HN guidelines state that if it is a story that will be found easily on a mainstream news site, it is probably not a good submission for HN. I flag political posts fairly regularly because there are plenty of other places to have those conversations besides HN.
The headline: Meta exposé author faces bankruptcy after ban on criticising company.
The article: “Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order. She is on the verge of bankruptcy.”
A little deeper in the article: It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure. Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement.
Alternative: Woman voluntarily signs non-disparagement agreenment with $50K penalty for each breach. Goes on to repeatedly breach agreement, publish a book full of disparaging commentary. Has yet to pay a cent to the company.
"voluntarily" is doing a lot of work there. I don't disagree with the facts here, but I do with this particular qualifier which implies a level of willingness to sign away rights was something that she (or anyone in that position) wanted. She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't. So she did sign it, but lets not pretend her choices at that moment were many and/or equal when faced with the law team of a trillion dollar company.
It's doing even more work when you're aware that, at one point, the NLRB had banned non-disparagement clauses in severances and employment agreements outright, stating that even offering these terms amounted to coercive behavior that prevented people from discussing their working conditions. [1]
it has a lot of work to do yes, but is still slacking off at its job when she signs it voluntarily, takes the consideration, then violates it and pays no consideration in return.
The book talks about the conditions when she was fired. She was suffering from life threatening medical problems from complications from a pregnancy. Not hard to see these terms as coerced given the medical and financial problems she was facing at the time.
Can you elaborate on the financial problems she was facing? She seems to have been a highly paid Facebook exec who would have had great health insurance. And if her employment was in the US she could keep that insurance through COBRA for between 18 and 36 months.
Life threatening medical problems are obviously horrific and she has my full sympathies. But I'm having a tough time drawing a from that to "coercion" for someone who was a director at Facebook.
She reported not being particularly high paid compared to her peers. When she was hired Facebook didn't care at all about her area (government relations).
As that became more important her role grew but she was never really promoted.
She also was not well informed about how tech compensation works and negotiated poorly (no stock) she came from an NGO background in New Zealand.
Her salary was probably quite a bit more than the average American but she was living in expensive areas (DC and SV) and interacting with extremely wealthy people. At one point Sheryl Sandburg got annoyed that she was leaving work for childcare and told her to hire a live-in nanny. She was living paycheck-to-paycheck on a high income with no wealth accumulation (many such cases).
OK, then honestly it's hard for me to have any sympathy for the idea that she was "coerced". She was being paid lots... but wasn't getting paid even more?
If you're an executive at Facebook, you should know how to research negotiation and compensation, and figure out a living situation where you're saving money. You're in the big leagues. If Sheryl expected her to be able to hire a full time nanny, then that's an excellent time to renegotiate a salary than can afford that.
If you're an entry-level worker who can't make ends meet in San Fran then of course I sympathize greatly! But if you're an executive at Facebook making enough money that you can even consider a full time nanny... you're not facing any level of "hardship" by which an offer of even more money in exchange for non-disparagement could be considered "coercion". Nobody is in poverty here. Nobody is going to wind up hungry or on the street.
That's what I don't understand. How can a high-up executive at Facebook be living paycheck-to-paycheck?
If I made, say, $300K/yr and was living paycheck-to-paycheck with zero savings after many years with the company, I'd say I was making highly irresponsible spending choices.
And she had a husband too, who sounds like he was working.
So something's just not adding up. It doesn't make any sense that a director-level executive at Facebook is 1-3 months away from "poverty".
COBRA means you pay the full cost of the insurance. So suddenly instead of paying $150 you are now seeing a $500 or more bill, especially if your employer is a major company that pays for all sorts of benefits. COBRA is a joke when you consider you just lost all source of income.
> The point is, you're not suddenly facing ruinous bankrupting medical expenses.
This is a powerful assumption given how expensive medicine is in the US - even with insurance - and how often people in their adulthood need medical treatment.
> The point is, you're not suddenly facing ruinous bankrupting medical expenses.
COBRA is going to cost her in the range of $3k-6k/mo. Then on top of that she's still going to have to pay all the co-pays and other out of pocket expenses. So probably going to need to hit like $10k in out of pocket expenses before she starts to be fully covered, at least for the things that are covered and in network.
I'm not sure what issue she ha{s,d} but I'll say that when my mom had cancer my dad was a top salesman for a major insurance company, we had the best plan you could get, and despite that they paid well over a hundred grand in medical expenses. This was 2 decades ago, he was making over a quarter million a year, and we were living on a very tight budget. Even if we had a lot in the bank I'm certain my family would have been completely financially ruined had we added the expenses of COBRA and removed the loss of income.
I do not think you're looking at the reality of the situation clearly. Maybe you're right, but none of us know the full details. My point is that the explanation is far from an unreasonable one, so it cannot be dismissed so easily. We'll need to know more to determine if your intuition is correct. But as of now, it is certainly too hasty
IIRC, part of the reason that so many countries have specific "here's money specifically for retirement" things (pensions, 401k here in the US) is that many people just don't plan far ahead very well.
If entry-level and lower-paid workers aren't saving money then that's understandable. That's why these government programs exist.
If you're an executive at Facebook, I think you have the ability to plan things well. If you still can't save any money, at that point it's hard to see how it's not just your fault.
She wasn't an executive in the sense you're thinking and certainly wasn't hired as one. She was hired to work in an area Zuckerberg never cared about and never gave anywhere near sufficient resources to.
