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'Jeff Bezos is Wrong, Tech Workers Are Not Bullies' (ft.com)
Silicon Valley employees have a right and duty to protest when we think projects are unethical, writes Laura Nolan, who recently left Google. From her opinion piece for Financial Times: Messrs Bezos and Bloomberg paint Amazon and Google as victims, pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism. This is absurd. Google and Amazon, and the DoD for that matter, are some of the most dominant institutions the world has known. Mr Bezos recently became the richest man in modern history. Mr Bloomberg is not far behind on the list of the world's wealthiest. Demanding that such power be held to account is common sense.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees -- the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds -- have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union. I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we've seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and personnel decisions they consider unethical. I am part of this growing tech workers' movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees -- the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds -- have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union. I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we've seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and personnel decisions they consider unethical. I am part of this growing tech workers' movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
>> We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
As long as I have the right to hire people who don't care about how what I just paid you to build is used instead of you, we have a deal.
(Rent-a-coder, FTW.)
It isn't bullying, but acting victimized has become the go to tactic of the day to gain attention or sympathy, so it's hardly surprising to see corporations utilizing this tactic. Once you've established that you're the victim in the scenario, it apparently grants carte blanche to be as much of a dick yourself as you care to be. Anyone who disagrees can be accused of victim blaming, being on the side of the bullies, or whatever other nonsense someone wants to spew.
The behavior is hardly new, but I think Twitter and other social media platforms handed it such a megaphone that no one is quite sure how to react.
Humans trying to make a profit out of the exploitation of other humans. Other humans say it's unfair and oppose resistance. News at 11.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
The first problem is: who gets to decide what's unethical?
a "Site Reliability Engineer" which, according to Google is an engineer that operates the mundane day to day operations tasks via automation and who show aptitudes in both programming and sysadmin
That would be "scripting"
That would be "script kiddie"
https://srecon16europe.sched.c...
the workplace is an bully & workers have no union to fight back ageist the 80 hour weeks.
So you agree with anyone who isn't a moron ... That Bezos is playing the victim?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
No, I don't think bickering would be a good idea.
Apparently not since these same pampered tech workers with high salaries can leave anytime they want and they do.
The real reason they want a union is to keep salaries high (no competition from foreign workers) and also to exclude others entering the workforce.
They do not want competition. They do not want capitalism. They want a pampered and feted lifestyle without worry.
The DoD work is a ruse to allow them to unionize. It will fail, but it is how they want to get it done.
Bezos is upset because the serfs are revolting, and not doing what the land owners want. How dare they!
Bezos has a right to disagree with the tech workers, the tech workers have a right to not want to be involved in making war. But Bezos complaining about what his own employees are saying about what they do and don't want to do is absurd.
this is the same line of thinking that has working class people railing against "elites" at their local University in the form of doctors, scientists, economist and sociologists but then somehow convinced that the likes of the Koch brothers and Donald Trump are regular Joes like them.
:), they own multiple studios ). And don't get me started on Sinclair media, we'll be here listening to me rant all day.
It's a narrative used to manipulate the working class into accepting less pay and fewer benefits. It's easy to push that narrative because the actual elites, the billionaires who run things, also own all the media. Bezos for example owns the Washington Post. Koch media is huge (heck, if you play videogames odds are you're playing with your Koch
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Better yet, DON'T resign, unionize and make sure the company gets nothing done if they're doing something unethical. Active obstruction is better than passive non-association.
Nah ... Since you are anti-freedom, we would prefer to give you a taste of your own medicine. You seem to have mistook the definition of capatilism as "I am free to do whatever I want as long as I can find people desperate enough to do it for the pittance I am offering." The hilarious thing is you are (no doubt) the same idiot crying that there is no wall in place to keep out these people you are desperate to exploit.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"Bullying" isn't "refusing to follow unethical orders blindly" or "asking for reasonable pay." The first is a human duty, the second is a human need,
I'm sorry to be the one to burst your bubbles and safe spaces. Here are a few facts for young workers recently graduated from college:
1) Every single company wants a piece of the lucrative DoD pie. The money is simply too big to pass up. This includes FAANG and all the other tech companies.
2) Companies are not moral beings. The sole purpose of companies is to make a return on shareholder equity. Period.
3) The apparent liberal bias of Google and Facebook et al is only so much posturing to retain employees and fit in with the prevailing west coast US culture. They are simply amoral and apolitical money makers.
You also have the right to get another job.
Badmouthing your employers is an excellent way to remain unemployed.
... be it mechanical engineering or quantum programming, as tech has always been, at the end of the day, and out of necessity, a meritocracy.
I'm told this is changing.
I've still got a few good years in me, and I love to mentor and teach the younger folks even more than I love to code these days. But when building things becomes more about "the feels" than actually building things, then the things that are supposed to be built, in short, won't be. Or at least, they won't be built anything as they should be.
I guess that I'm glad that I'll be done before things to through what I see an inevitable cycle through complete collapse to remind us that yes, merit matters, and getting the job done and well is, at the end of the day, the primary goal of being an engineer, or any sort of builder or creative in general.
Check your premises.
