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I don't see anything exceptionally dirty about that mail. I went to the article to get the full context and still don't see it. The intimation of the article an

I don't see anything exceptionally dirty about that mail. I went to the article to get the full context and still don't see it. The intimation of the article and, in fact, everything I've heard on this stuff, is that all anti-poaching agreements exist solely for the purpose of depressing employee wages, but I don't think that holds true. It may be technically illegal, but the potential moral implications of a no-poaching agreement are non-obvious and I think decent people can forge these agreements with good intentions. Reporting on staff movements isn't necessarily selfish or evil. It's important to understand what's going on with your workforce: know where they're going and why. Catmull's email seems totally fine to me -- he's reporting on a poached employee to Jobs, explaining that Sony is aggressively pursuing Pixar personnel, and that they were already taking a certain employee of moderate value particularly. Catmull reiterates that there is no extant no-poach arrangement with Sony. That's useful information for a CEO, right? I think some people are trying to make this a bigger deal than it has to be. If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement. EDIT: Woops, HN has decided I'm not allowed to talk anymore. Usually when this happens it lasts a pretty long time (at least several hours, I suspect something like 12-24). I'd like to continue discussing with you all, but that'll have to be it for me in this thread.

corysama 12y ago
Quick reminder to everyone: Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them. You might think that cookiecaper is an insensitive clod. But, he's not posting fluff, off-topic or otherwise distracting material.
- learc83 12y ago
  >Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them. That's a rule on Reddit, but to my knowledge it's never been a rule here. Here's pg's own words on the subject. >I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
  - tzs 12y ago
    That would make sense if all down voting did was show the net score, or the up/down breakdown. However, when an article has a more down votes than up votes, it is also made harder to read, and the bigger the difference, the harder to read it becomes. That makes pg's remark make little sense, unless HN is supposed to be a place where disagreeing with the majority is discouraged, which is not very hackerish. Some clarification from pg would be helpful here.
    - cookiecaper 12y ago
      It also prevents someone who makes controversial posts from being able to post very much. Downvote as a disagree button only works if there are no consequences to being downvoted. Otherwise, it just reinforces an echo chamber. Substantive, reasoned posts that contain unpopular opinions should be more visible than the circlejerk that always percolates to the top in these situations.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  If nothing else, cookiecaper represents the kind of thinking that leads to these situations in the first place. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's amoral. Yes, it betrays profound ignorance of the law and ethics, and yes, it's shot through with the kind of "logic" so poor it's actually repulsive. But that's actually the point. In the same way that smoke indicates fire, a stink like this indicates a giant pile of shit. And that's exactly what's just hit the fan. If you (a) agree with cookiecaper and (b) have anything to do with HR, now would be a great time to consider switching careers. You simply don't have the moral judgement your job requires. Better get out now before you find yourself in the middle of a similar mess.
  - judk 12y ago
    Your personal attacks on cookiecaper are disgusting.
    - alexqgb 12y ago
      Here's the thing: when you're discussing the failures of another person's moral reasoning, you are inevitably calling their character into question. It may not be the point, but it's unavoidably the effect. For the same reason that you can't state that someone is lying without denigrating their character, you cannot point out that someone is representing an utterly amoral position without implying that they are a generally untrustworthy human being. Let me put it this way: would you be comfortable having cookiecaper running HR for your company? I should hope not. But if you were, what would you tell a board member who came across a post like this an wanted to know why - exactly - a guy this demonstrably off-base was being allowed to fill a position that carried so much risk? For what it's worth, people were just downvoting the guy. I think there's some value in seeing what he has to say in order to better understand that mindset that let to the moral implosion we're presently discussing. Separately, I think the tone of condemnation is actually very important. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have had damaging encounters with others who think and act like cookiecaper (e.g. anyone who has worked under Catmull). It's important to establish, in a very public fashion, that the values he displays are absolutely not okay.
      - 12y ago
wpietri 12y ago
Prices arise through market forces: the competition of buyers for the same goods. If the largest purchasers of a given good agree not to compete, then prices are absolutely harmed. Understanding where staff is going is reasonable. Making it so that your staff doesn't have opportunities to go anywhere? That's a criminal conspiracy to rig a market.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  I agree that a likely effect was artificial depression of employee salaries, but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement. Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way. It's possible that Pixar et al had the best intentions when establishing this protocol. It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed. I would bet that most people who would've been poached would've been hired by a competitor within hours of resigning at their current employer. That doesn't make it OK, and like I said, it's very possible all of this was illegal from the get-go. I'm just saying there's no need to jump to the conclusion that malice and conspiracy were the primary motives behind these compacts, and there's no need to drag someone's name through the mud when definitive evidence doesn't exist.
  - mullingitover 12y ago
    > It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed. They stopped being direct competitors the minute they agreed to collude. The term you're looking for is 'fellow cartel member.'
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    > " but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement" Do we need to demonstrate intention? You brought up mens rea elsewhere in the thread but it hardly seems relevant at the end of the day. Someone with a clear intent to screw his employees certainly is more despicable and villainesque, but the practical impact on the employees is the same even if he did so unintentionally. And we can frown upon it all the same, because it's not as if he did something innocent with unforeseen side effect - the agreement was illegal, and the fact that it was secret suggests everyone involved knew this. So yeah, I'm maybe willing to believe that Ed Catmull didn't go out there with the explicit intent of screwing his employees. He may have engaged in this agreement in protection of his company, or of his work, but ultimately he (and every other SV CEO involved) kept it hush-hush because they knew it was illegal and immoral, and that the wider world would cry foul at what they were doing. Mens rea would make the morality of this more open and shut, but I do not believe it is critical to our ability to judge the impact and legacy of these