So you are an Amazon board member and you receive this letter.
The letter is said to be directed to you in confidence. It is not. It is openly published on scribd for all the world to see.
The letter is said to be written by an ex-executive of the company. It is not. Or, if it is, it is written in a style that has "lawyer-written" stamped all over it.
The person making the claims is saying he is doing this to uphold company values but is far from disinterested. If he was fired for whistleblowing, that is wrongful and he gets large damages. Otherwise, not. So, maybe it is sincere and maybe not. But who knows?
The person also waited two years to write this letter. Does this undercut its premise that its goal is to correct wrongdoing? Or was it now put out opportunistically to further some litigation goal instead? Again, who knows?
Ditto for a complaint being made just now to the Washington agency responsible for fraud. Why now and not earlier if the problems were serious and pressing?
Then too, the alleged victim (Discover Card) is hardly a naive consumer, knows how to defend itself, and had known enough about this to ask questions going as far back as 2012. Is there, then, less than meets the eye concerning the claims of its having been overtly cheated?
Everything stated in this letter may be true and damning as it appears. I don't know what happened, nor do I know the people involved. But I do know when something is framed insincerely and this letter is framed insincerely. It may all be true but its style and timing do not ring true.
This has to have another side to it, in my view, and it is wrong to take it as self-evidently true without hearing that other side. What we have now is only a one-sided story that is heavily slanted in its presentation.
Certainly if I were a board member to whom this was purportedly directed, I would be highly skeptical. I would assume instead that I was not even the intended audience for the letter. And I would probably be right.
Way to stand up for the little $145B company. Who, by the way, have an army of lawyers and PR professionals who write everything that comes out of the corporation. Regular employees are banned from speaking on behalf of the company.
Aren't you a lawyer? Are you the only lawyer who tells clients "go ahead and speak for yourself, it's not my place to help you word your thoughts effectively"?
Who, pray tell, do you think writes the "Letter from Jeff Bezos" that occasionally appears on the website?
The litigation goal, you may recall, is to compensate the aggrieved for losing his job over failure to join a criminal conspiracy.
> The litigation goal, you may recall, is to compensate the aggrieved for losing his job over failure to join a criminal conspiracy.
So, that's what the document claims. 'grellas makes the point that this isn't just a normal letter, it's probably written by a lawyer and has legal implications. In this case, we have some very serious allegations within the context of a legal battle. The next step, which should clearly be within the legal system, is discovery/investigation. Saying "there must be another side to this" is pretty reasonable -- I'm not lawyer, but most courts allow both sides to speak before making up their mind.
Why would you think that this snarling reply would persuade anyone on HN, let alone George Grellas? Who would take seriously a comment that opened by suggesting Grellas was sticking up for Amazon? Hey, way to stick up for the $30Bn credit card company, by the way.
This is the first interesting top-level comment on the thread, but is weighted down by the fact that it spoils the outrage tourism fun to be had at tl;dr'ing the letter and gawking at the few interesting details.
You'd think a nerd message board would reward critical thinking. Instead, the replies to this comment all seem offended by the concept.
This, I know, is not a helpful addition to the thread, but oh well, I'm just as bad as everyone else here.
Helpful tip: George Grellas has never, in the entire time he's been on the site, written an unhelpful comment. One good way to read HN is just to start with Grellas' comments.
I mean it: go look, you won't find a single bad comment. It's spooky.
Most thoughtful comments that get downvoted soon get voted back up by other users. That's one reason why it's against the HN guidelines to comment about downvoting. At least half the time your comment is soon obsolete.
Instead of posting comments like this, please just upvote and trust your fellow users. If you (or anyone) think a comment has been treated particularly unfairly, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
It wasn't thoughtful; the very premise of it (that this was sent to the rest of the planet before it was sent confidentially to the boardmembers) is factually incorrect.
I gingerly suggest you put some work into identifying the "very premise" of comments, because that was not the "very premise" of Grellas' comment.
Grellas' is raising the point that this letter concerns a two-year-old dispute between two gigantic American corporations, one of which is a credit card company, but frames itself as an urgent public policy concern.
You can believe that concern is irrelevant, but you can't pretend that it's something it's not.
The letter is said to be directed to you in confidence. It is not. It is openly published on scribd for all the world to see.
The letter is said to be written by an ex-executive of the company. It is not. Or, if it is, it is written in a style that has "lawyer-written" stamped all over it.
The person making the claims is saying he is doing this to uphold company values but is far from disinterested. If he was fired for whistleblowing, that is wrongful and he gets large damages. Otherwise, not. So, maybe it is sincere and maybe not. But who knows?
The person also waited two years to write this letter. Does this undercut its premise that its goal is to correct wrongdoing? Or was it now put out opportunistically to further some litigation goal instead? Again, who knows?
Ditto for a complaint being made just now to the Washington agency responsible for fraud. Why now and not earlier if the problems were serious and pressing?
Then too, the alleged victim (Discover Card) is hardly a naive consumer, knows how to defend itself, and had known enough about this to ask questions going as far back as 2012. Is there, then, less than meets the eye concerning the claims of its having been overtly cheated?
Everything stated in this letter may be true and damning as it appears. I don't know what happened, nor do I know the people involved. But I do know when something is framed insincerely and this letter is framed insincerely. It may all be true but its style and timing do not ring true.
This has to have another side to it, in my view, and it is wrong to take it as self-evidently true without hearing that other side. What we have now is only a one-sided story that is heavily slanted in its presentation.
Certainly if I were a board member to whom this was purportedly directed, I would be highly skeptical. I would assume instead that I was not even the intended audience for the letter. And I would probably be right.