japan in an instrument case. Or Shkreli. Or Theranos, Enron, etc. Most boardrooms are boring, but there is a big fiasco every year or so.

quicklime 6y ago
By the time Carlos Ghosn was smuggled out of Japan, he had been gone from Renault/Nissan for almost a year. So it's not like this was organized by a team at Nissan working under Ghosn.
- agency 6y ago
  Though amusingly he continued to squat in a Nissan-owned mansion in Beirut after his escape. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-06/carlos-ghosn-is-back-in-corporate-housing https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-06/carlos...
- jariel 6y ago
  The Ghosn issue is much more complicated though. There are arguments that the judicial system was politicised in a manner. He was a foreigner who fell out of favour in a land that protects their own. See Olympus Camera scandal.
  - S_A_P 6y ago
    a grain of salt and all of that, there is at least some evidence that Ghosen was set up, or at least allowed to behave badly for the purpose of ousting him later... https://www.motortrend.com/news/former-nissan-ceo-carlos-ghosn-removal-plot-conspiracy/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/former-nissan-ceo-carlos-gho...

refurb 6y ago

First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? In my last job I had an opportunity to work very closely with the executive committee of a Fortune 50 company. Before I started the work I thought "wow, they must be so smart, I'm going to learn so much!". What I did learn is that the people at the top are really no different than the people at the bottom. Yes, there are some very smart and productive people. But there are also people that make you wonder how they got there. The fact the eBay CEO decided to harass the crap out of someone is not surprising in the least.

Spooky23 6y ago
Usually it’s who you know. I did consulting work for a few CFOs whom I wouldn’t let near my kids lemonade stand till.
- wegs 6y ago
  I'd say it's much more willingness to be a bit psychopathic. Most people wouldn't compromise their integrity to move into the C-suite. The competition is fierce, so the people who make it to the top are the people who /are/ willing to do anything to move into the C-suite. I've also done work at that level, and some people outwardly appeared as sleazeballs, some almost radiated charisma and integrity, but when you got down to it, at the organization i was at, all were evil, backstabbing bastards. Middle managers saw a lot of that, but tended to be decent people. And line employees never saw that -- middle management shielded them. Good books to understand these dynamics better: * Dictator's Handbook. * Power, by Pfeffer. Disclaimer, since I got jumped on this before: This refers to big organizations. If you're the CEO of a 5-person startup, this doesn't apply to you.

coldtea 6y ago

>First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-by-night operators in a shady part of town. How could something like this happen? Very easily. Also very often. And this is one of the lightest cases. Huge multinationals have people defamed, killed, politicians bribed and exhorted, and everything in between... Usually it happens with several layers, where the CEO or some exec gives a message like "Do what you have to do", and several layers of increasingly thuggish associates get the message. Remember the movie Insider, how the whistleblower got death threats? In real life many people get worse, including actual beatings and deaths. Especially in huge companies with subsidies, and factories in the developing world, this is par for the course... from Coca Cola to United Fruit Company to the Nike's of this world... And god forbid someone stands to hurt some multi-billion deal...

bigbugbag 6y ago

I'm not surprised. Online reputation is making and breaking, shaping people and businesses. This kind of behaviour is rampant, you even have individual resorting to harassment of people who disagree or said something they don't like. Facebook and twitter revolve around this behaviour, presidents and political figures engage in this behaviour and at least a dictator gained power using it (see duterte in philippines). Add to this that the larger the corporation and the higher in the hierarchy means the impunity is almost a given (see HSBC laundering scandal, facebook multiple scandals, etc.) To me the surprise here is that the information got out and that the authorities actually acted on it.