2k18 what's the worst enormous tech company?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum

bros, bros, bros

shouldn't this be a poll?

🎶 JEFF BEZOS 🎶
🎵 More than meets the eye 🎵 pic.twitter.com/RTXp19lAB1

— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) January 3, 2018

i haven't finished reading this, but i was not aware of this

https://i.imgur.com/K9tzpYq.jpg

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/

The Four have so much power over our lives that most of us would be rocked to the core if one or more of them were to disappear. Imagine not being able to have an iPhone, or having to use Yahoo or Bing for search, or losing years’ worth of memories you’ve posted on Facebook. What if you could no longer order something with one click on the Amazon app and have it arrive tomorrow?

i can't even imagine

I don't know that breaking them up is the *only* logical conclusion...

would be fun to go back in time to any point in history and pose these questions to random folks see what their reaction would be.

Imagine if you could no longer contact your friends through SixDegrees, or if you couldn't discuss the latest episode of Space Ghost on irc. Just imagine, and try not to have a breakdown while imagining.

the core

THE CORE

https://itep.org/amazon-inc-paid-zero-in-federal-taxes-in-2017-gets-789-million-windfall-from-new-tax-law/

The online retail giant has built its business model on tax avoidance, and its latest financial filing makes it clear that Amazon continues to be insulated from the nation’s tax system. In 2017, Amazon reported $5.6 billion of U.S. profits and didn’t pay a dime of federal income taxes on it. The company’s financial statement suggests that various tax credits and tax breaks for executive stock options are responsible for zeroing out the company’s tax this year.

The company’s zero percent rate in 2017 reflects a longer term trend. During the previous five years, Amazon reported U.S. profits of $8.2 billion and paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 11.4 percent. This means the company was able to shelter more than two-thirds of its profits from tax during that five year period.

Incredibly, Amazon’s corporate tax goose egg for 2017 doesn’t include the effect of a second big tax disclosure: the $789 million one-time tax break the company projects it will receive due to the new tax law. While the Trump Administration’s corporate tax cuts generally took effect on January 1st, the law includes a grandfather clause for companies that (like Amazon) have managed to defer or postpone tax liability from prior years.

Instead of paying these deferred taxes at the previous 35 percent rate, Amazon now gets an extra reward for postponing the taxation of this income: a 40 percent discount from 35 to 21 percent. This is the source of Amazon’s $789 million windfall.

For whatever reason Google is not listed as a sponsor on the CPAC website, but is listed in the paper booklets handed out at the conference. https://t.co/ky7FmAEKHF pic.twitter.com/oiDfnCMIs4

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 22, 2018

@shannonrwatts someone at the CPAC conference just sent me the sponsors list. Google is side-by-side with the NRA as a lead sponsor. So much for their "do no evil" mantra. pic.twitter.com/lbpWP2sB3O

— Kevin Grandia (@kgrandia) February 22, 2018

"we support innovation, including initiatives that may or may not be evil"

Apple is a fun hip progressive company that's all about self-expression and helping the Chinese government construct a nightmarish, dystopian panopticon https://t.co/HsLJwrcg6T

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) February 24, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/us/cambridge-analytica-facebook-privacy-data.html

“This was unequivocally not a data breach,” tweeted Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive. “No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”
...
Mr. Bosworth argued on Twitter that a violation had been committed only by Cambridge Analytica and Mr. Kogan, whose app “did not follow the data agreements.”

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, issued a similar defense in a series of tweets that have since been deleted.

“The recent Cambridge Analytica stories by the NY Times and The Guardian are important and powerful, but it is incorrect to call this a ‘breach’ under any reasonable definition of the term,” Mr. Stamos tweeted.

yeah neither of you is a lawyer huh. I hope you guys are fucked

dozens of articles yesterday announcing YouTube's plan to "fight conspiracy theories" no one seems the least bit concerned with how Google–the second largest company in the world–will determine what is and isn't a "conspiracy theory" pic.twitter.com/hbPv5SGGpk

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) March 14, 2018

Has anyone availed themselves of these alternatives to Big Tech products? from Mark Hurst of WFMU and elsewhere:

https://creativegood.com/blog/alternatives-to-big-tech/

I use DuckDuckGo by default for searching and only fall back to Google if it's for work and I come up empty. DuckDuckGo works most of the time and has this cool feature for searching other sites.

I've been a FastMail customer for several years and highly recommend them.

Fuck Google.