Groups of employees trying to defend rights it is a necessary part of society. Many times, company owners try to define things as if people working with there were not humans and this must be discouraged.
However.
Check what have been happening in Costa Rica these last months. We are in the middle of one of longest strikes in our recent history. Basically, current scholar year have been finished months before, because unionized workers are against several government tax definitions. And they are waiting for the judicial system to define if their strike it is or not a legal one (Costa Rica has a lot of worker protection laws).
The problem is that, in the middle, thousands of children, their families are suffering, and hundreds and hundreds of derived jobs are in peril.
Sometimes the unions pretend just to show that they are strong and they don't like to negotiate but to impose their way of thinking. This makes many employers to think if they must hire more people as permanent workers, as they know they could be growing a future "enemy" inside their company. Sometimes it is better to be small, or to hire by service and have no more legal links with people.
Unions are needed, but they must have very clear and have well specified goals and action paths. They must help workers (the ones like to receive their help, not by imposition), but they can't define what the company goals are because they are not the company owners. This is like many things in life ... if I have a job, one where my dignity it is preserved, but I don't like what my employer do, then I must find a different job. And, sometimes, some "clever" individuals with particular goals in mind (not the ones for the unionized people but their personal agenda), take the union control and they really become a danger for the companies. That is what owners are afraid of.
You advocate doing this according to something an employee deems is unethical? Google employees get to decide if Google will work with the DoD? They run the business now?
Suppose the employer is going to do this thing you don't like anyway. Don't you expect they would just do it under a different name and let you all go? Or would you have them forced to keep running a business they clearly disagree with to keep you in a paycheck?
I love watching these liberal CEO and coorps get targeted for stuff like this.
Google and Amazon are great at advocating for employee rights for companies that are not theirs and do not affect their profits.
I hope these techies home towns are host to the first dirty bomb in the United States that could have been stopped if they would have continued working on Facial recognition. I hope they die a slow and painful cancerous death because of their ethical values. Fuck em
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
I love seeing all companies that increase surveillance and damage privacy, whether "liberal" or "conservative" be thus targeted. It's great that Americans are finally seeing through the BS of the military and prison-industrial complexes.
Society defines what is ethical and what is not.
And being ruled by plutocrats pretty much like they are kings, while not being allowed to organize yourselves in groups that are powerful enough to stand up to those kings, is unethical in our current Western society.
Of course worker unions themselves can become corrupt and turn into similarly unethical behemoths.
However that does not mean that we'd be better off without any unions. It means that everyone has to be vigilant, look for and expose corruption.
Unfortunately most people are too lazy to keep this up and there's plenty of people who see this as an opportunity for exploitation.
That's the first problem - laziness and irresponsibility.
Except you're wrong. Laws are not necessarily ethical or moral. Permissible by law doesn't mean it's "the right thing to do" at all.
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Sadly, many of them are such naïve progressives that they truly believe that stopping the DoD is a good thing. The fucking idiots don't realize that the alternative is to extend the Chinese government's advantage. Yes, their religious-political beliefs are safe inside their 1% bubble.
Yes, many silicon valley tech workers are 1%, naïve idiots.
Very nicely put.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
If you think that facial recognition is to prevent terrorism, I feel sorry for you. More like "arrest people with an unpaid traffic ticket from 1995." Don't underestimate the greed of governments.
Every individual. It's not some legal definition that needs to be universally agreed on or dictated from up on high.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Does anyone really believe that someone like Bezos could possibly be the victim in such a scenario? What people are really that dumb?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This isn't outsourcing, workers are organizing by themselves.
The laws? Of all the things, the laws? Please. Nice try to divert from the real issue, I grant you that, but at least field something other than legal when you want to talk about morality or what's good and evil.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sometimes, resistance and disobedience are needed to correct a moral wrong. Good on the workers for doing what they can. I don't really empathize with billionaire CEOs -- worst case, they have have a few million less: they'll survive.
Heavens help us, if we actually were to try to represent all our legitimately held moral beliefs through the power of law.
Heavens help us, if we actually were to believe we achieved that status.
IMNSHO yours is the perfect non-argument, because if we were to take it seriously, the answer is to change the laws to compel Amazon to behave exactly the way we want, because might is right. That is probably not what you mean.
If we include in that, "trying to sell someone something they don't need at a price they can't afford", then probably a large number of businesses would shut down.
Playing the victim does indeed work for the common bully - but for a corporation? Corporations are strong, they have teams of lawyers for counterattacking anyone attacking them. Someone with power to retaliate properly does not need my sympathy as 'victims'.
Now, show me a corporation killed by renegade workers - then we may have a 'victim'. But then again - only a corporation, not a living person . . .
Nuclear weapons and bioweapons don't care either. Doesn't mean that moral people should be working in improving either. If everyone uses the argument is "someone else will do it, so I may as well," then those things will get developed more rapidly and by brighter minds.
Look at what the US military and CIA did in Latin America in the 60s through 80s. Operation Condor. The US may be (relatively) free internally but it exports authoritarianism, then whines when it comes back and slaps them in the nose.