She's described as an executive and as a director in articles.
I don't know what other sense there is? And what possible relevance is there of the relationship between her role and what Zuck thought? I'm sure Zuck doesn't care much about accounting or HR either. Lots of well paid executives work in areas of corporations that aren't the founder's main focus. That's the kind of problem most people would love to have.
Directing an area is very different from the title (or compensation) of Director, and it's certainly not equivalent to Director in a tech organization. SWW was hired as "Manager of Global Public Policy" but the book never indicates that she ever has reports or is a manager in that sense, which is generally a requirement to be understood or perceived as a "Director".
If you're surprised media articles don't ask questions and get basic facts wrong, go read any article about a topic you have direct experience with.
The articles don't seem to have gotten any basic facts wrong.
She had director in her title and reported directly to a vice president, Joel Kaplan, who is now a C-level officer. She managed staff.
That's seriously high up in the corporate hierarchy at Facebook. Feel free to read more:
"She managed a growing staff and oversaw government relations for entire continents, including Asia and South America. She reported to corporate vice presidents and had direct contact with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, then the chief operating officer."
So again, I don't what you mean by "wasn't an executive in the sense you're thinking". She's seems to be exactly an executive in the sense that everyone thinks.
> She's described as an executive and as a director in articles.
I once met with a person who used to be a vice president in a major US bank. I was impressed, until much later when I discovered that there were three thousand “vice presidents” in that bank.
VP is a low rank at a bank but a high rank at Meta. I would be very surprised if anyone at Meta with VP in their title made less than $1M total compensation. "Director" at Meta is also a high rank.
...while rejecting all meaningful suggestions and actions. It's very obvious throughout the story he doesn't care about the impact Facebook has on the world.
Zuck cares about growing into China. He cares about powerful people pretending they like him. He couldn't give less of a care about people dying, about his platforms being used to spread misinformation, about that misinformation corrupting elections and descending the world into authoritarianism, about the spread of hate speech, or anything else.
Ask your local nurse or schoolteacher how they feel about being "thanked" while everyone keeps voting against any meaningful change that would actually help them.
Not to mention that sometimes you'll need to be reimbursed rather than have them cover costs directly. They too are a profit maximization company, you can bet they want to pay out all little as possible and delay payments as long as possible.
Just a few months ago a close friend was denied her diabetes medication because her bloodwork showed her levels (of whatever they were testing) were nominal. The problem is, those tests showing normal is the exact thing you'd measure if the medication is working (if she was somehow no longer diabetic and taking medication then the levels also wouldn't her nominal). Her and her husband both have medical degrees too, and it took weeks to get the insurance to agree to cover the costs. All because someone only knew how to look at some spreadsheet but not how to interpret that data... (a common occurrence, even in our (HN's userbase) own field)
I'm not sure why this is shocking to anyone. Did we forget Luigi Mangione so quickly? His actions speak to the level of frustration Americans have with this system. You do not need to condone his actions (which I do not) to recognize the plight he represents.
$500? Ours was $2800/mo for a family of three and this was 2018 (Not FANG, big pharma)
Yes the original plan was great. No, we didn't need a plan that great. No we couldn't "downgrade". With the bigger income suddenly gone, coming up with $2800/mo in cash was a huge problem. COBRA is useless for many/most, unless your coverage is shite and the cost to the employer low.
when you are fired, you are free to disparage your former employer. she was not free to do that because she signed away that right, and you can only sign away something in exchange for something, which she obviously took.
when you don't mention or acknowledge this aspect, you are not making a convincing argument. perhaps they gave her a very attractive severance package, and you don't know that they didn't, so how can you draw a conclusion?
life threatening health problems is not a free pass to "i get whatever i want", not for me, not for you, and not for her, although we know that in the world of Karens it is an entitlement.
What’s likely is that she was offered more generous compensation in return for things this. This is pretty standard stuff. What “threats and consequences” are you suggesting?
In all likelihood the “voluntary” part was an exchange for accelerated stock vesting or similar. Could have walked away without that financial gain, signed the non-disparagement agreement to walk with the stock vested.
I don't think that's true in most situations. I think most companies would still pay a severance out of a general effort to smooth things over, and some sense of social loyalties.
And some aspects of the agreement would be fine. No spilling actual business relevant secrets, nothing that would count as libel or slander, etc.
Nope, they'd have security show you the door and maybe threaten to sue you into the ground if you talk. They choose mkney because money is easier, but if you take this option away, you just get the stick and no carrot.
True but not the ones who will be firing you. At least not in big corp, it would be some HR worker who doesn't know you from Adam and couldn't care less about you.
But then Facebook would have had no incentive to offer the agreement to her. And she must have been very happy with what she got in the deal, given she gave up the option of talking about all the apparently horrible misdeeds she witnessed while they were still fresh, rather than a decade later.
Plenty of companies have nonenforcable clauses in their contracts. Either by momentum or stupidity. That's despite the inclusion of such conditions can often void a contract in its entirety.
Is there an incentive to have unenforceable clauses? Yes, of course. The same way one might be incentivized to say they will harm you if you do not do what they want even if they have no intention of harming you.
It's called "a bluff". Play some poker, you'll see how effective this strategy really is.
A company can craft whatever document they want. That doesn't make them legal. The laws of the jurisdiction they're in always beat whatever you're signing.
Best example in software are non competes.
A company can make you sign something that doesn't allow you to do any software development when you're a developer.
