Or, alternatively, sexual abuse is a current hot-button issue, and this is helping to create a perfect storm of people who feel either exploited by companies and their executives (because they are), or that they don't have a reasonable amount of influence in large companies (they don't), or that so many executives get to fail upward (they do), or that sexual abuse is still not handled as seriously as it should be (it isn't).

Google will have a few bad days of PR, nobody will be able to identify this event in Google's stock price or quarterly reports, and in about three weeks everyone will have forgotten completely about this and gone on to the next series of things to be bothered about.

This much simpler explanation allows the world to keep stumbling along about like it always has, and cryptocurrency gets to continue to be a solution in search of a problem.

>this is helping to create a perfect storm of people who feel either exploited by companies and their executives (because they are)

What do you mean by that? I know only a few Googlers, mostly new grads. They don't seem to be worked to the bone or mistreated (9-5, high comp, benefits etc.) and have excellent working conditions (ergonomic workflow, offices with natural light, mentoring, good internal tooling).

In fact, I don't know if I would enjoy it. Since I like intense environments... they have it good though.

Those are good by modern standards, but you still get to see someone get paid $2 million a month for 4 years, plus receive investments in their next venture, after committing an offense that would probably get you summarily fired.

It's pretty messed up that we look at a situation like that now and say, "well the employees only have to work 9 to 5 and they get great health benefits, so I don't see why anybody would be upset."

You decide to make the most uncharitable interpretation of my comment therefore I am not interested in engaging with you any further.

> The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally

The end does not justify the means. So what good is a society built on prejudice, harassment, and corruption?

If you can sweep controversy under the rug until such time that it's convenient then good luck ever getting change to occur for the better.

> by getting rid of the organization and making any people behind it anonymous & fungible, you can continue to organize economic activity without painting a target on your face.

Making it anonymous & fungible is only necessary if you're unable or unwilling to stand up for your actions. If you're unwilling to stand up for what's right or are doing something you know is unethical, then what right do you have to the proceeds from your actions?

What good is a society without due process or presumption of innocence, where a disputed allegation would be punished without proof?

I suspect that at a certain level, corporations must have accountability similar to nations. Right now corporations don’t need to be democratic, they don’t need to allow any type of “freedom of speech” and indeed have strong incentives/prohibitions against it in the case of no-disparagement clauses.

I think people may need to be allowed a vote in the companies they work for/monopolies that service them, and that freedom-of-speech rules for corporations, employees, and customers is likely to follow that of their host nations — not equally free everywhere, but that no-disparagement clauses would be legal in the UK and illegal in the USA, for example.

Do companies apply any of that to employees unless they are a protected class? If they want you gone you're gone for whatever reason they make up if they even make one. You don't get to have a presumption of innocence or due process.

Why shouldnt companies be treated the same way by their employees?

I think we'd all like to see contracts meant to prevent those abuses honored. It's only unfortunate that more of us don't have such contracts.

That's not a court. It's a company. And just like they can decide to hand out golden parachutes to execs accused of misbehaving they could chose not to. That's not the same as punishment by a court of law after 'due process'.

I thought the $90 million was required by a contract. If not, and Google made the decision to offer the money after the accusation, that's different.

(1) it depends on what else was in the contract, I haven't seen the contract but 'being fired for cause' usually triggers a whole pile of clauses that have serious consequences.

and

(2) Google went on to invest in his new venture, which I highly doubt was in the contract no matter when the whole thing went down.

As it is one arm of Google decided to let the man go for cause and give him a golden parachute, and another arm of the company decided to invest in his next venture.

Neither of those read like something bad happening to Andy Rubin. You could fire me any day for any reason you'd like to pick if you gave me 90 million.

> Making it anonymous & fungible is only necessary if you're unable or unwilling to stand up for your actions.

Doesn’t this presuppose “good” people are in charge?

> The end does not justify the means. So what good is a society built on prejudice, harassment, and corruption?

Spoken like someone who was raised in a culture where airing grievances led to getting what you wanted most of the time.

I mean, it's not illogical. There's a reason why the activist archetype is so respected in our society. It gets results!

But the outlook that fuels activists to push things things until they win: "I'd rather burn everything to the ground than not get what I want" is also an incredibly short sighted and selfish way to look at things.

This is the human condition I guess. We take things for granted. Like the stability we've grown up in, so much that we're willing to sacrifice our inheritance [a stable and mostly fair society] chasing windmills.

Luckily we've amassed so much wealth and institutional inertia that I think it'll be a while before it all comes tumbling down.

