It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
I have no idea whether he said that but it reminds me of something. I'm rewatching (by which I mean "playing in the background while I do other stuff") the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and it literally has this in it.
> Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus division.
> But make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault, I trusted them to get the job done, but that is the price of leadership.
All true...been a huge fan since it originally aired. I was about the same age as the characters and doing the same work and got all the references and loved every minute of that show but looking back now overall I only feel regret for not buying BC when I saw this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU
I dunno what you expect, everyone wants to avoid the negative consequences of their actions, should we be surprised that the rich and powerful can actually do it?
If you hire a house cleaner, and the house cleaner doesn't do a good job, would you fire yourself from the house? What repercussions will you personally suffer?
But they were fine with the hiring in the first place. Making mistakes is allowed - it's worse to pretend like everything you did in the past was flawless.
Also, Zuck controls 61% of the vote for Meta. Investors knew that it was his show when they invested
A closer analogy would be that you asked the house cleaner to clean the pool house when you actually needed the main house cleaned. The house cleaner recognized that you asked for the wrong area to be cleaned, but went ahead and did it anyway, but did a great job cleaning the wrong thing.
The cleaner isn't the problem with respect to the cleaning itself, but what about the culpability in exploiting someone who has lost their mind? In this case Zuckerberg is willing to accept the exploitation that occurred in the past simply for what it is, but now that he has had a moment of clarity he also cannot let it continue.
The missing bit is where you say "I take full responsibility for this situation", to the cleaners who's lives are impacted by this significantly more than yours.
> Would you fire yourself from the house?
You keep pushing this false framing/binary for some reason. You made a bad call, you lost the money, that's a given (a passive if you will). Where's the active "taking responsibility" part? That's the main critique.
> I don't think you meant you merely wanted the performative sound of "I take full responsibility for this situation" to come out of his mouth. Without actions, the words mean nothing.
100% agree, and that's precisely the critique towards Mark as those words presumably came out of his mouth.
> So, what would be the actions you were looking for here?
Claw back his executive compensation, forfeit bonuses for the fiscal year and use that to fund better severance / transition support? There's smarter people than me who can answer this, I am merely pointing out and ridiculing this fake accountability and moral theater.
This is actually very problematic that a company can claw back compensation that wasn't previously agreed upon (with the exception of crimes).
Companies could have put this clause in the job offer. Yet they don't. Why? Because no respectable person would have signed such contract.
You wouldn't sign such contract either.
> fund better severance / transition support?
To continue the analogy of the cleaners, you don't provide severance nor transition support either.
In FB, the severance of 4-month minimum seems good.
> Forfeit bonuses for the fiscal year
100% agree! If the company's or their performance is bad, they absolutely don't get bonuses. This is coded in their performance/compensation review criteria.
If your employee makes 10 successful things and fails 1 thing, how much would you punish that person? probably none.
It is irrelevant if the workers did a good job. They are at the service and discretion of the house. The house, i.e. the owner, always remains. Until everything burns down. In case of Meta, pipe-dream, one can only hope.
Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket? Is he going to personally help those employees get back on their feet? Is he going to make sure their families are ok? Is he stepping down?
What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?
The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.
I think you're more upset about this than the typical Meta employee. Judging by... vibes, the main reason they aren't taking volunteers for these layoffs is that they might get more than 10% champing at the bit to take the severance.
The 2022 RSUs at Meta have more than doubled since the grant price, and are mostly vested out now, ending Feb 2027, after which there will be a steep TC decline for people employed since 2022, especially those on an initial grant or with very good performance for that refresher. There are a good portion of people sitting on either FIRE or at least extended funemployment amounts of money that the severance is looking mighty tempting to.
That might happen for a year or two but it's not like they're getting refreshers priced at 180. After paying all the taxes, and factoring in the HCoL area they probably live in, I doubt many people are retiring early on that. Very few high earning people would quit their high paying job so they could live a "normal" life and worry about bills and expenditures.
