Please don't 'buy' digital items from Amazon, because you won't actually own them. Pay extra, support your local bookshop and get a physical copy which you will actually own.
I really appreciate that sentiment, but on the other hand 98% of the books I buy I won’t read a second time (because reading a new book will almost always trump rereading an old one), so I’m actually fine with not owning most of them, especially at $1.99 prices. The few that I deeply care about I buy a physical copy of.
It's a trade-off. I love the convenience of ebooks, but not owning my books is just categorically unacceptable to me. I want my daughter and anyone else coming after me to have free access to them, not to have to jump through Amazon's hoops (if such hoops even exist) for access.
I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.
I use a kindle but I have never bought a book on the kindle store ever (been using it for 10 years). Totally doable and not hard to avoid... especially since the smaller stores not only have better sales but the author typically gets more money too.
They used to allow downloads of all books, which you could then rip the DRM from, but they got rid of that last year. Huge disappointment, and is why I don't buy books on Kindle anymore.
It's an enjoyable read, hopefully it's the start of a whole new arc in the series with more to come. My only real complaint is it's short and I want more. If you never read his other Interdependency series, it's also great.
Alternatively[1], for those of us who have enough clutter: Buying it digitally means you've paid for it. The author gets their cut, and you can now seek out unencumbered formats that best serve your usage with a clear conscience.
In the US, a contract can’t supersede laws like those that protect whistleblowers. (I think this is part of how Harvey Weinstein was prosecuted because his NDAs were found invalid)
The author didnt disclose any illegal activities in her book. And she didnt claim whistleblower status.
> The author didnt disclose any illegal activities in her book. And she didnt claim whistleblower status.
Both statements are factually incorrect.
> Wynn-William filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024 and with the Department of Justice in 2025, according to her filing.
Also, here's a short but not comprehensive (read the book when it came out and I forget things) list of the sledged illegal activities described in the book:
- Collusion with the chinese authorities
- Securities fraud
- Illegal foreign political contributions
- Sexual harassment and workplace retaliation
I don't know the reasons for why there has been no enforcement/further investigations aside from some congressional circus, especially when Zuck was caught lying to Congress. But I would be willing to bet that they involve money in politics.
I read the book. Lots of unethical stuff, not so much illegal. There’s no revelation or new info publicly released. If it was illegal, I’d expect prosecution in the past 10 years.
Lots of things I’d like to be illegal. Or I wished were illegal.
I don't think such clauses have ever been held to prevent people from testifying in criminal trials. Signing book deals on the other hand...
If it's true that she signed a severance deal, e.g. signed this when she was leaving and therefore already knew she was agreeing to protect a bunch of snakes.. Well she fucked up. At the point when she signed that agreement she was already informed and aware of what kind of people she was agreeing to not disparage.
Still looking for the part where, in acknowledgement of her own culpability, she assigns all book royalties to some charity that, say, provides counseling to troubled teenagers ...
So she’s expected to not only put her own financial life in jeopardy to publish this information, but then to take the money that she does have and donate it all to charity?
One has to live. And there are not a lot of commercial enterprises that pay well that will hire someone who publicly flaunts an employment or severance contract.
Give her a break. It’s amazing how many nits we have to pick with those with little power when they choose to exercise it, that we end up excusing wholesale abuses of power by those who actually monopolize it.
There are a lot of defenders of capital on hn, which is expected, that's totally fine. But I think we should all have a bit of admiration for someone who risked her life to shed light into the internals of an arguably sick business entity.
It’s funny as I see this argument from people who at the same time excuse Snowden for publicly exposing government surveillance overreach when he had similar tools (disclosure to relevant authorities) available to him.
Snowden is still a horrible analogy when comparing to this situation.
Snowden released classified data at great personal cost - he is now a US fugitive and will be promptly arrested if he ever tries to leave Russia.
Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a tell-all book for which she was paid. My understanding is that she also signed the non-disparagement clause as part of her separation agreement, in order to get a substantial severance (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
I've only read parts of Careless People, and I think it's great that Wynn-Williams wrote it and exposed some details at the personal level of how nuts these folks are. But I take issue with framing her as some kind of victim ("Meta stole Sarah Wynn-Williams Voice" - give me a fucking break). Meta wouldn't be able to do shit if Wynn-Williams hadn't told them she'd keep her mouth shut for a pile of money. What did she expect would happen after she received that pile of money and then opened her mouth?
Snowden, similarly, signed a substantial non-disclosure agreement which was a condition of his employment with Booz-Allen.
