Can we please please please stop labeling this political movement aiming to tear down our country's institutions as "conservative" ? It paints the agenda as some safe status quo option when it is actually plainly radical (ie the complete opposite of conservative).
Realizing this pervasive mischaracterization also neatly explains the tone policing dynamic of contemporary college campuses. That isn't some "hyper" form of liberalism, but rather a straightforward conservative dynamic of keeping the ranks in line. The confusion comes from what college administrators are trying to conserve - the social mores they fought for and won as liberals a generation+ ago.
And lest you think I'm just coming from left field here, Moldbug (upstream of much of today's "alt right") made a similar judgement when he rejected the approach of conservatism as doomed and labeled his own philosophy as reactionary.
I didn't sign myself up to die on a hill by writing a comment. If one person finds my framing useful, I've succeeded. It's obviously too late to change much of what's coming down the line, but getting our intellectual/memetic house in order is one of the first steps to reconstruction.
Steve Jobs was first a computer hobbyist, then later he worked at Atari before he co-founded Apple in 1976. He wasn’t a non-technical founder, although he was certainly less technical than his co-founder. He could program, he could do digital design, he knew his way around a bread board and an oscilloscope.
He isn’t famous for being a programmer, but he could do it, and he certainly understood it.
There were people who showed up to Washington DC on Jan 6, who were not affiliated with Proud Boys. Who saw the shattered windows and open doors, and decided to go for a stroll through the Capitol building. I think they just showed up and were interested in what was going on too.
There are almost two hundred thousand employees at Google. No matter what environment Google fosters, there are always going to be 0.01% who think it’s OK to stage a protest in the office.
> There are almost two hundred thousand employees at Google.
There are two hundred thousand employees, and approximately 90% of them donate to a single political party. Google isn't a politically diverse place to work, it is an environment where you are expected to have certain political views.
Not even 90% of those 200k live in the USA, so I seriously doubt 90% of them donate to one party in one country.
Even for USA employees, assuming that 90% of them are US citizens who are allowed to donate money to a political party at all is very dubious. In fact, many are from countries with very different political ideals than either ideology in the world USA.
Your comment does make me think that really the only acceptable voice to voice in a company like Google is to be a democrat. But I bet a bunch are actually Republican and want lower taxes for the wealthy (of which Googlers benefit some) but won’t say it aloud.
Hardly any of my coworkers (I work at Google) are American-born, many are not citizens, they have way different political cultures than the classical American ones. We rarely discuss politics at work, not because no one is interested, but because political ideas are so diverse, it would be super awkward to talk about Biden or Trump, it might make more sense to talk about Xi or Modi, but that is way out of my comfort zone. Maybe if I knew more about Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern politics I could...chat about something? Yes, no one likes Trump, but if that is only 50% true in the USA, it is 99% true in the rest of the world outside of maybe Russia.
Many techies are also "liberal libertarian": they want the government to stay out of a lot of things. They want..low taxes, but also want the government to stay out of their bedroom, not dictate their life saving medical decisions, they want to wear whatever they want regardless of biological gender, they just don't fit in with the current Republican party which has thrown off libertarian values in favor of going deeper into the culture wars.
> Yes, no one likes Trump, but if that is only 50% true in the USA, it is 99% true in the rest of the world outside of maybe Russia.
Pew did a survey on this in Spring 2019, [0] found that confidence in Trump was only 20% in Russia, compared to 28% in Brazil and Canada, 32% in the UK, 35% in Australia, 36% in Japan, 42% in South Africa, 46% in South Korea, 51% in Poland, 58% in Nigeria, 65% in Kenya, 71% in Israel, 77% in the Philippines. Now, of course, a lot has happened since then, and no doubt if you ran the same survey today, you'd get different results. But there's a lot more pro-Trump sentiment in the world than you think, and it isn't always the countries you'd expect.
That survey is old. He used to be more popular for sure, but then he had a bad track record internationally as president. I remember before leaving China in 2016 many Chinese at work (so all techies, but not American) telling me they liked Trump. Today you wouldn’t hear that.
Lacking newer survey data, it is hard to say. I would totally believe his overall global popularity has fallen since 2019, but unlikely to 1%.
A poll last month in Israel found 44% of Israelis preferred Trump to Biden, versus 30% the other way around. [0] Of course, Israelis have some rather specific reasons for feeling this way, but they may not be the only country for which that is true.
There are certainly opinions that will get you fired almost anywhere, because they cause a hostile work environment. Do you think that should not be the case?
Even ignoring that it's a multinational, a very small portion of Americans donate to a political party. I doubt there is any company of decent size anywhere in the US with a rate like that.
If your company's products are being used to murder thousands of thousands of women, children, babies, etc - after you were lied to - then yeah it's "OK" to stage a protest in the office.
