Moral of the story - if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder and even increase market even with the most botched marketing campaign selling sugar water
> if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder
Pepsi's cockups are no doubt the catalyst of the events that unfolded but can you say that they are responsible for someone murdering someone else during what happened? are any actions the protestors undertake in anger the responsibility of Pepsi?
Pepsi made a mistake that disappointed some folks, nobody lost anything because of what Pepsi did directly, Pepsi wasn't assisting anyone in committing a crime, they weren't out to commit a crime / help anyone commit crime like you describe.
not the same as a get away driver is still part of the organised action.
I would say a better, or atleast much more controversial example is this - you cannot hold BLM movement responsible for the people that loot and burn, for exactly the same reason pepsi isn't accountable - because these actions (promises made -> not delivered -> riot started) are causated, but they are not correlated.
On the other hand - imagine you are a director at Pepsi managing this promotion. Imagine you personally sit down and send an email(or a courier-delivered letter I suppose) to the head of whatever factory is bottling your product, saying "under no circumstances print the number X on the bottle caps". Then the factory prints number X on 800k bottles.
Why is or should Pepsi be responsible for this? If I send an email to someone explicitly telling them not to do something, and they do it anyway - why should I be responsible for it? Unless the bottling factory is their own, but the article doesn't specify.
That's why executives of big cos get paid big money. They are held accountable (or should be anyway) for the actions of their company. The buck stops with them so to speak.
If the thing is really a big deal, as in this case, maybe the exec should do more than just "send an email" and assume everything is fine.
A trailing period in URLs in written prose is always ambiguous. Is it the end of the sentence, or part of the URL? If a trailing period is legal, what do you do if a URL is at the end of the sentence? Leave a space between them? It's fine for HTML because you control where the a tag goes, but auto-linking like HN does can't distinguish between the two cases.
HTTP and e.g. markdown has solved this with angle brackets. I tried that (didn't work), and putting a question mark at the end (also didn't work).
What did work was putting two full-stops, but that was so ambiguous that I left it as-was. Wikipedia has a redirect in place so obviously HN isn't the only one with problems.