Of course, considering the NDA was a condition of his employment, he was paid for his work that he could not have done had he not signed said NDA. What did he expect would happen after he received his money and then opened his mouth?
That's my whole point - I've never seen Snowden play the part of the grand victim like Wynn-Williams appears to be doing. He did his job, discovered some bad behavior, and released the information at great personal cost, a cost that he seemed willing to accept (he's obviously not happy about the consequences, but he knew what would happen). I haven't seen blog posts from him about how Booz-Allen "stole his voice".
"disclosing them to relevant authorities" would not bring the message to those affected by such carelessness. I would think "Disclosing them to the public" brings more awareness in the public, and though might be illegal, serves better for public good.
Legal is not always just or moral.
NLRB under Biden seemed to say that yeah you can disclose this to the media, and broad non-disparagements are unenforceable. But it’s also kind of a toss up depending on the NLRB, courts, administration, etc.
Trump’s NLRB has rescinded a bunch of that Biden-era guidance, so what is enforceable and what isn’t? Kind of hard to say at this point.
Arbitration agreed with Meta, but who knows what courts would say.
Well, the whole point is that courts won't weigh in, because of the arbitration agreement.
I took a negotiations course at university, and there was a section on arbitration vs the courts. There are plenty of good reasons to go with arbitration (employment contracts are not amongst them, though).
The one thing the professor highlighted was that if the arbiter was fundamentally unfair (e.g. civil rights violation), you're screwed. You can't then go to the court and make your case. There's no appeals process, etc.
I'm guessing there is no notion of "precedence" with arbitration, this being one of the reasons.
Not only that, but subreddits like r/AmITheAsshole are full of AI slop. Both in the comments and in the posts. It's a huge karma mining operation for bots.
This is sort of funny. Given how common it is to spot bots on Reddit now, it seems like they are likely to completely overwhelm the site and drive away most of actual humans.
At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.
Kind of extra funny/sad that Reddit’s primary source of income in the past few years appears to be selling training data to AI labs, to train the
Models that are powering the bots.
> At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.
Not really, it will still be kind of valuable for influence campaigns, a lot of people don't get it when there is a bit in the other side. Hell, a lot of times, I don't get it.
I know a fair number of people “normies” who get some value out of smaller niche Reddit communities — for advice, and things like product recommendations.
If suddenly all the posts are coming from bots who are trying push a product or just farm karma, I assume (perhaps naively) that those folks will get a lot less value, and stop showing up — even if they don’t realize it’s bots on the other side of the conversation.
Even before the advent of AI reddit was notorious for obvious bullshit being posted for karma farming. r/aita is even more famous for people making up stories for unknown and known purposes (known in the old days as "bait").
Plus, there's the disproportionate ratio of posters:commenters:lurkers. The tendency to comment over keeping ones thoughts to themself is a selection bias inofitself.
Great insight, didn't thing about it even anecdotally. I was lurking on Reddit since 2008 and finally created an account in 2012 when someone was really 'wrong on the internet' and had to step in.
Versus 15 Wikipedia links where in every one of those events 10+ civilians were killed — in some events even 50+ civilians killed in places like supermarkets, residential buildings, and railway stations - all you have is a Storm Shadow attack launched to strike one of the largest microchip producers for military hardware?
As I said, that's just a recent event that's fresh in my memory.
>killed in places like supermarkets
Oh, right, of course, all Ukrainian missiles that hit Russian civilians were off-target and all Russian missiles that hit Ukrainian civilians were targeting civilians. That's what western media and Ukrainian propaganda tells you
Akshually it's the the 2nd (France), 5th (Germany), 6th (Italy), and 9th (Spain) spots. But that's a bad argument, say.. a way of lying with statistics, considering the 1st place has 43% of the market share AND that exporting arms is not very relevant when the topic du jour is military build-up. The muscovites for example export 7.8% of the market share but that's not that relevant considering they're using the lion's share of military industrial output to terrorize Ukrainians.
Not defending what the DoD is doing right now, I firmly believe the US intervention is unconstitutional, BUT
Iran has been 'at war' with the west for a very long time. It's time to redefine the concept of war to be compatible with the 21st century and also include hybrid warfare and war-by-proxy. Iran has been waging war using Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas-aligned factions, Iraqi militias and the consistent aid it gave Russia through the Shahed drone program which is targeting civilians in Ukraine. And I don't even want to go into details about the war Iran is fighting against its own citizens.
I hate to quote Hegseth, but this is the FO phase of the FAFO cycle.
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