4 ms·

Something in me, somewhere in a dark and vengeful place of my soul, just wants to see the big companies burn down and let the ashes of the big tech giants be a

Something in me, somewhere in a dark and vengeful place of my soul, just wants to see the big companies burn down and let the ashes of the big tech giants be a warning memorial for future leaders that might don't make right.

polytely 5y ago
It would be somewhat bearable if it would at least have consequences for the CEO, it's fucking wild that he gets to walk away from this with $57 million. Do these people have no shame at all? (no) >The investigation also found that former CEO Wenig had made “inappropriate communications” but did not have advance knowledge of the harassment and stalking. Wenig, who was not charged, was allowed to resign in September 2019 with a compensation package worth $57 million; the Steiner scandal was a “consideration” in his departure, the company has said. These morally bankrupt parasites somehow get in situations where they get rewarded when things go well and when things go catastrophically wrong under their watch. I wonder what you would have to do as a CEO to actually get fired without getting a huge sack of cash, murder someone in broad daylight?
- riknox 5y ago
  I think Wenig was also pushed out somewhat in relation to his opinion on the sale of eBay Classifieds - the rumour at the time was that he was very much against it while activist investors where trying to push it through.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Which is obviously worse than harassing people using company ressources. /s
- coldcode 5y ago
  I always thought the CEO should be responsible for what their company did even if they were carefully screened from direct knowledge of stupid things. But obviously that rarely happens.
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    Maybe we should introduce a tradition similar to how a captain should go down with his ship, except in this case, have the CEO remain in his high rise office and then demolish the building from the bottom up. Of course I'm joking. I would never wish such an abhorent thing on the cleanup squad as to have to deal with Wenig's remains.
    - tartoran 5y ago
      Captain going down with the ship analogy for CEOs would be to personally pay from their own pockets or their future compensation any misdeeds on their watch. If this were to happen I bet we’d see companies immediately start behaving
      - vimacs2 5y ago
        My idea is more fun though :( On a serious note, I unfortunately don't think that would make companies behave because the problem with corporations is not specifically bad leadership but a more systematic one. Hierarchies just naturally cause communications to breakdown between different levels of an organisation with sufficient scaling and this will lead to inevitable conflict between workers and management which will further expand to conflicts between the company and their own userbase.
  - blackboxlogic 5y ago
    I think we have that for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I wonder why CEOs are responsible for some crimes, but not others.
- everdrive 5y ago
  >It would be somewhat bearable if it would at least have consequences for the CEO, it's fucking wild that he gets to walk away from this with $57 million. Do these people have no shame at all? (no) It's clear to me that I don't really understand companies. Why give him such a huge exit package? Why would any executive get an exit package? What is the benefit to paying them so much money to leave? Why do most companies do this?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Boards think, or pretend to think, they need to promise such payments at hiring time in order to attract the candidates they (think they) want. Board members tend to be, have been, or be related to CEOs. So, it is largely a matter of class solidarity. A norm of "CEO always wins" is good for them in general, even if it occasionally makes bad publicity. Bad publicity doesn't really cost them anything, anyway. Boards and corporate officers ganging up against the interests of the stockholders is an old story. Nobody seems to have a solution, or to know how to put one into practice. Typically there is no one but a Board in any position to act on any idea.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
It's something I think about at least once per week. 200 years ago, if the people in power were acting up, the people had the capacity to act...and they did. Heads fucking rolled. And not just some heads, but a lot of heads. Present day, the state is more powerful than people 200 years ago could even begin to conceive of. We have trillion dollar companies that literally do whatever they want. The people have little recourse to do anything anymore (there's a panoply of reasons as to why that's the case, but that's besides the point). We inherently know violent resolution is not the way to go...but let's be honest: nonviolent resolutions aren't working anymore.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I think that's a very rosy view of the olden days. The rich have always had disproportionate power, but historically there was a lot more top-down violence. When the US started out, it was generally only land-owning white men who could vote, a pretty small proportion of "the people". It took decades past your "200 years ago" to get a vote just for the minority of people who were white men, and it was a very bumpy process. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion It wasn't until about 100 years ago that a majority of "the people" could even vote, and it was only 50 years ago that saw voting and economic rights applied reasonably equally to a majority of "the people". Or we could look at actual attempts at "the people" having a modicum of power: labor organizing. The US has a rich history of anti-labor violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni... I am happy to complain about what's going on today. But as bad as, say, Amazon is about union organizing, we shouldn't pretend that it's (yet) as bad as it was for most of America's history. And part of what makes today better is a strong-enough set of governments to push back against corporate malfeasance. As the police in this story clearly did.
- rmah 5y ago
  Um, such actions were very very rare 200+ years ago. If you look at history from the lens of daily life in a given location, you will see that horrible behavior by the people in power would go on for lifetimes. Not only without without punishment or retribution, but sometimes celebrated and extolled. Often completely in the open. Typically, revolts only happened after things got really bad (as in lots of people murdered or starving bad). Even then, the vast majority of revolts ended up with lots of dead commoners and the same people in power. Until very recently, the idea that those with power could not use that power to extract whatever they could from those without power was laughable. And the shit that the common folks had to deal with hundreds of years ago makes the worse harassment of today seem completely benign. Hell, mass murder to make a few bits of extra gold was common. And no one really batted an eye. Sometimes society not only condoned it but celebrated it. Not to say that harassment today should be ignored. But harkening back to the good old days that never were is not, IMO, the way forward.

