I find it strange that no one mentions London, property prices have soared in the past 20 years [1] with money laundering playing a key role [2][3][4][5].
Nowadays, football clubs appear to be a better option, as they allow easy laundering of billions instead of millions...
I think it has (sadly) become common for people/companies to adopt software just/mostly because it came from Twitter/FAANG or whatever company that is high on hype...
>> I'm amazed that the contract Star Theory had with Take-Two didn't have a clause prohibiting Take-Two from poaching employees like this.
I'm amazed that people sign contracts accepting this kind of restrictions to their lives.
That's (fortunately) illegal in the EU country I live in, as it creates artificial barriers in the job "market", i.e. it is illegal to limit people's access to work. Still, cartel practices like not hiring from "friendly companies" abound.
>> If I hire a consultancy company to build something for me, would I normally be able to directly hire the employees who did the work?
I see contracts imposing restrictions like this all the time where I live, and people sadly just nod and accept, but these clauses never hold up in court as no company has a right to decide where people can or can't work.
Having worked as a consultant, I'm repulsed by the idea that I'd need my company's permission to leave and go work for a client. Especially because the provision stinks of "cheaper than actually investing in people retention". If the issue is intellectual property transfer, that's what an NDA is for.
> I'm amazed that people sign contracts accepting this kind of restrictions to their lives.
I believe he's talking about a contract between the companies, not contracts with individual employees. That may be different.
An employer making an employee sign a contract saying that they won't work elsewhere without the employer's permission has obvious problems, such as the vast (usually) difference in bargaining power between an employer and an individual employee, and it gives the employer massive control over the employee's life.
I believe that those are the main reasons many jurisdictions make such clauses unenforceable.
In the case of two companies making a deal that company A will buy a service from company B and not hire away B's employees, you are much less likely to have such a great disparity in bargaining power. Unless it's a very small industry, B's employees probably have many other job opportunities in that industry besides A and other companies B has worked for.
That suggests that there might not be such strong public policy reasons for make such contract unenforceable, especially if they have some time limit such as B's employees can't be hired by A for a year after working on B's service for A.
Almost every court case I can recall hearing of in this area was either (1) contracts between companies and individual employees, not between companies, or (2) arrangements between competing companies to try to limit labor mobility to keep salaries down, which raised antitrust issues.
No-one was stopping Star Theory employees from going to work for Take-Two.
The problem was when Take-Two messaged every worker at the company and said "We've just bankrupted the studio you work for. Come work for us on the same product you were working on before".
> Having worked as a consultant, I'm repulsed by the idea that I'd need my company's permission to leave and go work for a client
For a large consultancy with many clients, I agree.
But when a significant portion of your employer's income is a single client:
Are you comfortable with that single client of your employer having a strong incentive to make your job redundant so they can try to hire you under worse terms (as you suddenly lost your job)?
You don't need your company's permission, you're unemployed.
I guess what I'm thinking is something more along the lines of not hiring employees immediately after making them redundant through your own actions?
>> Are you comfortable with that single client of your employer having a strong incentive to make your job redundant so they can try to hire you under worse terms (as you suddenly lost your job)?
I understand what you mean, and that situation doesn't seem desirable either, but I think that that is very uncommon when compared to companies trying to retain/squeeze employees using contracts with employment restrictions.
>That's (fortunately) illegal in the EU country I live in, as it creates artificial barriers in the job "market", i.e. it is illegal to limit people's access to work. Still, cartel practices like not hiring from "friendly companies" abound.
Interesting. I've heard of EU countries where leaving a job requires giving 2+ months of notice or paying a large financial penalty.
Yes, it's usually three months in Germany. It's a bit on the long side but I don't mind that much. I guess I've been lucky to have only nice working environments so I've never been in any particular hurry to leave.
> I'm amazed that people sign contracts accepting this kind of restrictions to their lives.
I'm amazed that there are people out there who think we have a choice. I would not have my most important clients if I refused to sign non-solicitation clauses.
AFAIK, in Israel women serve less time and in less dangerous roles.
The only culture that I know of, which seems to have somewhat equal burden of war fighting are the Peshmerga/Kurds.
I'm moving away from gmail in favour of protonmail, so far I've experienced no issues.
I've emailed my contacts informing of the switch, and I'm passively migrating important accounts/services; in fact, this forced me to consider which services are actually important and worth receiving e-mail from. If I go a couple of months without getting e-mails from some service and nothing bad comes from it, then I probably won't ever read it anyway and it's not important.
As soon as their mobile app is better, I'll likely switch to their paid service, although a private calendar and a corresponding quality app would make the 5€/month seem like better value for money.
>> Some will proclaim "But they'll owe China! That won't end well!"
That's being "proclaimed" in that case because there's increasing and obvious evidence of that country's government using debt being to control governments, political decisions and societies:
Yes when China does something worth being positive about.
But it's a bit hard when they trap poor countries in debt, detain millions of Muslims in death camps and try and bully their way into every situation e.g. South China Sea, Hong Kong.
Because the bar is really high if they’re a news outlet. You have to prove that they knew what they were saying was false, and did it with the intent to harm.
Besides, I’m sure SuperMicro just wants it to blow over and be done with it. Being in the news for a lawsuit will bring it up again and possibly harm them financially as people (managers who order) who don’t understand things have knee jerk reactions.
Bingo. Fighting it would just preserve the Streisand effect. There doesn't appear to have been any material impact from where I sit, and there haven't been any further stories along the same lines.
If Super Micro knows they didn’t do it, they should absolutely love the story. Buyback the underpriced shares and make a ton of free money once the market realized the Bloomberg story is false. I don’t know if they actually did that, but that’s what I would have done. I didn’t actually do that because I trusted Bloomberg a lot. But there was substantial profit to be made as an insider. I bet many/most employees made that trade, at the very least.
It could also be the case that it never happened but Super Micro doesn't know for certain that it never happened. They may be pretty sure it never happened but unable to rule out the possibility that some portion of their organization was compromised by an intelligence agency.
Generally, when a company doesn't sue over something like this, it's because they don't have a case. And that always means that enough of the allegations are true that they couldn't win an absolutely massive judgement in court.
Because in the US, truth is an absolute defense to the defamation torts. (The same is not truth in the UK; you can still be liable for defamation even if everything you said is true. See, e.g., the case of the Nazi-fetishist MP.)
The Streisand effect is not a thing companies worry about. Because more brand damage = more monetary damages to collect.
