Your hypothetical makes zero sense as your questions have simple yes/no answers.

> Even if it's consensual, what happens when she decides she wants to move on from the relationship?

Then they're no longer in a relationship and still have to follow HR/company policies.

>What about her peers that didn't receive promotions while she did?

Did they follow the company policy (e.g., hiring committee recusal) or not for the promotions?

>This is why these laws exist.

Did the company policies follow employment regulations when setting and enforcing their policy?

Well, I guess they should fire her, then.

yall got it backwards. pussy is the power dynamic. men need it, have to have it, totally controlled by it. man not using woman for sex. everyone like sex. woman use pussy power to get promotion

Interestingly, no!

These policies are intentionally narrowed to workplace conflicts of interest. HR doesn't want to manage morality clauses or stuff outside the workplace.

There is zero nuance in a boss sleeping with someone who is a subordinate which is why every company very explicitly forbids it. Companies don't even allow people who are already married to be put in a situation like that.

Once one person has the ability to get the other fired, ruin their career, blackball them from the industry, etc. you can't know if they actually freely consented or not. Once you have coercive control over someone how could you even know that's not why they "consented?" Even if they initiated you can't know if at some point they wanted to stop but now felt they couldn't because of fear of retaliation.

Yes, you can extrapolate, and our society does. This is why ministers aren't supposed to have relationships with their clergy, therapists are not supposed to have relationships with their clients, lawyers, doctors, etc. The list goes on and on.

Can become, yes. Depends a bit on what exactly the nature of the power imbalance is. Which is why there are usually strict rules about relationships with your reports and how to resolve the situation. Like reporting it to HR so the work positions can be shifted in a way to move positions so that there is no longer a reporting relationship between the two.

Exactly. At every place I've worked or consulted at, bosses dating subordinates is not permitted. I have seen multiple instances where people have to move teams/managers because they start a relationship.

These restrictions exist in most workplaces. Boss/subordinate relationships can result in extortion and bad behavior, regardless of which party starts it.

Congrats you just figured out divorce laws and alimony from first principles.

Wow you are mere inches from understanding the concept of sexual harassment. Keep going!

I've never worked at any company that used them or heard about them. Instead we take yearly training saying that even flirting with the idea is a cause for immediate termination.

Do you have stats on how common these are? Is it more popular in some non US country maybe?

Do you suppose Jensen had a love contract with his subordinate, when the breaking of the news of their extramarital relationship led to a 20% drop in stock and the removal of Jensen as CEO?

Yeah. It’s not like being an ultra chad billionaire with great biceps and confident personality is NOT attractive to women. Maybe her husband wasn’t doing it for her (legit feel bad for that man, whoever he is, today).

It doesn't matter, he was in a position of extreme power imbalance where he could show her both favoritism or fire her depending on how things went. It's improper and inappropriate at best, and illegal at worst.

Are you sure this is the comment you meant to reply to?

I am referring to the meaning established in the law. Many things fall under the legal umbrella of sexual harassment. If you want to describe it as something else maybe you should be the one looking for a new term to coin.

Which victim is that? You should probably do some research on what it is you think is so repugnant.

Here, this is probably a way to digest it that you might follow well. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p8bjVSK5Ov0&t=2415s

But was she a direct report when the affair started?

That's totally fair, nobody is happy with DOGE at this point and a lot of people were skeptical and nervous as it was happening. I just don't recall anyone popping in to say "damn it, they're doing it wrong!".

lol, do you think it is a coincidence that going after DC’s money was met with more media attention than other things? I don’t.

But DOGE (as conceived) is the wet dream of a libertarian from any era. If anything it's a bone that Trump threw to libertarians. It's not especially MAGA imho.

> a bunch of people excusing his behavior

And also a bunch of people condemning his behavior. And many or most of the comments about him from either side are flagged. Most people here are bored of the topic and want to talk about topics that satisfy intellectual curiosity, which is what this site is for.

This site gets millions of visits and tens of thousands of commenters posting hundreds of thousands of comments each month. The ideological skew is what you would expect of a site that attracts hackers, tech industry employees and freelancers; strongly socially left and moderately economically left, but forming a normal distribution with representation from across the spectrum of reasonable opinion, just as you would expect in any large group of people,

The guidelines start with a directive to "be kind", and people who are unkind or who advocate unkindness get penalized and banned here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Leftism begins with anti-capitalism

Can we please not open a comment with a dogmatic claim about a nebulous ideological concept? After some of the most sophisticated thinkers in history have debated topics like this for centuries, we are not going to move the needle here, today.

If you want to engage in battle over ideology, please find one of the many places on the internet that are set up to host debates about ideology. You've been here long enough to know very well that comments like this are against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit:

Also, on this:

> "yeah but Jensen made so much money"

Please don't ever post false quotes here or mischaracterize the community like this. There's not a single instance of that text string in this thread or indeed in the entire two decades of HN, and it's not an accurate reflection of any significant strand of thought here.

People are debating whether the offence is severe enough to warrant dismissal from the company, given how successful and important the company is and given his role in building it, which is a perfectly valid question for thoughtful people to debate. Nobody is saying he should be excused of any/all wrongdoing simply because he “made so much money”. Please stop trashing this community with slurs like this.

Die-hard socialists often consider "liberals" to be soft-core right wingers. I'm not sure there's an objective center, it's all a matter of perspective.