It's like the difference between a window and a mirror. Through a window you can see the whole world. Add only a thin film of silver and you only see yourself anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wonder if aasimovâ(TM)s three laws of robotics would be a reasonable guide to morality...
Or would you think the standard too high?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
âoeWhen you are privileged. Equality feels like oppression.â
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism.
So, since when is Silicon Valley patriotic? As in, they care about America and their fellow Americans? Huh? Silicon Valleyites are "citizens of the world". They care far more about distant peoples from backwards cultures than their own neighbors in places like Texas, Idaho, and West Virginia. They regard us with mingled scorn and apprehension. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk. Here is a great essay I have bookmarked that discusses the issue very eloquently and precisely.
Here's another great essay, "Revolt of the Elites" that also addresses this issue.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yes, you. Box. Your stuff. Out the front door. Parking lot. Car. Goodbye. - Cave Johnson
#DeleteFacebook
Even well done laws set an outer bounds on behavior. That is, they set a bright line in the middle of a wide grey line. They represent the line beyond which the behavior is unquestionably unethical or immoral. They leave plenty of things inside the line that are still unethical most of the time.
Of course, there are also the bought and paid for laws that do no such thing and simply represent something a wealthy person or group doesn't want people to do (for example, compete with them or be able to live without them).
The first problem is: who gets to decide what's unethical?
That one is easy. The answer is always: I do.
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
Amazon recently decided to pay all its US warehouse workers a minimum of $15/hour. Senior developers at Amazon make more that JeffB does (all his money is from founder's stock, he declined any additional stock-based compensation last year, and his salary was $176k).
Amazon is not a pleasant place to work, and has lots of problems, but they pay well enough.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You better take care of that yeast infection pussy.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
They're all playing victims. From Jeff Bezos, arguably the Rhodes-like colossus of 21st century America at the top down to Mx. I-am-an-ornate-office-building over at Google, to Candace Owens and Donald Trump and Spartacus and Fauxcahontas and Kamala Harris.
It's a cultural sickness and it's wide-spread. We have to think less in terms of victimization and more in terms of positive accomplishment. I've been fucked over lots of times when I was in school, on the job, whatever. Sometimes I fucked myself over with a combination of bad luck and suboptimal decisionmaking. If I dwelt on it, it'd be a death sentence. Don't dwell on the negative. Don't amplify the negative.
How the fuck am I supposed to know what someone needs or can afford?
Not my role.
It remains an immoral and unethical act to let a sucker keep his money.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've had the displeasure of working in IT under a union (Public Sector) as well as without with a couple Fortune 50 companies.
Both suck, but in different ways.
1) Unionized employment under government is an exercise in mediocrity. Productivity and morale is low. Nobody gets fired. Nothing gets done. Nobody is accountable... and to top it off, you are underpaid. If you do work really hard and try to innovate, you get resistance (even sabotage) from your peers and management. Nobody gets fired so folks that wouldn't make it in the real world grow deep roots at the public teet.
2) Non-Union big tech (rhymes with Hicrosoft). Performance and innovation is encouraged. Pay is a lot better. At least with one, when you reach a certain level (say Architect) you start meeting resistance from other teams/peers who are known as "retired in place" (having the ear and trust of management, but otherwise not really accomplishing anything day to day). They actually start working against you in an effort to look relevant. Bonuses are tied to budget and you quickly discover that they don't align with your actual efforts or achievements in the year. You then bump up against a "pay ceiling" that's comfortable (mid 100s) but doesn't show long term promise (despite the company line) unless you move over to mgmt and start playing office politics.
I think IT folks need to realize they are individuals, and don't control the company. Hell, even the CEO answers to the board and shareholders. If you don't own 50.1% of the company stock, you do as instructed-- or you find another job. NOBODY is that important to a company of size that their absence means anything. Now-- if the mood is right and enough people leave, the company might get the message (or might just pay folks more to compensate). That's economic reality. Your "resistance" and self importance are fantasies that will never be realized an simply create unhealthy attitudes, bad will, and ultimate failure on your part (and then your ego will promptly blame someone else).
That doesn't quite work out. Each person having their morality can nearly be made into a logically consistent system, but not quite. Some people are griefers, to use the gaming term, and delight in hurting others or taking away their rights, and that's their morality. Corporate management seems to collect such people, so it's very relevant here.
So, each person deciding on their own does require one important ethical principle dictated to all: moral systems that hold as a good causing harm to others are invalid. And that's a non-trivial constraint; heck, it's an elaborate ethical code in itself once you look at all the corner cases.
So if every manager decides that bullying from their position of power is fine and ethical, and you say "everyone gets to decide", then they're doing nothing wrong. You're left with nothing more than "but I don't like it", which isn't ethics any more, just subjective taste.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Indeed - and I would say the nigh-eternal prevalence of the latter groups of laws, make any attempt to use laws as a moral guideline deeply misguided. Laws can, and sometimes do, follow morality, but they do not define it.
