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Comment by overcyn | Hacker News Reader

> you can be fired or suffer repercussions by your employer, for things that you do on your own personal time

Yes this happens, but should it be the case? Is this something you morally support? Should people be fired for smoking weed in their personal time? Posting on social media? Making a joke to a friend? Donating a political campaign?

People have been fired for these things but I don't think it should be lauded. I don't think its healthy for companies to monitor their employee's personal life, so they can punish them at work.

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The people in charge of these firings are executives like Zuckerberg and Kaplan. It's completely disengenous to phrase the argument as "should this happen at all?" when it's really "should executives be allowed to punish workers for their personal life choices, while not holding themselves to the same standards?"

Are you saying that it is a bad thing. But since it is happening it should happen to everyone? If so, it just seems like you're propagating more of bad thing.

Why not just advocate for the the corporate world to be more accepting of personal life choices? Firing Kaplan doesn't get you any closer to that.

Because they are not going to be more accepting. The leadership is only trying to pull this argument out because it bothers them.

I agree that when all else is equal, we shouldn't do bad things to one person just because they happened to someone else. All else is not equal here. Given the power Facebook has over their employees lives and in politics in general, they are like a feudal lord. When they stop enforcing the rules on just them and their friends, that's a breakdown of the rule of law which leads to a breakdown of social harmony and leads to people starting to rebel against leadership like you see here with Facebook's employees

If the realistic thing is that the higher ups are going to oppress the workers, it's also the realistic thing that they aren't going to oppress themselves.

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