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I always find this kind of sentiment weird. Do you think less of yourself for living in the country you’re living in because there are people who do illegal or

I always find this kind of sentiment weird. Do you think less of yourself for living in the country you’re living in because there are people who do illegal or immoral things? Apple is an organization of 160k employees. Even from a numbers game someone is going to be doing something problematic. Additionally it’s important to remember that the news report is a one-sided interview basically. It’s hard to know what’s going to be established as fact here until it hits the courts.

dogleash 2y ago
>Do you think less of yourself for living in the country you’re living in because there are people who do illegal or immoral things? No. But I do feel worse for the things management does. I think that's pretty normal. That's exactly what today is about, right? > Apple is an organization of 160k employees. Even from a numbers game someone is going to be doing something problematic. I'm not judging Ryan in accounts making off-colored jokes. I'm judging the decisions of the top dozens of leaders.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Pretending that someone can leave their country as casually as changing high-mobility jobs is extremely disingenuous.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Pretending that it’s difficult to emigrate somewhere as an American citizen, especially someone with a high mobility job like this, is extremely disingenuous.
sigseg1v 2y ago
Are there any sufficiently large organizations (500+ employees seems to be right around the mark) that exist that are NOT doing illegal things? I have a list of 2 from personal experience, 4 from family experience, and several more from friends experience. From this I would be surprised to find if there exists one that is not regularly doing illegal activities. The story is extremely believable and I have no reason to doubt it because it mirrors what I have seen personally.
- enriquec 2y ago
  I've worked at plenty of organizations 1-25k+ and never done or known of anyone doing anything even close to illegal.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Would you even have known the details for each of the 25k people? I could make a similar argument that when I worked for Apple back in the day I didn't know about anyone doing anything illegal. But Apple is a massive company and I'm sure there was probably all sorts of things going on.
    - enriquec 2y ago
      When you make an assertion, you have to prove the positive. Proving the negative isn't how logic works.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  I would suspect that as scale grows, law breaking becomes more likely. However that doesn't mean that all those companies break the law with same severity, ubiquity and ill intent. I do think if we uad a legal that could actually hold these organizations accountable, and we would see less corporate law breaking. A common stance on HN is that we should be putting more executives in jail for longer instead of just fining companies amounts that are just the cost of doing business.
jkaplowitz 2y ago
> Additionally it’s important to remember that the news report is a one-sided interview basically. It's an interview of two of the three sides, not a one-sided interview. The motivation for the article is that the US National Labor Relations Board has now joined the initial complainant in making the allegations against Apple and asking them to settle by agreeing to specific remedies. They did also try to get comment from Apple, and since Apple declined to answer their questions (see the end of the article), they nevertheless quoted Apple's statement to Reuters on this topic from last month. So all three sides are at least represented in the article. Sure, it's true that no judge, jury, or administrative hearing officer has yet ruled on the allegations; that is still in the future if no settlement occurs, but part of the news report is that such an administrative hearing has now been scheduled.

dogleash 2y ago

>Do you think less of yourself for living in the country you’re living in because there are people who do illegal or immoral things? No. But I do feel worse for the things management does. I think that's pretty normal. That's exactly what today is about, right? > Apple is an organization of 160k employees. Even from a numbers game someone is going to be doing something problematic. I'm not judging Ryan in accounts making off-colored jokes. I'm judging the decisions of the top dozens of leaders.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

Pretending that someone can leave their country as casually as changing high-mobility jobs is extremely disingenuous.

vlovich123 2y ago
Pretending that it’s difficult to emigrate somewhere as an American citizen, especially someone with a high mobility job like this, is extremely disingenuous.

sigseg1v 2y ago

Are there any sufficiently large organizations (500+ employees seems to be right around the mark) that exist that are NOT doing illegal things? I have a list of 2 from personal experience, 4 from family experience, and several more from friends experience. From this I would be surprised to find if there exists one that is not regularly doing illegal activities. The story is extremely believable and I have no reason to doubt it because it mirrors what I have seen personally.

enriquec 2y ago
I've worked at plenty of organizations 1-25k+ and never done or known of anyone doing anything even close to illegal.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Would you even have known the details for each of the 25k people? I could make a similar argument that when I worked for Apple back in the day I didn't know about anyone doing anything illegal. But Apple is a massive company and I'm sure there was probably all sorts of things going on.
  - enriquec 2y ago
    When you make an assertion, you have to prove the positive. Proving the negative isn't how logic works.
shkkmo 2y ago
I would suspect that as scale grows, law breaking becomes more likely. However that doesn't mean that all those companies break the law with same severity, ubiquity and ill intent. I do think if we uad a legal that could actually hold these organizations accountable, and we would see less corporate law breaking. A common stance on HN is that we should be putting more executives in jail for longer instead of just fining companies amounts that are just the cost of doing business.

jkaplowitz 2y ago

> Additionally it’s important to remember that the news report is a one-sided interview basically. It's an interview of two of the three sides, not a one-sided interview. The motivation for the article is that the US National Labor Relations Board has now joined the initial complainant in making the allegations against Apple and asking them to settle by agreeing to specific remedies. They did also try to get comment from Apple, and since Apple declined to answer their questions (see the end of the article), they nevertheless quoted Apple's statement to Reuters on this topic from last month. So all three sides are at least represented in the article. Sure, it's true that no judge, jury, or administrative hearing officer has yet ruled on the allegations; that is still in the future if no settlement occurs, but part of the news report is that such an administrative hearing has now been scheduled.