"If you are a resident of or have your principal place of business in the US or Canada, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook, Inc. Otherwise, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited."
So if you're living in USA it seems like they don't need to comply with your requests.
Thanks for the head's up on the TOS. Actually, there WAS a period of time when I was on FB when I was living in Germany. In fact, when I signed up for FB, I was living in Germany (not in the military), so still probably worth a shot.
I'm dual Australian/UK and just tried it with my British passport (and Australian address).
Almost immediately I got an email saying that "Unfortunately, we won’t be able to respond to your email directly, as this form is only applicable in certain jurisdictions." Might try again when I'm back over Christmas.
Edit: On inspection of the Facebook T&C page, it says I'm contracted to Facebook Ireland, so I'm not sure what the email's about.
Key difference . . . names are chosen by a person's parents, while email addresses are chosen by a person for themselves.
Focusing on the name, which the person can't control, instead of on the person's accomplishments (resume), which the person can absolutely control, would seem to be an indicator of bias.
You don't think that your parents' income or education level has an effect on your later success?
And sure, it would be better to ignore names and focus on a resume -- but people rely on subconscious cues all the time. If your only goal is to find good candidates as quickly as possible, a subconscious cue which is usually correct works to your advantage -- whether it's "people with degrees from Harvard are stuck-up snobs", "people who write their resumes in LaTex are good coders", or "people with weird names like 'jewyl' are useless".
This just seems odd given that you have a page of information which is probably a lot more informative. But that's kind of the definition of racism -- even in the face of evidence that would contradict your stereotype you'll cling to your stereotype.
Sure, you have a page of information which is more informative. And you have Google, which is probably even more informative. And you could start phoning college professors and get even more information.
There's a point where the cost of gathering information exceeds its value. Unfortunately, that point sometimes comes halfway through reading a resume.
When you're comparing the candidate against someone else with the exact same resume that differs only by name, the rest of that information is not useful, because it doesn't help you distinguish between the choices.
But isn't that the point of the statement. It would be like saying that if you saw the candidate in person and they did the job equally well, but one had dark skin and the other light skin, so we used their skin color to distinguish -- but then trying to argue that skin color isn't really a proxy for race, since some black people could be lighter than a white person.
Thanks for this. I swear the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves their biases aren't about race are amazing (note I'm not calling anyone racist here).
First thing we all need to do is be willing to flat out admit our own faults without any rationalizations. That's the only way we'll ever be able to overcome it.
I would only consider racism a fault if it leads you to make bad decisions. In the hypothetical situation where two candidates differ only by their race, that won't happen.
Interesting logic. Of course people's resumes don't reflect the entirety of the candidate, so it is likely that basing decisions to move further based on race will eventually cause you to pass up the better candidate. Sounds like a fault to me.
The alternative of ignoring race gives you two identical candidates. If choosing a particular race consistently gives you worse results than choosing randomly would have, that's still evidence supporting racism as a general rule - you're just being racist in the wrong direction.
I just don't buy that it does. We're not picking two random people off the street here. These are people who have passed all the filters needed to have their resumes sitting in front of you. From education, to experience, to HR, to phone screen, etc. If, at this point, the two candidates still look identical, I don't think race gives you any meaningful signal. The black candidate has already proven that he has risen above any disadvantages he might have statistically faced. In fact, this should even be a plus in his column because he had the determination (or raw intelligence) to overcome his disadvantaged lot in life and be sitting in front of you, on equal footing with a white candidate who (statistically) had many advantages given to him.
Which statement? That wasn't the point of your statement that the resume provided more information than the candidates' races. It actually provides no useful information if the other guy has the exact same qualifications.
Your example is the same. They do the job exactly the same, so you decide based on the skin color. What would you think about someone who tells you "you should have just decided based on their performance?"
Making important decisions based on stereotypes rather than facts tends to be frowned upon these days. And (at least in the US) it opens yourself up to huge discrimination suits if you base your discrimination on protected classes like gender or race.