> This is the human condition I guess. We take things for granted. Like the stability we've grown up in, so much that we're willing to sacrifice our inheritance [a stable and mostly fair society] chasing windmills.

The notion that this is a “stable and mostly fair society” is not self-evidently true. And I suspect that if the question were surveyed, the results would differ dramatically across identity groups.

This is like the business version of Assassination Politics leading to all identifiable people being utterly milquetoast and all activity happening under crypto-secure nyms.

Someone will win an Econ Nobel for this.

>The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally, but that's where game theory is taking us.

Has it ever occurred to you that if people are willing to burn it to the ground, the "modern world" might not be quite as good for them as it is for you?

What we are seeing today are people who have long felt grievances talking to each other and discovering that they're not alone, and that the civil institutions which are supposed to address those grievances systematically do not do so.

And when people are given no other options to correct injustice, conflict is all that's left to them.

If you want to stop the world from burning, don't blame the people for fighting, blame the system for making it necessary.

I don't have an opinion on whether what google did was good or bad. I'm just a point of "outrage fatigue," especially with protests that come off as gimmicky.

Maybe pushback against google is appropriate, maybe it's effective, but I am sure fatigued by this kind of stuff.

Posts on my local subreddit asking where the next protest is are becoming increasingly common. They're not asking for details on specific protests, just want to know when there is a protest scheduled for pretty much anything. It's becoming mostly a social event for many. It'll be interesting to see how people whose social interactions depend on protest culture fare when the current trend fades away.

I don't understand... Did any protesters walk through your office? Are you having trouble getting GMAil support?

Because if, as professed, have no opinion one way or the other, I fail to see how you can be annoyed by something you only read about (after clicking on links presumably informing you what to expect). Are you also annoyed by the weather report? Because that seems to have become a daily staple.

> A lot of the popular unrest facing both corporations & governments today is people learning that conflict gets results.

Conflict likes workers peaceful protests, union negotiations, and various acts of civil disobedience against the government are in a broad category of "conflict."

Corruption, violence, harassment, threats of violence, libel, literally burning parts of the world to the ground, incitements to violence, swatting, disinformation campaigns, and genocide are in another very broad category of conflict.

If your use of the word "conflicts" mixes anything freely from both two categories then the sentence I quoted is meaningless.

> The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally, but that's where game theory is taking us.

If you are talking mainly about any of the things I mentioned in my first category of "conflict," then this sentence isn't persuasive.

If you are talking about the second category only, I don't understand the relationship to the article.

Yes.

Crypto is a compelling simulacrum of classical liberalism (free individuals engaging in trade and limited governments using precise laws to protect the commons).

This time we are trusting machines and mathematics to preserve individual rights rather than culture.

When you put it that way it actually seems like a good idea.

There are big potential downsides. Blockchains are chains. They don't forgive. They don't forget.

But I still think it's a worthwhile endeavor.

>Crypto is a compelling simulacrum of classical liberalism

hard nod

points to last sentence in profile

I'm one of those "get off my yard types" when someone comes along and (seemingly) blindly proposes blockchain in a discussion because blockchain is very good at what it does but what it doesn't do is 'everything'...

...but I'd take it a step further and say it's simulacra, the dollar became classical liberal econ simulacrum the minute we decided to start printing the things at will and standing well back[1].

---

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2AvU2cfXRk

That may be the appeal of the crypto world but the reality of the crypto world is that it is retarded. Crypto has no real world applications.

I've never bothered with crypto but I can think of a few situations where it would be useful. A few years ago I went on a vacation to Argentina which was suffering from high inflation, had instituted currency controls, and had an official bank exchange rate that was laughable compared to what you could get quite openly on most street corners. Being able to buy crypto in the US and then sell it in Argentina for local currency could have been useful. For locals, using it as a store of value might have been useful if not for the crazy amount of volatility. Another edge case is for purchasing things in legal gray areas. Obviously some use it to buy drugs, illegal services, and other things most wouldn't want to be involved in. Before streaming services became popular there was a Russian music ecommerce site called AllOfMP3. They sold MP3s for the local Russian price to customers around the world. As this was a large discount, it made the record companies unhappy so they pressured the credit card companies to stop allowing payment to AllOfMP3. In the age of crypto, they would have been able to chug along with little problem but back then it caused them to resort to trading in gift cards. I don't know how long they lasted once the credit card embargo was put in place but such a financial lockout would be more difficult for the record companies to accomplish today. Of course streaming services have made that business model mostly obsolete so we'll probably never know for sure.