This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more.
He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses in the millions, and he had persuaded Google to pay him even more money through a side-hustle company of his while remaining an employee. Then he quits and steals their stuff.
Hundreds of millions. As part of breaching his employment agreement by stealing trade secrets, Levandowski had to pay back one of his bonuses, which was $120 million.
I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. How much more should Google have paid to retain him? Or was this even preventable?
Except that in his case the bonus was paid based on Project Chauffeur hitting certain milestones. They retained him until the project hit the milestones, and then he left. Which is fair and square. And by the way, Chris Urmson and Sebastian Thrun did the same.
It's just that Google did not understand the Goodhart law of self driving, which states that you can hit arbitrarily hard milestones and yet get nowhere near real self driving.
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat
hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am
training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the
net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any
preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you
close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be
empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
I get what you're saying, but 99% of those working in AI aren't even trying to create AGI. They're working on narrow AI, and they're perfectly willing to acknowledge that.
Even the SOTA reinforcement learning folks know that they are working in limited (albeit progressively expanding) niches.
This has traditionally been a problem on Wall Street also -- if your bonus is based on profit, traders maximize profit (but also risk.)
Then the company wizes up and the bonus is based on profit with a risk cap...and traders maximize profit and minimize some form of risk (while taking on some other unmeasured liability, e.g., liquidity)
>I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent.
As with ever increasing CEO compensation, it has been frequently pointed out that this may be less an issue of performance and more a sort of internal cronyism with tightly connected people being excessively compensated. Given the mythology around tech founders/talent it's not surprising.
As long as the companies grew it was fine, but I honestly think these compensations are on their way out as shareholders at some point have to recognise that this isn't reasonable.
It's telling that the "he deserves it, it's all foresight and brilliance" is the leading reply and the "right skills, right time" reply is behind. I imagine just by sheer nature of the power law that some upvotes are people trying to justify their lot but that would be the minority of people. I guess just so many who haven't made it at all but hold this fiction dear for their own peace of mind?
Without seeing the scores, if the more recent comment is on top, we don't know which has more votes. But in fact, both have been on top at different times.
> I imagine just by sheer nature of the power law that some upvotes are people trying to justify their lot but that would be the minority of people. I guess just so many who haven't made it at all but hold this fiction dear for their own peace of mind?
What you're doing here is speculating about the motives of an unknown number of people who upvoted a comment. Can you really not think of any other reason they might have done so?
Whenever someone says "this state of the world is just, because <something you disagree with>", it's easy to say "that's the just world fallacy talking". But it's basically contentless. Really you're just saying that you disagree with the "because", and not explaining why you disagree.
The problem isn't with the explicit statement, which is rarely made.
The problem is with the fact "the world is just" is a position they reason from, and seek to defend, often in blatant contradiction to the facts of the situation.
I agree some people do that. But not everyone who says "this state of the world is just, because <something you disagree with>" is doing that. How do you tell the people who are doing that apart from the people who just disagree with you in this instance?
It seems to me that you're accusing people of a pattern of "mistakenly seeing the world as just". But your only evidence for this is one case of them mistakenly seeing the world as just; and in that case, you haven't even put in the work to show that they're actually mistaken.
(edit - for that matter, how many people even think this state of the world is just? From skimming, I can't see anyone explicitly saying it is. The author of the comment that triggered this subthread explicitly disclaims it.)
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
> The flip-side of this truism is that this point of view is probably healthier for the individual than seeing themselves as helpless victims.
That's not the flip side of that view, because the socialist view of an exploited proletariat in an advanced industrial democracy is not one of “helpless victims”, but of a powerful force that has the power to reverse the power structure once they realize it exists and act in solidarity against it.
I don’t understand why this post is being down-voted as it clearly states one of the foundations of socialism.
A quick (and very) simplified summary of the traditional socialist perspective is that in capitalism, the vast majority of the population must work as wage-earners (proletariat) to provide the means to sustain their life.
A much smaller group of people (capitalists or bourgeoisie) own the means of production and do not need to work. The material interests of these two groups are in opposition (class struggle): value is created by work done (labour theory of value) and it is in the interest of capitalist owners to exploit workers as much as possible, i.e., maximise the amount of value they can extract as profit.
As economic value is created by the labour of workers, in an advanced industrial society, they are the class with the potential to consolidate this economic power: if they were to unite (in unions and socialist parties), they could use this economic power to take political power from the capital class. The goal of the socialist is to unite workers across boundaries so that they understand that their material interests coincide with other workers (class consciousness) – what they have in common is more important than what divides them. If workers don’t see that their material interests lie with the vast majority who have to work to live, the class will remain divided (as illustrated by the Ronald Wright quote).
As well as these two primary classes, there are other (smaller) classes in capitalist society, such as
- petit-bourgeoisie (small capitalists who own their means of production, e.g. shop-keeper) who can employ workers but don’t possess sufficient capital to not have to work themselves. Their class interests can lie with both capitalist and worker.
- lumpen proletariat – the underclass of the proletariat who don’t provide economic value, e.g., thieves, beggars, criminals; they lack class consciousness and act in their individual self-interest; they can be used by capitalists against the interests of the proletariat (e.g., strike-breaking, inciting racism to divide workers).
> As well as these two primary classes, there are other (smaller) classes in capitalist society,
Not really smaller, the lumpenproletariat and petit bourgeoisie are each generally both numerically larger than the haut bourgeoisie. Less important in terms of the basic class conflict, but not smaller.
I’m not as well-read as I’d like to be (thanks, Internet) so I can’t be of much help. I’ve read a fair bit of Chomsky but his writing focuses more on modern topics such as US foreign policy and the influence of the media in democratic societies.
I used to be an anarchist (libertarian socialist) and was very much inspired by the accomplishments of the CNT and FAI in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 [1]. The book that I remember most from those days was “The ABC of Communist Anarchism” [1] by Alexander Berkman which explains in plain language the ideas and philosophy of libertarian communism. Being Irish and interested in history, I also read James Connolly’s “Labour in Irish History” [2] where he argued that class solidarity was more important to the cause of freedom than pure nationalism. I was also strongly influenced by the Orwell classics, “1984”, “Animal Farm” and “Homage to Catalonia”. Most of these books are free of the jargon and overly academic language that many leftist authors are wont to use.
Nowadays, I still consider myself to be a socialist, albeit a sceptical one. I’m always open to learning more about history, economics and human nature. I find myself seeing the conservative perspective on a number of issues and I despise the divisiveness of cancel culture and the modern incarnation of identity politics as being antithetical to the ideals of socialism. Anyhow, I’ve had “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists” on my to-read list for some time (now that I’ve publicly said it, I better stop procrastinating and actually do it).
I understand why socialism appeals to people when they see so much suffering and inequality in the world. What I do not understand is why any scholars would cling to the labour theory of value in light of such things as multi-billionaire startup founders.
It should be pretty clear to anyone at this point that all you need is a laptop, programming skills, a good idea, and a lot of luck to become a billionaire. You don’t need thousands, let alone millions, of employees labouring for you.
Previous poster didn’t claim billion dollars in revenue - just that to become a billionaire. Take Facebook acquisitions for example - WhatsApp, Oculus - low headcount (less than 500) for multiple billions.
There are a lot of trusts out there that operate with no full time employees and make billions in revenue. Maybe getting returns on investments isn't really a company, but it's also hard to say something like a hedge fund isn't a company.
Those trusts earn their money by investing it in enterprises that actually create value through the use of many employees.
I definitely would not describe myself as a socialist (I have an academic background in economics) but it's pretty clear that the labor theory of value is not contradicted in the slightest by citing examples of lone rent-seekers.
> As well as these two primary classes, there are other (smaller) classes in capitalist society,
While central to Marx’s writing, the LTV isn't particularly essential to socialism (that labor is essential to the production of value is, the LTV itself is not).
> It should be pretty clear to anyone at this point that all you need is a laptop, programming skills, a good idea, and a lot of luck to become a billionaire.
Or ownership of sufficient quantity of the means of production and a lot less luck. But, though there are reasons to question the LTV, I'm not sure how the high value of of some particular labor that requires only minor capital to realize in any way figures I to such criticism.
that labor is essential to the production of value is, the LTV itself is not
But that's silly. We see celebrities generating tremendous amounts of economic value by the "labour" of taking a selfie. To emphasize the labour is like focusing on the discarded cigarette butt instead of the thousands of acres of dry tinder it landed in.
Or ownership of sufficient quantity of the means of production and a lot less luck
People who own factories needed a lot of luck to get there as well. What real difference does it make whether I earn a billion dollars with a factory or a laptop? Or are they roughly equivalent in power and my laptop ought to be collectivized? That doesn't seem right.
> We see celebrities generating tremendous amounts of economic value by the "labour" of taking a selfie.
Well, and their and various publicists and promoters labor that went into creating the environment for the reception of that selfie, and lots of other people's labor on the things that made the celebrity a celebrity, whether it's the labor that went into building a business that made the family name for someone like Paris Hilton, or the labor that went into making movies or TV shows for celebrities manufactured in Hollywood, or the labor that went into political campaigns for celebrities of political origin.
But all that same labour goes into aspiring celebrities that nobody cares about. Hollywood is full of them. So the value clearly does not come from the labour.
Heck, even celebrities who have “made it” like Kevin Costner can still produce something like “Waterworld” while complete nobodies like JK Rowling can launch themselves to mega stardom by writing a novel while commuting on the train.
> May be mistaken, but historically didn't socialist view proles as a 'lumpen mass',
No, the lumpenproletariat, in Marxist theory is an underclass beneath and contrasted with the proletariat consisting largely of the unemployable (not due to economic system or structure, or physical capacity, but personal character and inclination), career criminals (of more than mala in se than malum prohibiting sense), and the others who neither make nor are inclined to make a positive contribution to society, and which unlike the proletariat is not viewed as a fertile ground for developing class consciousness and is viewed as a dangerous class at best useless to revolutionary organization of the proletariat, and also having a great potential, largely for pay, to individually be recruited as agents by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
Social mobility is a thing.
the fact that becoming rich has non-linear payout (e. g. it is expensive to be poor) encourages hard work.
If there are no real barriers in upward social mobility, it will quickly be apperant that earning a little capital and putting it to work is the best way to spend your life. Over time it will compound and produce even more.
Of course, often the best capital to accumulate is skills and education.
If the is no real upward social mobility, people will feel indifferent to the idea of producing more value, right now.
The converse involves temporarily embarrassed Bolshevik central planners.