Layoffs don't necessarily lead to share prices dropping, in the short term or long term. It definitely wouldn't impact the loans he presumably lives off of by using said shares as collateral.
No they couldn’t because the severance is paid out of the money the budget set aside for wages for the year.
So out of the 12 months, they give 4 months to the laid off worker and Facebook pockets the other 8 months.
Facebook could give zero severance, "pocket the full year budget" to use your phrasing, and distribute it to owners as a dividend. The severance comes directly from cash that could have been distributed to owners, as GP originally said.
This is assuming, though, that should shareholders want to take distributions the money wouldn't be there unless the layoffs are done. Facebook has plenty of cash to cover both if it shareholders or the board wanted to keep employee count stable and also pay out a comparable dividend.
They don’t give severance to be nice, severance is hush money. To get the severance employees have to agree to forgo any legal claim they could have with the company.
They have calculated that it’s cheaper to offer this money than to have to pay lawyers to defend the company from pissed former employees seeking to drag the company to court.
This is an entirely new claim from the one you made earlier and somewhat divorced from your original line of questioning around severance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885133).
Ultimately, regardless of whether the severance is generous or just a calculated ploy to keep former employees quiet, it comes out of shareholders' pockets.
It is not my claim it is common knowledge. The problem is users here trying to pretend that a standard legal practice is Zuckerberg taking personal responsibility. No he is just following the advice of his legal team.
On severance:
> the reality is that severance payments are just as much about protecting employers as they are about helping employees. In today’s complex labor landscape, employers are acutely aware of the risks associated with employment disputes and potential lawsuits. By offering severance payments, employers aim to minimize their exposure to legal claims, maintain compliance with labor laws, and safeguard their reputation in the marketplace. This practice is not just about goodwill—it’s a calculated move within the broader context of employment law and labor regulations, designed to manage risk and maintain control over the employment relationship. Understanding the real motivations behind severance payments is essential for both employees and employers navigating the ever-evolving world of employment.
He is not putting the shares down himself. He is just subject to price fluctuations like everyone else — so how is he taking personal responsibility for it?
Texas has gone nuts. I visited Dallas, Houston, Galveston from Oregon last year, looking to try out the cheap food that I hear about online because they dOn’T hAvE cOmMuNiSt tAxEs aNd rEgUlAtIoNs, and oh boy did I my hopes get crushed. Everything seemed as expensive, or more, than in my area with regulations, more reasonable worker protections and minimum wage…
That’s why we have laws protecting end of life rights in Oregon - which are much preferred over millions of firearms in the hands of ‘rEsPoNsIbLe gun oWnErS’, impulsive and impaired decision making, and someone walking into a traumatic mess coming back home.
Most of the rest of states use hospice as a way to kill people with morphine. Basically they give the patient as much as they want, and usually stops their heart.
Naturally, medically assisted suicide is illegal in most states. But its wink wink nudge nudge "pain management".
I hear you - as usual, people will do what they need to do in the way they can.
Personally, I wish we collectively recognized that this ‘pain management’ is a disservice to all dealing with those situations, much like handing out medical marihuana cards to recreational users was for actual patients, or women addressing family planning issues in some less than acceptable settings. Alas…
Thank you, Tetrahedron - you are the best possible end for that nasty site.
Between this takeover, and Trump’s BRUTAL takedown of AJ a few days ago, karma seems to be catching up with that shit peddling, abusive bottom-feeder scum that is AJ.
Here is to them eating each other, and choking on it.
Photoshop does that voluntarily; it's not required to by law. GIMP doesn't do it.
This is akin to trying to require all image editors to detect currency and refuse to process images of it. Making open source image processing software would probably have to be illegal because end users could trivially modify it to illegally process currency, or having general-purpose computers that can run software the government hasn't approved would need to be banned.
A dollar bill is exactly the same (roughly) always. Banning models of gun parts (or anything 3D printed, for that matter) is like trying to ban the patterns of dust in the wind. There are millions of permutations and ways to slice the problem.