Especially since it gets even worse than simple "bought and paid for" laws outlawing behaviors that are inconvenient for some people. There's also the laws that are created to outlaw behavior common among groups that you specifically want to target, for the express purpose of being able to target them with the full power of the legal system. The banning of cannabis was a good example of the combination of both - the lumber and pharmaceutical industries wanted it banned as a competitor, and the politicians in power at the time wanted it banned as a way to persecute hippies and minorities, who were active political opponents.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sure, if they ever fix the false positive problem with facial recognition it will be useful.
Today it isn't, facial recognition outside the lab is a waste of resources.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They run the business now?
Ideally, yes.
Kinda like democracy is the radical idea that the citizens run the country, not some guy that had a watery tart throw a sword at him.
Did you fail History class when Prohibition was discussed???
Legality != Morality.
* Some things are legal that are moral
* Some things are legal that are immoral
* Some things are illegal that are moral
* Some things are illegal that are immoral
If you're not willing to bleed for an ideal, it can't actually be very important to you, can it?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Waste of time, but the false positives give "probable cause" for further harassment...
I agree that wasting cop's time is a good thing. But from the cops POV, it isn't.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If I hire you, and you end up having ethical issues with the work I'm asking you to do, please feel free to find the door, and not come back. Also, do you really think a union is going to help your cause? Good luck with that.
of course a union would help. The fact that you won't allow the union is kinda proof of that.
Just another second banana
and every right wing think tank. About the only folks who opposed it were the far left, what today we call the "Berniecrats". Same deal for the Iraq war.
Right wing think tanks are a front for the billionaires. They realized in the 70s they needed to legitimize themselves so they hired folks like Bill Buckely to do just that. It gave them a veneer of respectability. It's the same reason they lean on Ayn Rand even though she hated them all with a passion.
And yes, the Democrats have right wingers who use social issues to distract from economic ones. Folks like Pelosi & Schumer. That said, those social issues aren't completely without merit. Let's remember that a significant portion of Evangelicals who take their Bible literally (selectively) would stone LGBTQs or (if they're being charitable) lobotomize them (which we used to do as far back as the ancient 1950s). Anyone remember Alan Turing? Anyone?
But let's not let the Clinton Democrats off the hook. Register to vote Independent or Democrat, Show up to your Primary and vote the Clintonites out and the Berniecrats in. Problem solved.
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The left is taking pains to force others to be what they consider decent human beings. I don't agree with James Damore's rant, but getting someone fired for having a different point of view and making a reasoned argument in an appropriate forum is reprehensible. We don't know what Andy Rubin actually did (outside the office, in his own time, with someone who wasn't working for him, in a consensual relationship), but the left exploded when the NYT told them to. I believe in being a decent human being, which to me includes not proscribing the actions of others (unless they cause real and immediate harm).
I don't want the left's nanny state. I want to live and work with freedom of thought, expression, and action.
but we've got an extensive network of people fighting our nut jobs. Go watch "Genetic Skeptic" or Aronra on Youtube.
Meanwhile the Right wing elected a Dominionist to the office of Vice President. If you don't know, a Dominionist is someone who wants to spread their brand of Christianity across the world, by force if needed. They're the Christian equivalent to Sharia law.
What I'm saying is the left's nut jobs are not even remotely comparable to the right's nut jobs. We actively fight to convert our nut jobs to science. The Right encourage them so long as they keep voting for tax cuts and gutting workers rights.
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Ok, then who decides what is morally wrong and evil? Come on, it's unethical to post without at least a little thought first. ;-)
Exactly that. I mean, you are showing the perfect example of someone who is playing the legal, not moral game.
Sucking money out of "suckers" is legal. Not moral -- you're making these people's life worse.
Usual arguments to make you feel like you're not an a**hole include : "if it's not me it will be someone else", "they deserve it because they're dumb" (everyone is dumb when it comes to some field), "not my role", ...
I'm selling something.
It's not my job to know if someone thinking of buying it can afford it. Their job, my job is getting paid for it.
Treating people like adults is not being an asshole, rather the opposite. If someone wants to interrogate me like when I was a middle schooler (looking for glycerin, fuming nitric acid and high molar sulphuric) they can fuck right off.
It is _immoral_ and _unethical_ to let a sucker keep his money (legalities be damned). The highest utility for the money (by definition) is for me to get it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I guess ðY¦' has to live with his choices. Like choosing a non Midwestern city to do business in, for painfully obvious reasons
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
Is it my ex?
Cops are going to cop. If they weren't using broken facial recognition, they'd be using their broken 'gut feel'.
Self correcting problem, wasting their time on random innocent people will keep them from looking at what I'm up to.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Did you fail History class when Prohibition was discussed???
I don't know, I was at the tavern.
If the company feels that someone is being unreasonable they can sanction or fire them for it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...received. for certainly the tech industry has no problem violating ethics when it comes to entrapping the end users. Re: http://3seas.org/EAD-RFI-respo...
Hmm, I assumed you would see the bullying by management as a problem. My mistake.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
WTF?
No, slumlords care if their tenants can pay on an ongoing basis. Evictions are fucking expensive and time consuming. Deadbeats suck.
If I'm selling something for 'cash', I just treat customers as adults who know their own finances.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I know that we have previously established that you are basically retarded .... yet I'm still at a loss to explain how even someone of your limited intelligence could conclude that firing people who refuse to work is "anti-freedom". It takes some next-level mental gymnastics to come up with that shit.