actions. > "Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way." But yet this isn't a game. These are people, not basketballs. It's careers, not the soccer field. It's families, children, vacations, dreams, plans, not points in to be scored against your opponent. You're being unfairly downvoted IMO and you've brought up some good points, but what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people. The mistake here is the belief that this is somehow unique to Ed Catmull, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, et al. The demonization of him I'm seeing in this thread is disappointing because a large percentage of the people doing the pitchfork-waving would have done the exact same thing in his position. All sufficiently complex systems (the movie industry certainly one of them) evolve complex rules and strategies, and it's remarkably easy to get lost in them and forget that these systems are built on top of people. It's tempting to think of people who do bad things as "evil men", because it gives us security: "I'd never do something like that, phew". In reality though there are few evil men, but many men who do evil things. The notion that some people are capable of evil while others are not is hubris, and is a great way to end up on the wrong side of the morality scale without even knowing it. I personally doubt Ed Catmull ever got out of bed in the morning and decided he was going to screw a bunch of animators and inhibit their careers, but yet it happened, and I'd encourage all the pitchfork-wavers in this thread to consider that they themselves can just as easily end up in that position, especially if they approach life with the assumption that they're one of the Good Guys.
yarrel 12y ago
The no-poach agreements were clearly made in good faith between the parties involved. It's the parties who were not party to the agreement but whose wage-earning potential was affected by it that are the problem.
brown9-2 12y ago
What are the good intentions you think someone could hypothetically have?
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  * More effectively preventing the transfer of trade secrets or other proprietary information; non-competes are widely unenforceable, so while no-poach doesn't necessarily stop it, it makes it less likely. * Preventing major disruption to studios' projects as key players are poached any time a film goes into production. You could say they should have separate contracts binding the employee to stay for the duration if that's the concern, but that's not really practical, especially in an at-will employment state, where said contracts will be viewed with heavy skepticism by all parties. The more efficient way to achieve a similar effect is to just agree at the corporate level that you won't engage in this practice. This can have the side effect of limiting wages, but I don't think it necessarily has to. * "Poaching" can be variously defined; the contract may make it legal for a competitor to process an applicant, but not legal to actively pursue staff that have not expressed direct interest. In such arrangements, employee mobility would be considerably less hampered. I think those are good intentions. The business guy is trying to do right by the business, which is the sum of all of his employees. One could logically conclude that if films are constantly hindered by bidding wars, making 90% of the process recruitment, and secret information is constantly wrongly disseminated by that high rate of turnover, that his business may struggle and jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone involved. Some people may not believe it, but employee dependence does weigh heavily on good people in high-powered corporate positions. One could also argue that the bidding wars just have to continue until the price for an animator stabilizes and that the companies just need to suck it up. These highly-editorialized articles definitely seem to make that case, and claim that the law backs up that perspective. That's fine if so. But it doesn't make Ed Catmull or the executives at every other firm involved in these pacts evil moustache-twirlers that exist only to steal from the middle-class, and we shouldn't be so quick to throw our own under the bus.
  - dpritchett 12y ago
    Why not negotiate a way to make the employee want to stay for the duration of the project? If the monthly salary isn't enough to ensure the duration of service you need, find a way to offer additional compensation. Try back-loading the employee's contract with increasingly large incentives in the latter stages of the project. Any steps you take that limit the employee's career mobility and agency without employee agreement and compensation are suspect.
lr 12y ago
I can see what you are saying (however, I don't agree), but I think there is a bigger issue afoot: there are just too few companies that do any one thing, i.e., in a world of 7+ billion people, there are only a handful of companies that make feature-length CG films that the majority (of movie ticket buyers on the planet) watches. Because of this, those handful of companies are a virtual monopoly (cartel), and can, and do act in this bad way.
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  s/monopoly/monopsony
confluence 12y ago
What about this part? > We don’t have a no raid arrangement with Sony. We have set up one with ILM [Lucasfilm] and Dreamworks which has worked quite well. I probably should go down and meet with Sandy and Penney and Sony to reach some agreement. Our people are become [sic] really desirable and we need to nip this in the bud.
mullingitover 12y ago
> If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement. Depressed wages are the whole point. The no-poach collusion is there to prevent the companies involved from being in a position where they need to make a counteroffer to retain their talent.
- gojomo 12y ago
  That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation? Counteroffers once an employee has mentioned a plan to leave are so fraught with morale issues that many managers recommend against them no matter what. And auctions suck for buyers due to the "winner's curse" – wise buyers will often try to avoid being part of an auction process. Does that mean the seller always wants an auction, highest price always being best? Maybe if you can sell-and-forget a physical item. But selling your unique-in-the-industry talents for the next N years isn't quite like that: it's a relationship where you'll need a full gelled team and other costly resources to do well, and some safety margin for miscalculations. A 'cursed' winner who overpays for you, and others, might wind up sinking your projects and career when the errors manifest. Pixar employees have done very well, overall, including through stock options which became more valuable because their teams stuck together, and delivered critically-lauded and highly-profitable work at sustainable costs. Perhaps an alternate-history, with more talent raids and compensation bidding-wars, would have led to some superstar employees making even more money. But it might also have torpedoed key projects at key moments, and left the company and the bulk of the employees, far worse off. It's not a simple situation to model.
  - alexqgb 12y ago
    "That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation?" The easy (and legal!) way to do this is to get people under contract. Executive teams do this among themselves all the time, so it's not as though they're unfamiliar wit the principle or the practice. Sports teams do it too, as do a lot of creative fields where the particular people involved make all the difference. The obvious downside (from the perspective of the suits) is that they end up paying more for talent than otherwise would. Every dollar going to the staff is a dollar that isn't available to the executive team. It's a zero sum game, and the guys on top were playing dirty to get what they'd never be able to get if they kept it clean.

