not negotiating financial details with your employees, covering your employees’ rent and groceries
My impression is that it’s very normal for employees to expense food and living costs during business travel without any negotiation, and that there exist common jobs where free room and board are a part of the compensation (e.g. working at a resort or on an oil rig).
being in any way involved in your employees breaking the law
I think it’s fairly common for companies to ask their employees to break the law. (Often a bad thing, from society’s perspective. But common.) I was asked to do it multiple times a day at a previous job. (A good job, at a well-regarded company. I’m not sure they even knew they were breaking the law until I pointed it out. Eventually they changed their practices—possibly because it made very little difference to the bottom line.)
With regard to weirdness in general: The biggest mistakes I see the EA movement making—with harms I estimate as far larger than harms in the OP—are a result of insufficient weirdness, not excess weirdness. So I don’t like to discourage weirdness in a blanket sort of way.
It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to point out a bunch of things which might have created a bad situation. What we really need is the ability to forecast the effects of individual norms in advance.
My impression is that it’s very normal for employees to expense food and living costs during business travel without any negotiation, and that there exist common jobs where free room and board are a part of the compensation (e.g. working at a resort or on an oil rig).
I think it’s fairly common for companies to ask their employees to break the law. (Often a bad thing, from society’s perspective. But common.) I was asked to do it multiple times a day at a previous job. (A good job, at a well-regarded company. I’m not sure they even knew they were breaking the law until I pointed it out. Eventually they changed their practices—possibly because it made very little difference to the bottom line.)
With regard to weirdness in general: The biggest mistakes I see the EA movement making—with harms I estimate as far larger than harms in the OP—are a result of insufficient weirdness, not excess weirdness. So I don’t like to discourage weirdness in a blanket sort of way.
It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to point out a bunch of things which might have created a bad situation. What we really need is the ability to forecast the effects of individual norms in advance.