In a lot of respects, I find modern business tactics skewing ever further towards being more and more harmful to society at large for the sake of business capital owners. Let's not forget the social contract and that we, as a society, allow businesses to operate while they remain beneficial to society.
I'm not saying remove capitalism but some modifications of our current state of capitalism are certainly in order. Perhaps this is tighter or different regulatory constraints, changes to some core principles (e.g. Citizen's United, business rights as "people", etc.). I'm not saying I have the answers or the quick examples mentionrd are the core issues, just that the future doesn't look great if current trends continue. We need to start a productive conversation and elect representatives willing to be a voice in that conversation to explore and try improvement options.
Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.
The LF hasn't been about tools and software for quite a while. It's disappointing. I wish they'd change the name at this point. At least it would be honest.
> 100% of donations received go towards funding diversity programs.
>> widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data
I agree the terminals are disdained, but I never understood this. The rest of your comment justifies the value. They provide great data (which they spend a boatload of money to get/clean) and they sell it. Customers don't have to buy it, they can try to get the data themselves.
I used a BB terminal extensively for over a decade. It saved me orders of magnitude in work, there is no way I could have obtained all this data myself on an ongoing basis and had it available easily via API. They make a lot of money, and they deserve it.
I had colleagues try to switch to Reuters terminals and they came ashamedly back to Bloomberg, hat in hand.
And one more thing was why doesn't my browser store my history - it just the URLs of where I have been but the html, the images, the text etc. Then let me search that.
Someone raised this on here a few weeks ago and it was a gobsmacking moment - my hand flew to my forehead and I realised yes - that would be so useful but the big tech firms find it more profitable to have that data on their hard drives not mine.
To me, the most obvious cause is women’s increased participation in the workforce. With women no longer free to volunteer and socialize throughout the day, a lot of these community organizations would see a decline in membership.
Even the simple decline in people who identify their neighbour as a friend can be explained by a lack of women living and socializing in the neighbourhood during the daytime. The increased use of paid childcare would similarly reduce the amount of children living and playing in the neighbourhood during the day.
Overall, this would contribute to the feeling that the suburbs are ghost towns during the day, and families arriving home from school/work would rush inside to eat dinner before chauffeuring the kids to all of their extracurriculars.
One thing to note is that Robert Putnam wrote the original Bowling Alone essay in 1995. Well before most people in America even had Internet access.
The trend of declining participation in religious organizations, civic organizations (like the League of Women Voters), fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), volunteer associations, labor unions, and sports leagues has been happening since at least the 1970s. Surveys of Americans have found a consistent decline in the number of self-reported close friends since as far back as the 1980s. Same for those who reported being friends with their neighbors. Indicators of social capital like the percent of people who donate blood have been falling since the 1970s.
The point is increasing levels of isolation and misanthropy is a manifestation of a broader trend towards declining social capital. And that trend has been ongoing for probably 50 years. Social media may have accelerated it, but I don't think it would have anywhere near the same impact if Facebook was introduced to the American society of 1960.
I'm with the Raskins, the problems derive from interacting with computers via applications. This may or may not be at the forefront of your mind but your fondness of Lisp and Smalltalk systems supports my claim. Other systems such as Oberon fall into this camp but I would also include early PC systems like the Commodore 64 and DOS machines, even though they loaded individual applications.
The commonality with these systems is the somewhat ubiquitous interface. I think this is why power users love the command line. These HCIs reduce the cognitive load of the application model where there are wildly disparate UIs to deal with on a continual basis. The growth of "web apps" has made this exponentially worse on the user because they're not bound by widget tool kits.
I also see modern markers to support the claim. From what I understand, in China a huge amount of activity on smartphones that we would conduct through various apps, they conduct through WeChat and WeChat bots. They do this because it's more convenient and my claim is this is the normie's equivalent of attempting to push all their computing needs into Emacs.
This is an old labor issue, but it used to revolve around handing out union flyers at work and posting on company physical bulletin boards.[1] That's generally allowed by law for labor activity, even if the employer doesn't like it. How this translates to online activity isn't entirely clear yet. But courts will make that analogy.