This is not completely true. Of the 10 or so people I have hired, 3 had resume names different from their legal names. One had a Pakistani name, another was chinese, and one had a ghetto name.
It is well known that you can put whatever name on your resume you want. It is not until after you are hired that you have to submit documentation.
In response to cperciva's comment . . . Statistically? Sure . . . on an individual basis? Should be irrelevant . . . that's why we base employment decisions upon the resume of the individual and not based upon the resume of the parents.
I gush about Slovenia all the time. During my 3 years living in Europe, it was probably my favorite place to travel to . . . absolutely gorgeous country and great people . . . also really darn innovative, smart and open (as illustrated by this project).
Wish that last part was really the case. If you want to succeed here you best back your bags and move out to somewhere else. It's just the way it is here communism is still deeply rooted in our society and successful people are frowned upon by vast majority (envy) and you'll have no luck finding any decent business ethics here.
I upvoted you back sinc I don't like the meaningless downvoting nither. But I must say that Slovenia, while still having a number of traits you have described, is in no way worse than similar Central European countries like Austria. If you really want to see a medieval mindset, just cross the border to Croatia... :)
Sounds like you're in the same boat as everyone else in your round, right? It's simply a function of the timing of the deal (less than a year since you invested, apparently) and the deal structure (cash vs. stock).
Stock inherently requires the acquired company to share the risk of the deal.
If the stock goes down further, you should be able to claim the loss on your taxes when you sell, which should mean you would need more than a 52% total decline to go in the red on the deal.
Are you an accredited investor? If not, you may have some legal outs to demand your money back, but you'd need to chat with a lawyer. If you were to pursue that route, though, you'd likely ruin any credibility to make future investments in other companies.
Kinda stinks that there's the gap between tax law and SEC regs timing, though. Good luck with the investment!
> Sounds like you're in the same boat as everyone else in your round, right?
5% of the investment is accounted for by US tax payers. The rest are not, so I'm not in the same boat.
> If the stock goes down further, you should be able to claim the loss on your taxes when you sell, which should mean you would need more than a 52% total decline to go in the red on the deal.
No. The tax event is on the grant, not a capital gain (therefore capital loss does not cancel). Furthermore, if I fall under AMT (very likely), I can't deduct anything.
>No. The tax event is on the grant, not capital gain (therefore capital loss does not cancel). Furthermore, if I fall under AMT (very likely), I can't deduct anything.
Ooph . . . sorry. However, just so I understand, if your shares were to rise above the transaction price, would you not be subject to capital gains tax on the gain? It would seem a bit misaligned if you could be taxed on gains but not benefit from losses (however, I wouldn't put that past the codes and that still wouldn't account for AMT issues).
> if your shares were to rise above the transaction price, would you not be subject to capital gains tax on the gain?
Yes. The way the IRS views it, I was given a an ordinary income bonus which consisted of new shares, and which was valued at $Z during the grant (and taxed as such, at that second). From now on, I own shares, so capital treatment goes into the future. If the stocks drop, I will have capital loss when I sell them -- but I need some other capital gain to net against.
I'm an Ivy MBA (yippee), and I'm working with a Natural Language Processing PhD and another guy who will be starting his PhD in NLP in September. However, neither can serve as a full-time Co-Founder . . . gotta find that person.
The business plan (yeah, the MBA actually wrote a whole one) has been vetted by some iconic folks in the industry, and proof-of-concept should be done by the end of the summer thanks to the brilliant NLP folks and some amazing designers.
So what are we doing? Basically, the hypothesis is that there is a fundamental misalignment between the way that people intuitively think about engaging with information online and the tools we use to engage with information online . . . we think in terms of our interests, yet the existing tools/services are structured by function. We're going to realign that.
Looking for someone based in NYC who can lead the technology vision beyond the PoC . . . they should have a passion for social media, experience scaling a consumer-focused web service (ideally as a team leader), and love the idea of playing with a ton of cleanly segmented and highly granular data on interests.