corysama 12y ago

Quick reminder to everyone: Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them. You might think that cookiecaper is an insensitive clod. But, he's not posting fluff, off-topic or otherwise distracting material.

learc83 12y ago
>Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them. That's a rule on Reddit, but to my knowledge it's never been a rule here. Here's pg's own words on the subject. >I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- tzs 12y ago
  That would make sense if all down voting did was show the net score, or the up/down breakdown. However, when an article has a more down votes than up votes, it is also made harder to read, and the bigger the difference, the harder to read it becomes. That makes pg's remark make little sense, unless HN is supposed to be a place where disagreeing with the majority is discouraged, which is not very hackerish. Some clarification from pg would be helpful here.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    It also prevents someone who makes controversial posts from being able to post very much. Downvote as a disagree button only works if there are no consequences to being downvoted. Otherwise, it just reinforces an echo chamber. Substantive, reasoned posts that contain unpopular opinions should be more visible than the circlejerk that always percolates to the top in these situations.
alexqgb 12y ago
If nothing else, cookiecaper represents the kind of thinking that leads to these situations in the first place. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's amoral. Yes, it betrays profound ignorance of the law and ethics, and yes, it's shot through with the kind of "logic" so poor it's actually repulsive. But that's actually the point. In the same way that smoke indicates fire, a stink like this indicates a giant pile of shit. And that's exactly what's just hit the fan. If you (a) agree with cookiecaper and (b) have anything to do with HR, now would be a great time to consider switching careers. You simply don't have the moral judgement your job requires. Better get out now before you find yourself in the middle of a similar mess.
- judk 12y ago
  Your personal attacks on cookiecaper are disgusting.
  - alexqgb 12y ago
    Here's the thing: when you're discussing the failures of another person's moral reasoning, you are inevitably calling their character into question. It may not be the point, but it's unavoidably the effect. For the same reason that you can't state that someone is lying without denigrating their character, you cannot point out that someone is representing an utterly amoral position without implying that they are a generally untrustworthy human being. Let me put it this way: would you be comfortable having cookiecaper running HR for your company? I should hope not. But if you were, what would you tell a board member who came across a post like this an wanted to know why - exactly - a guy this demonstrably off-base was being allowed to fill a position that carried so much risk? For what it's worth, people were just downvoting the guy. I think there's some value in seeing what he has to say in order to better understand that mindset that let to the moral implosion we're presently discussing. Separately, I think the tone of condemnation is actually very important. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have had damaging encounters with others who think and act like cookiecaper (e.g. anyone who has worked under Catmull). It's important to establish, in a very public fashion, that the values he displays are absolutely not okay.
    - 12y ago