An employer who tried to pull this in 1970 would have had a picket like outside the door the next day. Union truckers wouldn't deliver to their loading dock.
Also for a less tongue-in-cheek response this is related to the notion of "false consciousness" first written about by Friedrich Engels in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
I don't understand how HN can complain about Google sucking up data and rarely if ever mention LassPass's terms of service which basically flat out state they share your info to marketers. Effectively they appear to be making money by looking at all the sites you log into via LassPass. If you're using their browser plugin I can only guess, given their Terms of Service, that they're spying on all pages, not just pages you're getting a password via their service for. Though even selling the info of which services you're using is bad enough.
Sure, they have a free plan and so you are not the customer. Why do they get a pass?
Note: I have no proof they are spying. I only have the fact that their TOS points to their privacy policy and their privacy policy says they can collect pretty much anything you'd expect software to be able to collect and that they can share that info with whoever they decide to partner with.
Contrast to some other password managers that stay flat out, they don't collect your data and don't want to know it.
From their Privacy Policy
> 1. Information We Collect and Receive
> Service Data (including Session and Usage data):
> When you use our Services, we receive information generated through the use of the Service, either entered by you or others who use the Services with you (for example, schedules, attendee info, etc.), or from the Service infrastructure itself, (for example, duration of session, use of webcams, connection information, etc.) We may also collect usage and log data about how the services are accessed and used, including information about the device you are using the Services on, IP addresses, location information, language settings, what operating system you are using, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data ...
> Third Party Data: We may receive information about you from other sources, including publicly available databases or third parties from whom we have purchased data, and combine this data with information we already have about you. We may also receive information from other affiliated companies that are a part of our corporate group. This helps us to update, expand and analyze our records, identify new prospects for marketing, and provide products and services that may be of interest to you.
> Location Information: We collect your location-based information for the purpose of providing and supporting the service and for fraud prevention and security monitoring. If you wish to opt-out of the collection and use of your collection information, you may do so by turning it off on your device settings.
> Device Information: When you use our Services, we automatically collect information on the type of device you use, operating system version, and the device identifier (or "UDID").
That's pretty much everything given they put an extension in your browser and can collect all of that info for every page you visit
> 4. Information Sharing
> ... We may share your personal information with (a) third party service providers; (b) business partners; (c) affiliated companies within our corporate structure
Why would anyone want a password manager with this privacy policy?
From 2017 to 2018 they nearly tripled revenue, probably a reflection of the price changes that many in this thread have complained about.
The problem is that since then their growth has completely stalled out and is projected to be under 5% for both this year and next year.
While their revenue tops out over $1B their net profit is pretty slim.
Post acquisition expect to see a lot of cuts to improve cash flow as operations are slashed across the board, and depending on how the acquisition is funded it won't be a surprise to see the company burdened with a bunch of debt.
Then PE will either try to return cash through net income, or more likely than not relist the company after two - five years when the restructuring is complete and the company has a more financially interesting profile, akin to what happened with Ping Identity.
In an ideal world they will also try to increase revenue growth as well, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some more price increases coming down the line as well.
It's a violation of the jury's duty to render a verdict based on the law and the facts presented.
Who assigned the jury that duty? And when did that happen?
Per http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/nullifi... and other sources that I have seen, the understanding of the law when the Constitution was written was that juries should judge both the law and the facts. The view that they should not judge the law only arose decades later in the late 1800s. The fact that the legal profession today sees jurors as having a duty to NOT judge the law I see as undermining the intent of having jury trials in the first place.
The understanding of jury trials when the Constitution was written was that juries had a right and obligation to judge both the law and the facts. The first laws
Thanks for the link. This section caught my attention:
> I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers
A year and a half old, which is a lifetime in Trumpworld, but still relevant. The top (composite) infographic paints a pretty good picture of which outlets are most and least trustworthy, or at least viewed that way.