I mean, it's tech right? And how about our Cell network? Or our reliance on oil driven cars as the primary form of transportation? Or how about women and education? What do you suppose it was like for a scientifically minded women in the 1800s? How about the 1900s? How about today in Saudi Arabia?
Tech is not nor has it ever been completely divorced from the social and political environment it exists in. Nothing has changed.
To be blunt, this is an anti-SJW narrative being pushed by the right wing to distract from economic issues. A small number of bad actors on the left are being given a disproportionate amount of voice to rile folks up since polls show 80% of people hate political correctness. Those same polls show 82% dislike Hate Speech. The far right is exploiting this cognitive disconnect for their own profit.
The sooner we all get wise to this b.s. the sooner we all win. We can marginalize & ignore the nut job SJWs while pushing economic policies that benefit us all. It's a win-win for everyone except the far right and their billionaire masters.
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Morals are defined by a culture though some norms appear to emerge *nearly* universally: incest = bad, cannibalism = bad, rampant murder = bad, etc. Some of these are necessary to keep a stable society that can grow where people can interact etc.
In the past, in certain tribes, incest was only considered bad because it lead to certain conflicts based on tribe structure. In some societal structures, incest was a good thing to keep control/power. Today, most the world understands there's evolutionary problems with incest that leads to amplifying genetic disorders (which is bad for people and its society).
Most everything is relative. You probably think eating a cat/dog is terrible, many think you eating beef is terrible, some cultures are fine with eating certain insects. Scientifically speaking, none is all that bad in the right quantity if properly cooked, but it's pretty deeply embedded in our cultures and as a result, our psyches. These are not necessary for a culture but may be necessary in our own culture (cats are pets, they've been domesticated, and therefore we shouldn't eat them although we could).
*Ethical* issues, numbfuck. You are not free to require your employees to be *unethical*. It's funny, because I saw c6gunner, and right away I knew I was going to see a phenomenally stupid post. As usual, you didn't disappoint.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Think wider. All a monarchy is is a company that got big enough to squash all the competition, including the previous government.
It's interesting that you put a lot of weight on the skill to start a company but none on the skill to actually produce anything. A company whose only skill is being a company is not going to last very long and is economically a deadweight we're better off without.
You also put a lot of weight on investors and the risk to their money and none on creators and the risk to their creative efforts and careers. How do you think an engineer feels when years of effort and occasional creative genius sink into the pit because the business people just couldn't get it together?
It makes sense that a business person would handle the purely business matters and that engineers would handle the purely engineering decisions. But everyone has a stake in morals and ethics.
Meh, once you have enough stock with long term gains, the salary is basically noise. Who cares about a few million taxed as income when you have hundreds of millions or even billions in stock with gains taxed at 20% (or even 15% if you are selling slowly).
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is the richest man in the world. But that's not because he is paid outrageously, indeed, for a man running a $1T+ company, his compensation is relatively minuscule.
From Salary.com
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Executive Compensation
As Chief Executive Officer, Director at AMAZON COM INC, Jeffrey P. Bezos made $1,681,840 in total compensation. Of this total $81,840 was received as a salary, $0 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $0 was awarded as stock and $1,600,000 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2017 fiscal year.
Bloomberg:
Amazon.com Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos received $1.68 million in total pay last year, unchanged from 2012, including $81,840 in salary and $1.6 million to cover security arrangements.
Of course, he is fabulously wealthy due to his ownership share of a trillion-dollar company: Bezos currently holds 78,893,033 shares or 16.3% of the shares outstanding. His wealth can fluctuate wildly as the share prices change--in either direction. In fact, at this point today, the price is down $21.95 per share, so just today Bezos has lost $1.731B, so far. On a good day he may come up positive to the same tune.
Based on salary and other compensation, Bezos earns about 5 cents per second, so the "10 seconds" notion is just plain wrong. His on-paper wealth may indeed rise and fall rapidly, Bernie Sanders Sanders' claim that Bezos' wealth increases by $275 million every day may be true for certain days. But he can lose $275 million per day on bad days, too.
P.S. His salary (not counting security costs for which he is reimbursed) is way less than what his long-time critic Sen. Bernie Sanders makes in his job as a US Senator, and Sanders doesn't ever see the bill for his security costs.
They do not want competition. They do not want capitalism. They want a pampered and feted lifestyle without worry.
And nobody should have that except the 0.1% ownership class?
If you look at history, unionization is basically the core engine of human progress. It's the only way that improved pay and reduced working hours have ever been gained, and that's the stuff that actually improves the economy, by putting money into the hands of people who will spend it soon, and giving them the time to spend on new and less essential things produced by technological advancement.
Without it, money concentrates in the hands of the ownership class, who seek to maximize inequality since it will make them feel more aristocratic. They're as least as happy to do that by impoverishing the masses as by enriching themselves, both of which are bad for the economy and humanity in general. People have less free time which decreases the number of non-essential services they can consume. All to feed the egos of a selfish few.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In Europe the company would have to justify their decision, either to a tribunal or in court. It would have to be pretty serious.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The sad thing is that when you're retarded, you clearly have no clue that you're retarded. An intelligent person would realise that opinions on ethics differ from person to person, and that employers have no responsibility to accommodate them. An intelligent person would never have suggested that it is "anti-freedom" to fire an employee who thinks it's unethical to do his job. Clearly you're not burdened with such a problem; like every other idiot you feel completely free to just string together words in whatever way makes you feel good.