You can sign that today then do the opposite tomorrow because that's just against the law.
How it's not voluntary? She didn't face prison if she didn't sign, she faced having less money. She chose more money. What other threat coukd facebook apply beyond not paying severance?
> She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't.
Like what? If it's something you sign when you leave, it generally comes down to whether you want some level of severance payments/accelerated vesting or not, even when you're fired (when you're at the executive level).
Basically, the company says: if you agree not to sue us or disparage us, here's a bunch of money.
There are no threats. The consequence is, if you don't sign, you don't get the extra money. It's completely and entirely voluntary.
She was a highly paid executive who chose to get even more money in exchange for keeping her mouth shut. Now I think it's great she wrote the book, I love transparency. But nobody can be surprised Facebook is taking legal action when she presumably took their money under an agreement not to disparage. Nobody made her take the extra money.
Remember this next time you have cancer and get fired, and then have the option to “voluntarily” sign something to keep receiving money until hopefully you’re well enough to look for a new job.
I think where most people disagree with you is that this is not the bar. I think you'll find that most people agree with you in some sense but have a drastically different bar. If you can't recognize this then there's no productive conversation to be had
I didn't say that was the bar, I just used it as an example of being clearly below the bar.
All I'm saying is that if a director-level executive who had worked at Facebook for years doesn't meet the bar as someone who can sign financial agreements without being coerced, then essentially nobody can. And then where does that leave us? Nobody is allowed to negotiate and sign contracts because everything is considered coercive?
At some point you have to be considered an adult who is responsible for the agreements you enter into. (Unless there's actual coercion, you know like you're at gunpoint, or if a contract is based on fraud, etc.)
> without being coerced
> you know like you're at gunpoint
I think this is the other part where people are using wildly different bars. It seems like you're in the camp that since no one put a gun to her head that she wasn't coerced.
Legally speaking, coercion doesn't require threats of physical harm, it also covers threats of financial or legal harm as well. So your interpretation is clearly too extreme.
There's a lot of gray area here and these non disparaging agreements are without a doubt in them. If you have an expectation of getting a severance package, like many companies offer as incentive programs (much like they used to offer pensions) and you later learn that you only get it on the condition of a non disparaging agreement, that can be reasonably interpreted as coercion. Is it or is it not is up to the lawyers, but let's not act like a situation like that is not in the gray area.
You keep mentioning her salary. Does anyone have actual numbers? We see people who read her book saying she was living paycheck to paycheck, so what's the argument? She's bad with money? Okay? So what? What difference does that actually make? It anything her lack of good financial planning (a thing most people aren't good at, regardless of income level) makes it easier to strong arm her. Again, is that coercion in the legal sense? Let's let the lawyers figure that out because we're just two idiots talking on the internet who don't have nearly enough information to make good conclusions.
But honestly, I'm more curious why you're so invested in this and quick to vilify her. We've had a lot of conversations over the years and I don't recall you ever being so quick to judge. Why is it that we're talking about her legal authorization to discuss Meta executives and not she claimed they did. Shouldn't that be our main concern? We shouldn't believe her outright but we'll have to make our own judgements on that, but isn't that the real story here? I care more about that than if she changed her mind and is now facing legal troubles. The answers to the truth of what she claims is critical to determining if her non disparaging contract was even legal and if she can be prosecuted for violating it. If she's a true whistleblower then it doesn't matter what she signed because the contract wouldn't legally be able to cover such things.
So at the end of the day, why does it matter. Right or wrong we're concentrating all our efforts on the wrong discussion. We're idiots in the Internet, not lawyers. But we are also Internet users and her claims have implications for all of us. So who fucking cares if she violated her contract or if the contract is invalid, what matters most is the validity of her claims. Why are we all acting like the validity of the contract has any influence on the validity of her claims. We're being fucking insane right now
I don’t really feel bad for the author. Most of these separation agreements - especially at higher levels - are generous golden parachutes with the stipulation that you don’t do damaging things like working for a competitor (while on garden leave) or disparage the company.
I am not aware of their separation agreement being published, but you have to be a special type of stupid to work for Facebook as an exec, get a $500k advance on a book you wrote about Meta, and then go bankrupt. From the limited information I have I can see why Facebook fired her.
You need to feel afraid for the ability for a corporation to so easily get you to surrender your own fundamental rights.
It’s not a coincidence you rarely hear stories like this in Scandinavian or even broader European countries because they have basic safety nets that mean you don’t need to sign away your rights in order to just live peacefully.
They are using the same kind of exit NDA used to coerce OpenAI employees who left that organization. We should all be afraid for ourselves as these organizations turn into black boxes where the only people who could speak out feel they cannot. This thing where you stop working for a company but they can still penalize you financially if they don’t like your annual “post-employee performance” evaluations is Kafka-esque.
Just to clarify, OpenAI did change their agreement (to some degree) after the SEC put pressure on them. In Facebook’s case the SEC has been notably silent despite the calls from US senators (AFAICT).
I am all for safety nets, and I actually live in a country with stronger safety nets than the USA, but I still don’t feel sorry for the author who basically has had every card to be extremely wealthy and squandered it.
Also realize that it isn’t private companies job to fix the broken social system in the USA, usually separation agreements for high paid employees offer severance well above and beyond the legal requirements (I have seen 3 months to a year including accelerated vesting in some cases), and a condition of accepting those benefits above and beyond the laws is you don’t disparage your employer. If you don’t accept the agreement you get the bare minimum according to the laws but you are then not bound to the disparage clauses.