The truth is that any system has winners calling the shots and losers at their mercy. What matters is figuring out which system (or blend of systems) produces the best outcomes for its worst off constituents.
Yes and there's no socialist country that has produced Amazon, Google, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX to name a few. This platform, keyboard, routers in the middle are all US made. And there's a good reason for that
Never claimed I could or wanted to, just pointing out that it's disingenuous to claim these systems fail in a vacuum because they are inherently flawed.
Or maybe they do fail because they are flawed. And foreign interest weakening them is just a story. People suffer under socialism. Maybe you should liver under a socialist regime before preaching them.
I am happy to have this debate in a more fluid channel and with a wider group. May be that's the best way to understand this. HN leaks into wider culture and people here do have voice and impact. So definitely arrange for a discussion for wider participation if you can.
Basically, he was one of the key founders of the project that made Google Maps what it is today (a crown jewel of Google with one of the best cartography datasets), vs what it was originally (better UI to third-party, licensed cartography data).
I remember about 12 years ago somebody from the GIS industry, scoffing at the notion that Google might even try to go do some mapping of their own. For him, maps was something Navteq and TeleAtlas knew how to do, and a search engine was deeply misguided if it thought it could venture into that space. That was honestly the prevailing wisdom at the time — it was going to be hard for web-based Google to even deal with the ugly real-world-ness of mapping.
Fast forward to today. Google Maps basically showed the GIS crowd how their work oughta have been done all this time. They invented street cars, street view, and actually made it work; and they used the data to produce accurate maps of the world.
So to your question, what led this guy to an astounding level of monetary reward was that he was part of a team that made a big, calculated bet with Maps and executed very, very well on it. That gave Page ample reason to compensate them well, and it gave him trust that they could handle more projects where they would show up incumbents (such as the traditional car manufacturers, whose inroads into self-driving tech had been very timid for decades).
And it's not clear that they are close to self driving cars, but they certainly contributed to upping the game of that whole industry.
So there's your recipe :) I'd bet that folks who came up with the key tech behind the iPhone are in similar positions at Apple, given how they turned the whole mobile phone business on its head (remember Nokia?).
EDIT: I don't mean the above to indicate that the reward was deserved in any way. Likely, a lot of what happened here is luck plus outstanding team work rather than individual lead performance. But to the question being asked, this is the kind of circumstance and outcome that seems to have supported, in one man's view at least (Page), that level of compensation. If you look at folks at Google who made/make big $, the story is often similar - they led products that were fledgling challengers into industry leaders within a few years (Chrome, Android...).
Our GIS department had airphoto and street view on web based arcgis when google rolled out maps. So did our neighbouring cities, with a central site trying to link it all together.
They also had, maybe, 10 users outside of our own network a year. Everyone else we’re using the traditional pre-google-maps map websites, in my country krak.dk.
I think what google did better was marketing. Then they mapped every WiFi network on the planet to make real life location tracking faster than using GPS.
What google did was make it into a mass product and they had the resources to apply it to a planet level. That is more than marketing. There are a whole lot of steps between tech demo/proof of concept to product. The most important of which is to actually have the foresight of what the product can be and a plan to get there.
It's true GIS departments did have some access to LandSat grade access via ArcGIS.
But it wasn't useful to anyone who wasn't in the GIS/remote sensingspace. Firstly, the ArcGIS product was primarily client/server and secondly you had to understand what you wanted to see before you used it - it was (and is) literally as easy to get infra red satellite imagery as actual photos.
That's not just marketing - it made it usable for whole new markets.
> With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars into a project with potentially no upside?
I wouldn’t frame it as having potentially no upside. In public talks after Google found success as a public company, Larry Page has never hidden his desire to leverage Google’s strengths to improve the transportation industry, so the desire to invest in a venture that has nothing to do with Google’s vision of “organizing the world’s information” was always there. It turns out that transportation and search have a lot in common but it wasn’t immediately obvious back in 2009 how transportation could benefit from investments by an Internet search engine.
I remember attending a Google sponsored event where Google Street View—along with crowd-sourced data added by human users—was marketed as data that would lay the foundation for a self-driving car project. They would later screen a video of the panda-like prototype from the Google Self-Driving Car project, and how the SDC could use Street View data to safely drive people around town, to which there was a lot of applause by the audience.
Let me clarify then that I'm not making a case that this kind of reward is justified. Likely a lot of it is luck, and the dude might have been a crook from the start for all I know. Just saying this is the kind of circumstance and outcome that leads to that kind of reward (rather than a particular set of skills).
There were several others on that team with similar (or greater) degrees of insight and execution, none of whom got paid anywhere near that kind of bonus.
Very likely! Compensation at that level, in a company with this much power concentration, is not driven by much else than the owner's perception of what is beneficial to the business, however skewed it might be from the recognition of actual contribution.
Beyond that, the exact moment when this guy stop those trade secrets was unlikely to be the first time he did something unethical. He was likely manipulative, lying, either to harm competition etc etc etc long before which made him good at climbing corporate ladder and negotiating.
He just got too brazen with those trade secrets. Which is exactly how people get high rewards, until it breaks.
There’s enough people in the world to make the chance become the primary driving factor in that.
You could post factually justify their place, but that’s easy in hindsight.
If you think your statement is true - could you please provide a research into which skills would be needed to exploit the right place at the right time that actually proves that’s not some mystical abberation of self-help books?
No, you cannot compare becoming the world's best self-driving engineer to winning the lottery. This is like becoming Lebron James, it's tremendous talent combined with tremendous commitment.
Lebron James was the exact definition of right place, right skills, right time. Lots of players have "tremendous talent" and "tremendous commitment." Lebron wouldn't be what he is today without a tremendous amount of luck. Would his career have worked out if Carmelo was drafted to Cleveland and Lebron went to the Nuggets? What about if Lebron needed to do a year in college now? How would that have impacted his trajectory?
Nobody is doubting Levandowki is an extremely talented engineer, but literally every person that achieves that level of success also took a considerable amount of luck to get there. Right place, right time, right skills is everything.
Having followed sports my entire life, and played a bit... Lebron is not a good example. He is a freakishly transcendent talent, the exception to the rule.
There is no "right time, right place" factor for Lebron, unless we're simply considering the fact that he lucky enough to be born at a time on Earth when professional basketball is a thing that exists.
Would his career have worked out if Carmelo was drafted
to Cleveland and Lebron went to the Nuggets? What about
if Lebron needed to do a year in college now? How would
that have impacted his trajectory?
Assuming his work ethic and will to succeed aren't somehow impacted there is literally no permutation of events, no alternate universe, in which Lebron James does not become the NBA's greatest talent for roughly a decade. He is/was that good.
Generally though, I do agree with you.
Lebron's championships, as opposed to his individual performance, are definitely somewhat the products of circumstance. He heroically dragged some mediocre supporting casts to the Finals and fell short a few times, which simultaneously proved both his own brilliance and the inability of even the arguably-greatest player of all time to do it all on his own.
A lot of supremely talented athletes have failed to find success in professional sports due to simply never finding a good fit for themselves where they were able to shine.
Similarly, there have been some oddballs who have found great success thanks to being in circumstances in which they were able niche for themselves. James Harden is a modern NBA player who comes to mind. The Rockets play a somewhat bizzarro style that caters to Harden's bizzarro skirting-the-rules game.
My only quibble with your "there is literally no permutation of events, no alternate universe" take is injury and other bad luck. I suspect for every Lebron -- who's been lucky enough not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, injury-wise, for decades -- there are a number of equal/better players (physically and mentally) who get bumped, land wrong, tear an ACL, and their trajectory changes forever. (Or get in a car accident, or... etc, etc.)
The underappreciated part of luck (by the lucky) is not the good luck people have the benefit of, it's the bad luck they avoid.
See this just isn't true. Durability is a physical property and in this area, like many others, LeBron is just on a totally different level than pretty much everyone else. The number of minutes he has played + the low amount of offseason he has (consistent deep playoff runs) + the physicality of his game + the few injuries he has sustained strongly suggests that he has a rare durability.
I really think you are underestimating how special LeBron is, how obvious it has been since he was in middle school, and how much it says about his physical gifts that he has played such heavy minutes for so long. We still talk about high school prospects being the next LeBron James because he was obviously a once in a generation talent (Zion being the only prospect since LeBron that has equalled his hype). Also LeBron has not really had good luck in his life. He had talent that transcended his terrible situation.
Certainly an ACL tear or other catastrophic event would have altered his trajectory.
On a human level, it is worth appreciating such things. Finding new ways to express and experience gratitude is one of the most profoundly powerful things a person can do. A true key to happiness. (I hope this doesn't sound sarcastic: I really believe this)
I think we just generally leave that sort of thing out of "what makes Lebron, Lebron?" type discussions because it's a constant for all athletes. A catastrophic injury would disrupt any player's trajectory. That's not interesting or useful to discuss from an analytic standpoint.
What we're really looking for is, "why is Lebron different from others who've avoided catastrophic events?" or to be more on-topic, "why was Levandowski able to rise to superstardom when other engineers weren't?"
Certainly, yes, some of this can be chalked up to Levandowski's avoidance of catastrophic events. He wasn't eaten by bears! His parents didn't blind him with acid! He wasn't struck by meteors! But, this is also true for a lot of other engineers, so this doesn't tell us anything useful. Everybody already knows that being killed by a bear is detrimental to one's career prospects.
To return to (and hyper-focus on) Lebron for a second...
there are a number of equal/better players (physically and mentally)
who get bumped, land wrong, tear an ACL, and their trajectory changes forever
In his case, the numbers suggest that the number of "better-than-Lebron players who don't make it" is extremely small and likely zero.
1. Every year, millions of people play basketball and do not suffer catastrophic incidents and yet also do not display the sort of generational talents displayed by Lebron.
2. Given the extremely large sums of fame and money involved in collegiate/professional basketball, anybody manifesting his level of talent is unlikely to go undiscovered. There is a lot of incentive for everybody involved to identify and develop such talent. This would be less true for many other pursuits. I suspect there are many "undiscovered Bobby Fischers and Gary Kasparovs" out there in the chess world and many "undiscovered Lewis Hamiltons" in the racing world; I suspect this is not the case for "undiscovered Lebrons."
3. Basketball is also different from other pursuits in that freakish physical height is a great advantage. If you are tall, in most of the world, people will tell you to play basketball. A height of 6'8.5" (Lebron's height) is something like 99.99th percentile and playing basketball is one of the few lucrative things one can do with that height, unlike a 99.99th percentile intelligence or even 99.99th percentile strength.