You are so dogshit stupid it isn't worth anyone's time to even try to explain to you why you can't require employees to be unethical as a condition of employment.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Sure, but Amazon is not paying JeffB particularly much, is the point. His total comp isn't an example of a CEO being paid many times what the average worker makes, as falsely implied by TFA.
A bit OT, but the reason long-term capital gains need to be taxed at a lower rate is that we don't index them for inflation. I'm a huge fan of a true flat tax, taxing all earning the same, but that would include indexing capital gains. It will never happen, sadly, but it would be nice.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hah! Good one!
"I think it's unethical to make pesticides, and refuse to do any pesticide related work!"
"We are a pesticide company."
"Well you have to hire me! Zero_Fucktard on the intertubes said so!"
Best of luck with your "career" boy.
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
In Vermont, it's illegal to leave them there. They have the only compulsory Good Samaritan law. (Which is then no longer a Good Samaritan, but who cares about words...). In 15 states, you should reach over them for your box of cereal and not touch them if you're not a licensed medical professional. Those 15 states have no Good Samaritan law for unlicensed bystanders. If you try to render aid and make any mistake, you would be liable and could be sued. The rest of the states, you can try to help without fear of being sued. They could sue, but you would win easily and cheaply.
You really are dogshit stupid.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Thanks bro. Now can I have my shake and fries, please? No, I don't care that you think dairy is unethical; as long as you're wearing that hat I expect you to bring me my food.
When my new CEO stood up on stage and announced "our company is going to have record profits because it is aligned with the New World Order" I left the following Friday.
Go well
They may be Anti-Union but not necessarily aggressively anti-union.
If a tech worker wants to be part of the Union they can get a Job in the State or in Education. Or they not be part of the Union and get a job in a fast paced environment and make a lot more money.
The problem is the Union doesn't help out as much as they say they do.
If you go on strike for a week for a 2% increase in wages. You basically lost 2% of you salary going on strike to get a 2% raise. Also from my experience, companies with Unions will layoff more people then non Unioned companies. Why? Well most Unions will negotiate some number to allow for layoffs, so the company will make sure to meet their quota, so in case of a down turn, they can prove they may need more. Plus also you need to consider the Union Self interest, They get paid per employee, So it makes more sense for them to allow them to fire off the Higher paid people so they can hire more lower paid people in their place.
Don't get me wrong, I am for negotiated labor, and if the company is mistreating its employees, there should be a recourse. However the current Union system is not well designed for the 21st century.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But now you are talking about "some legal definition that needs to be universally agreed on or dictated from up on high". You've just moved the judge from one point to another.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And how your post tries to show that there is the other group (progressives in your case) is actively out to get the other group.
We are all victims and life isn't fair. However if someone says This is causing me Pain. Your go to Response should be How can I help, not calling them names, because they are suffering from something you are not.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm saying employees and the larger society should be a part of the decisions. For example, in many countries it is customary for at least one seat on the board to represent employees.
It's not like a company would ever be anything without people who actually do the work. It's not like founders are shy about asking employees to be patient about raises or overtime, or a zillion other things when they're up and coming. When they respond favorably, that is just as meaningful an investment as money.
If you don't need logical consistency, you're free to choose anything arbitrarily. That being the case, I choose logical consistency. It has proven a very good way of operating effectively in the world.
There are no axioms for ethics, no first principles to reason from except from an "external cause". Without such, you cannot base morality on reason. This is known as the "is-ought gap": there's no principle that lets one reason from an "is" to an "ought".
Various meta-ethical principles have been proposed as starting point, to counter the assumption that held for millennia that there could only be a theological starting point. Kant's ethics, JS Mill's Utilitarianism, etc, etc. One such is a sort of "near-relativism" in which the meta-ethical principle is that every set of ethical principles is simultaneously fine, each person has the right to decide for themselves, except those that hold causing harm to others as the good.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It only becomes a legal matter if someone chooses to elevate it to one.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is the most poignant assessment of current culture I've seen in a long time. Bravo to you.
LOL. I raise my glass to you. =P
Normally when something is ethical is when the Total Benefit to society is higher then the cost of the implementation/product.
I live near a Protected State Forest. There is also a Major road that twists and turns around it, where car accidents happen monthly. Including within the past decade a Gasoline Truck which flipped over and spilled into the creak, and a Natural Gas Truck which flipped over and caught on fire.
Now it would be ethical to cut down a bunch of trees to straighten out the road, so to save lives, and prevent further pollution of the environment.
However it wouldn't be ethical to cut down these same trees, just to put in someones personal house.
There is value to these trees to Society, however the cost of Tucks flipping over, causing loss of lives and polluting streams and rivers, is much higher then its value to society.
The persons house has some value to society. However its impact is just mostly to the resident, so the Trees in the forest is worth more.