wpietri 12y ago

Prices arise through market forces: the competition of buyers for the same goods. If the largest purchasers of a given good agree not to compete, then prices are absolutely harmed. Understanding where staff is going is reasonable. Making it so that your staff doesn't have opportunities to go anywhere? That's a criminal conspiracy to rig a market.

cookiecaper 12y ago
I agree that a likely effect was artificial depression of employee salaries, but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement. Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way. It's possible that Pixar et al had the best intentions when establishing this protocol. It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed. I would bet that most people who would've been poached would've been hired by a competitor within hours of resigning at their current employer. That doesn't make it OK, and like I said, it's very possible all of this was illegal from the get-go. I'm just saying there's no need to jump to the conclusion that malice and conspiracy were the primary motives behind these compacts, and there's no need to drag someone's name through the mud when definitive evidence doesn't exist.
- mullingitover 12y ago
  > It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed. They stopped being direct competitors the minute they agreed to collude. The term you're looking for is 'fellow cartel member.'
- potatolicious 12y ago
  > " but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement" Do we need to demonstrate intention? You brought up mens rea elsewhere in the thread but it hardly seems relevant at the end of the day. Someone with a clear intent to screw his employees certainly is more despicable and villainesque, but the practical impact on the employees is the same even if he did so unintentionally. And we can frown upon it all the same, because it's not as if he did something innocent with unforeseen side effect - the agreement was illegal, and the fact that it was secret suggests everyone involved knew this. So yeah, I'm maybe willing to believe that Ed Catmull didn't go out there with the explicit intent of screwing his employees. He may have engaged in this agreement in protection of his company, or of his work, but ultimately he (and every other SV CEO involved) kept it hush-hush because they knew it was illegal and immoral, and that the wider world would cry foul at what they were doing. Mens rea would make the morality of this more open and shut, but I do not believe it is critical to our ability to judge the impact and legacy of these actions. > "Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way." But yet this isn't a game. These are people, not basketballs. It's careers, not the soccer field. It's families, children, vacations, dreams, plans, not points in to be scored against your opponent. You're being unfairly downvoted IMO and you've brought up some good points, but what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people. The mistake here is the belief that this is somehow unique to Ed Catmull, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, et al. The demonization of him I'm seeing in this thread is disappointing because a large percentage of the people doing the pitchfork-waving would have done the exact same thing in his position. All sufficiently complex systems (the movie industry certainly one of them) evolve complex rules and strategies, and it's remarkably easy to get lost in them and forget that these systems are built on top of people. It's tempting to think of people who do bad things as "evil men", because it gives us security: "I'd never do something like that, phew". In reality though there are few evil men, but many men who do evil things. The notion that some people are capable of evil while others are not is hubris, and is a great way to end up on the wrong side of the morality scale without even knowing it. I personally doubt Ed Catmull ever got out of bed in the morning and decided he was going to screw a bunch of animators and inhibit their careers, but yet it happened, and I'd encourage all the pitchfork-wavers in this thread to consider that they themselves can just as easily end up in that position, especially if they approach life with the assumption that they're one of the Good Guys.

yarrel 12y ago

The no-poach agreements were clearly made in good faith between the parties involved. It's the parties who were not party to the agreement but whose wage-earning potential was affected by it that are the problem.

brown9-2 12y ago

What are the good intentions you think someone could hypothetically have?