One practical difference is that you can make dollar bill detection relatively robust. Sure, you could cut it into 4 pieces and scan them separately, but you'd still get stuck when it comes time to print them. There are only finitely many dollar bill shapes. But there are infinitely many plausible gun components, and infinitely more ways to divide them into sub-assemblies.
There is a pattern of yellow dots on the currency. I do not know at what size they tile across the paper, but the piece of currency would have to be smaller than that, most likely.
Far easier to dump the firmware and NOOP out that algo.
Some critical differences between the situations that come to mind:
- The problem of counterfeit currency is well acknowledged and has roots in antiquity. Reasonable people agree that currency genuinely cannot do its only job if counterfeiting is possible, and have had that agreement for thousands of years. In addition, the sole right to print currency is given to the US government in its constitution (almost certainly for this reason). These two things grant government control over printing currency both a moral and a legal legitimacy that government control over printing gun parts doesn't have.
- Because the government has control over the design of legitimate currency, it is actually practical to prevent software from reproducing it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation . Gun parts have no such distinguishing characteristic, and cannot be made to have one, since there is no authoritative body responsible for all of them. Having such a marking could be made legally mandatory, but it is not actually required for the function of the part, whereas currency needs to match the authentic design in order to be useful. It is therefore much less practical and effective to mark gun parts to prevent replication than it is to similarly mark currency.
- Creating your own guns specifically (and weapons, generally) is widely seen as a natural or God-given right. I would go so far as to say that it is intrinsically human, and that losing access to it would be as painful to some as losing access to rock 'n roll. I would say that due to this pain, losing that right is one of the chief signs of an enslaved people. While not everyone would agree with me, many would, which gives the issue a divisive moral edge. By contrast, creating your own currency might be seen as some sort of natural right by some people, but creating your own US Dollars certainly is not seen that way by anybody. Well, I'm sure you could find someone, but you know what I mean.
- As far as I know, there is no law compelling printer/photocopier manufacturers to use anti-counterfeiting software, and compliance is voluntary (but apparently pretty widespread -- though I doubt it's universal). A similar voluntary setup with 3D printer manufacturers would be less objectionable (though also much less likely to succeed). Introducing any sort of mandatory compliance regime introduces friction, slows innovation, and invites corruption.
- Manufacturing gun parts is actually pretty easy, and could be accomplished via many methods accessible to hobbyists, ranging from whittling by hand to duct taping hardware together to lost wax casting to desktop CNC to a desktop injection molding setup to metalworking on a lathe in a garage machine shop. It is in no way limited to 3D printing, though that admittedly lowers the bar a bit. Learning to work on guns is not significantly harder than learning to work on cars, though perhaps fewer people know how to do it. Thus, a focus on 3D printing seems much more driven by sensationalism, paranoia, and ignorance of this fact than it is by practical assessment of the issue. By contrast, creating even minimally recognizable counterfeit currency without the assistance of a computer is practically impossible and certainly cost-prohibitive. In manufacturing gun parts, it is perfectly practical in some cases to do the equivalent of drawing a dollar bill with a crayon -- something much less successful in the counterfeiting world.
- Adding broad pattern-recognition controls to a 3d printer is a novel and difficult problem that will likely impact innocent people doing legal things. Preventing the printing of accurate-looking currency has a much more narrow impact, and is much more focused on people doing illegal-adjacent things.
Without meaning any malice toward your question, I mention that I write because you have stepped on one of my pet peeves: it seems to me that an inability to see the difference between things that are, in fact, different, is one of the major failure modes of modern society in general. We need an appreciation for texture and nuance if we are to navigate the world rightly.
You cannot defend yourself from a hungry coyote or surprised mountain lion with a dollar bill but you can certainly protect yourself or your child from one with a gun
No you haven’t, because it was published today. What you’ve seen are past articles from the same author on the subject that all share the same "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess:" prefix.
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