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> Would he have lost them money? Yes, definitely, without question.

So would it be right to fire Kaepernick at the first hint of controversy, since it would be reasonable to predict that would cause at least some loss of revenue?

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I don't think the role of quarterback on a football team is comparable to the role of CEO of a tech company.

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> I don't think the role of quarterback on a football team is comparable to the role of CEO of a tech company.

Yeah, an NFL quarterback has much higher profile. Given how well known quarterbacks are to the public, statements they make (especially on TV during games) have much higher impact than a tweet from some no-name CEO.

I think the focus on revenue, etc. have an element of bad faith to them. The real metric seems to be you agree with A and disagree with B, so it's wrong to punish A and fine to punish B. What to choose as a publicly offered "critical metric" can usually be gerrymandered to get whatever result one desires.

Personally, I don't think anyone should be fired for expressing an opinion, especially not one that's well within the Overton Window of the country as a whole. To do otherwise invites polarization and extremism.

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> Yeah, an NFL quarterback has much higher profile.

Hilarious. I'll stop communicating as it's clear you're only communicating in bad faith.

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>> Yeah, an NFL quarterback has much higher profile.

> Hilarious. I'll stop communicating as it's clear you're only communicating in bad faith.

My statement is objectively true. Grab someone on the street, and ask them which of these names they recognize: Colin Kaepernick (QB) or Jed York (CEO)? They're going to recognize the guy they actually watch on TV.

We can even get pseudo-quantitative with this:

https://twitter.com/jimmyg_10 (one of three current starting quarterbacks for the 49ers, apparently got the job last season): 234.1K Followers

https://twitter.com/jedyork (apparently CEO of the 49ers since 2008): 128.6K Followers

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> My statement is objectively true.

Sure. It's also not relevant. You asked a question that made no sense. The appropriate question would've been "Who has more impact on company earnings, a quarterback or a CEO", in that we're discussing one's ability to impact revenue for a business. It has nothing to do with celebrity.

You're welcome to quantify whatever you like. How blue is sky blue? Ultimately it doesn't matter. A CEO has far more ability to damage the company they work than a quarterback. This is why your behavior is in bad faith. You're arguing points nobody made/don't change the outcome of what we're discussing.

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> Sure. It's also not relevant.

Except that it is.

> You asked a question that made no sense. The appropriate question would've been "Who has more impact on company earnings, a quarterback or a CEO", in that we're discussing one's ability to drive revenue for a business. It has nothing to do with celebrity.

No. For one, you're wondering off into the weeds. We've gotten sidetracked discussing the effects of a particular type of action (stating a personal opinion publicly) on revenue, not the effects of all actions theoretically available to the role. The CEO can certainly have "more impact on company earnings," but that's because they could do things like badly misallocate investment, which are not relevant to a discussion about personal political statements.

The amount of "celebrity" someone has directly effects how much attention their statements will get, and thus the impact of those statements.

> A CEO has far more ability to damage the company they work than a quarterback. This is why your behavior is in bad faith. You're arguing points nobody made/don't change the outcome of what we're discussing.

Eh, no. Way up here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440465), someone drew an equivalence between Colin Kaepernick and this CEO, which sets up an uncomfortable dilemma for certain common clusters of political tendencies (i.e. it was right to fire Kaepernick). That dilemma was "solved" by gerrymandering criteria to differentiate their positions in a way that doesn't actually make much sense (e.g. somehow this CEO's controversial opinions can be predicted to negatively affect revenue, while Kaepernick's much higher profile statements could not have). Showing that "solution" doesn't make sense because it doesn't match the facts restores the dilemma.

My ultimate position is that both this CEO and Kaepernick should have both kept their jobs, in spite of the political opinions they expressed. I suspect that any set of seemingly politically neutral criteria that justifies the CEO being fired but not Kaepernick likely was engineered to justify a result that was really determined by underlying political biases (e.g. applying a factional Overton window to the broader population).