polytely 5y ago

It would be somewhat bearable if it would at least have consequences for the CEO, it's fucking wild that he gets to walk away from this with $57 million. Do these people have no shame at all? (no) >The investigation also found that former CEO Wenig had made “inappropriate communications” but did not have advance knowledge of the harassment and stalking. Wenig, who was not charged, was allowed to resign in September 2019 with a compensation package worth $57 million; the Steiner scandal was a “consideration” in his departure, the company has said. These morally bankrupt parasites somehow get in situations where they get rewarded when things go well and when things go catastrophically wrong under their watch. I wonder what you would have to do as a CEO to actually get fired without getting a huge sack of cash, murder someone in broad daylight?

riknox 5y ago
I think Wenig was also pushed out somewhat in relation to his opinion on the sale of eBay Classifieds - the rumour at the time was that he was very much against it while activist investors where trying to push it through.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Which is obviously worse than harassing people using company ressources. /s
coldcode 5y ago
I always thought the CEO should be responsible for what their company did even if they were carefully screened from direct knowledge of stupid things. But obviously that rarely happens.
- vimacs2 5y ago
  Maybe we should introduce a tradition similar to how a captain should go down with his ship, except in this case, have the CEO remain in his high rise office and then demolish the building from the bottom up. Of course I'm joking. I would never wish such an abhorent thing on the cleanup squad as to have to deal with Wenig's remains.
  - tartoran 5y ago
    Captain going down with the ship analogy for CEOs would be to personally pay from their own pockets or their future compensation any misdeeds on their watch. If this were to happen I bet we’d see companies immediately start behaving
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      My idea is more fun though :( On a serious note, I unfortunately don't think that would make companies behave because the problem with corporations is not specifically bad leadership but a more systematic one. Hierarchies just naturally cause communications to breakdown between different levels of an organisation with sufficient scaling and this will lead to inevitable conflict between workers and management which will further expand to conflicts between the company and their own userbase.
- blackboxlogic 5y ago
  I think we have that for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I wonder why CEOs are responsible for some crimes, but not others.
everdrive 5y ago
>It would be somewhat bearable if it would at least have consequences for the CEO, it's fucking wild that he gets to walk away from this with $57 million. Do these people have no shame at all? (no) It's clear to me that I don't really understand companies. Why give him such a huge exit package? Why would any executive get an exit package? What is the benefit to paying them so much money to leave? Why do most companies do this?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Boards think, or pretend to think, they need to promise such payments at hiring time in order to attract the candidates they (think they) want. Board members tend to be, have been, or be related to CEOs. So, it is largely a matter of class solidarity. A norm of "CEO always wins" is good for them in general, even if it occasionally makes bad publicity. Bad publicity doesn't really cost them anything, anyway. Boards and corporate officers ganging up against the interests of the stockholders is an old story. Nobody seems to have a solution, or to know how to put one into practice. Typically there is no one but a Board in any position to act on any idea.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

It's something I think about at least once per week. 200 years ago, if the people in power were acting up, the people had the capacity to act...and they did. Heads fucking rolled. And not just some heads, but a lot of heads. Present day, the state is more powerful than people 200 years ago could even begin to conceive of. We have trillion dollar companies that literally do whatever they want. The people have little recourse to do anything anymore (there's a panoply of reasons as to why that's the case, but that's besides the point). We inherently know violent resolution is not the way to go...but let's be honest: nonviolent resolutions aren't working anymore.

wpietri 5y ago
I think that's a very rosy view of the olden days. The rich have always had disproportionate power, but historically there was a lot more top-down violence. When the US started out, it was generally only land-owning white men who could vote, a pretty small proportion of "the people". It took decades past your "200 years ago" to get a vote just for the minority of people who were white men, and it was a very bumpy process. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion It wasn't until about 100 years ago that a majority of "the people" could even vote, and it was only 50 years ago that saw voting and economic rights applied reasonably equally to a majority of "the people". Or we could look at actual attempts at "the people" having a modicum of power: labor organizing. The US has a rich history of anti-labor violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni... I am happy to complain about what's going on today. But as bad as, say, Amazon is about union organizing, we shouldn't pretend that it's (yet) as bad as it was for most of America's history. And part of what makes today better is a strong-enough set of governments to push back against corporate malfeasance. As the police in this story clearly did.
rmah 5y ago
Um, such actions were very very rare 200+ years ago. If you look at history from the lens of daily life in a given location, you will see that horrible behavior by the people in power would go on for lifetimes. Not only without without punishment or retribution, but sometimes celebrated and extolled. Often completely in the open. Typically, revolts only happened after things got really bad (as in lots of people murdered or starving bad). Even then, the vast majority of revolts ended up with lots of dead commoners and the same people in power. Until very recently, the idea that those with power could not use that power to extract whatever they could from those without power was laughable. And the shit that the common folks had to deal with hundreds of years ago makes the worse harassment of today seem completely benign. Hell, mass murder to make a few bits of extra gold was common. And no one really batted an eye. Sometimes society not only condoned it but celebrated it. Not to say that harassment today should be ignored. But harkening back to the good old days that never were is not, IMO, the way forward.