Ok, so the fact that the USA has no laws for severance is the problem, not the fact that companies who pay severance above and beyond what is required of them comes with strings attached. If severance was legally mandated people could tell the company to pound sand when they push an exit contract on you.
It blew my USA colleagues when I told them I can take over a year of legally mandated parental leave and there is nothing the company can do about it.
But this line of argument doesn’t always hold with me. At some point, the behaviour of a company or person could be so heinous, that no amount of voluntary signing of an agreement should prevent you from exposing them.
You can read into this something like mugger says "my victim, whom when I was holding a knife out promised not to tell anyone about the robbery, went on to tell the police".
"I then sued my victim for causing me harm."
But it's hard to know about a situation when it's complex and you're a long way away from it. Maybe the book was unfair. Maybe it was fair. Or both. Maybe what happened was so bad it should supersede this kind of agreement. Who decides, and how?
This is a false (and dare I say dishonest?) analogy. Reporting crimes is protected by law [0]
If the author would report a crime she would be protected. The author is just airing some dirty laundry. She was paid money in exchange for not airing said dirty laundry. Hence her troubles now. Cry me a river.
I don’t take a position on this because I don’t know it but I think you’re (willfully?) misunderstanding the point. I don’t think all ethical problems can be legally defined. Something may be legal and wrong or illegal and not wrong. If she was indeed forced out for reporting sexual harassment, then what ethical responsibility does she still bear towards that company, regardless of what they ask her to sign as she leaves? The point isn’t that she’s right or wrong for sure, it’s that the problem is complex and legalities cannot account for all situations.
I read the book and can recommend it. It was both interesting and, in places, had a good sense of humor. It was interesting to see the intersection of news coverage I had read with the author’s inside perspective.
IMHO, the book has little or nothing about the kind of things we usually see called out in NDA breaches: ideas or code names from products, details on contract negotiations with competitors, internal processes, etc. The author was involved with managing relationships between Facebook and foreign governments and this makes up the meat of the book.
The freedom of contract is pretty fundamental. The entire point of a contract is to force you to do something it's your right not to do or to not do something you have the right to do.
The 1st amendment is about what laws the government can or cannot pass restricting your rights. It doesn’t say anything about what rights you can choose to give up by entering into a contract. There may be other laws governing the validity of such contracts though.
Parent comment cares more about Zuckerberg’s lawyers’ paperwork than calling out a terrible company for its terrible actions. Maybe if we play nice those lawyers could help Zuck buy another Hawaiian island?
Cry me a river. The person who wants to get rich here is Sarah. If she was motivated by exposing some dirty laundry inside Meta she could have started a blog or podcast. But she went for the book deal.
Should a private contract that requires a citizen to sign away a fundamental right (the right to say something that is not confidential, is objectively true and does not incite violence) be enforceable?
Not sure if all three conditions apply here though.
You can’t be forced to sign away your rights, but you can make an agreement to enter into an arrangement with confidential information with another party and agree to penalties if the contract is broken.
Making anyone free to reveal anything without consequences even after entering into an agreement about it isn’t going to work. You’re probably thinking only about the narrow case where a company is wrong and the employee is whistleblowing, but that is protected when done through the right channels.
However this wasn’t really whistleblowing. This was someone trying to make profit on her own book and sell more copies by sharing info she agreed not to.
> On the simplest level, a whistleblower is someone who reports waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, or dangers to public health and safety to someone who is in the position to rectify the wrongdoing. [0]
You'll find variations in wording but the definition is fairly consistent. If you go look at the requirements to be a *protected* whistleblower (as opposed to just a whistleblower) then it's that you have to have made an effort to report the issue to someone with the power to resolve it. The specifics can vary by job, so I don't know if she is protected or not. IANAL
So, you'll still be protected as long as you took the right steps. These usually include oral reports btw. There's no condition that prevents you from writing some tell all later. In fact, it's not that uncommon. Especially given that if you're a whistleblower you might end up making yourself unemployable. So personally I'm fine with making money from a book deal and speaking deals. Their time is still as valuable as anyone else's, right? What matters is if procedure was correctly followed. IMO it's like people making money filming themselves doing charity. Yeah, I'm not sure that's the greatest thing but at the end of the day the charitable actions are performed, right? May not be the ideal case, but I'd rather someone do something good for the wrong reasons than for them not to do good ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'll also add that there's many whistleblower programs that will pay you to blow the whistle. Usually it'll be in the form of a percentage of the fine issued against the offending entity. The IRS offers 15-30%[1].
In this article, I believe the UK is asking this same question. It will be interesting to see where they land; I suspect this is why the author hasn’t had to pay any fines yet.
I don't think that matters in terms of whether it is even enforceable. I could sign a document allowing management to take my first born son but them doing so is not legal. "But he signed it!"
You could also sign an NDA. And then you'd be bound by that NDA to not disclose the information it is protecting. Should penalties from that should also be non-enforceable because it would limit what you can say?
Consider that you have no agency if a gun is pointed at you, and that you do have agency if the gun is a water pistol. In your mind, does everything in between exist in a spectrum, or do they fall into one of the two buckets into which the above two scenarios fell? I.e. is your conception of agency binary or continuous?
A significant difference is that it is not legal to own slaves or trade in slaves. That makes contracts for the sale of slaves inherently unenforceable.