I think that we agree mostly, but I just don't think Lebron's individual skill is that inherent. If you compare high school lebron to now, obviously there are tremendous differences. The amount of "what ifs" that show up indicate a tremendous amount of luck.
There are plenty of "Most insane athletes we've ever seen" coming up from High School that never turn into anything, or don't turn into the greatest players of all time. You can't just say "Lebron was more talented and worked harder" when things like car accidents, illness and coaching can all ruin a player's career.
I feel you're trying to make a valid point, but you aren't really respecting how much LeBron was an outlier as a prospect. There simply are not plenty of prospects with his size, control, explosiveness, durability and fine motor control. 16 years after LeBron was drafted, we finally saw someone who is as much of an outlier as LeBron in Zion.
> but you aren't really respecting how much LeBron was an outlier as a prospect
This is rewriting history. The thing about signing someone straight from high school is it's tough to know how good they are, given they've mostly spent their whole career stomping normal people. Also I'm not implying Lebron was bad, or even anything less than a top pick. I'm just pointing out that there are quite regularly draft candidates that are touted the same way, that do not end up as a Lebron James.
> There simply are not plenty of prospects with his size, control, explosiveness, durability and fine motor control
Most of which he developed in the league? Which is as much a testament to him as it is his coaching, no? Which is a variable that could've prevented him from ascending as high as he did?
> 16 years after LeBron was drafted, we finally saw someone who is as much of an outlier as LeBron in Zion.
This is flatout not true (and frankly pretty offensive to Lebron). Zion is overweight and duck-footed, the combination of which has already shown issues even in his first season. His team knows it, which is why they're keeping him at 20 minutes a game.
If you can't play a player because of their fragility, you can't really call them great.
I'm just pointing out that there are quite
regularly draft candidates that are touted
the same way, that do not end up as a Lebron
James.
Can you name examples? I don't think that's correct, at all. Not even Michael Jordan garnered that sort of attention in his early teen years.
Lebron had thousands of people and scouts at his games as a high school freshman and sophomore, and was was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before his junior year of high school.
What you're saying about LeBron as a high-school prospect isn't consistent at all with the consensus at the time. 2003 wasn't that long ago - you can find draft prospect reports that show this. You can also compare his reports to the other top prospects and the difference is palpable. For example here is an excerpt from scout.com
"Simply one of the best high school players in the last decade. Whatever you have heard about him is true. He’s so gifted it’s scary. As a scorer, his range extends to 3-point land. He’s a terrific passer and is quite unselfish. Simply put: his talents are on another level. We can list schools with him until we are blue in the face, but in the end this is the best high school-to-NBA prospect since it became chic to make the jump. LeBron James is a special basketball player, good enough to don the cover of Sports Illustrated as a junior in high school."
Fron nbadraft.net
" He has met and surpassed the hype every step of the way. The game just comes so easily to him, he’s the epitome of a hoops prodigy. He has changed the face of highschool athletics with Nationally televised games being carried by ESPN. He has lived up to the hype and then some every step of the way. Carmelo Anthony has a better jumpshot than LeBron, and a NCAA title under his belt. But LeBron has far superior upside.[...] No one has ever had to overcome this kind of hype as a highschool player."
I don't think this is a great example. LeBron James has once in a generation physical gifts. It is not true that lots of players have the physical talent that LeBron has. With those gifts, he is going to go pro in a major sport and probably be a standout in most situations. I think his success is pretty independent of luck and time.
Not to mention that for all I know I could have a once in a generation physical gift, but i never really enjoyed physical sport and never trained to the level where this gift would become apparent
Or maybe I have a hand-eye coordination that means I'd be a gold medalist at Shooting, or some other sport I've never had the inclination or opportunity to train in
Sure, but there is an ocean between the fraction of Lebron James' success that is luck (which is substantial, as you point out, call it 25%) and that of a lottery winner (which is effectively 100%)
You're arguing against a point no one made. I never said said Lebron was all luck. I said that the luck was Lebron having his genetics and mindset combined with the year he was born, the circumstances with which he was drafted and the coaching and teammates he got.
He was the best self-driving engineer at a time when that was worth $120 million to Google. Is the world's best hydrogen fuel cell engineer getting $120 million bonuses? How about the world's best metallurgist? Historical linguist? You have to be the world's best in a field that could unlock dominance in an enormous potential market that is being actively contested and that one of the world's richest corporations thinks might be won in the next decade.
A valid point. Especially as self driving is nowhere close to bringing in revenue for any of the companies involved. Other than engineers working with batteries or metals which lead to actual billion dollar revenues.
You might say what's unusual with Levandowski is that he made so much money while working for someone else; and while not actually achieving any additional revenue.
If a battery or metals (or self-driving) engineer comes up with a material break through and starts a company they could easily eclipse Levandowski's earnings.
Sounds about right. Lance could basically sit down in the rocket and take the fame, while thousands of other people did the work to make the rocket and have it go to the moon and back.
It's not that he's the best self-driving engineer (though no doubt he is excellent). It's that he is the best self-driving engineer who is also a shrewd political operator.
My take on that but by no means I'm knowledgeable in those topics:
As far as I've heard Waymo was considered to be #1[0] when it comes to self-driving cars, thus it's probably someone of Waymoers
So if he was actually doing a lot of work there (basing on experience and how important for Google he was) then I think it's fair to consider him as a pretendent to be industry leader
[0] - Basing on Googling "most advanced autonomous cars"
That's survivor bias though, isn't it? Hard to see the world's best self-driving engineers when they're not getting caught stealing trade secrets and forced to reveal compensation.
No one is saying that talent and commitment weren't involved, but anyone who thinks there's not also a lot of luck involved is kidding themselves. Any number of fantastic and hard working engineers, not being at the right place at the right time could end up nowhere.
Of course, commitment can increase your odds grealy, but it doesn't magically make them 100%.
I think they gave the credit to him about having the skills. But it's the truth that luck is a huge factor. The same goes for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They had enormous skill and talent but if they so much as had slightly different childhoods or friends or geographic locations it would have been someone else.
1. Bill Gates had computer access
2. Steve Jobs met Woz
One basic requirement is that you must be so greedy that this kind of bonus isn't enough. A person less greedy than that would never pull through with the posturing that gets anyone to that level.
Sociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder on top of average skills.
My career took off when I had a particularly bad metal break where I exhibited both to a frightening degree. When I got over those I just retired with all the money I'd made.
“Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most.”
What's more ridiculous is that he was not even worth it. Uber wouldn't even have realized he existed if Google didn't pay him so much. The technology itself was never that secret or that valuable.
People in the security industry have told me that this sort of thing often comes down to ego and self-importance.
In Intelligence, people have been caught selling state secrets for 10-20k a pop. The kind of secrets that can land you decades in jail. It makes no sense from a monetary standpoint.
This phenomenon has been known from ancient times. A slighted ego is a powerful incentive to turn to the other side. For example, in the ancient Indian work on statecraft, the Arthashastra, Chanakya lists the kind of personalities who can become spies: See Chapter XIV of the Arthashastra:
One contrast I can think of between people in intelligence and Levandowski is tens of millions of dollars in pay... which actually causes me to agree with you. It seems mostly guided by an overinflated ego and a sense of invincibility.
Intelligence screening essentially tries to select for more financially conservative people and in the cases so far people only go that far due to extenuating situations like divorce, addictions, etc. rather than standard American Greed motive. Until relatively recently people didn’t make $500k+ / year as individual contractors or founding random boutique firms. As such, one of the oddities of the US IC demographics is that a really high number of them are Mormon. It helps explain the Salt Lake City presence and investment when most other sectors of technology are relatively lukewarm there.
Once decision makers are Mormon, of course they're going to hire more and more Mormons. They don't even have to be doing it corruptly, thats just how networks of humans work.
It's likely Levandowski has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as is evident by his founding The Way of The Future, which is his own church to worship artificial intelligence.
In all seriousness: You shouldn't remote diagnose mental illnesses for anybody.
It's totally frowned upon by psychiatrists and psychologists, who are experts in the field, because it's actually impossible and can do a lot of damage.
This has nothing to do with Levandowski not being a full blown greedy asshole and now a criminal too. But the problem is really that doing that can potentially hurt people with mental issues.
This seems like good advice. Amateur diagnosis of mental syndromes seems to happen a lot these days.
It raises an interesting question though. Every time narcissism / NPD comes up, the general advice seems to be that you should stay they hell away from these people. There seems to be plenty of evidence that they can wreak havoc on the lives of people around them, particularly anyone in an intimate relationship with them.
So it's arguably a good idea to learn how to "diagnose" these people, at least for self-preservation.
> In all seriousness: You shouldn't remote diagnose mental illnesses for anybody.
As a counterargument: I am extremely annoyed by the people who publicly criticize the personal traits of others without even considering that they might be affected by a mental disorder.
Those two things aren't necessarily in opposition.
For example we can choose to have sympathy and empathy for Kanye West during his public struggles. (Or not. I'm not telling anybody what to do. I don't have strong feelings about the guy myself.)
We can recognize that yes, clearly, the man is struggling with something. We can also simultaneously refrain from hamfistedly trying to figure out what, specifically, he's struggling with.
In your view, are those merely different degrees of the same thing? I mean, yeah, I guess. I suppose "that guy is struggling" is something of a diagnosis in and of itself.
For me, the clear differentiator is that "that guy is struggling" is a "diagnosis" I think just about anybody would be qualified to make. We have all struggled. And people generally don't go on Twitter posting sprees of alternating jumbled, grandiose, and vaguely worrisome thoughts when they're doing well. Nor do they make tearful public appearances, etc. And his wife confirms he's struggling. So assuming he's not putting on an elaborate ruse - I think your average layperson is qualified to say he's struggling.
Being more specific than that would require a level of training and direct contact with him that, obviously, a layperson doesn't have. And mental diagnoses are rather uh, fuzzy even when handed out by qualified professionals under ideal circumstances.
It's like the difference between me saying, "my car won't start" (a thing I'm qualified to say!) and "the fuel injector controller is faulty; Honda screwed up the design and Nissan's version of the same thing is much more robust." (a thing I just made up, and am not remotely qualified to say)
You should do some reading about it. I don't mean that like "go educate yourself", more like you might be surprised how fascinating is. I thought for as long as I can remember that it was a term excusing people being awful. Labels for everything. After reading some books about it I was left feeling... A lot of things.
