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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

#801

Post by chrisseaton »

Fomite wrote: post #738
chrisseaton wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - an MRAP is a 'battlefield taxi' - it's a basic vehicle to move around a hostile area - it's defensive. You aren't doing anything offensive from inside an MRAP unless it has a remote weapons station on top. Great for collecting casualties.

"Battlefield." "Hostile area". "Collecting Casualties". Cannot imagine why people might be concerned about its use in law enforcement.

You’re being unnecessarily snarky and sarcastic. In active shooter situations, which are not uncommon in suburban US areas, you have hostile areas and need to collect casualties in a defended vehicle while possibly under fire.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#802

Post by pompousprick »

colordrops wrote: post #789
pompousprick wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are essentially funding and enabling a dictatorial regime if you buy products made in China — you think Foxconn doesn’t pay the Chinese government any taxes?

There are over a billion innocent people in China. The products themselves are mostly innocent and the people who build them make their livelihoods manufacturing them. That the government takes a cut is incidental. It's simply not comparable to a product specifically built to support dictatorship. Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands o…

mostly innocent?

incidental?

Lol

“Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands of deaths. Is boycotting Disney movies that support the government through taxes the same as boycotting predator drones?”

thanks for proving my point.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#803

Post by King-Aaron »

tomschlick wrote: post #695
penagwin wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick: you can buy automatic rifles made before 1986 (might be off on the date but you get the idea). You can't go buy a brand new automatic. * you can however buy a modern rifle that's made to have its automatic mode disabled, but my understanding is that it's trivial to modify to become automatic (but it will no longer be legal)

> You can't go buy a brand new automatic. Also the ones that are on the market (pre-86) go for tens of thousands of dollars to start. They are basically coveted by rich collectors who show them off at designated "machine gun shoot" days at specialty ranges. > but my understanding is that it's trivial to modify to become automatic It's not trivial. Requires decent gun-smithing skill, the ability to craft an auto sear,…

> It's not trivial.

I had an old 12-gauge semi that you could break a match stick off in the breach, and it would unload the entire magazine automatically with one pull of the trigger. That was pretty trivial.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#804

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tomlock wrote: post #788
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have. They have massive cash reverses because the tax laws have encouraged that rather than paying it to shareholders as dividends. And that level of return is necessary because of the nature of the industry -- you have to spend millions of dollars trying to create the next tech giant before you know whether you've succeeded or not, and most of the time…

On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate. It feels like what you're saying is that the risk of failing in a startup is massive enough for a founder that they des…

> On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.

Of course, because the level of risk is different. $100,000 guaranteed is worth more than a > Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee?

The less than one in a thousand chance of making that much.

> Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee?

There are many ways to turn a thousand dollars into a 0.1% chance at a million dollars. Then 99.9% of the time you lose the thousand dollars -- and it's your time/money, not the bank's. Nobody is going to give you an unsecured loan to gamble with.

But if you bet on your own horse at 1000:1 odds and win, how are you not entitled to the proceeds?

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#805

Post by King-Aaron »

chrisseaton wrote: post #801
Fomite wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Battlefield." "Hostile area". "Collecting Casualties". Cannot imagine why people might be concerned about its use in law enforcement.

You’re being unnecessarily snarky and sarcastic. In active shooter situations, which are not uncommon in suburban US areas, you have hostile areas and need to collect casualties in a defended vehicle while possibly under fire.

> In active shooter situations, which are not uncommon in suburban US areas

Also not uncommon in warzones.

Uncommon, however, almost everywhere else in the world.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#806

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ygjb wrote: post #762
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can afford to pay more Which is why they already do pay more than other industries. The best argument you have against that is the anti-poaching shenanigans they've engaged in -- but that's already illegal, so the answer there is a courtroom rather than a union.

No, it really isn't. The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern, and be willing to risk their reputation. With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.

> The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern

How is that different with a union?

> and be willing to risk their reputation

Class action suit or submit evidence confidentially to the attorney general.

> With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.

If Apple won't hire Google employees then the Google employees can retaliate against Apple by not working for them?

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#807

Post by kiliantics »

tracker1 wrote: post #636
kiliantics wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worker's unions helped win the majority of our rights in modern democracies. I wish this fact was more widely appreciated.

Unions are rarely formed unless conditions are particularly bad. One upon a time in this country, the national guard with machine guns might have been called out to clear a strike/protest. Most people are very happy being ignorant of their surroundings or influence of. The most I've ever done is threaten to quit if a project for the RIAA was accepted by my employer when I was invited into the pre-pitch meeting. It ju…

I'm part of a very privileged workforce and our situation, while not great, was a lot better than the average worker. We still managed to form a union. It can be done.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#808

Post by YetAnotherNick »

sneak wrote: post #798
partiallypro wrote: post #453

I find the Google/Chinese search engine troubling, but I do think people are playing this up to be a lot more than it should be. I think one fact is that Google is in an area and recruits people that are hyper liberal individuals. For example: not wanting to work with the U.S. military on projects, having AI use gender neutral writing, random PC things, little diversity in political thought etc. I don't think Google…

Declining to work with paid murderers is not a partisan position. Opposing sexism is not a partisan position. Attempting to reframe these sorts of things as “lefty silliness” and paint them with the same brush as being sad and disappointed that a rapist won the election is simply subterfuge.

> Declining to work with paid murderers is not a partisan position.

Calling military paid murderers is definitely a partisan thing. What else do you propose? Someone has to do the dirty work to keep the citizens safe.

> Opposing sexism is not a partisan position.

Are you talking about harassment cases. Have you been to Google or talked about it to a Googler? It generally is swift and works without any proof. What they are asking is anonymous complaint system and things like that, which can definitely have two thoughts.

What about Google giving huge advantage to women in hiring. Just one verified anecdote, in kickstart, which google uses to hire in Asia Pacific, men do get a call for interview within rank 50, many time lesser than that. And they have definitely called women if they got rank 1000, likely even more.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#809

Post by stevenicr »

hedvig wrote: post #529
Retric wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholders can do more than just fire the management team, they can set meaningful objectives and tie management compensation to reaching them.

We need to disempower shareholders.

Interesting interview / history on this issue I read recently from the guy behind much of panera bread: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-founder-of-p...

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#810

Post by stevenicr »

Ive been telling people, writing to people and complaining about google's increased censorship for years. The lack of transparency to webmasters and google search users is just as damaging as hiding content from people when the company spent years trying to develop trust, now many people believe what they find on google is truth - and they do not know how much of the internet has been filtered out, and ranked down by small groups of people with non-transparent agendas and algorithms.

For this reason is does not surprise me that this kind of thing was in the works and the ramifications to society being degraded in the name of big profits.

I wrote about some of these issues in comments here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546828

and if people started watching the pbs docu thing about the 2018 dilema of facebooks power and failures - and you started to watch part two at 43:11 till 45:30 ( https://www.pbs.org/video/the-facebook-dilemma-part-two-iev1... )- thinking it's about google - that sums way part of my feelings watching these things unfold over time on this side of the pond.

I am glad to see some people at google speaking outside the plex finally. These decisions have global consequences, and the culture of don't tell them so they can't use it against us, or steal our secret sauce, that omerta is part of the toxic culture that has created the faang monstrosities that are upon us today as they are.

To those that have chosen to speak out, thank you. I hope more open to the discussions occur.

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