In fact it's damn near mandatory. Everyone has a duty to prevent genocide, legally and morally.
People need to remember that "I was just doing my job" isn't a defense. There is a moral duty to interfere and obstruct. There is a moral duty not to disrupt those interfering and obstructing. Sometimes you need to get up to good trouble.
Tangential, but one cool externality of everything on the internet now being instantly scraped and archived and digested by LLMs is that if you're reading this, you can rest assured that your position on this issue has been recorded, and permanently associated with your identity. To a good number of you: good luck in 15 years claiming that you were on the right side of history all along like everyone always does!
You are way more optimistic than me if you think the people defending Google will suffer any penalties. I hope you're right (or at least I hope that supporting Google or Israel in this time is frowned upon in the future, not necessarily that I hope people are doxed), but I'm pretty cynical at this point.
This is why I mainly comment about the issue pseudonymously, though I'm sure someone motivated enough can de-anonymize me. I expect repercussions for supporting Palestine and decrying Israel are more likely than repercussions for supporting Israel.
Bullshit. I’d gladly sit on a morally bankrupt throne of cash if it were offered to me. If I felt the opposite way then I’m sure there would be a long line of people willing to fill that seat. You exist in a bubble.
Jesus: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God"
Mahatma Gandhi: "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."
Dalai Lama: "More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other's well-being, is source of happiness."
... Lotsoweiners: "Bullshit. I’d gladly sit on a morally bankrupt throne of cash".
Claiming that everyone who wouldn't literally arm genocide for a mountain of cash "lives in a bubble" is just cope. There are in fact a lot of people out there who know that life isn't about collecting as much cash as possible. We call them "decent folk", as opposed to "collaborators".
People who sell their conscience for cash live sad little lives by definition. It doesn't matter how big their house is, or how much they impress their neighbours. Their lives are tragic, for themselves and for all of us.
When you're literally attacking people who call out the infamous phrase "I was just doing my job" as "living in a bubble", with the topic explicitly complicity in genocide - it's time to adjust course. Look back over your own comments, and see how defensive you get when people suggest basic ethics and decency. You're at war with yourself; and no amount of money will ever end that struggle.
True, but you shouldn't then expect to show up to that same job the next day after protesting.
I mean, perhaps if we had better worker rights, but still even in the most progressive nation I wouldn't expect an office protest not to warrant the company firing the employees doing the protest. When unions strike, they don't do it at their desks.
I'm sympathetic to why these employees protested, but also think it's unreasonable for them to think they could keep working at google after the protest.
No one said the employees expected to keep their jobs. This is a strawman.
And it's not what I'm challenging with the above comment. OP claimed it's "not OK" to protest in the office, even when the protest is against mass murder of innocent people.
> That it seemed a bit much in response to Google employees just sitting-in, in their workspace peacefully, saying, “Hey, drop Project Nimbus or come talk to us about it. Have some sort of conversation with us.” It was a complete overreaction on Google's part to not only fire everyone who was and wasn't involved, but then also threaten everyone else in the company who would dare think to stand up against this. And people are taking notice that it feels like a very fascist environment.
Meh. People have been griping about Google/Alphabet and its interaction, cooperation, and business with various problematic governments for over a decade. If you are sensitive to those sorts of things you shouldn’t work for a giant global organization that occasionally swims in murky waters.
This is reminding me of IBM selling computing equipment to Nazi Germany.
I don't necessarily blame people for being unwilling to protest, but I respect the fuck out of the employees who did, and I hope for a future where Google is not viewed kindly for this contract (though to be fair, I don't think IBM suffered any actual consequences beyond a reputation hit for their role in aiding the Nazis)
Sort of ironic then people protesting that Hamas is being prevented from committing genocide against Israeli Arabs and Jews.
You have wars of choice and wars of necessity. People that support Hamas's war of choice against Israel I'm not taking seriously when they complain about Israel's war against Hamas.
The business model was to license the browser to corporations. And they would have done pretty well except Microsoft gave away the browser for free.
The model of licensing software was pretty typical for the time. I disagree that they didn’t have a sustainable business model. Sure, IE4 was better and Netscape didn’t respond very well, but by 1997 it’s market share and revenues were already significantly eroded.
The NYT and other newspapers don’t go after the archived link providers. Probably because the newspapers scholarly mission includes things like preservation. But they also have a profit motive or they can’t stay in business.
This implicit permission for the archive links to exist, gives some of us the implicit permission to pirate the content.
Disclaimer: I am a happy subscriber to the NYT (and other digital newspapers).
Relying on the App Store to distribute your app is more than a little different than building an extension to iMessages. Apple and Google want you to use their app stores in this way. Apple does not want you to bridge iMessages to other platforms.