It's a little unnerving, extremely nuanced, complicated, and fascinating. I've come to see it more as a description for a mode of being that's actually very important to understand to some extent and to figure into how you understand the world. A label like NPD does it no justice, like any other label for the way a human might behave. I highly recommend giving the idea a chance and thinking about how it might fit into your life.
I think it's important not to sensationalize it. In fact, it's probably far more typical and mundane in most instances. I've come to believe it's widespread but generally only acknowledged or recognized in extreme cases. A typical case of the topology only revealing the mountains from among the rolling hills.
The narcissistic personality was first described by the psychoanalyst Robert Waelder, in 1925; furthermore, the term narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) was coined by Heinz Kohut in 1968.
Whenever I see this sort of reaction, I suspect the person making it lacks understanding of what a "disorder" is.
A disorder is not an excuse for one's behavior.
A disorder just means, hey, there's something here that's out of the normal. A recognition of something that people struggle with.
Does Levandowski have some kind of disorder? I really have no opinion; I haven't followed this case and refrain from amateur diagnoses in general.
But it is not normal to steal hundreds of millions of dollars (or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of things) and if a person has a longstanding pattern of shitty behavior then yeah, there's something going on there that's worth figuring out.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's actually clearly correlated. The same underlying ego could've driven both the ambition and rewards he got at Google (after lots of rule-bending) and the brazen theft.
This. You see this behavior in gamblers who make it big and then lose it big, or in revenge trading. Make a lot of money then lose a lot of money. If you are even luckier you might even be net positive at the end.
People who know when to quit will usually not have made that much money in the first place because it's a different personality type almost.
For some people, it isn't ever about having enough. It's always about having more. It also might not have been entirely about the money: he could have craved recognition, more power or who knows what else.
There's a great quote in "Liar's Poker" where the author's mentor is explaining to him the dissatisfaction he feels even though he got a big bonus. He describes how as you earn more you become ever more jealous of people who are earning even more than you. It goes something like "We never become rich, we simply experience ever-increasing levels of relative poverty".
On the money! and the game is like being in the matrix...you’re always trying to bend the spoon even though reality tell you otherwise...in the end, you start believing the spoon is bent, when it’s not
In reality, the overwhelming majority of fraud and theft never gets prosecuted, and organised crime is an actual thing.
We even know governments run drug cartels to fund black-ops, and sell stolen weapons to this weeks chosen side.
I don’t have a problem with what Levandowski did. It’s just that stealing from one mega corp to give to a another bunch of overly wealthy and getting caught is sloppy.
And makes for a pretty boring documentary or film adaptation.
The existing theories are plenty likely, but I figure I'll toss out a (probably significantly overly generous) alternative. I don't know nearly enough about the situation to really give much of an estimate of the relative likelihoods.
Imagine you deeply believe that getting self-driving cars to market ASAP is vital to saving countless lives. And imagine you strongly believe you know how to make that happen. If you aren't being able to do that in your current environment, you might feel compelled to change even if you're getting huge piles of money, and you might be willing to cut corners along the way. How much would you give up, if you were convinced it would save thousands of lives each day?
Judging by the amount of money he was collecting from them, his ultimate reason must have been rage against a manager or coworker unless he just has a totally unusual view on money needs?
>> This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more.
Not sure about this instance but in general, people dont get to some promontory then lose it all doing something illegal/unethical. They often rise up the ranks -- doing illegal/unethical things the entire way up. You just see the time they got caught (the last time) and it seems they could have stopped at step n-1.
A sort of white-collar kleptomania? A thief with a stronger sense of risk management would've quit a long time ago. He felt compelled to keep going perhaps.
A company making N billion in revenue is a lot different than its profit, and LOT different than an individual making even one billion of personal wealth. There's a reason the adage is not about millionaires. 1 million, 10 million, even 100 million isn't really "world-changing" amount of money. But 1 billion is, and there are currently just over 2500 people in the world that have at least 1 billion in personal wealth. People don't really understand just how much a billion dollars actually is. It's an obscenely dangerous amount of money for a single individual to command.
Being a billionaire isn't about money, it's about ownership. Take Warren Buffet as an example, Buffet is "worth" 71 Billion dollars, but what does that actually mean?
Buffet doesn't have a vault full of 71bn dollar notes. His wealth almost entirely consists of the ownership of Berkshire Hathaway stock. That means that wealth consists of factories, media companies, property, mines, shops, warehouses and hundreds of thousands of people doing productive work.
So by and large, and there are exceptions of course, most billionaires are so because they lead and own huge businesses doing work on which our entire civilisation depends. They gained that control through being effective leaders that know how to build efficient and productive enterprises that employ people like you and me.
So what's the alternative? Appropriating their wealth would also involve removing their ownership and leadership of those businesses, and handing it to who? On what pretext, and to who's benefit?
Personally I have no problem with people being successful like that. What I think can be a problem is what happens to that wealth when those people die. If a person obtains vast wealth through hard work and contributing to society that's fine, but inheriting that kind of wealth is a different question. I think there's a reasonable case to be made for much higher inheritance taxes and regulation of trust funds.
One strategy is to rescale.
So, if I am worth 1 million (I wish!) then someone worth 1 billion could treat things as though they were 1000 times cheaper than me.
If you could get a $1000 per night hotel for $1 per night, that might change how you live.
Further examples left to the reader.
Although it does not surprise me one bit that you express such a sentiment as it is likely the most common one from that perspective; it is the result of the whole tech industry and even economy that is and has long been a kind of extreme mania of permissiveness and pillage, with next to no push back that would have possibly moderated such behavior, both on a systemic and the personal level that this is an example of. I know that being faced with such a reality will both be instinctually rejected by many as it is a threat to their frame of mind and causes cognitive dissonance just even hearing it, and some will simply not even have the ability to integrate it at all.
What, just from looking at all the massive and excessive fraud and graft and "disruption", aka, destruction, of the economy that we have just alone witnessed in our lifetime that is any different than what Levandowski thought he could maybe also get away with on an individual level. He just didn't realize he had to diffuse what he was doing and not make himself an individual and identifiable target.
Just alone China has been pillaging and stealing in every conceivable manner over just the last 25 years or so; from all out hacking, to buying up tech companies and IP, to placing engineers in our Universities Inc., to basic industrial espionage, to immigration to place industrial spies in our tech companies, and on and on and on … to little more than the muted chirp of crickets.
What would make Levandowski think that he could not have gotten away with what he was doing when we have witnessed nothing but the very same kinds of law and ethical and moral depravity all across the board from top to bottom, left to right, and front to back for decades now? Tech companies have perverted and sold out our whole society as a function of even deeper graft and corruption for many decades now, I am not at all surprised that Levandowski thought he too could get a piece of action; he just made the mistake of not running in a pack like in DC or on "Wall Street" on in the tech sector. He stood out and strayed from the pack in a noticeable manner so they needed to pick him off to avoid wider recognition of what is really going on as we careen off the rails.
To put a point on it, it is precisely the utterly permissive, corrupt, and rotten state of not only the whole tech industry; but our whole society and failed and inherently illegitimate government that are the cause of someone like him thinking he could get away with what he did. Because let's be frank, it was a solid bed that he would have gotten away with it considering what everyone else has gotten away with for many decades now.
Sure espionage happens, but there are half a dozen people in prison for spying for the Chinese already, and counting. In fact it’s precisely because people keep getting caught and thrown in prison that we know it keeps happening. Every few years a programmer at an investment bank gets sued or jailed for stealing code. There’s nothing new about people facing consequences for pulling this sort of crap.
Judge Alsup said that home confinement would “[give] a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison time is the answer to that.”
From Google >>>> TO Uber >>>> To >>> TOSSING SALAD in jail.
Corporate politics likely came into play - he was sidelined at Chauffeur and didn't show up to work, if you read the bloomberg articles. Likely he just wanted to make a difference and politics or corporate stupidity got in the way. The irony is that all these tech companies talk about changing the world. Reality is lawsuits and corporate politics.
Corporate politics don't make you steal from your company. "Sidelined" wouldn't be a defense for direct embezzlement of funds, and it's not a defense here.
If he felt the way you describe, he should have gone off and started his own thing (he did!) maybe sold it for lots to someone else (he did!) and not steal tech from his former employer (fail!)
We all get fed up with work politics, not having our opinions prevail, etc. We don't all walk out the door with countless hours and millions of dollars of work product.
He was so brazen in using identical schematic and suppliers. It amazing to think all this is a result of the supplier getting confused from having two clients with identical schematics and accidently cc'ing the wrong engineers.
I'd agree with you, if I hadn't worked adjacent to the financial industry for a bit. There are a lot of companies with liberty in the name (not even just US based), and I've mixed some up, even on technical issues.
Obviously the "name" isn't the issue, or maybe it is, it's possible they worked with this person in the past, and it never occurred to them to check the current employer, because it usually doesn't change that much, but once you end up working with customers in an emergent industry (separate experience in analytics, yes the past two decades is emergent), you'll find you have a customer who after a few quarters is on to a new job, but still your customer!
There are so many ways for these wires to get crossed, I'll stick to Hanlon's razor, but modify it to not be about malice, but to be about confusion:
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by confusion.
And if there's any chance I get something named after me, since this pattern is cute, let's call Clover's razor, any aphorism that takes on the form "Never attribute to X that which can adequately be explained by Y."
I could imagine that after Levandowski left Waymo that his email was forwarded to a manager or peer. You could see how a supplier could accidentally pick corey@waymo.com instead of corey@uber.com when they type “Corey” into the email client.
Yep, especially since Gmail also truncates signatures aggressively. They almost make it difficult to know if a person is representing an org, and instead just show what ever name they've decided is most appropriate :)
> Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by confusion.
That's a new favorite of mine. I think I'll need to append it to Hanlon's razor any time I use it:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, and never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by confusion."
I've had that happen with crystal oscillators that I ordered at nonstandard frequencies. The vendor gave me a heads-up when my customer placed subsequent orders for production. "Hey, just FYI, these guys appear to be cloning your product."
I thought that was nice of them, as they were under no contractual obligation to decline orders from anyone else or to let me know about them. I guess Levandowski would have a different take on it.
I’ve seen this happen before in a totally different industry. Now I wonder how many opportunities there are for companies to do this and I wonder how often they get away with it.
Never seen that story and can't find any details after a quick Google search. I wonder how much of the anti-Levandowski news is Google or Uber PR propaganda.
"Recently, we received an unexpected email. One of our suppliers specializing in LiDAR components sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s LiDAR circuit board — except its design bore a striking resemblance to Waymo’s unique LiDAR design."