It is not illegal to refrain from speaking. If you want to enter into a contract that requires you not to speak under certain circumstances there is probably nothing inherently unenforceable about it.
I'm pretty sure for example it would be legal for the Diogenes Club [1] to expel you if you violated their no talking rule, if someone would actually make a real Diogenes Club.
> meant to belittle the value or importance of someone or something : serving or intended to disparage someone or something
Maybe it is not meant to belittle, but merely uncovering the truth. Who is to know, what her intention was, when releasing a book? I guess one would have to read that book and check how she formulated things, to know, whether it is intentionally belittling the "value" of Meta.
Also, subjectively speaking: How does one belittle the value of something that already has net negative value for society?
Maybe the waters are a little bit murky there.
But anyway, this goes to show, how these companies consume your soul. Trying to prevent you from ever revealing the truth about them and their illegal activities.
Non-disparagement clauses (common for executives) are clauses found in contracts that just state you can't say anything bad about the company, doesn't matter if it's true or not. Some examples here: https://contracts.justia.com/contract-clauses/non-disparagem...
I think it's a case where the law should simply say such clauses are not enforcible.
Non disparagement clauses are put in every severance agreement in the US as a matter of course. It's not just for executives. They'll put it in the severance agreement of a sandwich artist in exchange for one more paycheck -- or sometimes in exchange for nothing at all: "mutual non-disparagement"
Clearly the solution is to write everything you have to say through an ancap lens and make it sound as if you think they were really smart for doing all the things they did.
Maybe, but if you couldn't rationalize whatever makes you the most money being ethical then you probably wouldn't take a job at a place like Facebook in the first place.
Conveniently, that makes it easy to write your praise. It doesn't take much to go from "demographics like 'teenage girls with body insecurities' want relevant ads like beauty products! We're helping consumers to satisfy their needs!" to "showing teen girls aspirational images that drive them to buy beauty products (and happen to drive insecurities) is just helping them reach their potential! We're helping consumers to uncover needs they didn't know they had!" Wherever your comfort line was to decide to work there, you can probably drive it a little further with similar reasoning.
Same in many EU countries. Poland and Germany are two examples.
For example if someone robs you (or do worse things to you) and you call them out publicly you can be liable if you can't prove it happened.
In practice the law defends the offenders. You can't speak up if you don't have a hard proof. I think it's ridiculous but so is a lot of civil law. Americans often don't appreciate how well they have it in comparison.
It's basically a ban on exposing evil to protect the money of those committing the evil. God commands us to expose, correct, and punish evil. That makes for a better society.
People often underestimate how harsh their words come across to others when posting them on a web forum. If you intended them with sincerity, that’s fine, but one can easily read your words in the way that is often meant as a hurtful attack. Please take more care to ensure your words are clearly, sincerely kind in future.
Edit: On further investigation, I see we've had to warn you before about making that kind of comment relating to religion, and I note you posted a similarly dismissive reply last time. And indeed this time you've escalated, with the words "Cruelty is enabling clearly psychotic behavior."
Given that you're showing no intention to reform this pattern of behavior, it's time to ban the account.
I think that true statements could be considered disparaging. Consider something like:
"Zelphirkalt claims they do not abuse their child. Despite this their kid has been seen at the ER for broken bones multiple times in the last 10 years, and spent a few months in therapy."
Even if I know that your kid's ER visits were for:
1) a broken leg from a fall out of a tree
2) a broken finger from their martial arts lessons
3) a broken nose from defending themselves in a fight
and that the therapy was mandated by the school system as a result of the fight and a "zero tolerance" policy, the text of the statements in question are still absolute truth. I've just phrased it in such a way (and declined to report on other truths) that a reader is encouraged to draw the conclusion that you abuse your kid physically and emotionally. I think if I published something like that in a book, you'd certainly consider it disparaging, and I think a court might agree if you were enforcing a non-disparagement contract I had signed with you.
That said (at least in the US) I doubt a court would find it to be "libel" or "slander", since those are MUCH higher bars to clear by default and assuming you were a famous individual (or company like facebook) the bar is even higher. Something like this would likely hinge on my own reputation and how likely a reader is to assume I'm speaking from "hidden knowledge" as opposed to coming to a given conclusion from public knowledge.
Not all immoral, abusive and exploitative acts are illegal. In fact, most are not, because companies have whole legal departments dedicated to figuring out just how they can exploit the system and other people without getting punished legally.
This liability would most likely prevent Sarah from getting a new loan (for example to move away from it all). And in theory bankruptcy means not being able to fulfill existing liabilities-which Sarah is most likely not able to.
But practically Meta probably wants Sarah to not publish the book. Sarah may get even more money from another deal with Meta :)
i guess, but the headline IS accurate. The top-level comment is just spin, it doesn't point out anything that is misleading or inaccurate about the headline.
It's pretty common for technical people (and corporate PR) to misunderstand how the machinery of the judicial system can be used and abused.
Non-disparagement agreements should be made illegal. It significantly reduces the chance that people can bring criminal actions to justice due to fear of lawsuits. But also, it just doesn't align with American society, where free speech is the most important and foundational value.
You still don’t have to like it or go on message boards advocating on behalf of the company.
There’s no principle saying that you have to be on the side of an organization being exposed for behavior that is horrible for society, just because they may have a legally sound argument in court.
Laws and rules and courts are fully arbitrary and exist in search of justice.
If the rules brought us to this place, of what use were the rules?
