171–180 of 245 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[You asked if I'm a Googler] I used to be a Googler, years ago. That's how I know how ridiculous the outrage and the downplaying of Walker are. I'm glad I can talk now without being accused of defending my employer. I brought up Warner because he's one of the most persistent voices, yet he wanted to talk about China, which is not related to election interference.
Did you reply to the wrong person?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me put it this way: if you want to have a real productive discussion on data privacy, you want the head lawyer who, despite Senate grandstanding, probably does make legal decisions for the company. You don't want the guy who thinks that google, probably uses version control software, but doesn't know what it is. The ic didn't want a decision maker, they wanted a heel.
Let me put it this way: when the entire point is to educate the public about ongoing attacks and to show that these companies are taking all of this seriously... Snubbing our Intelligence Committee because Page didn't prioritize it highly enough seems, to me, to be the least helpful thing your employer could have done.
And again, if you want a discussion, you need people who are contextual experts. A CEO can't speak intelligently about security and privacy at Google or Facebook. Nor can Congress. You can discuss things in broad strokes and talk about high level initiatives, but actually real, useful discussion is unlikely.
There was a popular post yesterday showing pichais response to a question about fake news at a Google internal meeting. It was a widely derided answer and being uninformed, despite it being to a roomful of engineers who work at Google.
That leads to one conclusion, through any number of avenues (pichai doesn't understand the issues, realpolitik, people don't understand the issues, googlers don't understand the issues, etc.), That a congressional hearing asking Google about fake news would be unproductive theatre.
At this point, though, such a public-relations strategy feels dated. On balance, the celebrity of even the most caricatured CEO (Zuckerberg) appears to be a net positive for his company. I disagree totally with that point. The "superstar CEO" Zuckerberg is now ridiculed, hated, and negatively "meme-ed". He is now the face of censorship (for some) and a laissezfaire strategy threatening democracies (for others). Even…
The real loss is Senators no longer trusting Alphabet/Google after this snub. You really don't want to turn the government against you.
The Senators that wanted Larry or Sundar to voluntarily submit to and draw more media attention to their spectacle of abuse directed at the firm (and others in the industry) obviously didn't trust Google in the first place, and the rest know the game and aren't going to be effected by this except perhaps by realizing that Google's leadership isn't completely braindead politically.
There was no possible net upside for Google participating in the charade of a hearing, and the committee rejecting Google's offer of the most qualified person to address the substantive questions notionally at issue in response to the voluntary invitation for participation was an unmistakable signal that that was the case.
> You really don't want to turn the government against you.
You also don't want to voluntarily cooperate with the parts of the government that have already turned against you and are trying to scapegoat you to build support for policies hostile to your interests.
Law enforcement isn't the only part of government that can seemingly innocently invite you to talk with malign intent, and it's not the only part of government you should decline voluntary cooperation with when you don't have good reason to believe that the intent of the invitation is aligned with your interests.
The stock dropped because the CAO departed less than a month after starting at Telsa. Not because of the puff of marijuana.
I'd wondered about this when I heard Google wasn't sending any of their top brass. In my experience, it's very out of character for Google's top leadership to not predict when people are going to be pissed off about a decision. And it was stupendously easy to tell that Congress would be pissed off by this decision - when I mentioned the news to my wife she was like "You can do that? Just stand up Congress?" I'm remin…
[1] https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/08/23/senate-intelligen...
We badly need a 3rd smartphone platform.
Elon Musk interview on Joe Rogan last which made their shares drop 8% for the day because he took one puff. Everyone went berserk because you are not supposed to do something like that if you are the CEO of a large company. The stock dropped because the CAO departed less than a month after starting at Telsa. Not because of the puff of marijuana.
The fast crashes seem more related to stupid media freak outs - similar to FB and the Cambridge Analytica thing.
I like him giving the the middle finger. Why does he have to satisfy a bunch of egomaniac corrupt politician who has been net negative for the society. Why we have to watch in awe of their complete disconnect from current affairs of the society due to their total ignorance?
Right? Dorsey is also running Square, and has to go to DC to answer questions about shadowbanning Twitter users? That is the most pressing issue of our democracy? Don't worry about college or healthcare costs when Twitter users are being 'unfairly' shadowbanned?
I'd wondered about this when I heard Google wasn't sending any of their top brass. In my experience, it's very out of character for Google's top leadership to not predict when people are going to be pissed off about a decision. And it was stupendously easy to tell that Congress would be pissed off by this decision - when I mentioned the news to my wife she was like "You can do that? Just stand up Congress?" I'm remin…
Google tried to send their top lawyer, Kent Walker, but was rejected by the Senate [1] less than two weeks before the hearing. [1] https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/08/23/senate-intelligen...
It's kind-of Congress' own fault here. They so often have these... events, that are mostly for show and for the politicians to grandstand making them seem tough to voters but really have very little substance. I doubt any meaningful policy ever comes of them. Doesn't everybody know by now that they're grilling these CEO's in front of the cameras and begging them for money behind the cameras? "outrage" indeed.
The Senate Intelligence Committee hearings are usually pretty facts-first unlike the other random hearings and sessions. I watch them on C-SPAN whenever they happen (which isn't that frequent). Edit: I strongly recommend watching these directly from C-SPAN rather than the summarized spin-version from random news companies. You might be surprised how little of their time is wasted on grandstanding. Yeah, some politici…
Granting, for the sake of argument, that SSCI public hearings are on average more substantive and less grandstanding around pre-set narratives than other public Congressional hearings [0], there was ample advance reason to believe that this hearing was not going to further that pattern.
> Yeah, some politicians will throw in their jabs, but that's not the purpose of those committees and it's a fractionally tiny amount of the dialog.
It may be a tiny amount of the dialog, but even then it's often the tiny amount that actually is decisive in motivating the hearings, in much the only way that advertising may be a minority of the airtime on commercial TV networks, but it's 100% of the purpose.
[0] I don't think it's true on balance, but I do think it seems true based on the selection of public hearings that get major media attention, because substantive, non-showboating hearings of other committees rarely get attention.