391–400 of 615 posts
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I don't particularly think so. What matters is whether the stuff in the book was true, not whether the author is of unassailable character
When one's goal is to look for any reason to downplay facts, questioning the character of the messenger is a standard tactic.
This book was SO GOOD. It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions. I wish those folks could feel…
Do you work in or closely follow the tech world? I read this book thinking that it'll be some expose but honestly it was underwhelming in a sense, it's almost better than I thought. Everything in the book either was obvious for anyone who worked in the industry, or better than I thought it'd be. There were some weird personal things about Zuckerberg, but even those were expected or given. It was an OK read, however a…
I'm going to place an order for the book right now. I encourage you all to do the same. We the people hold the power to keep in check the immoral companies, governments, and other unscrupulous entities that would exploit the collective to enrich the few. And ultimately that's through our money and how we spend it. Screw Meta and their anti-human business model.
Unlike an elected government, who the common people at least in theory have a chance to replace via elections, the public pretty much has no say in what these companies and their leadership are allowed to do. Nobody voted for Meta. Nobody voted for Palantir. Nobody voted for Philip Morris. You can say that someone "voted with their wallet," but that doesn't point to a viable solution. "Not voting with your wallet" es…
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Literally anyone with the access to these people would be someone making bank. Do you think Cheryl Sandberg would bother to talk to a poor person? That's kinda the nature of whistle-blowing. You're complicit, you have inside knowledge and THEN you choose to do the right thing. Snowden worked for the NSA before he exposed their lies about spying on US citizens, you think he did literally no work towards that end befor…
It's kind of the reason C-execs (and up) stay, the company keeps paying them more and more to hold the secrets.
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Unlike an elected government, who the common people at least in theory have a chance to replace via elections, the public pretty much has no say in what these companies and their leadership are allowed to do. Nobody voted for Meta. Nobody voted for Palantir. Nobody voted for Philip Morris. You can say that someone "voted with their wallet," but that doesn't point to a viable solution. "Not voting with your wallet" es…
I don't disagree with you entirely. But we're not powerless. I'd argue that we saw the impact we can have when we act collectively when Trump tried to pressure ABC into cancelling Jimmy Kimmel. It took ABC a few days maybe before they capitulated (again, except this time to their customers).
It's been interesting to watch some of Wynn-William's claims be vindicated by recent court decisions about the addictive and manipulative qualities of Meta and Google's products. She left the company in 2017, and along with her many other allegations about Facebook and their executive team, had a good amount of information in the book about the reasoning, rationale, and management decisions that led to allowing adver…
This is just pure evil, and I'm not using this as a metaphor, it is evil by definition. I wonder how do the people behind these decisions sleep at night? Don't they have kids of their own? How can they look at their kids' faces knowing that they've deliberately caused harm to some other kids?
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Unlike an elected government, who the common people at least in theory have a chance to replace via elections, the public pretty much has no say in what these companies and their leadership are allowed to do. Nobody voted for Meta. Nobody voted for Palantir. Nobody voted for Philip Morris. You can say that someone "voted with their wallet," but that doesn't point to a viable solution. "Not voting with your wallet" es…
The phrase "voting with your wallet" is hilarious to begin with, because it admits that rich people have more voting power and implies that's how it should be.
Companies need customers, and if they lose customers, they can go out of business. The saying doesn't mean "the bigger the wallet, the bigger the vote" but rather "boycott this company and do not be a customer."
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Yes, all of this happens (and worse!) and still no boycott of Facebook. We have been turned into a country of dopamine deficient addicts. And now these same companies are funding a useless war, killing innocent children, and soon, collapsing the world economy. If you still use these platforms knowing what we know now you are just as complicit as every executive. https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
Hard to boycott something you quit using 10 years ago.
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Arbitration does help with the problem of overwhelmed and expensive courts. What is needed is fair arbitration. The outcome should approximate the outcome of the full court proceeding. Make the arbitration rulings appealable in court on the basis of factual errors, errors of law, corruption, and potential errors by omission (i.e. failure of discovery). And make the company responsible for the full costs of the litiga…
>Arbitration does help with the problem of overwhelmed and expensive courts. What is needed is fair arbitration. That sounds like you want all the benefits of an actual court without all the costs of an actual court?
Barring that, faster and cheaper is better.
Simply limiting discovery, counterbalanced by loosened rules of evidence, followed by allowing specialist arbiters and avoiding the multi-year wait for a court proceeding seems to be faster and cheaper. There is a small error introduced by allowing discovery of 1,000 pages of emails instead of 100,000, and by allowing hearsay or affidavits, but probably most disputes would not strictly depend on deposing a dozen people and interpreting the 23rd box of company documents.
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You're invoking a common "libertarian" trope, so I'm going to address that larger topic. Right-fundamentalist (ie axiomatic) "libertarianism" is fallacious. Logically, by asserting an unlimited "right" to contract, one can straightforwardly reframe any totalitarian state as merely being contracts between the state and its citizens/subjects/victims. And simply renaming things clearly does not make for a society that r…
Contracts are entered by private individuals, not by the state. So your pithy claim to instantly demolish the idea is not actually effective.
If you're making an argument that the right to contract should be unlimited between individuals (and perhaps unlimited between legal entities), but should be limited when made between individuals and artificial legal entities, that would be an interesting framing to explore. But afaik it's not really a popular one.
(although I don't know that such a framework would actually invalidate what I said, especially for autocratic totalitarian states - each citizen of North Korea could just as easily be said to have a contract with Kim Jong Un himself)