Frankly, who gives a damn about the motivations? This is clearly in the public's best interest to know, and nobody deserves to be bankrupted over that.
There should be no such thing as a non-disparagement clause.
It's a gag, pure and simple. You should always be able to tell your own story -- what you lived through, what you lost, who failed you. But these clauses are everywhere now, slipped into contracts and settlements, letting corporations bury their mistakes and keep the next person in line from knowing what's coming.
I learned this the hard way.
I grew up believing USAA was the gold standard of insurance. My grandfather used to say, "I won't always be around, but USAA will always have your back." So when my house flooded, I trusted them. They assigned me a contractor and promised -- in writing, on their website (it's still there: https://www.usaa.com/perks/home-solutions/contractor/) -- that I'd get a five-year workmanship warranty on the repairs.
What I got was a disaster.
Their contractor turned my house into a construction horror show. They cracked my foundation slab by drilling into it to move a drain -- cutting tension cables in the process. They killed two huge front-yard trees by dumping chemicals on them. They didn't scrape off the old glue before laying new flooring, so the planks bent and shifted underfoot. They painted latex over oil, so the paint peeled off in sheets. They tiled the bathroom directly onto the subfloor with no moisture barrier, ignored termite damage behind the walls, dropped and damaged new appliances -- cook top and oven were both damaged. Since they used multiple sub-contractors, their crews even the new cabinets they installed were cracked and chipped in over a dozen places. They stole everything from my garage -- even stole the ice cube maker from my fridge!
It got worse.
They cracked the gas line and left it leaking (I had to call the fire department). They installed two sinks with the hot and cold lines reversed. Messed up all of my GCFI outlets, and they left the entire upstairs without electricity and without working outlets at all. They even covered electrical outlets with drywall instead of cutting openings where the plugs had been. Every corner I turned revealed something new, often dangerous -- and I documented it all with photos, videos, emails, and texts. I thought having a paper trail meant I was safe.
When I complained, we went into mediation. The contractor -- a steam-cleaning company that had only recently started doing restoration work -- admitted they'd screwed up. One of their managers even wrote, "Look, the situation at your house is unfortunate. We hired subcontractors we thought we could trust, but clearly we didn't supervise them correctly. This isn't how we normally operate, but we'll make this right."
We built a punch list of fixes. They agreed to pay my living expenses while I was displaced.
Then they vanished.
No crews. No repairs. No communication. No reimbursement. I kept sending receipts -- just like we agreed -- and got nothing. USAA went quiet too. Three months later, someone at USAA finally said, "Look, I can't help you, but why haven't you hired a lawyer yet?"
I said, "Because I trusted you."
After a year of silence, USAA's mediation team -- who had never set foot in my house and were based in another state -- emailed me: "Your house had issues no contractor could have foreseen," they said. The work, while clearly bad, was apparently "about what you could expect from the average contractor in Austin right now." They knocked $2,000 off the bill. I had to spend $80,000 fixing the foundation slab alone. (All told, I've spent over $300k repairing my house to date, and there's still more to do... just for context, I only paid $275k for my house in 2010...)
And here's what I didn't know: the "mediation" wasn't neutral. It was run through Contractor Connection -- a company that exists to serve insurance carriers. I was never really their customer. USAA was. Any pressure to do the right thing had to come from USAA -- and USAA simply didn't care.
So I finally hired a lawyer. Expensive. Slow. A year later, we finally had our "day in court." Except it wasn't court -- there's no public record, no evidence allowed (meaning my entire photo slide deck showing all the issues wasn't even looked at!), no jury of sane peers who could see this from a human angle. Just arbitration with a "neutral" retired judge who had spent the past two years doing nothing but USAA cases. (Think she'd have had that job for two years if she ever ruled against the insurance company?) At one point she said, "We have to give the benefit of the doubt to these hard-working contractors who came to aid you in your hour of need. If we don't protect them, they won't be there when others need them."
You can imagine how her ruling went.
(Another thing everyone should know about Texas before moving here: there are no "Licensed Contractors." So even though I had a professional inspection outlining all the issues, when it came time to present it, I said, "It's clear a professional didn't do this work." And the contractor's lawyer was able to shamelessly say, "Nowhere in the contract does it say a professional would do the work." So shady.)
The contractor wanted me to pay their legal fees. Pay for the full amount of the repairs -- wouldn't even tell me what the insurance company had agreed to pay, but claimed the value of their work was three times higher than any number I had seen until that point. It still bothers me that they were allowed to just make up a number -- and all the written emails and texts saying they'd make things right, pay my living expenses, were just ignored.
But what killed my will to fight... mid-way through, my lawyer told me that if I wanted to proceed to trial, I'd need a $250,000 retainer up front -- and it would drag on for two or three more years. And I wouldn't be allowed to fix or move back into my house until it was done because they would need the house as evidence. By then I was exhausted, broke, and just wanted it over. Ten hours into a marathon arbitration session -- literally as the building's janitorial staff was locking doors -- I agreed to a deal to just make all this stop. We'd all just walk away. I'd keep the house in the state it was, we'd never have to go through mediation again or do another blue-tape walk-through, but they weren't paying for anything -- not even the expenses they'd already agreed to pay, certainly not the damages to my house.
At the end my lawyer pointed me to a DocuSign field and said, "Sign here." After I said, "Well, at least I can warn other people with a brutal Yelp review," my lawyer said: "No, you can't. You signed a non-disparagement clause." At no point was this talked about before I signed it. When I asked, "Why didn't you tell me?" my lawyer just said, "Oh, these are really standard..."