cookiecaper 12y ago
* More effectively preventing the transfer of trade secrets or other proprietary information; non-competes are widely unenforceable, so while no-poach doesn't necessarily stop it, it makes it less likely. * Preventing major disruption to studios' projects as key players are poached any time a film goes into production. You could say they should have separate contracts binding the employee to stay for the duration if that's the concern, but that's not really practical, especially in an at-will employment state, where said contracts will be viewed with heavy skepticism by all parties. The more efficient way to achieve a similar effect is to just agree at the corporate level that you won't engage in this practice. This can have the side effect of limiting wages, but I don't think it necessarily has to. * "Poaching" can be variously defined; the contract may make it legal for a competitor to process an applicant, but not legal to actively pursue staff that have not expressed direct interest. In such arrangements, employee mobility would be considerably less hampered. I think those are good intentions. The business guy is trying to do right by the business, which is the sum of all of his employees. One could logically conclude that if films are constantly hindered by bidding wars, making 90% of the process recruitment, and secret information is constantly wrongly disseminated by that high rate of turnover, that his business may struggle and jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone involved. Some people may not believe it, but employee dependence does weigh heavily on good people in high-powered corporate positions. One could also argue that the bidding wars just have to continue until the price for an animator stabilizes and that the companies just need to suck it up. These highly-editorialized articles definitely seem to make that case, and claim that the law backs up that perspective. That's fine if so. But it doesn't make Ed Catmull or the executives at every other firm involved in these pacts evil moustache-twirlers that exist only to steal from the middle-class, and we shouldn't be so quick to throw our own under the bus.
- dpritchett 12y ago
  Why not negotiate a way to make the employee want to stay for the duration of the project? If the monthly salary isn't enough to ensure the duration of service you need, find a way to offer additional compensation. Try back-loading the employee's contract with increasingly large incentives in the latter stages of the project. Any steps you take that limit the employee's career mobility and agency without employee agreement and compensation are suspect.

lr 12y ago

I can see what you are saying (however, I don't agree), but I think there is a bigger issue afoot: there are just too few companies that do any one thing, i.e., in a world of 7+ billion people, there are only a handful of companies that make feature-length CG films that the majority (of movie ticket buyers on the planet) watches. Because of this, those handful of companies are a virtual monopoly (cartel), and can, and do act in this bad way.

rahimnathwani 12y ago
s/monopoly/monopsony

confluence 12y ago

What about this part? > We don’t have a no raid arrangement with Sony. We have set up one with ILM [Lucasfilm] and Dreamworks which has worked quite well. I probably should go down and meet with Sandy and Penney and Sony to reach some agreement. Our people are become [sic] really desirable and we need to nip this in the bud.

mullingitover 12y ago

> If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement. Depressed wages are the whole point. The no-poach collusion is there to prevent the companies involved from being in a position where they need to make a counteroffer to retain their talent.

gojomo 12y ago
That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation? Counteroffers once an employee has mentioned a plan to leave are so fraught with morale issues that many managers recommend against them no matter what. And auctions suck for buyers due to the "winner's curse" – wise buyers will often try to avoid being part of an auction process. Does that mean the seller always wants an auction, highest price always being best? Maybe if you can sell-and-forget a physical item. But selling your unique-in-the-industry talents for the next N years isn't quite like that: it's a relationship where you'll need a full gelled team and other costly resources to do well, and some safety margin for miscalculations. A 'cursed' winner who overpays for you, and others, might wind up sinking your projects and career when the errors manifest. Pixar employees have done very well, overall, including through stock options which became more valuable because their teams stuck together, and delivered critically-lauded and highly-profitable work at sustainable costs. Perhaps an alternate-history, with more talent raids and compensation bidding-wars, would have led to some superstar employees making even more money. But it might also have torpedoed key projects at key moments, and left the company and the bulk of the employees, far worse off. It's not a simple situation to model.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  "That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation?" The easy (and legal!) way to do this is to get people under contract. Executive teams do this among themselves all the time, so it's not as though they're unfamiliar wit the principle or the practice. Sports teams do it too, as do a lot of creative fields where the particular people involved make all the difference. The obvious downside (from the perspective of the suits) is that they end up paying more for talent than otherwise would. Every dollar going to the staff is a dollar that isn't available to the executive team. It's a zero sum game, and the guys on top were playing dirty to get what they'd never be able to get if they kept it clean.