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> But the line between "just cutting a few corners" and prosecutable criminality isn't nearly as bright as we in the peanut gallery like to think The line mayb
by sailingparrot 1y ago
> But the line between "just cutting a few corners" and prosecutable criminality isn't nearly as bright as we in the peanut gallery like to think
The line maybe isn't bright, but faking data to a potential buyer to make it appear like you have 15x your actual number of users is clearly way past the line you cannot see.
That would be like saying it's hard to know if noon is during the day or night because the exact moment that qualify as "dawn" is hard to discern.
- Calavar 1y agoI think the difference is PG faked it until he could make it work at some future endpoint, Charlie Javice gave up on trying to make it work and instead faked it at the endpoint
- ajross 1y agoBut my point upthread is that that "difference" is a post hoc rationalization. She needed to close that deal to save the company, in which she presumably believed. The money would change everything, right? She probably did picture this as "faking until they made it". PG "got caught" at a moment when Yahoo (the acquirer, I think?) had already decided on a deal it valued and was willing to deal with some accounting mess to close it. Javice got caught by an investment bank with rather different ideas about value who perceived the "accounting mess" as active fraud. In a culture (this culture!) where everyone cheats, the actors lose sight of how to judge what cheating is acceptable.