And apparently, she didn't think it was worth bringing up because another one had already been in the original contract I signed while standing in two inches of water in my living room. Looking back, it feels like they knew from the start they weren't going to deliver quality work -- and they wanted to make sure anyone who went through mediation could never speak publicly about it again. (Technically it doesn't cover USAA, but calling them "independent" is like calling a husband and wife independent -- legally separate maybe, but joined at the hip in every way that matters.)
That's the real power of these clauses: they don't just close your case, they erase it. They wipe away the evidence, silence the people who lived it, and make sure the next homeowner walks into the same trap with no warning. And there's a power dynamic. They've done this a hundred times. They show up with the contract they want. You're acting in the moment, often stressed or panicked. You think you're just signing to pay them -- but really, you're signing to let them off the hook for any damages, and do things in the shadiest way they can do them. And no matter what they say or do after that, the only thing that matters is the original contract.
So I can't name the contractor in Austin. But I can tell you it was USAA's contractor. And everything I went through was part of a process that USAA designed. =P
Insurance companies aren't there to help you. They're there to protect their balance sheet. If you get crushed in the process, that's acceptable collateral damage. They don't care about making you whole -- only about checking boxes in a process designed to minimize payouts and keep the stock price climbing.
And non-disparagement clauses? They're how corporations make sure no one ever finds out -- so they can keep getting away with it.
I think any contractor who relies heavily on sub-contractors is a little shady by default. At that point they aren't paying for a good job, just for someone to "put tiles on the bathroom wall." If anything slows that person down, they don't get paid. So the sub-contractor has no incentive to call out flaws, or termite damage, or any order of operations issues that might stop them from finishing that day. Sub-contractors just want to get in, get done, and get paid.
It's better to find a contractor who does the work themselves, or at least one you trust as a partner to inspect the work of their crews. But here's the catch here... time is money. Someone has to absorb the cost of delays. Those days don't just get refunded. That's why the relationship is so important. You need to make it clear you're willing to pay for things to be done right. If that message doesn't reach every person who walks onto the job, corners will get cut.
But to even recognize when corners are being cut, you need some basic knowledge of building techniques. Knowing the "right way" to do a job makes all the difference.
When the big freeze hit Austin a few years ago, a lot of pipes burst around town. Some of my neighbors had flooding too, but their stories sound nothing like mine. Most of them just say, "Hey, I got a remodeled bathroom!" or "Hey, I got new floors out of it." I don't think every contractor is shady. But I did get a shady contractor. Another way to spot them... anyone willing to do "insurance prices" is usually looking for ways to cut every corner. Insurance is really a scam that forces you to use the worst contractors for the job... it's unfortunate.
The contractor wasn't just shady with me -- they were shady with the insurance company too. Honestly, I'd call it attempted fraud. At first I didn't catch on. For example, they told me, "Your laundry room doesn't have a drain. We can add one to bring it up to code, and the insurance company will pay for it." That sounds good to a homeowner to hear the insurance company will pay for it, but it should have been a giant red flag. If they're looking to pad the bills that they send a supposed partner, you can be sure they'll play games with you too.
Another example: they said I needed a brand-new subfloor to fix a few "soft spots" and creaks in a 20-year-old second-story floor. The upcharge was about $8,000. What they should have done was tighten the existing boards in the bad spots and spread self-leveling compound across the whole thing. Instead, they just dropped new plywood on top of the old plywood. Later, another contractor told me this wasn't even a fix. The floor still had the same soft spots and creaks. (Seriously WTF!) And then the top step was the wrong height; it's more dangerous than I would have imagined -- everyone tripped on it. Fixing it after the fact was expensive.
Live and learn!
For the record, the standard process is straightforward: rip up the old floor, tighten the subfloor down (because after 20 years it will have shifted), apply self-leveling compound, wait a day for it to dry, then lay the new floor. That's it. But I suspect they tried to add another layer of plywood because there's no "wait a day" step there; if they do it the wrong way, they don't have to have a crew come back out. But there shouldn't have been an upcharge or anything special needed. The contractor just took advantage of the fact that I'd asked about the soft spots, knew I didn't know the right fix, and made up something expensive.
Anyway, I don't share this story to scare anyone away from homeownership. Owning a house can be great. The real lesson is: educate yourself. Learn how homes are built and repaired. Watch a few "inspection gone wrong" videos on YouTube. Try small projects -- replace trim, hang a door, tile a bathroom, or even just build a birdhouse. Once you know the basics, you'll be able to tell when a contractor is cutting corners or upselling you on nonsense.
read the book. her allegations are important and she's a brave woman. Low point: zuckerberg pressuring the author, while she is suffering from late pregnancy complications, to travel to Myanmar with a callow sales pitch for their dictators. Following which they failed to appoint a native-language speaker to monitor usage in the country, while facebook became a very clear vector for racially motivated violence.
Another low point: MZ working with communist party chiefs to engineer a "chinese" version of facebook where the government could see all citizens' private information at will.
She REALLY stuck her neck out for millions/billions of people's basic rights. The fact that she is facing bankruptcy for it just makes her that much more of a badass.