It was also in many articles. The story is that they were reluctant to pursue it until that email, you can find a ton of sources in the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski
You kind of made my point by quoting straight from Google public relations. Was the strikingly similar schematic verified independently by journalists? Did it come up at trial?
I respectfully don't really understand your point, you think there's a conspiracy to publicly falsify evidence and influence the public? That would have caused immediate problems at trial if each company made such bold false statements and would have been a blessing for Levandowski's legal team. Also, not sure how or why you would 'google' anything to verify news if your bar is so high and you're not willing to spend more than a minute researching.
edit: it took two minutes to find the WAYMO LLC v UBER TECHNOLOGIES pdf on google and they reference the email evidence various times.
> you think there's a conspiracy to publicly falsify evidence and influence the public
It's not a conspiracy theory, companies employ public relations to influence how the public views them. In this case Google has a strong interest in making Lewandowski out to be unusually reckless so that other engineers don't view Google as a company that goes after engineers.
I think you're spending more time trying to justify your initial failure at finding the story on google rather than just doing the basic research to satisfy your curiosity. I can't tell if you're trolling at this point.
Why is white collar crime punished with such light sentences? I could have got that sentence for house breaking, or shoplifting to the value of $5k. I could get a lot more for dealing drugs to a few friends. Steal $100m and get 18 months, starting when the world is a nicer place. The world really is set up for rich people.
Someone made this point elsewhere. It's a 'trade secret' and 'stealing' is not as accurate as 'leaking' or 'copying' as it doesn't prevent the original owners from using it.
Usually civil lawsuits are fines. Should your (ex) employeer be able to put you in prison? Because I can see how that can be misused if a few figured out how to be convincing enough
For any non-violent crimes we should not send people to prison. I don't even know why it became a criminal matter. Civil courts can do that job really well.
If we prosecute everyone who took information from the previous job, then there will no sales people left. I don't know any SaaS sales person who doesn't take their sales funnel with them.
That would mean that rich people could just do non-violent crime without any real consequences. The risk to be caught is way too small to outweigh the rewards of those crimes. It would still be a benefit for them in the long term.
Some fines in a few countries are based on income, most notably Finland, which has issued fines in the tens of thousands for minor infractions like speeding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
I would argue that rules should pay attention to "motivation".
When you say the politician should "work", I hope you mean "breaking rocks" or "brick laying" rather than continuing as a politician...
Much more interesting to me is that the article says "he will not need to report until threat of COVID-19 pandemic has passed." and "With no end to the COVID-19 pandemic in sight, it is possible that Levandowski’s latest lawsuit will be resolved before he even reports to jail."
A courtesy not afforded to the largely not-rich, not-white general prison population. I don't think Levandowski should be treated worse, just noting it would be nice if less privileged prisoners were treated as humanely.
Totally agree. I don't like it when the responses are "they should rot in prison" because so many people have done less and been in prison forever. We need to severely reduce sentencing in this country - across the board - for everyone, especially the minorities and impoverished that have borne the brunt of our ridiculous school to prison pipeline.
Rich black people don't have the same privileged to buy justice as rich white people?
That's not true. From basketball players to music icons like Michael Jackson the rich can buy a certain level of justice.
If you think the white rich still have it easier. I think we are focusing on the wrong thing. The 1% or .1% percentages have it better than everybody else regardless of color.
To simplify this comment, when I say "black" I mean "not white". Easier than to keep typing non-white, etc.
You have a quadrant of four categories:
1. Rich and white
2. Poor and white
3. Rich and black
4. Poor and black
You are interpreting the statement to refer to "people who are not (rich or white)" - which with Boolean logic expands to "people who are not rich and not white)". Looking at the first form, this means category 4 (people who are poor AND are not white). It also means that poor white people get this privilege, and rich non-whites do.
The other person is interpreting it as "not (rich and white)" which means all the categories except 1.
in English, comma separated lists of adjectives or other descriptors are almost always understood to have AND between them, not OR. OR must be explicit, otherwise AND is implicitly assumed.
This is not just a matter of two equally valid alternative explanations: a reasonable reading of the original sentence "not poor, not white" (along a minimal amount of thought about the context and subject matter, e.g. prisons clearly are not full of rich blacks) would have easily led to the other person realizing that it was category 4 that the parent was talking about, not 1-3.
I think rich any-people shouldn't get a free-ride buuut... The comment you're responding to focused on privilege being the primary differentiator, but you focused in on "largely not-rich, not-white general prison population", please read comments a bit closer.
You’re trying to make this into a race issue, when that’s not really the case here.
The justice system in San Francisco bends over backwards to keep criminals of all races, classes, and backgrounds out of prison, and especially so with Covid-19.
It makes sense though - if California only had a single prison and it was built inside of a volcano then we'd object to folks not receiving capital sentences being sent there since there's probably be all sorts of chances that the prisoner die during incarceration. The prisons we have weren't designed for Covid, they aren't safe and while those people are criminals they are people. They did ill but weren't judged worthy of losing their lives and, I'd wager, some people look really closely at their behavior to figure out if they're going to be an immediate societal risk before deferring their sentence.
There's about an equivalent number of whites and blacks in US prisons, with a lower number of Hispanics and a much smaller amount for the rest. [1] Race doesn't matter, only wealth and status insofar as they get you the influence and connections to swing justice your way.
The fact that he's still sentenced and will have to serve while other inmates are currently being released due to covid shows that there isn't a major discrepancy in this particular case.
> A courtesy not afforded to the largely not-rich, not-white general prison population.
This claim seems to be unsubstantiated and in fact blatantly false... Please take the care to do cursory research on the situation before blindly stoking the race flame. That kind of thing is the very last thing we need in the public discourse right now.
> Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to alleviate the outbreak by releasing as many as 8,000 inmates and further reducing the population by about 10,000 through delayed admissions.[1]
I would guess some of them had public defenders. Although I guess they got it without even having to argue for it. Did Levandowski's lawyer argue for it? According to the article Levendowski's lawyer argued for home confinement (unsuccessfully, obviously).
Yes, in this case "literaly" means "figuratively", but still, what's the mechanism? I don't think he paid a bribe, and nobody is suggesting that. One may argue that the judge was somewhat subconsciously influenced by Levandowsky's wealth; this is also quite improbable, the judge in this case [1] is a very high profile judge. In particular he rebuked Trump on DACA.
In the end though, if anything, it looks to me Levandowsky's prison postponement makes his sentence harsher, not more lenient. He will still have to serve his whole sentence in an actual prison, and until he starts the prison sentence his liberty will be curtailed (for example it's very likely he will not be allowed to leave the country). A good defense team would've gotten for him house arrest during the Covid19 crisis, and his defense team argued for this. They didn't get it.
So, literally or figuratively, how did money buy Levandowsky a get-out-of-jail-free card?
Why is the government throwing people in jail for leaking trade secrets?
Trade secrets aren't supposed to have government protection, that's the entire point: they're risky. If you want a monopoly on your technology, you're supposed to file a patent. Trade secrets were invented as a riskier way to extend your monopoly by giving up government protection.
If the government is going to give trade secrets the same protection as patents (or even more, because patent infringement doesn't come with jail time), companies have zero motivation to publish.
> If the government is going to give trade secrets the same protection as patents (or even more, because patent infringement doesn't come with jail time), companies have zero motivation to publish.
Despite both forms of IP enjoying legal protections, there are many reasons to prefer trade secrets over patents or vice versa.
It's much much easier to accidentally lose trade secret protection by inadvertantly divulging those secrets, so in that sense patents are more "durable".
You also can't use trade secret protections to prevent reverse engineering, so any invention that's easily observable and reversible is not suitable for trade secret protection.
Trade secrets also can't be used to protect from independent invention, so if someone else discovers your trick, you have no recourse.
Conversely, trade secrets apply to things that cannot traditionally be patented. The classic example is, of course, the recipe for coke, as recipes in general are not patentable subject matter
Trade secrets also have no expiration date, hence again, Coke.
Obviously this is a deep well and I've only just barely scratched the surface.
Trade Secrets were not protected under US law until 1996. All of the upsides of trade secrets you list are benefits that they have, despite a complete lack of government enforcement, as it should be.
Coke protected its formula for over a century with NDAs and effective security measures. They went through enormous effort and expense to protect the secret, because the law until 1996 said that they were responsible for their own secrets.
Some of Google's algorithms get leaked and they go whining to the government demanding that people be thrown in prison for espionage. It's a bastardization of the purpose of intellectual property.
There is nothing wrong with trade secrets. There is something very wrong with government underwriting the risk involved in building a business reliant on trade secrets. Patents exist as an incentive to publish: you show us your work, we let you have a total monopoly on it for 20 years.
Trade secret protections break that deal. If the government will now give you a monopoly for the rest of eternity on any invention that you label "secret", then there is no reason to publish anything ever, the state of the art stagnates, and the technology industry becomes dominated by uncontestable monopolies with the power to throw you in prison if you look over their shoulders.
Well, lucky for you I'm not arguing on the merits of the law, only that it exists (and has since at least 1979 when the first federal law in this area was passed, though state protections pre-date that), and that the original commenter was mistaken in thinking it didn't.
As for the rest, eh, I genuinely don't care enough to argue. My original purpose was to correct a misunderstanding and provide some hopefully helpful additional context, not to argue for or against the ethical righteousness of various IP protection regimes.
> If the government will now give you a monopoly for the rest of eternity on any invention that you label "secret"...
You're misunderstanding it. If you steal a secret's blueprints, the government will come after you. If you reinvent the secret's methods yourself, you're free to do whatever you want.
It is interesting that recipes are not art but rather fact. The same with fashion. I think that SpaceX has trade secrets rather than patents because there is nothing stopping China using the information in a patent whereas a trade secret is obfuscated.
So, given current US patent law, if SpaceX has some system/method/etc that is patentable material, but that they've chosen to retain as a trade secret, and someone else comes along and rediscovers the thing and patents it, then absolutely, SpaceX may then be in violation of that patent.
That's because, as of 2011, the US (and basically the rest of the world) works on a first-to-file basis:
Meaning: "In a first-to-file system, the right to the grant of a patent for a given invention lies with the first person to file a patent application for protection of that invention, regardless of the date of actual invention."
Obviously this is not without controversy! The upside is it drastically simplifies patent filing, litigation, etc, since there can be no debate about who was the first to file a patent for an invention. But, as you point out, there are significant downsides.
