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We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

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Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#441

Post by forty »

reaperducer wrote: post #309
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship in the EU is generally intended to protect individuals; censorship in China is meant to protect the ones doing the censoring. The EU has democratically elected governments; China is an authoritarian dictatorship. Those are differences in kind, not just degree.

Censorship in the EU is generally intended to protect individuals I seem to recall that anything about Nazis is censored in France. I believe selling Nazi stuff on eBay is forbidden, for example. But I haven't heard about this in a long time, so this may not still be true.

I can confirm this is still the case. You cannot wear items / symbols of a criminal organization (that's what the law says approximately)

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#442

Post by patrickaljord »

briandear wrote: post #292
patrickaljord wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're an anarchist, that's exactly what the government's job is: decide what's best for people. That's why you have prescription only drugs, anti-vice laws, securities. All these things exist because the government think the people are too dumb to decide things by themselves. Not saying I agree with it, just saying you would need to argue for anarchism if you were to argue "who is the X government to decide w…

> that's exactly what the government's job is: decide what's best for people. Wrong. The government’s Just is to protect life and liberty and ensure a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts. It’s just is most certainly not deciding what is best for people. Protect my rights and otherwise stay out of the way.

Why could we not protect ourselves? Many ancaps or ancoms would argue that would be possible. The government assumes they know better than you do on how to enforce contracts or protect yourself and impose a monopoly on force by force to make sure you can't build alternatives. So yeah, it is based on the premise that they know better than you do on certain areas of life. People just disagree how wide these areas should be. I may be mistaken though so feel free to prove me wrong.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#443

Post by tomschlick »

> MRAP's are for combat, not police work

While they were designed for combat, they are effectively the same thing that Brinks uses to transport money. They are meant to stop bad things from killing the people inside. They have 0 offensive weapons.

They are entirely defensive vehicles that have been used to rescue downed officers, civilians in harms way (gunfire), and multiple times in natural disasters where other vehicles would have gotten stuck.

While I get that they "look scary" to some people, they do have utility and come very cheap from the federal government that is trying to get them off their books. Local police pick them up because when there is a gunfight/hostage situation/disaster it's better to have one 5 mins away than an hour away.

I honestly don't get the outrage about them.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#445

Post by amelius »

tjoff wrote: post #439
megaman8 wrote: post #383

I think, what these employees don't realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. By placing values above profits, it increases it's goodwill with customers thus increasing it's moat and it's retention, as well as it's employee retention. This strategy made sense in the early days. Not anymore. As Google's position becomes increasingly st…

Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. This might sound weird but some people (and companies) don't subscribe to the notion that money is the only thing that matters.

Shareholders do.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#447

Post by whack »

megaman8 wrote: post #383

I think, what these employees don't realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. By placing values above profits, it increases it's goodwill with customers thus increasing it's moat and it's retention, as well as it's employee retention. This strategy made sense in the early days. Not anymore. As Google's position becomes increasingly st…

There's something you've overlooked: companies are ultimately run by humans. Humans who make decisions at all levels of the hierarchy, in order to further their own personal priorities, even if it dramatically conflicts with the shareholders' goals of maximizing profits.

In some cases, the personal priorities can be personal advancement. We see this all the time when managers hire/promote their friends, sexually harass their subordinates, and make decisions on the basis of politics as opposed to technical/business merit.

And in other cases, the personal priorities can be moral values. Values such as promoting free speech, fighting censorship, protecting consumer rights, and avoiding layoffs.

The idea that every single decision taken by a company is perfectly optimized to maximize long term profits, is baseless. There simply does not exist any mechanism to monitor and enforce such a requirement. The shareholders have only one lever to pull: accept the current leadership team, imperfections and all. Or fire them and risk destroying the company in the resulting churn. This gives both the executives and employees tremendous leeway to prioritize values over profits, as long as they are good enough to not get fired.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#448

Post by RickS »

starbeast wrote: post #399
RickS wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, and not sure this is what OP's talking about, but I have examples. First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned us…

>search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments". I'd say it has gone full; "Show me what your advertisers and other sources of income, would like someone like me to find on the internet."

I refrained from going so far in part because there's places you can still get great info on things like pihole, which would violate the interests of those departments.

But my gut says that it's not that google is defending the sanctity of such results, but that those results are an annoyance and not a real threat, so are just off the radar. When someone with enough sway wants them gone, I've got no doubt they'd be nerfed too.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#450

Post by nostrademons »

blaisio wrote: post #376

It really pains me how Google has changed. When I was younger I always wanted to work there. Now that I've graduated college, I would probably never want to work there.

It seems to be the nature of companies getting bigger and older. When I was 10 I wanted to work for Microsoft when I grew up - this was 1991, when Microsoft products were the clear leaders in most PC software markets but they had yet to seem like the evil monopolist they would become. By the time I was in college, I was running Linux on my laptop just so that I didn't support the evil empire. By 27 I was working for Google, which was the hip non-evil place to be at the time.

Go get involved in crypto and find some projects that are actually building stuff instead of pumping the price. That's the historical analogy - IMHO we're right about at 2002 in the cycle, after the new technology bubble bursts but before anyone knows who the winners will be, or if they even exist. If you're successful people will hate you anyway because that's the nature of success, but at least you can get a decade or two of feeling like your work means something in before that.

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