She is almost as bad as the people she writes about unfortunately. She enabled the Facebook machine and even when she saw highly unethical things she wouldn't leave because she didn't want to miss out on her unvested stock. She wasn't some lowly employee getting coerced into taking actions she didn't agree with - she was a highly ranked exec flying on private jets with Zuck because she wanted the money. She could have taken another high ranked tech job at any time. Instead she put her life and unborn child's life at risk multiple times. For the money.
I think this is the wrong take. I don’t agree that people are good or bad, I think actions are, and there are lots of reasons and motivations a person can end up enabling a bad situation, some of those motivations can even at the time be justified.
I do believe Meta is very bad for the world and has way too much power. Anything that can get people to open their eyes to this is important. Dividing those that are trying isn’t helping.
all pretty much true - but she wrote this book, which goes a fair way to redeem her in my view. also, she tended to at least try to temper the worst tendencies of the executive team.
She was certainly the best of a bad bunch and I’m glad she wrote the book. I just found her total lack of self-awareness made it a difficult read. A worthwhile one nonetheless.
“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time,”
That's a fact of reality. Trying to compare what Trump is doing to simply stating that we were in a financial crisis when Obama took over is while every single argument with someone from the right should be done knowing they don't stand on principles and will literally redefine words and reality to try and make a point.
The topic of censorship is definitely relevant. However, HN submission guidelines suggest that if it’s something that you’re going to be reading about in the mainstream press or catching on the TV news, it’s probably not for this forum.
What would be an example of such criminal charges being brought by this administration? Is there a case that stands out as clear retaliation?
Edited to add: I can think of the mortgage fraud cases being discussed/brought against some high-profile people, but can’t think of any corporate world leadership being charged.
FIRE has a list of people fired for making offensive comments after Kirk’s killing [0]. FAMA has something similer for people fired for making offensive comments after Floyd’s killing [1].
FIRE calls it the tragedy cycle: "A tragedy happens. Someone reacts by celebrating that tragedy for whatever reason. Then the social media mob comes to demand this person be fired, expelled, or otherwise punished for their views."
Those lists are pointless if we can't see exactly for what words those people have been fired.
If my employee makes a slur against "n*ggers" while he has black coworkers, it is not the same thing as simply copy-pasting Kirk's own words on gun violence being an acceptable consequence of the 2nd amendment.
Europe has laws against hate speech that Americans think reach too far, but the positive side effect is that employers are not the one doing the calls - which they do instantly, under pressure, without any chance for the employees to defend themselves. A European firm has no basis to fire an employee until a court has reached a conclusion - the best they can do is suspend the employee.
The FAMA story links to examples, though not all of the links remain live.
One of the first was from a police officer who had posted on social media, "If he can scream he can breath, something else was going on. I’ve been pepper sprayed with CS gas and it messes with your breathing but you can definitely still breath.”
Another was a sports broadcaster who was forced out/resigned after tweeting: "Longtime Sacramento Kings TV broadcaster Grant Napear resigned Tuesday after he tweeted "ALL LIVES MATTER" when asked by DeMarcus Cousins for his opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Some of the links, and therefore the comments, are not accessible from Europe, but the actual comments (or stories including the comments) are all there.
It wasn't literal and it wasn't quoting. Kirk named 4 people in his actual quote, she maliciously changed it to make it appear he said it was about all women of a certain race, and put it in quotes so that people think she was quoting verbatim.
"If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
Her edit is wrong, and probably deliberate, for that she will be criticized. But Kirk did write and say some truly heinous things. That much is something we all know.
He accused four successful black women of "steal[ing] a white person's slot", and guys here are desperately trying to pretend it only applies to these four persons.
Again, you're putting words in our mouths just like she did to Kirk.
You should never be attributing verbatim quotes to someone while signing their name to it, especially as a journalist, it's simply wrong and unacceptable.
The reader can decide for themselves what Kirk actually meant after reading his actual original quote with you or her deciding for all of us.
Do you seriously think Kirk is only accusing the "four people" - four successful black women - of "steal[ing] a white person's slot" and just these four? Only these four? That this is the message he is sending?
The point is that it in no way justifies making up quotes and adding his name to them as if he literally said something else verbatim, especially as someone working for a newspaper.
She could've just added what she thought he actually meant after not butchering what he said on purpose.
This was similar to my take. What's dystopian about how the Chinese system was/is/was rumored to be was that it was the government doing the tracking and scoring.
Which ends up harsher than what private entities do as a form of moralistic restrictions than are dubiously related to one's ability to pay back loans. I don't see how barring one from using long distance travel is going to help them better pay back loans beyond punitive punishment.
The wave of CRM is CDP. Customer Data Platform. The key is that it isn't just your basic account data, but all the behavioral data across various system interactions both online and off (if applicable). Shopping Cart abandonment email campaigns are pretty benign. But the outrage around the targeted ad for baby/pregnancy products that made the news from Target a few years ago is just the start for what more insightful data signals can give you. I don't really care about most retailers knowing what I buy. I do care about them reselling that data to big aggregators that know everything I buy, where I go and when, and join that what sites I visit and what mail I get. It is too much and can be abused.
> The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.
For what it is worth, $13 billion is about the GDP of Somalia (about 150th in nomimal GDP) with a population of 15 million people.
You’re right on this point, but my read of the article was that you can buy the fastest trains in the world but if your infrastructure is not up to enabling them, they won’t go much faster than the ones you have already.
The headline — which, let's face it, will be the only thing a whole bunch of people are going to read — really makes it out like they bought shitty trains, or even that trains can't be better. Which is just untrue.
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