I would claim FITF ultimately encourages patenting and thus public disclosure of inventions, which is overall better for the world than one dominated by protections with trade secrets. But I can't claim to have put a lot of thought into that position...
Do you think that documenting the tech and publishing a hash of the document would help? I've seen some services that offer to do this, but I'm not sure if this would work in a court of law.
First off, some background. In order to prevent someone else from patenting your idea, absent being the first to file it yourself, you need to disclose it in such a way that it qualifies as "prior art", thereby rendering invalid any subsequent attempts to patent the invention.
Now, what does that disclosure look like? First, let's talk about the Enablement Requirement:
Quoting from that section: "The information contained in the disclosure of an application must be sufficient to inform those skilled in the relevant art how to both make and use the claimed invention."
This is a general requirement both for patents, and for relevant prior art. In particular, with respect to prior art specifically, if you look at 2121 part III of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2121.html
) you find the term "enabling disclosure":
"A prior art reference provides an enabling disclosure and thus anticipates a claimed invention if the reference describes the claimed invention in sufficient detail to enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to carry out the claimed invention"
There's also some rules about a POSITA being able to find the prior art. For example, with respect specifically to publications, in section 2128.2 of the manual (https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2128.html) we find:
"'A reference is proven to be a "printed publication" "upon a satisfactory showing that such document has been disseminated or otherwise made available to the extent that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter or art, exercising reasonable diligence, can locate it."'
So just writing down the invention and sticking it a drawer doesn't count! The inventor must have been able to find the prior art.
Anyway, this is all to say: Simply publishing a hash of a document to prove you have it is almost certainly not sufficient to invalidate a patent application, since such a disclosure clearly doesn't meet the Enablement Requirement for prior art, nor does it meet the requirement for being discoverable.
As a random aside: this touches on why the idea of defensive patenting or defensive publication exists. Suppose you come up with an invention where protection of the invention (either patent protection or trade secret) has no value to you, but where you want to avoid being sued by someone else in the case of independent invention.
In that case, it's not at all uncommon to file a patent application or otherwise disclose the invention in a notable publication (like, say, a journal) so as to prevent someone else from acquiring a patent on that invention. And note I say "application". You don't need to be granted the patent! The application is enough to qualify as prior art (and in fact it's not at all uncommon to see abandoned patent applications cited as prior art by patent examiners in patent prosecution wrappers, which are publicly available to anyone via the USPTO Public Pair system).
If you have read any sufficiently advanced patent, you'll easily see they're very hard to replicate without insider knowledge, bastardizing the principle behind protection due to publication.
> If you have read any sufficiently advanced patent, you'll easily see they're very hard to replicate without insider knowledge, bastardizing the principle behind protection due to publication.
I've certainly read my fair share of patents, and bluntly, I don't understand how you can make that claim. (har har)
Yes, patents are written with a POSITA (person having ordinary skill in the art) in mind, meaning you need familiarity with the area to understand them. A large part of the patent prosecution process is ensuring that the patent meets that standard. So I don't immediately buy that they're "very hard to replicate" for such an individual.
Heck, that would work against any individual patenting an invention, as if the patent cannot be understood by a POSITA, then it can't be easily enforced in a court of law. The entire Markman hearing process would fall apart if the judge couldn't form a coherent understanding of the claims.
Do you have examples where you believe this to be the case?
Pretty sure anyone could hire a few experts to duplicate the flavor of Coke exactly. Their moat is branding, partnerships and a huge distribution network, not some "secret recipe".
I think Coke's moat (in addition to branding) is their use of coca leaves, basically impossible for any other company to source legally (at least in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Coca_leaf
It's been accidentally disclosed a few times over the years. IIRC at some point someone offered to sell the recipe to Pepsi, and they refused on account of the legal mess it would put them in and perhaps a sense of honor
And the fact that "Pepsi Coke" is a marketing non-starter; they want people to buy Pepsi, and the people who won't buy Pepsi, but will buy Coke...will just buy Coke, not Pepsi Coke.
I thought I had a decent layman's knowledge of intellectual property across copyright, patents and trademarks, and had no idea trade secrets had any kind of legal protection whatsoever.
Very important knowledge to be aware of. Thanks for spreading the word.
Yup, I mentioned that specifically about half way down my comment. Tbf, I edited it a lot for a while there and added that later so you may have seen an earlier version. :)
No, patents cover someone even independently coming up with the same idea and making a copy. Trade secrets don't have that protection. You can still steal trade secrets. If you couldn't, you're basically arguing IP isn't property (which is a perfectly valid philosophical position, and one I'm sympathetic to)
The problem is that it would break all employment as we know it. Now all I have to do is get hired on AdWords, steal the algorithm, & start a startup to undercut Google. I can price at a loss because I'm a small fish. Google can't because they've got monopoly concerns. Even outside of that extreme example, this would come up regularly for any pure technology startup looking to exit with an acquisition.
That's not to say it's not necessarily a better system (no trade secrets - all innovation is public) but the monetization strategy to reward novel innovation is much less clear (you can only get so far on support contracts).
That's what NDAs are for. Coke was able to protect their secret formula with NDAs and access restriction for over 100 years without any legal protection whatsoever.
That's the gamble of trade secrets: no legal protection, but you can keep your monopoly as long as you can keep the secret. If you want the government to defend your monopoly, you have to file a public patent as a price of entry.
The Industrial Espionage Act of 1996 upended that balance by legally protecting trade secrets. Now you can have a government-protected monopoly for all eternity, all you have to do is stick a "secret" label on your invention. Patents are entirely redundant in this new world of trade secret protection.
Should he go to jail? Idk. But stealing food from a grocery store isn't perfectly analogous to stealing IP. Bringing his knowledge to uber doesn't mean google can't use it. The same is true for digital piracy. Maybe it should be illegal, but it's not exactly the same as stealing an object.
A 10- or 100-millionaire stealing IP to get an n^th bomb-ass house/yacht/whatever might be heavily deterred by prior examples of imprisonment. Or, at least, certainly more deterred than a hungry thief.
If he goes to jail, people might be deterred from this particular type of anti-social behavior.
Why? They can be convinced that fame/n^th houses/yachts is not life.
But! If a food thief goes to jail, no one is deterred.
Why? Food is actually literally fucking life. You cannot deter someone from anti-social behavior that results in a cessation to hunger.
So, respectfully, I think you have things exactly the wrong way around here. Jail is a GREAT deterrent for white-collar crime, but a TERRIBLE deterrent for a many other crimes. We need fewer poor people in jail for sure, but we also probably need more rich people in jail.
You can go to jail in the US for stealing stuff with almost no value. A pack of Tampax, a bottle of water, some expired food they were going to throw out -- it doesn't matter.
Frankly he got off lightly. He was in a position of trust (and leadership) and he stole the crown jewels, and if he'd been successful it is very definitely eating Waymo's lunch.
If he had violated the CFAA to steal the documents he'd be up for considerably more time.
Not for any other IP violation. I could steal a Marvel movie and make millions of dollars illegally showing it in theaters, and I would only get fined. I could copy the formula of a patented drug and produce it illicitly, undercutting the patent owner, and I would only get fined. I could start a fast food business called "McDonalds" in blatant violation of a trademark, and I would only get fined. Trade secrets are the only intellectual property you can be thrown in prison for violating (and they are the only type of intellectual property that lets you keep an legally untouchable monopoly for all eternity).
>Bringing his knowledge to uber doesn't mean google can't use it
There were hundreds of engineers who worked on the technology that Levandowski stole. Let's not entertain this narrative that it's his work and talent alone.
Yes, I'm saying that government protection of trade secrets is fucked up. It renders patents completely obsolete: all you have to do is slap a label of "secret" on anything you invent and now the government will protect your monopoly on it until the end of time.
That works fine for physical machines, but if you're talking about software, then copyright protections, DMCA, and CFAA apply too, which makes reverse engineering also illegal.
And you cannot make a trade secret or a trademark something that's visible and nonspecific, like say UI design or look of hardware, placement of buttons etc. But you can make a design patent.
Patents make trade secrets stronger, especially if the patent is just part of the story.
In general, fraud is a criminal offense in most countries.
This is rightly so. Defrauding others of possessions or money is sufficiently aberrant that any criminal justice system worth its salt should bring prosecution.
What was Google defrauded of? What have they lost because their secret got out?
All they have lost is a monopoly on the technology that they were never legally entitled to in the first place. They still own all the assets, and their business is unchanged.
> Why is the government throwing people in jail for leaking trade secrets?
> Trade secrets aren't supposed to have government protection, that's the entire point
Is it your theory that the US government is illegally imprisoning Levandowkski? That's an explosive claim, what do you have to back it up?
Because it's a kind of fraud. If you cheat someone out of $1M by tricking them with a Nigerian Prince scam, you go to jail. If you cheat someone else out of $1M of profits by selling their trade secrets to a competitor, you should see a similar punishment, right?
Intellectual property isn't physical property. Google lost absolutely nothing in the exchange except the possibility of perpetual monopoly on this particular algorithm. Google still owns it, and they can still profit from it, the only difference is that they now have to actually compete.
Stealing IP via piracy will put you in jail too, though. I'm not trying to make a case for whether or not trade secrets (or movie downloads or software) "should" be protectable via law. I'm stating bluntly that it is.
Don't steal $5,000 from the liqor store, that will get you arrested at gunpoint and you'll spend many years in prison. Instead steal $50,000,000 and you'll probably still be rich once you pay the fines and complete the community service or home arrest.
Depending on the circumstances and state, unarmed robbery could earn you less jail time than Levandowski.
Armed robber on the other hand may carry a minimum 5 year sentence.
This seems just fine to me. The amount of money between the $5k liquor store and Levandowski's theft is almost irrelevant: the armed robbery comes with significant risk of violent loss of life, which rightfully weighs much heavier in the criminal justice system than some other crimes.
Now if you want to talk about ridiculous sentencing minimums for non-violent crimes like possession of small amounts of illegal drugs, I'm all ears.
But that's the case with all white collar crime right? they all get very less sentences.
from the outside, it looks like the system is rigged to favour the rich white collar folks or maybe your point is also valid, as in, there is no threat to life and that's their criteria of measurement.
But it is a fact that rich people get treated better in the Prison system
Yes but if it's your first offense in the world of multimillion dollar white collar crime you'll probably get an ankle monitor and house arrest. Or six months...
I've seen a number of people banned for life from securities trading in British Columbia, for frauds exceeding 10 million, and they received basically no prison sentence at all.