A company if often thinking in terms of short sighted goals. While their total cost to society is often ignored.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
which is about 260,000 times less than the $28,446 the median Amazon employee made in 2017 according to Amazon's SEC filing. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/e...
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
The first problem is: who gets to decide what's unethical?
Or even better, who is at fault for the piss-poor working conditions? The corporation that tries to keep costs low and profits high - through salary caps, anti-union campaigning, and tax deals? Or the workers that continue to apply for jobs at said companies?
There are other tech industry jobs that allow unions, have solid benefits, and a great work-life balance. If Google and Amazon start bleeding employees en-masse to other, better companies (MS? Apple? startups?) then their profits go down the tubes and they'll have to fix the complaints. Hard to make profits if no one wants to work for you. With how regularly these articles come up it feels more and more like sob stories about that on-again off-again ex that treats you like crap, but you just cant quit them.
You are not free to require your employees to be *unethical*.
Sure you are. You are not free to require your employees to commit any actions that are *illegal.* Sure, there's a lot of overlap there, but unless you're actually breaking a contract, there are few legal repercussions if you fire someone because they feel what you require of them is unethical. There are, of course, plenty of extra-legal repercussions that businesses want to avoid, like protests, boycotts, or just a horrible reputation.
I've never applied for a job with any of these mega tech giants, and I'm not sure if I ever will. If you're one of the people working in tech who ran to the opportunity to work for Google, or Microsoft, or Apple, Oracle, IBM or one of the other big ones -- you should have known your employment was just a cog in a giant corporate machine. To them, you're only another line item on a payroll spreadsheet unless you're SO exceptionally good, you rose in the ranks to some sort of upper management position.
The plus side has been better pay and benefits packages than smaller companies can afford to hand out. But there's a lot to be said for working for small businesses that really value your skills and opinions.
I think the cries to unionize I.T. are foolish. Sure, you can go that route if enough people at one of these tech giants really want to do it. But doing so still won't give you leverage to determine where they plunk down the next corporate HQ. Meanwhile, union I.T. workers would just cement that idea that they're disposable as individuals. They're just there to show up in large numbers, under a collective banner, as "Here to push some code around for you guys!"
If you feel a sense of guilt over what a company like Amazon is doing -- maybe you should go work elsewhere, instead? Computers all work the same way, no matter which company they're located at.
Cool. You should do that. We call that a "free market"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
your hat doesn't determine your beliefs, your words and (more importantly) your actions do. Your words (can't say anything about your actions since I only know you by words) make you right wing. That might be unconformable to you. That's not uncommon. The right wing have gone pretty far off the deep end since Bill Clinton moved the Democratic party to the right. That forced the GOP to move right and in turn their hardline right had to move themselves. This was done to maintain a separate political identity. The end result is where we are now. Torture's OK, people openly call for shooting asylum seekers, 8 wars and counting and the Flint Water Crisis. I could go on....
And I think you're missing the point. It's not that the left and right don't have pseudo science nut jobs, it's that the left have members of our community who dedicate their lives to combating pseudo science. The Right, for their part, have no such community.
Worse, they've got the Evangelicals (who the accepted with open arms because, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters to the leadership of the right wing is shifting money & power to themselves and their masters). The Evangelicals fight tooth and nail against science since, well, it contradicts their interpretation of scripture (and their leadership is also in it for some of that money and power).
My point is that the people you're bedding down with are objectively worse than the folks I hang out with. You should distance yourself from them for your own good. If you do maintain ties do what I do, and try and get them to see reason.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
#NotAllTechWorkers
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Well most everyone failed that part of history class, because prohibition still exists and is immensely harmful, and almost everybody loves it. It's just drugs other than alcohol now (and increasingly pot). Support for legalizing all drugs is minuscule, people just can't comprehend how it's taking something dangerous and making it way more dangerous because we can't actually stop anyone who wants it from getting it.
Someone neglected to inform them that formulating foreign policy isn't their job.
Letting someone else make your decisions doesn't absolve you from the ethics of those decisions.
Protesting projects to which one has personal objections is not bullying. The DoD in particular has a long history of it. You don't have the right for your view to hold sway -for that, you still have to convince other people of the merit of your ideas- but you do have the right to object.
We do have a serious problem with bullies in our midst, though. That's ironic, given that even just a decade ago we were more conmonly associated with being bullied than with bullying, but it is what it is. This very site has been around long enough to chronicle the shift. The incels and Nazis, the gamergaters and trolls, the gatekeepers and the missing stairs: geeks had barely conquered the world when far too many of us flipped the switch from tormented to tormentor. And even those of us who didn't still enabled those who did, out of a misguided sense of duty for far too long.
Bezos is wrong. But we have become the bullies of our age; it just wasn't in the way Bezos claimed.
Vote the Berniecrats in? Are smoking crack? You want to see what the U.S. would look like under them - look at Venezuela!
Your FAR better off voting in folks from the Constitution party! They AT LEAST will directly reference their authority to do what they want to do based on the U.S. Constitution and Amendments. Every other party thinks the U.S. constitution is a joke to violate and step on. Remember Bush? "The Constitution is just a god damn piece of paper!" Yeah and Bush is a god damn worthless piece of shit! When he and his family finally die the fuck off the world will be a better place!