Also, while I'm here, fuck Theranos and all the reporters who fell for that.

destroy facebook

as for alternatives:

search -- duckduckgo
email -- airmail
browser -- dolphin on iphone / safari or firefox on macbook
music -- unfortunately still spotify but tbh it's not as bad as people say compared to bandcamp/apple music/google play/youtube/etc
social media -- none

though i still use youtube

at work it's completely different btw

music -- unfortunately still spotify but tbh it's not as bad as people say compared to bandcamp/apple music/google play/youtube/etc

What is wrong with bandcamp? I sometimes see people criticizing it, followed by someone else saying “what is wrong with bandcamp?”, followed by the first person saying “actually bandcamp is fine”

I think lemniscate means it's not dramatically worse for the world than the listed alternatives such that they feel like it's incumbent upon them to avoid Spotify.

this by no means is a simple answer obviously, because there are so many variables but

the percent of revenue sales bandcamp gets is something like 15% plus paypal fees, and while this sounds wonderful on paper, the number of people who buy and how much they spend on that platform is very low

there's a source (see http://www.metalinjection.net/its-just-business/one-indie-artist-broke-down-what-he-makes-from-spotify-youtube-itunes-bandcamp-etc) that says a bandcamp artist wasn't able to sell his music pretty cheaply to more than 75% of his listeners, and i have read a lot of these types of cases online actually, so most people end up giving away their music for free on it, which is what a lot of people recommend. it's a platform to build better relationships with your fanbase, and the free model seems to work really well for this

also bandcamp has very little of the market when lumped with streaming services

so check out https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/07/24/what-streaming-music-services-pay-updated-for-2017/

when compared to other services, spotify has a huge piece of the market, and is more accessible to users, i.e., more people use spotify basically, so while they pay a pittance per stream, you have a larger pool of users who might like your music, as opposed to bandcamp's niche that hardly buys

in the end spotify and youtube are better for revenue (stream and ads respectively), while bandcamp is best for building a dedicated following

I've bounced between the streaming services, but if you really care about revenue making it to the artist, buy something.

I don't really count bandcamp as "streaming" because 99% of the music I listen to from it is stuff I've purchased, even if I'm streaming it because it's not currently on my phone.

The pure-streaming platforms, even if they let you download music within the app, are kind of a different animal, imo

I'm also hesitant to qualify Amazon overall as a "tech" company because half their business is "Wal-Mart, but online" and the other half is divided between gadgets that gather metrics to get you to buy more things and a platform that's basically a spun-off datacenter in a box offering

that is, the latter is a tech company and fucks up infrastructure in a completely different way from the warehouse fuckery

yeah they're more like the worst enormous company

mh you do realize amazon is more than online walmart right?

out of its many subsidiaries and products, twitch, streaming video, and amazon echo, which does home automation, just to name a few

amazon cloud is a huge part of its business, they're very much a tech company

all that's true, I just think calling them a "tech" company diminishes the true extent of their ambitions. I mean they also own physical grocery stores and run a movie/TV studio; they want to expand into healthcare and shipping. They're basically unprecedented afaict

I kind of lumped the digital entertainment stuff in with the latter, which is tech

I mean, I did mention gadgets! The music business seems ephemeral compared to their other ventures, the studios are definitely a disruptive straight-to-market thing in the netflix mold

I think “tech” as a descriptor becomes less of a qualifier as existing companies use the same underlying technology. The common thread outside of actual technology use is “disruptive” market targeting and ridiculous stock valuation

So I’d grandfather companies actually making computers/software as their core business in, but that’s probably a personal bias

all that is keeping Tesla from being GM with shoddier QA is their computer stuck in the middle of the dash

we’re only a couple decades removed from the time when cable television was really disruptive tech

we're only a couple decade removed from the concept of owning a personal computer being a niche thing

Gak! disrupted my 1990s

true!

I somehow include Dell in “tech” but they’re not by this definition. I don’t think they innovate in any significant way. They’re a commodity appliance company.

IBM probably manages to spend more on R&D than Dell still, despite their best efforts to become a company that sells nothing to nobody.

IBM does r&d but it’s the tiniest slice of their business

Of the products they sell for $$$ to large corporations, software-wise, they bought 80% of it through acquisitions

I use a bunch of their crap daily and the utility of most of it is being eclipsed by open source or more robust upstarts. I think one of their largest accounts is their message queuing server and associated software sales to wal-mart

not really the place to post this but my facebook quit lasted a whole three days. too much good stuff (all or mostly from ilxors) with an unspecified amount of me being lonely mixed in. don’t hate the players hate the game or something.

4. https://t.co/QRfgwkNj80 Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lbs in one day?) and income

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Stunning that more people don't know this.

I mean Google Takeout will wake most people out of their slumber if they are not lazy.

mh otm Watson & WebMQ are like the whole company now

it’s so fucking weird, we were evaluating products implementing a certain enterprise authorization standard and IBM has one, but they integrated it into an appliance and none of the support pages have been updated for over five years

their “let’s get modern” approach for a long time was to just buy a company making a tool people need now, then never updating that product ever again. they aren’t alone in that approach but they’re one of the worst offenders. also, the appliance crap is exactly what hbo’s Silicon Valley show is parodying and they’re otm

They're basically unprecedented afaict

they're sears-roebuck

hot take, no tech company should be "reminding" me of old posts or photos at any time ever. apple photos ffs just pinged "you have a new memory" with a shitty picture i've skipped over hundreds of times for a reason.

https://mondaynote.com/mark-zuckerberg-thinks-were-idiots-638c64dfab12

mark zuckerberg otm

People think Amazon has the most positive impact on society out of any major tech company
CEO Jeff Bezos’s decisions also have the greatest impact on their daily lives.

