The piece starts out saying the iPhone is a commodity.
My chair is a commodity. The physical iPhone manufactured at a Foxconn factory has aspects of a commodity.
But is that physical iPhone device worth hundreds of dollars solely for its physical manufacture form? I know that teams of dozens/hundreds are working on software updates to push out over the network to fix problems and enhance the device. This helps make the high price worth it. But here the idea of the device as a traditional commodity breaks down. My chair does not get fixes and improvements pushed to it, at a very low cost, from a relatively small team.
I should note, this does not negate the idea that Foxconn workers are exploited, rather that the math is off. Because the iPhone price is from a mix of traditional manufacture, plus those programmers in Cupertino pushing out updates, and an analysis must take this difference into account.
To take up their seats, they would have had to swear an oath - "I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God."
So if the Irish republicans had sworn an oath of allegiance to the queen, her heirs and their successors, they could have had the benefits of UK press freedom. Ok.
The BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament.
So starting from the vantage of a news service banning interviews with members of its own country's parliament, outlets like Russia Today have to be below that bar.
A number of Russian outlets are listed as unreliable - perhaps some of them are tabloids like English language tabloids, but it seems that all Russian outlets with a standard mild or heavy support of their government are not OK, whereas this is not the case for the US and UK outlets with the same mild to heavy view of things from their country's vantage. It is just the myopic view of the English speaking countries.
I have to laugh at the Times of India (rated yellow) comment - "It tends to have a bias in favor of the Indian government".
Times of India, An Phoblacht, CGTN, Global Times, Press TV, Ria Novosti, Russia Today, Sputnik, TASS, Telesur, Venezuelanalysis and Xinhua are all yellow or red.
BBC, Bellingham, Economist, Forbes, Fox News, New Republic, NPR, Reason and Weekly Standard are all rated green.
It is pretty clear - sites generally supportive of the US/UK governments and their businesses are OK. Sites generally supportive of India, Venezuela, Russia, the Irish minority(/majority) in north Ireland, China etc. are not OK. It's just a myopic view of the world from two English-speaking countries, and English Wikipedia.
The difference is labor time compensated for is compensated for, labor time expropriated is not.
Labor time compensated for by Google excessively well is also labor time where workers are producing wealth excessively well. Ken Thompson had a hand in creating an enormous amount of wealth before he stepped foot in Google. Where does all this created wealth come from? The work done by those who work and create wealth at Google (and the uncompensated primitive accumulation of web content - and the taxpayer funded grants to Stanford and for ARPAnet development etc.)
The difference is the union at some level ultimately has to answer to the workers who comprise the union, whereas the corporation is ultimately responsible to the majority stockholders who are expropriating surplus labor time from those working at corporations.
> it is going to be significantly harder to start steering the company's product direction and social responsibility efforts than 'just' representing the employees during e.g. benefits and compensation negotiations.
Unions with a very limited focus on their member's compensation negotiations tend to be either short-lived or so weak it is like they don't exist. Just for survival, unions want wider unionization in their own industry and then other industries and then internationally.
Actually FAANG was already organized against employee compensation in the secret pact between Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt etc. which courts found illegal.
Are corporations and their majority controlling shareholders just representing the employers "during e.g. benefits and compensation negotiations". No. In 1938, the American Enterprise Association (now called AEI) was formed by Chrysler, General Mills, Paine Webber to push corporate hegemony. Their website is one screed after another attacking progressive values. If these companies think it important to spend money attacking, as you call them, progressive values, why should unions limit themselves in not defending them? It makes little sense to start things out with one hand tied behind the back. AEI is just one front of corporate America's many fronts.
> While a union that represents workers interests is a good thing, I think it would be dangerous to give even a part of google to people with ideological fervor.
On a practical level, a union that concentrates just on its members interests, is not able to concentrate on its members interests. Just as one person can be crushed by a company, a union at one company can be crushed by an industry. The UAW organized GM, then Chrysler then Ford (one of the weapon carrying workers in the GM strike was Larry Page's grandfather). This kind of thing is necessary for the survival of one union. If FedEx is not unionized (it is not), that weakens the union at UPS.
The AI researcher said there were racist aspects of Google AI, IIRC. Whatever the specifics of that case, unions do not prosper over the long run with a racial divide. There are numerous cases of jobs traditionally done by black men replaced by white scabs, or vice versa. It is why Bernie Sanders wants less immigration, despite the disapproval of upper middle class liberals to his right - too many unassimilated Latin American workers can be played against native workers in a divide and rule sense.
> an increase in labor supply due to women entering the labor force
In the USA, there has been a (relative) decrease in labor supply due to women leaving the work force. Women's participation in the labor force by percentage has decreased over the past twenty years.
My thesis is that for the earnest young founders mentioned in the essay who want to make the world a better place and to work on X, the trouble starts when they sign a deal with VCs, super seeds etc.
If they are not earnest, but sociopathic, then the thesis does not apply to them. The essay was about earnestness.
Tangentially - if you read the emails, texts etc. found in discovery for Brin, Schmidt etc., they are secretly entering a cartel the DOJ would break up to forbid direct recruitment of their own workers. Even the people who are doing all of the work to supposedly "make the world a better place" are being screwed by the effort, never mind people outside the company and the externalities on the way to that greater profit.
> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound?
I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better.
The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past?
- The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay.
- Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.
- The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company.
It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.
My chair is a commodity. The physical iPhone manufactured at a Foxconn factory has aspects of a commodity.
But is that physical iPhone device worth hundreds of dollars solely for its physical manufacture form? I know that teams of dozens/hundreds are working on software updates to push out over the network to fix problems and enhance the device. This helps make the high price worth it. But here the idea of the device as a traditional commodity breaks down. My chair does not get fixes and improvements pushed to it, at a very low cost, from a relatively small team.
I should note, this does not negate the idea that Foxconn workers are exploited, rather that the math is off. Because the iPhone price is from a mix of traditional manufacture, plus those programmers in Cupertino pushing out updates, and an analysis must take this difference into account.