4 ms·

> The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. I thin

> The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. I think it's because a lot of "hustle" culture and stories of the early business careers of very successful founders involve a bunch of stuff that sure looks like fraud or otherwise like something that ought to be illegal (it may not be, but I mean that it feels like the kind of thing that ought to be illegal, to a normal person) that works out great for them and sure looks like it was a necessary step on their journey to hundreds of millions of dollars and being on the cover of TIME or whatever. Add in normal corporate business practices just feeling gross as hell on a pretty regular basis, and I can kinda see why people might see this as not really that different from how you're "supposed to" do things—if you aren't a chump, anyway. Kinda like the college admissions bribery scandal. There was a lot of "oh, so their crime was not being rich enough to bribe the correct way?" in people's reactions, because... well, the system's officially corrupt, in a lot of people's opinions, so prosecuting unofficial corruption feels more like a very fancy organized crime racket putting the screws to the (relatively) little guy to protect their own corruption, than good old feel-good justice.

dralley 5y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-31/theranos-trial-elizabeth-holmes-was-a-lottery-ticket-for-investors https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-31/theran...
nonameiguess 5y ago
The worst example of this is the recent NCAA shoe company bribery scandal, where shoe companies paid student athletes and their families to attend particular schools sponsored by the companies. In any other industry, delivering money to people who become a part of your organization and generate revenue for it is just employment, and having your sponsors pay them directly is just cutting out the middleman. Only in amateur sports is that considered bribery and an offense that can get a person sent to prison. Kickbacks, of course, are quite different, where a company official has a legal duty to negotiate in good faith in the best interests of their company and not make purchasing decisions based on which vendor gives them the biggest personal cut of the deal. It's hard for me to see the other side of that, how anyone can possibly not understand that that is illegal.
0xFACEFEED 5y ago
Heh, yea. Good observation. This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change. Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi services and learned about the legality of it all, I'd have moved on to the next idea.
- handrous 5y ago
  YouTube got huge largely due to rampant piracy, in the early days. Straight-up posting copyrighted material unmodified, and all kinds of use of media (songs, especially) in ways that aren't protected by fair use. All while copyright cartels were going after torrent users—YouTube? Made a bunch of people rich, none of them paid for what they knowingly did, and no-one thinks 1/10 as ill of any of them as they do of this guy, now. What the hell is the lesson of any of this? It sure seems to be "doing unethical and/or illegal things is downright necessary to succeed big-time in business, and doing them successfully will make you rich and, most bizarrely, respected—unless you screw the wrong people (i.e. the bigger scammers/criminals/morally-questionable people) then you're just a criminal and we'll all sneer and spit on you and fine you and send you to prison"
  - amznthrwaway 5y ago
    I don’t think the lesson is that it’s necessary; but rather that if you are successful as a business, you will probably get away with the crimes.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Copyright and taxi-medallion laws are grossly immoral examples of regulatory capture that impoverish and endanger the public in order to provide a much smaller benefit to a small number of "exploiters." YouTube, BitTorrent, and Uber Cab were able to improve this situation, making them very popular despite greatly angering the exploiters. Similarly for, say, marijuana sellers. Doing illegal things that are nevertheless ethically upright and very popular may pay off for a business, as it did in those cases. Or it may not. It's less likely to pay off when the illegal things are instead unethical, unpopular, and harmful to the public, at least if you get caught—and when they involve betraying the people closest to you, you're probably going to get caught.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dralley 5y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-31/theranos-trial-elizabeth-holmes-was-a-lottery-ticket-for-investors https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-31/theran...

nonameiguess 5y ago

The worst example of this is the recent NCAA shoe company bribery scandal, where shoe companies paid student athletes and their families to attend particular schools sponsored by the companies. In any other industry, delivering money to people who become a part of your organization and generate revenue for it is just employment, and having your sponsors pay them directly is just cutting out the middleman. Only in amateur sports is that considered bribery and an offense that can get a person sent to prison. Kickbacks, of course, are quite different, where a company official has a legal duty to negotiate in good faith in the best interests of their company and not make purchasing decisions based on which vendor gives them the biggest personal cut of the deal. It's hard for me to see the other side of that, how anyone can possibly not understand that that is illegal.

0xFACEFEED 5y ago

Heh, yea. Good observation. This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change. Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi services and learned about the legality of it all, I'd have moved on to the next idea.

handrous 5y ago
YouTube got huge largely due to rampant piracy, in the early days. Straight-up posting copyrighted material unmodified, and all kinds of use of media (songs, especially) in ways that aren't protected by fair use. All while copyright cartels were going after torrent users—YouTube? Made a bunch of people rich, none of them paid for what they knowingly did, and no-one thinks 1/10 as ill of any of them as they do of this guy, now. What the hell is the lesson of any of this? It sure seems to be "doing unethical and/or illegal things is downright necessary to succeed big-time in business, and doing them successfully will make you rich and, most bizarrely, respected—unless you screw the wrong people (i.e. the bigger scammers/criminals/morally-questionable people) then you're just a criminal and we'll all sneer and spit on you and fine you and send you to prison"
- amznthrwaway 5y ago
  I don’t think the lesson is that it’s necessary; but rather that if you are successful as a business, you will probably get away with the crimes.
- kragen 5y ago
  Copyright and taxi-medallion laws are grossly immoral examples of regulatory capture that impoverish and endanger the public in order to provide a much smaller benefit to a small number of "exploiters." YouTube, BitTorrent, and Uber Cab were able to improve this situation, making them very popular despite greatly angering the exploiters. Similarly for, say, marijuana sellers. Doing illegal things that are nevertheless ethically upright and very popular may pay off for a business, as it did in those cases. Or it may not. It's less likely to pay off when the illegal things are instead unethical, unpopular, and harmful to the public, at least if you get caught—and when they involve betraying the people closest to you, you're probably going to get caught.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]