Interesting when you look at the partisan breakdown in the lower graphics. The Democrats adhere fairly closely to the consensus view, aside from assigning some additional weight to outlets like Washington Post and CNN. But the Republicans appear completely divorced from the middle, placing Fox News and WSJ on a pedestal and distrusting all else, including such relatively unbiased sources as PBS, AP, and NPR.
I know it's kind of a tangent, but I want to point out that Google is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the major perks, are trained not to fraternize with the rest of Google's employees, and are of a markedly different racial and cultural makeup than the rest of Google's employees.
Also, remember that time that Google, Apple, and "dozens" of other companies colluded to prevent each other from hiring talent from each other, in large part to defraud their own employees of opportunities (to the tune of an estimated $8,000,000,000)?
So it seems like there's a small group at the top that does whatever the hell they think they can get away with, then a large group in the middle that is more-or-less exploited by the top group, and another large group on the bottom that are more-or-less totally fungible and who are almost completely ignored by design by the other two groups.
Most of the people in the "middle" group are either clueless about their exploitation, or complacent, and what we're seeing in TFA is a fraction of the former becoming the latter. I suppose a tiny fraction of people might actually quit Google over this.
(I worked at the Google-plex for a couple of years as a TVA, a kind of half-life role in between a normal Googler and a service staff. It was a very weird experience, and afterward it felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth.)
> *The most basic question we set out to answer was this: Did McKinsey’s pristine reputation as the foremost purveyor of “best practices” match its record? After nearly a year of reporting, we found that the answer was often no.
Every recent ICE investigation is related to an ongoing major story:
The more recent spate of McKinsey articles are related to the fact that Pete Buttigieg has entered the top tier of presidential candidates, and McKinsey is his third other job on the resume.
It's not tough to believe if the investigative hypothesis is correct: that McKinsey is the goto consulting firm trusted by the world's most powerful governments and companies when it comes to decisionmaking.
“Therefore any cruelty has to be executed at once, so that the less it is tasted, the less it offends; while benefits must be dispensed little by little, so that they will be savored all the more.”
That is basically a union effort. The cognitive dissonance on display with regard to labor in tech is fascinating. Many have internalized the propaganda created by big business that "unions are bad, unions are expensive, you don't want to unionize" and they aren't willing to revisit that internally, but they're like "what if we just organize without a union, refuse to work unless our demands are met" failing to realize that's exactly what a union is.
Union dues aren't collected so somebody else can get paid for doing nothing. That somebody (or somebodies) else is your advocate. They know your industry like your bosses do, except they aren't on your bosses payroll, they're on YOURS, meaning they go to bat for YOU, not the company. And Union membership is often a requirement for working. Why? Because if it wasn't, the company would staff up on workers not wanting to be part of the union, until they had enough to survive the resulting strike, and fire all the union people.
The effectiveness of corporate America's attack on organized labor over the last century cannot be overstated. They have done a fantastic job of demonizing any efforts at bargaining from the employee's side, and employee's wages demonstrate it.
The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being "Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots. Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be evil".
All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.
For technology companies, buybacks signal to me that they have dying (or dead) engineering. It is rather financial engineering at work.
One of the kpi at play here is EPS [1], typically used to evaluate CEO performances.
To me, this was about numerator increasing over a rather static base.
What instead happens, is that denominator is reduced (with buybacks) to jack up EPS value. It amazes me, that most of run-of-mill (non analyst) folks simply buy into EPS↑ story.
It is drowning out real investment, this conclusion is correct because the companies themselves are saying so in their statements. Some companies are taking on huge debt to keep up in the buyback races despite having bad products that are losing market share. Oracle is probably the biggest example of this buyback insanity via debt, but there are many other companies doing the same thing.
Other companies have committed in their financial statements to "returning 100% of free cash flow to investors via buybacks and dividends", so they are actually committing to not invest in the company at all regardless of how much money they make. Chevron and Texas Instruments are two big examples of this, there are dozens of other companies with similar buyback first strategies.
I live in Massachusetts.. mentioned in the article as averaging $16k.