He was recommending himself 12 month of home confinement. We’ve basically been in home confinement for 5 months now. Basically in Covid era, he’d be Scott free
Wait. The guy essentially says “I committed a crime, will pay US$XXX million, but we had it in our contract that the guys who hired me would take the blame, so make them pay me US$X billion.” Am I reading that correctly?
Can that contract even remain legally recognized?
Sorting out quarrels between entities who were found cooperating in a crime, evaluating whether one should compensate the other for failing to uphold its part of the deal, certainly looks like the best use of a country’s justice system.
> As part of the transaction for the acquisition of Otto, Uber agreed to indemnify Mr. Levandowski for claims Google might raise against him. These claims included claims Google might assert for breach of fiduciary duty, breach of the duty of loyalty, breaches of various restrictive covenants, and trade secret misappropriation.
> Uber was aware of Mr. Levandowski’s conduct through the extensive investigation it conducted prior to and after entering into the indemnity agreement with him, and long before it purported to rescind. To the extent Uber claims it was unaware of certain facts, those facts were not material and were fully available to Uber had they cared to look more carefully at the materials it was provided by Mr. Levandowski. In fact, Mr. Levandowski repeatedly told Uber to search those devices for the most accurate information.
> Mr. Levandowski therefore commences the Adversary Proceeding to obtain declaratory relief as to the impact of Uber’s purported rescission on the parties’ respective rights and obligations, to enforce Uber’s obligations arising from the Otto transaction, and to disallow the Proof of Claim.
If I’m reading it correctly, Levandowski says Uber was in on the whole thing as early as Otto’s acquisition (if not earlier), and Uber did not deliver on what was promised per their arrangement.
That makes whatever was promised for Otto essentially reward for a crime, which incredibly Levandowski expects to rectify in a court of law.
Murder might be for 0 money, but the sentences for that are even higher.
The harm of robbery greatly exceeds the monetary cost. It's right and proper that violent crime should carry much higher sentences than nonviolent crime (and that's before we get into how much less clear-cut these white-collar cases usually are).
> Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to alleviate the outbreak by releasing as many as 8,000 inmates and further reducing the population by about 10,000 through delayed admissions.[1]
Quite a lot; there is a federal policy for release to home confinement of current prisoners with COVID-19 risk factors after evaluation of other factors.
Levandowski was charged in the federal system, to which California state prison policy is irrelevant. (The fact that the particular federal court hearing the case was located in California doesn't change that.)
OTOH, both delays in prison sentences and releases of current prisoners to home confinement are not uncommon due to COVID-19 in the federal system right now.
It blows my mind that there are protestors at San Quentin agitating for prisoners to be released into the public when the prison is one of the biggest cohorts of COVID in the entire region.
They literally let people walk out of prison and get on a public bus, after spendings months in close quarters amidst the worst outbreak in the Bay Area.
I think your comment would be much stronger if you just stated it directly - "They should not be denied justice because the lack of justice made them vulnerable to infection". - paraphrasing gilrain
It's called compassion. Imagine you catch a dangerous virus, and you are in a place where you have literally zero agency.
It's as if you are assuming people who commit crimes, or even people who get sent to jail (they are not a perfect venn diagram) aren't empathetic human beings.
Most people in prison don't want to randomly infect and kill people. Most of them do not want to hurt families, or friends. Most of them don't even want to talk or engage with anyone, and here you are, saying they should stay in a cage, accept their fate, get sick because a guard spits on them, and reflect about how they are serving time for selling cannabis, a now legal substance.
There are people who are intentionally not wearing masks, and you are assuming people leaving prison will not actively try to protect themselves and others, think about that.
Also, that they are put on busses is what the state is doing, not the former prisoners. They could do many other things to mitigate risk, and it's not on the prisoners, who have no money, or agency to have responsibility for that.
> It's as if you are assuming people who commit crimes, or even people who get sent to jail (they are not a perfect venn diagram) aren't empathetic human beings.
Empirically speaking, as compared to the general population. Prisoners are less empathetic. Empathic concern is highly correlated with agreeableness and agreeableness is lower in prisoners than the general population.
"Results of this study showed that big five personality traits accounted for 19.4%, 18.1%, 30.2% of the variance in three dimensions of empathy, namely, perspective taking, empathic concern and personal distress, respectively. Specifically, agreeableness had a strong positive association with empathic concern..."
"Both tests found that while prisoners were lower in agreeableness and extraversion than non-prisoners they were also substantially higher in conscientiousness than the general population..."
Cohen is mostly notable not because he was initially eligible for the general COVID-19 release to home confinement that the DOJ has set up, but because DOJ tried to unconstitutionally craft his conditions of release in a way to squelch his first amendment rights when they found out he was planning on releasing a book that would be embarrassing to the President.
I think GP was mixing it up with the President's chief Campaign Manager, Paul Manafort, who was serving his 7.5 year sentence in prison and moved to home confinement for covid 19.
I did mean Cohen, not Manafort (Cohen was Trumps lawyer, Manafort his campaign manager) -- The GGP said "How many other criminals can avoid jail time right now due to the Covid threat?" and having recently seen an article about Michael Cohen being out of jail on furlough due to C19 (linked in my original post) I posted the link; from TFA:
"Cohen was released to furlough in late May as part of a release program undertaken by the Bureau of Prisons to address the coronavirus pandemic."
However, as dragonwriter points out, turns out Cohen 1) was writing a book possibly damaging to Trump and 2) had been out at restaurants in NYC possibly in violation of his furlough; again from TFA:
"A photographer from the New York Post captured Cohen dining at a restaurant near his apartment with his wife and another couple in early July. Cohen said that didn't violate the terms of his release."
The controversial part is that the DoJ put him back in jail, but it seems it might have been to prevent him from completing his book (and the ACLU successfully sued to get him released again).
This is the link I should have posted regarding his original release in May due to C19:
When I have an upcoming dentist appointment looming over my head, My entire week can be ruined by anxiety. I have no idea how people can be sentenced to serious time in prison that will happen... sometime in the future...
For what it's worth, Befriend your dentist and the staff there and take headphones to listen to a long podcaste, video or music. It's not perfect of course, but it does wonders and letting them know also helps so they can help get you through it. Finding another dentist or looking into sedation is also an option if it's too bad. As someone with crap tons of dental work and awful teeth, I assure you you're not alone there. :)
Ditto. I have had tons of dental work. Fire up the iPod, and yes I still use a old iPod Nano for walks and dental work so I can be distraction-free. Toss in some nitrous and it is almost a pleasurable experience. I certainly don't dread going to the dentist.
An honest and naive question from someone outside industry: where is the line between stealing trade secrets and taking your experience and expertise developed at another company to a new company. Where does a lesson learned during project X become taking the know-how of the company which it developed during project X?
Because obviously the next company pays you so much because they see in your CV that you gained experience at the other company. This also works outside tech and I'm genuinely confused how this works for people bouncing across FAANG, say. How do they not take best practices across companies? What is your personal expertise and what is company IP? Does it depend on the wording of the contract? Is it ambiguous and murky and up to the court and everyone just hopes they won't get in trouble?
Taking best practices is not the same as taking trade secrets. It's ambiguous and murky, yes, but realistically, if it is ambiguous and murky, the case is likely to fall apart. It's when it's clear that you took some secret sauce with you, and replicated it wholesale, that a case is likely to be brought, and likely to be won.
How about stuff like how you set up your automated tests, or the Python project folder structure, or that you always first test the road sign recognition on self driving cars before testing something else. Or you first pretrain your neural nets of lane detection before jointly training for road signs and lanes.
I mean you remember the code you wrote and when faced with a similar case you will solve it in a similar way. The above are just really silly simplified examples for it.
Looks like his "Way of the Future" church website is also no longer his: https://www.wayofthefuture.church/
The last time it was online with the original content was in March 2020.
That's because one is talking about an actual sentence and one is talking about a theoretical maximum based on filed charges; the theoretical maximum for the laundry list of charges filed against Levandowski before he pled to one of the minor elements was pretty frigging enormous (and much more than he would have actually been likely to get even if he was convicted of the whole laundry list.)
His professional reputation is in tatters ... probably best he goes to China after his release as they will probably be the only ones that would not care and have the cash that would hire him.
Maybe he has some hidden, but then we'd be talking about bank and bankruptcy fraud and people are probably keeping an eye on him. Any new job after all is settled and done, will be without much responsibility or upshots
If Uber shows he knew he gave them stolen trade secrets, doesn't it also follow he would have only agreed to sell Otto to them if the agreement showed he was indemnified against specifically that?
not otto related. why is techcrunch so slow on chromium browsers. to read the article, had to open it in firefox reader mode, private. thousands of requests to just read a wall of text.
Why do we have laws for trade secrets? Seems like that lowers wages and decreases innovation. Really bad for majority of people. I understand they are fantastic for minority of people who are shareholders, but are there contrarians who think we should do away with legal protections for them?
Not sure if this comment is sarcasm, but if we didn't attempt to reasonably protect trade secrets the opposite of what you are saying would happen.
If I invest billions in a form of technology or a superior product and it can just walk out the door to any competitor, I actually have a perverse incentive to milk my existing products as much as possible and AVOID innovation due to the lack of return on it and the ability for those ideas to just walk out to another competitor
No, I'm generally curious, why do we have trade secret laws? Seems anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-equality to me. There must be people who question them and I'm curious to learn more.
> If I invest billions...
Yes, if you had billions to invest you should strongly dislike this idea. I'm saying that perhaps trade secret laws are good for billionaires, bad for everyone else. So removing them would be bad for billionaires, good for everyone else.
Shareholders have the government's help in preventing their employees from leaving to compete. Without that help, they'd have to treat their employees on a more equal footing.
> AVOID innovation
A freer market generally leads to more innovation, not less. Sure, a small number of billionaires may stop funding innovation, but that may be dwarfed by the rise of a number of innovative upstart companies made up of former employees.
> I'm saying that perhaps trade secret laws are good for billionaires, bad for everyone else.
Sure. In a certain, short-sighted sense, so are any property rights. Trade secret law is important for anyone who wants to invest in the creation of high value intellectual property that won't be protected with patents. Without such protection, there is much less incentive for investment. Billionaires are one group of people who conduct such investment. Startup founders and early employees are another. Another group that may interest you is anyone who invests through the public market in companies that derive value from trade secret protections. And of course anyone who finds value in the purchase of such goods, or any employee of such a company.
