411–420 of 527 posts
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What about the upsides?
Heavily outwieghed by the downsides. Facebook has done a lot of good, but IMO there is no question that it's done more harm. And Zuckerberg is a crazy person. There are a lot of people I wouldn't want to ultimately report to, but Zuck is right next to Larry at this point.
Not a great way to argument against someone who disagrees with that point
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Taking that logic at face value, it would mean "if you choose not to take a political stance, then you still have made a choice". Okay, so you've chosen not to make a decision. Yet I don't see how having made the choice implies you've still made a decision ("you have still taken a political stance"). If anything it seems like you just argued against the point?
If you choose not to decide on a political stance, you have chosen to accept the current political climate as it is.
Is providing food in supermarkets without political background checks "a political choice"? If so, then everything, including picking your nose with your left or right hand, is a political choice and the term "political choice" becomes utterly meaningless.
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I was shocked when I learned that employees at Facebook use Facebook internally for work related discussions. Facebook is not built for that purpose.
It is actually built for that purpose! Or at least, there are many people dedicated to optimizing the use of Facebook at work, selling it into companies as an enterprise solution, and so on. There are millions of paying customers. At some point I believe it was called "Facebook for Work" but now it has been rebranded as "Workplace from Facebook". Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are us…
Notifications are exactly like facebook notifications, so you'll get an email that says "open workplace to see this". To use the tool effectively, you need to have it open at all times. It's a weird in-between state of slack and email, where it's somewhat async and somewhat sync. You'll get overwhelmed with notifications and will want to have "inbox zero", which is considerably more difficult than in email, where you can optimize your workflow. The sidebar will have a list of groups you're in with read/notification counts that make absolutely no sense.
It also has chat functionality that can't be turned off, and it's not group based. It's like being forced to use gchat for all communications.
It has a "organization tree" feature that requires employees to fill in their own reporting structure. This also can't be turned off.
If you want your employees to spend all day chatting in forums inside of facebook, workplace is the product for you.
> Ctrl+F -> "quit.", "quit " I see so much debate about what's right to do within FB, "how will people change the structure from the inside with this rule?", etc. QUIT. Just quit. Seriously. Make it public why you quit. Quit en masse. FB is not a good company. Your talents are useful in many other places. Yes, I'm privileged in saying this. No, I wouldn't feel comfortable quitting my job right now. But if you believe…
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Work on projects that have less moral ambiguity.
Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
Everything has some political issue around it, but Facebook has politics baked into it because it's using political issues as a means of making money. They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug.
The way their platform is built is setup to manipulate people, and that platform is being used at scale to do so in ways facebook knows is fucking up the world. Its very existence is political at this point.
> Ctrl+F -> "quit.", "quit " I see so much debate about what's right to do within FB, "how will people change the structure from the inside with this rule?", etc. QUIT. Just quit. Seriously. Make it public why you quit. Quit en masse. FB is not a good company. Your talents are useful in many other places. Yes, I'm privileged in saying this. No, I wouldn't feel comfortable quitting my job right now. But if you believe…
Quitting may make you feel better but it doesn't fix social problems. There's just too many people who can't afford to take a lower paying ethical job.
It's a horribly dystopian opinion that disparages the moral action and inhibits good people from doing a good thing: taking a stand against unethical behavior.
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If you choose not to decide on a political stance, you have chosen to accept the current political climate as it is.
What is the current political climate? And is it static, will it not change? Is providing food in supermarkets without political background checks "a political choice"? If so, then everything, including picking your nose with your left or right hand, is a political choice and the term "political choice" becomes utterly meaningless.
At 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to" That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?
Many:
Education. Healthcare. Corrections, law, and law enforcement. Social work. Public utilities and subsidized housing. Etc.
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Work on projects that have less moral ambiguity.
Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
Food and water production has VERY big ethical issues. Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc.
So yes, there are problems in the food and water industry, but I don't really get what your point is? Should we just close our eyes, ears and mouths and say "fuck it, not my problem"?
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They will, in fact, just hire somebody else. American companies have access to an unlimited supply of labor. Better to stick around and try to unionize. It may not happen in your lifetime, but the other fact is the United States is a corporate hellworld. Workers have no say in anything. Until that changes, the corporations won’t.
I don’t know that this level of defeatism is justified. Quitting does help. Why does quitting help? Consider IBM. Their revenue is about 20% of its peak. It used to be seen as a monopoly power. Now we barely think about them. I think that IBM has made itself an unattractive place for employees where it used to be seen as an extremely prestigious place to work. And I think poor quality employees, along with average to…
And FB ceases to exist. A loud message will echo through silicon valley fit years to come.
The only ethical decision for the engineers to make is to quit. Thus all employees there are mathematically unethical. They are writing the code that executes the immoral decisions.