I have a child who stopped going to private day care a year and a half ago. For us it was more like $20-24k/yr for child care. There were centers near one of my workplaces that were more like $35-40k/yr/child. Anything near the trendy high tech office spaces in Boston/Cambridge is going to be in that > $30k/yr/child range.
I think there are nice profits being made because:
- The teachers/caretakers make 50% at best of what public school teachers make
- They just in time schedule the living daylights out of everything
- You can easily figure out the gross income of the "school" because the tuition figures are public and you can see the # of rooms in the school and calculate from regulation how many kids are there. They were always 95% full in my experience
- The expensive/fancy ones tend to be owned by big chains & franchises, those are not operations that exist without someone getting rich.
One of the biggest day care chains in the country is owned by Bain Capital.. they've made a lot of money on it. They don't get into stuff that isn't profitable.
My experience was even at the upper end of the market the product is pretty darn bad compared to public school systems in our area. The public school staff is amazing and incredibly professional compared to the private day care staff. Not even close. And the ratios for elementary school are better than pre-school/pre-K at expensive day cares in our area. And even if you took all our local & state taxes and gave 100% to the school it does not match what day care costs. And obviously the state & town do not give 100% of the money to the school system.
Have been on the receiving end of several McKinsey engagements.
The work itself was generally not all that good. The knowledge of “experts” brought into meetings rarely contributed more than what a reasonably intelligent person could dig up on Google search results in an hour. They were also often farmed out on random staff augmentation functions that just annoyed the hell out of people. “Hi I need you to fill out this excel spreadsheet with 35 columns so we can put a presentation together... oh and if you could do that by 6 PM tonight that would be great.” That sort of nonsense so they could produce some nonsensical 50 page PowerPoint deck that nobody read.
There were a few decent people there but by and large value was not generated. As others have pointed out a major motivator seemed to be to provide some C-level exec with CYA coverage to claim that programs being implemented were based on the advice of outside “experts.”
In the two main cases I saw the McKinsey strategy ended up being a total disaster that seriously damaged the company and the C-level exec that hired them in both cases got canned as a result so in the end even the CYA concept didn’t really work.
As someone who has contributed regularly to Wikipedia over the years, I stopped recently due to another cancer that Wikipedia has, called 'Philip Cross.' Supposedly an individual, he has made roughly 150,000 edits since 2013 without taking a single day off.
Anybody who is not aware of 'Philip Cross' can read about 'him' here:
"According to Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by Cross remarked that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel."
Wikipedia management, all the way up to Jimmy Wales are well aware of 'Philip Cross' and yet 'he' continues to operate freely as an editor. Despite the basic usefulness of Wikipedia for non-controversial topics, I decided that I cannot and will not support an organization that allows this kind of astroturfing.
This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new. The major points of their work, and especially of Piketty's monumental _Capital for the 21st century_ still stand: that capital is a positive feedback loop in a way that labor is not; that mid-20th-century laws that put brakes on this feedback loop have been removed; that a variety of data sources are confirming growing inequality and market capture particularly in the UK and US; and that the only reasonable solution for this is a tax on owned capital (not on income or cap gains) and the political chances of this happening are slim, etc.
And in the end this article is another one in their house style: not particularly informative in the details, they're not arguing openly or forcefully against Piketty, but instead bring up enough different nitpicky papers that it starts sowing doubt in the mind of a reader who hasn't actually read the book.
But then again The Economist has had it out for Piketty (and Saez) for a long time now, they very clearly hate Piketty's Capital and keep sniping at it, but can't stop themselves from bringing it up all the time. :)
At least they are very open about their biases: they promote a view that the solution to all ills is lower taxes and less regulation. However, Piketty's analysis and proposed solution directly contradicts that.
I'm not saying remove capitalism but some modifications of our current state of capitalism are certainly in order. Perhaps this is tighter or different regulatory constraints, changes to some core principles (e.g. Citizen's United, business rights as "people", etc.). I'm not saying I have the answers or the quick examples mentionrd are the core issues, just that the future doesn't look great if current trends continue. We need to start a productive conversation and elect representatives willing to be a voice in that conversation to explore and try improvement options.