Don't get me started on the piece of shit democrats out there!
Clintons - criminals with a HIGH body count - that whole family needs to be put in a rocket and sent towards the sun!
Nancy Pelosi - that fucking bitch should have been GONE from office a long time ago! What the FUCK is wrong with you Democrats!
Maxine Waters - that HO! belongs in a mental institution!
Chuck Schumer - Shove a cattle prod up his pooper for christ sakes!
Bernie Sanders - the socialist punk - send him to Venezuela - he would be a GOD there!
Diane Feinstein - that fucking cunt! Oh shes for gun control as long as she gets to keep hers and everyone else loses theirs! Bitch slap that cunt with a fire in your eyes!
Republicans - OMG!
Trump - what can I say - Put him in with Maxine Waters! Those two crazy fucks can keep each other company!
Mitch McConnell - where the fuck did they pull him from the sewers of some slum down city?
Thank GOD Paul Ryan is GONE!
Bob Corker - Really? Tennessee can't do better than that?
Ted Cruz - holy FUCK! stick him in one of the drug smugglers tunnel and pump fart gas into it!
Jeff Flake - shit his last name says it all!
Lindsey Graham - WOW! Just stick melted marshmallows all over his body and pour melted chocolate on him and let the rest of the boy loving republicans have at it!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Yeah, back in the day we used to call that "being a selfish a***hole".
Case in point, it's not illegal, but pretty much the definition of immoral.
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
The first problem is: who gets to decide what's unethical?
Moral relativism is simply allowing evil in degrees. You either know the difference between right and wrong OR YOU SHOULD.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm selling something.
It's not my job to know if someone thinking of buying it can afford it. Their job, my job is getting paid for it.
It depends on who you serve.
Treating people like adults is not being an asshole, rather the opposite.
Treating people like assholes isn't adult, it's just making an excuse for being an asshole.
If someone wants to interrogate me like when I was a middle schooler (looking for glycerin, fuming nitric acid and high molar sulphuric) they can fuck right off.
Ok, so you were bullied at school, sounds like it was pretty cruel. I hope you're ok.
It is _immoral_ and _unethical_ to let a sucker keep his money
Which is the rationale narcissists and criminals use to justify the personality disorder that compels them to cheat people who's trust they've earned. "If I don't do it, someone else will.".
One person, one million people, where do you draw the line? Imagine the old war veterans after you cheated them out of everything that they had - "It was my moral and ethical duty to defraud you of your retirement - sucker". Perhaps that's what cyber criminals follow up with after saying "It's just business".
If you cheat someone out of their money you've chosen to do that, you intend to take something that isn't yours, you have intent. That's called fraud, there is a reason that's a crime, it causes people enough hardship that it is a motivation for murder.
(legalities be damned). The highest utility for the money (by definition) is for me to get it.
Legalities be damned, keep thinking that way and you'll end up ass raped in a cell or worse found dead in a dumpster after being beaten to death by the people you defrauded.
It would be _immoral_ and _unethical_ not to point that out to you.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well yeah.. because I'm American.
I understand European liberalism would be different - hence the qualifier.
Most people are _not_ suckers. Nerf the world and they will be, soon enough.
Bad deals, entered into voluntarily are not criminal. You might claim that Rolex is 'immoral' for overcharging, but their suckers think they are getting value. Who am I to argue? They were lucky to get together with their money in the first place. Also true for 'timeshare buyers', 'brand new car buyers', 'Mac users' etc etc. Fat of the land, industries are built around groups of suckers. 'Instant gratification' is expensive, both for those too stupid to notice and those too rich to care.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There are lots of ways to 'maximize profit'. Depends on your time horizon.
A repeat sucker is worth his/her weight in gold, your right about that. But true financial sodomy tends to smart them right up. Pain should hurt.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In fact, when I was in HS I made some tax free, cash money on an eviction crew for a 'slumlord'.
Which means I got to watch the deadbeats haul off one carload of their most valuable stuff, then watch their 'friends and neighbors' loot the remainder of the pile as soon as they left. Smart deadbeats left someone behind to guard their junk.
'Slumlord' is a though business. A slumlord that never evicts is a sucker. Most 'slumlord' tenants are grifters with rental histories that send normal landlords running.
CA landlord isn't a business I want anything to do with. The laws have made it so that you simply can't rent to a family with a disabled child in it (essentially unevictable), but you can't ask. Just stay away.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If only we had some common values.
Most people are _not_ suckers. Nerf the world and they will be, soon enough.
Most people are suckers to self serving people because they project their value system onto them. Media, politics are all geared around keeping people emotionally charged so that they are predictable and easy to control.
Bad deals, entered into voluntarily are not criminal.
Constructing a bad deal to defraud someone is criminal.
You might claim that Rolex is 'immoral' for overcharging, but their suckers think they are getting value.
Except I didn't. All you have to do is ask yourself if you are serving others or yourself and you will discover how evil lies.
Who am I to argue?
Or justify.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.