>Blacklisted search terms on a prototype of the search engine include “human rights”
If there was any remaining debate about Google being something like a “good company,” I hope this will settle it. I’m sure there are many thoughtful and ethical individual employees (such as those who circulated and leaked this memo), but that isn’t represented in executive decision making or the company’s general direction.
I think 3000+ dead US citizens, whose deaths were dismissed as “inflated numbers” by a mendacious reality TV star at the head of a global nuclear empire, kind of speaks for itself on the angle of dystopia
>I don't think it in itself qualifies as unethical even - while uncomfortable to make money from the misfortune of others the alternatives are worse.
Economics doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Puerto Rico is for all intents and purposes a colonial territory of the United States. How ethical a given action is isn’t simply rooted in the action itself, but the history that preceded it and established the power relations upon which any given transaction are premised.
Crypto-currency speculators might not want to see themselves through the lens of colonialism, but that’s because they’re part of those who have benefited from colonial expropriation. You either respect the right of the Puerto Rican people to understand their own circumstances (of which anti-colonialism is a long-running, dominant narrative) or you mythologize away that history because it makes you money and you just don’t care. But the history is real no matter how you dress up your amorality in the narratives of economics.
The Dig is like EconTalk for leftists. Even if you’re not onboard with the ideology, the intelligence, researched depth, and interest of the host Daniel Denvir is matched by little else in media today.
Exactly. Whether it’s H1B abuse or tying work to healthcare, employers don’t want to compete for labor. When the Chamber of Commerce supports a socialized healthcare system, I’ll believe otherwise.
Why don’t you spend a little more time thinking critically about the real options faced by the working poor in a society with vast inequality and decades of flat wage growth?
That he subverted democracy by threatening the Seattle city council as they attempted to address their homelessness crisis makes me skeptical of this effort. I doubt we can do much to fix the underlying issues in a context where billionaires can intimidate governments into surrendering power to their unilateral, authoritarian control.
In Japan, most housing is also a depreciating asset and isn’t used as an investment vehicle for global Capital. You need zoning changes AND this depreciation/disincentive to investment outside individual ownership if you want to recreate their affordability.
>Evolution only selected for those of us who manage to reproduce individually and societally, not for those who tend to live to a ripe old age with a minimum of misery.
Once humans developed complex societal structures, any such discussion of "evolutionary selection" borders on the ludicrous. Who reproduced and survived was (and is) far more dependent on you're relative power and status within these systems than anything even closely resembling natural selection.
Respectfully, I think you might be conflating your own class perspective with those of these workers. Most people in low-wage jobs aren’t giving much thought to whether they enjoy them. They’re meanial and unfulfilling, the people working them are aware of this. They’re generally focused on whether or not they can get through the day without too much abuse and make enough to survive. If they seem consistently unhappy, the answer to that is probably no.
At the point when you recognize this and then choose to proceed apace, you become a “mustache twirling villain.” YouTube crossed that threshold a long, long time ago.
We’re in the middle of the best economy and wages still aren’t rising. Monopoly, monopsony, and free market extremism have crushed them for all but the very few.
And? If Amazon bought a company with poor working conditions, ripe for unionization, it’s their problem. They’re the bosses now.
Maybe the workers hoped things would get better absent labor organization, but now that they’re being managed by a company rife with labor abuses, their circumstances have become more clear to them.
It’s not pure speculation- it’s the worker’s side of the story. You can’t discredit their experience because the other side behaved in such a brazenly stupid fashion that they’re probably being advised to not speak to the press at all. Even if management’s perspective was included in the article, corresponded to your framing, the same would hold true. Your skepticism isn’t really skepticism when it leans consistently in favor of one party or the other.