The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can't withdraw the money directly, so they have to spend the organization's capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else at a really, really bad exchange rate. It really is embezzling without the charm of efficiency. We'd be better off letting them withdraw $1M instead of forcing them to spend $30M so that your competitor offers them a $1M raise.
Activity tagged "tech industry"
Mozilla Corp. has agreed to settle allegations it refused to hire a former Apple Inc. software engineer because of her prior labor activism.
nothing is certain except death, taxes, and tech bros trying to reinvent something they spent 10 minutes learning about
"The Invisible War" (Podcast).
In this year's two-part finale, Ed Zitron enumerates the damage being done to billions of people by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy - and why you need to have solidarity with your fellow user.
Why wouldn't people crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world can be absolutely fucking miserable, bereft of industry and filthy with manipulation, an undignified existence, a disrespectful existence that must be crushed if we want to escape the depressing world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without fearing accusations of bias that will happen either way. The truth is that the media is more afraid of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer’s voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, and no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they accumulate more power.
Marc Andreessen has donated another $2 million to Donald Trump. He's contributed $5.35 million this year (across several committees).
This was one of the best podcast episodes I’ve listened to in a long time. Put it on if you’re feeling despair about the state of the internet and tech industry.
And I think that’s why talk of AI bums me out. AI isn’t a solution looking for a problem—it’s a market strategy made by people who aren’t even thinking about problems. Tech companies want to make sure they own the future, even when they’re not sure what the future is going to be. It’s so, so boring, and it’s making me very sleepy.
So what gives? Why the hell would the famously liberal denizens of Silicon Valley and the idealistic dreamers behind Bitcoin and AI possibly be in the tank for such a nakedly fascistic candidate? … is a question you would only ask if you’ve been asleep for the past 15 years.
There’s people who are really angry about a lot of tech stuff who disagree with each other about everything, including whether or not they really even have a problem. But all of their problems start with the fact that there’s a lot of commercial surveillance. So these people might disagree about everything else, but they will agree that their problem could be solved if we could do something about commercial surveillance.
So if you think Mark Zuckerberg made grampy into a QAnon, or if you think Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that TikTok is convincing millennials to quote Osama bin Laden, right? Or if you think that it’s ugly that red state attorneys general are following teenagers into out-of-state abortion clinics, or that Google reverse warrants reveal the identity of everyone in a black lives matter demonstration or for that matter, the January 6th riots, or if you are worried about deep fake porn, or if you’re worried that people of color are having the surveillance data captured about them mobilized to discriminate against them in employment and financial products, right? All of these different things all start with cutting off the supply of surveillance data.– Cory Doctorow