I know I personally would not attempt to build high value intellectual property if there were no trade secrets. If I had an idea I thought would be valuable but depended on the scheme, I'd leave and do the work in a country that supported my intellectual property rights.
The term "Intellectual Property" is a red herring. You cannot have property rights and IP rights. Logically it doesn't work (if you say my computer is my property, but that I can't arrange the bits how I want, then it is not my property). This case is well made in many places so I won't regurgitate much further. But it's important to clarify that the term is a euphemism and is in direct conflict with actual property laws. Better choice of terms include "Intellectual Control Laws", "Intellectual Bureaucracy Laws", or "Intellectual Slavery Laws".
> Trade secret law is important for anyone...
I am not arguing that trade secret law is unimportant for investors of capital. I agree it is very important for investors of capital. However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs, to have the government involved in enforcing secrets among its citizens. Why not let the free market figure it out? To me it seems that would be both more equitable and much more effective in a utilitarian sort of way. However, I don't dispute that it is in the strong financial interests of the top 1% of the population (myself included) to keep these laws as is. I'm just saying they are likely unethical and counterproductive if one were to optimize society for innovation.
> I know I personally would not attempt to build high value intellectual property if there were no trade secrets.
Mathematically the world would not notice, even if your name was Edison. The most impactful inventions in the world were all invented far before we had copyright and patent laws. We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors.
> Better choice of terms include "Intellectual Control Laws", "Intellectual Bureaucracy Laws", or "Intellectual Slavery Laws
I'll go ahead and keep calling them what everyone else does, thanks.
> However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs,
I'm not overly concerned with what is natural. Many good things are not natural. Why not let the market figure it out? Because the market is known to be inefficient for the production of non-rival, non-excludable goods. Traditional macro econ theory suggests that without protection these goods will be produced less than they ought. There are other solutions to the problem besides government intervention, but the ones I'm aware of require very high levels of consumer coordination.
> We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors.
Then you shouldn't be too bothered about the restriction on handling of trade secrets by folks other than their owners. I mean if it doesn't matter what gets invented, who cares whether someone owns it or not?
> I'll go ahead and keep calling them what everyone else does, thanks.
A very pragmatic position.
> I mean if it doesn't matter what gets invented...
I think inventions matter. But I think our contributions are always marginal compared to what we build upon. If all of the people who say they won't create without monopoly profits stop creating, there will be more than enough people who continue to create that the world won't notice. In fact, it may even improve things. We'd have less intellectual garbage because novelty would stop being rewarded as much as utility.
> If all of the people who say they won't create without monopoly profits
Trade secrets and monopoly profits are different things. The source code for your business' software is a trade secret, even if you don't have a monopoly. It would be untenable to produce software for profit if any of your employees could walk off with your source code after your investment and set up a competing business selling the same thing at a cut rate.
From the sound of it, you might not find this prospect so sad. I can certainly imagine a world where all software is produced by consortiums of users funding development voluntarily. That doesn't seem to be a common general pattern, however, with the exception of a few programs like Blender or Dwarf Fortress. If it were more efficient for producing good software than the status quo I would personally expect to see it happen naturally more often. There's nothing that prevents such arrangements from being created today.
> It would be untenable to produce software for profit if any of your employees could walk off with your source code after your investment and set up a competing business selling the same thing at a cut rate.
You can still ask your employees to keep things secret, of course. Just without government as your enforcer. What would generally happen is you'd have to sweeten the terms of employment to make sure your people are happy. Profits for existing shareholders would drop, probably significantly, but the market would still churn out goods as before, and wages would rise.
> with the exception of a few programs
I would say at this point the majority of important software are not protected by trade secrets (TCP/IP, Linux Kernel, XNU Kernel, Git, DNS, SQLite, MySQL to name a few of many thousands). Tens of thousands of people are paid to work on these open source software products, and yet generally remain with their employers, even though they could "walk out the door" at any moment.
Secrets are fine. Government enforcement of secrets I find highly questionable, and only in the interests of the 1%.
All the software you cited is basically server infrastructure software. I suppose that depending on your definition of important, you could say that this is the majority of important software. Perhaps if important includes only what is needed to develop web properties. But there are a lot of people who use software besides web developers. I don't really buy that your list names even close to the majority of important software by most folks' reckoning of what's important.
Some important (to me and many other people) software you didn't mention:
* Everything besides generic infrastructure that makes
any web property work (Google, Bing, Netflix, Facebook,
Amazon, DropBox, Personal Capital, etc.).
* Microsoft Windows
* Microsoft Office
* Mac OS X
* Nearly all games
* Nearly everything that makes any given bank work
* The Adobe Creative Suite
* Any popular Android or iOS app
I'd guess that the number of people working on the pieces of software I mention here exceeds those working on your list by at least one if not two or three orders of magnitude. I doubt much of it would be economically viable except for government protection of intellectual property.
Anyway, fortunately, the government will likely to continue to protect IP in the foreseeable future. It's working pretty well so far.
Both private property and intellectual property are arbitrary social constructs. You can argue whether one or the other is good or bad if you want, but neither are fundamental laws of the universe and neither are more intrinsically true than the other. You are trying to draw a binary categorical distinction between the two where none exists.
> However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs, to have the government involved in enforcing secrets among its citizens.
It's no more "unnatural" than the enforcement of physical property laws. Courts and prisons and cops are artificial human institutions, not part of "nature".
> neither are more intrinsically true than the other.
I would disagree. The term "property" is circa 1300. The term "intellectual property" started being used about 500 years later to (I would say undeservedly) piggy back on the success of the former. But it's an oxymoron, as IP rights in fact contradict property rights, hence it being less "true", in a logical sense.
> It's no more "unnatural" than the enforcement of physical property laws.
Yeah, that line of mine was sort of rhetorical and not substantive. If it were a PR I'd remove it :).
he didn't get any of the ~600m from the otto sale. It was entirely based on earn outs from progress, and there was no progress, and none of the milestones were hit.
If it's any consolation: the more money you have, the more painful a jail sentence, even a short one like this, is, because the opportunity cost is massive.
OTOH, the marginal utility of that opportunity cost is less.
Some people end up with their kids sexually abused in foster care because they had to spend a few months in prison. Is the reduction in marginal earnings for wealthy people comparable, really?
Wow. The opportunity cost of spending part of your life in prison is not measured in dollars. I mean, I guess Anthony might measure it in dollars, but that's really, really far gone.
The literal definition of "opportunity cost" of something is what that thing costs you in terms of opportunity, i.e. what you could have done otherwise.
If you have millions of dollars in the bank, then you can do a LOT more stuff than some poor schmuck. The opportunity cost of having that freedom taken away, therefore, is a lot higher.
> The sentencing is the latest in a series of legal blows that have seen Levandowski vilified as a thieving tech bro, unceremoniously ejected from Uber, and forced into bankruptcy by a $179 million award against him.
He had to pay $179 million in the civil case. He's bankrupt.
No, getting sued and prosecuted for stealing trade secrets, using them as a basis for starting one business competing with the employer from which they were stolen, and then selling that business to another competitor of the one from which they were stolen.
A similar case could be made against anybody who goes to work for a competitor. He fact that you aren’t guilty might not matter so much if you’re facing vastly asymmetric legal resources.
Sounds like he stole a bunch of trade secrets and gave them to his new job, and he got the new job because of his ability to do this. This may not be completely accurate, I haven't been following it too closely, but broad strokes.
You must know this behavior is completely different than simply switching jobs?
Yeah, but that explicitly mentions physical files, not knowledge you've acquired.
Don't take physical files guys. Don't take digital files either. It's pretty simple.
If it's in your head, you're almost assuredly safe. Every prosecution I can find for the Economic Espionage Act has to do with physical files. For you to be the first charged for knowledge in your head (and not running afoul of an NDA, a patent, a non-compete, etc), you'd have to be even more egregious than this guy, and just as valuable. Good luck hitting that bar.
If it makes you feel any better, we don't punish any of these people with the enthusiasm that punish teenagers on the South Side of Chicago. At least Levandowski gets a sympathetic cheering section.
> It seems inconsistent to punish technologists like Levandowski when we don't punish bankers, CEOs, and polluters with the the same enthusiasm.
Levandowski was cofounder and CEO of Otto, and is being punished directly for how he got there, and later (until charged) cofounder and CEO at Pronto.ai.
So, I'd say we charge CEOs with exactly the enthusiasm we charge Levandowski.
I'm sure if the DAs could prove that any bankers had broken the law in court, they would be more than happy to prosecute them. The problem is two-fold: it's much less clear which if any laws were broken by the nebulous "bankers," and even if we knew which laws were supposedly broken, it will be harder to prove intention, which in the case of laws without strict liability (most of them), might end up making it hard to punish the person being investigated.
This is a very unbalanced idea of what happened. The Uber released video’s exposure was clearly adjusted to make it darker than reality. Also the sight of the “jaywalking” was shown clearly to be a place where people regularly crossed the road. There is a sidewalk that leads and ends right at that spot. So it is clearly a urban planning design issue.
This is not to say that Uber is criminally liable but that it isn’t as clear cut as you may want it to be.
More than the 18 month prison sentence, it would have been far better to punish him with life-long red mark on his career to never be able to found, or run a company and never be able to buy stock or any kind of a position in any company.
Seems like 18 months will be spent plotting his next big thing and it’s rinse and repeat.
Also put an upper limit to his wealth. Say total : $40K. And cancel his passport.
Putting people in an enclosed room for 18 months sounds pretty barbaric vs. the measures I am recommending which is basically live a modest free life like the middle class of America.
He was already sued into oblivion. What's left will be taken by the lawyers. He'll be lucky to have 500k - 5million after all this is said and done, and it will be very difficult for him to find employment into the future.
I agree that the comment above was advocating some pretty excessive measures but 500k-5M is a fair bit more than most folks end up having when they get to retirement.
He's not going to be unemployable - he'll be unemployable in a few specific sectors of tech, he can absolutely go out and get a "normie" job if he's got marketable skills.
They also imposed a fine of $95,000 and ordered him to pay $756,499.22 in restitution to Waymo LLC, as Google’s self-driving program is now known. Levandowski was also sentenced to a 3-year period of supervised release.
I agree with your sentiment though: a short period of imprisonment in a presumably low security prison plus <US$1M in fines is definitely on the slap-on-the-wrist side of Got-Off-Easy <> Disproportionately-Severe spectrum.
He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses in the millions, and he had persuaded Google to pay him even more money through a side-hustle company of his while remaining an employee. Then he quits and steals their stuff.