Due to Facebook and Google not complying with WA electoral law on political ad disclosure, the state passed a rule clarifying that this applies to digital ads.

It "takes effect" today (the law has been in effect since 1972). As of today, Google will no longer take ads aimed at influencing ballot measures or elections....... in Washington State only.

yay democracy is saved

Fuck Google, still the worst ever

Google still the worst ever, even Trump thinks so

Due to Facebook and Google not complying with WA electoral law on political ad disclosure, the state passed a rule clarifying that this applies to digital ads.

It "takes effect" today (the law has been in effect since 1972). As of today, Google will no longer take ads aimed at influencing ballot measures or elections....... in Washington State only.

― we used to get our kicks reading surfing MAGAzines (sic), Friday, June 8, 2018 3:28 AM (three months ago)

yay democracy is saved

― and TOWERS MONACO as 'seaman' (bizarro gazzara), Friday, June 8, 2018 3:31 AM (three months ago)

...records from the state Public Disclosure Commission and local candidates show that despite the company's self-imposed ad ban, Google has in fact sold more than $6,000 in political ads aimed at Washington's elections since it announced the ban on June 7.

The majority of those ads were purchased by Republican State Senator Joe Fain of south King County, who has reported spending $5,000 on Google ads since July.

...Republican State Representative Vicki Kraft['s] campaign finance disclosures say she bought a total of $933.74 worth of Google ads since July.

...Unlike Google, Facebook made clear it would continue selling Washington state political ads despite the lawsuit and the newly clarified state regulations.

Public Disclosure Commission records indicate that so far this year, Washington state campaigns have spent more than $90,000 on Facebook ads.

And today both Google and Facebook are going to the state capital to lobby for their ability to undermine democracy to be legalised.

want to read an epic thread about how bad it apparently was to work on google+?

Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.

I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 9, 2018

it seems to have picked up traction on twitter and it's really juicy and all that shit. however, i guess i'm the lone dissenter who thinks "fuck google, but also fuck THIS GUY"

it's depressing as living fuck to read through. poor guy who had to get paid only $115K per year + $100K in stock, and there were dumb people that he had to work with, and people that didn't appreciate him

fuck off morgan

i'm sick of reading 100-post essays on twitter. get a website.

you are not the lone "also fuck this guy," there are at least two of us

You didn't stop working while your grandmother was dying, not because you'd get fired because of it but because your Google project was so important to you? My sympathy is minimal.

Lol that guy is an incredibly pompous spoiled brat who sucks

I can hardly imagine the level of self-regard & precious entitlement required to begin writing that thread. NOBODY CARES WHERE YOU CAME FROM

Fuck that guy. I hope everything he touches is destroyed and forgotten.

posts # ONE HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT and ONE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE on that thread:

On my way out, Greg tried to chit-chat and shake my hand. It took everything in me not to tell him to go fuck himself.

I walked past his extended hand, and said “Nah, man.”

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 15, 2018

He said, “Pfftt, really!?”

I turned around and looked him the eye as I backed out of the door.

“Yeah, really.”

The end -

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 15, 2018

meanwhile, a bystander who witnessed this interaction cough-whispered "FUCK BOTH OF YOUUUUUUU"

it's strange that he thinks that thread makes google look bad and him look good

there isn't even much about google+ being a misguided product in it, it's mostly just complaining about your boss publicly

it's the replies that get me. almost universally they praise him for being a wonderful storyteller

i haven't been to california since i was 16 but i am going to try to stay at least 1000 miles away from san francisco for the rest of my life

that thread reads exactly like something I’d expect a guy with this avi to write tbh

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1035062189353185282/GFHibt_J_400x400.jpg

Greg: https://i.imgur.com/gqmHkMj.jpg
Morgan: “Nah, man"https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1035062189353185282/GFHibt_J_400x400.jpg
Greg: “Pfftt, really!?”https://i.imgur.com/gqmHkMj.jpg
Morgan: “Yeah, really."https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1035062189353185282/GFHibt_J_400x400.jpg

The end -

Facebook's argument to Washington is that they should be allowed to continue to influence elections without disclosing anything at all about their actions and the money they take for them, because this regulation gives them immunity from any state law anywhere ever.

That argument only serves their interests as long as elected officials feel like Section 230 works in their favor. What a stupid fucking mess.

Trends in my FB circle is that people are posting (24hour?) goodbye posts before permanently deleting their account (3 friends in the past 36 hours).

At least with Friendster and MySpace the buzz just faded away, this is more of a toxic amputation. This combined with an nearly 90 day swoon seems pretty real to me. I spent last weekend with my senior-aged folks and even they aren't as attached to the site as much as they were in the past few years.

ban facebook

I had a friend who quit facebook for good about 6 years ago and never looked back

we actually write handwritten letters back and forth now, lol

Usu use pigeon post now tbh

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft said Friday that it would sell the military and intelligence agencies whatever advanced technologies they needed “to build a strong defense,” just months after Google told the Pentagon it would refuse to provide artificial intelligence products that could build more accurate drones or compete with China for next-generation weapons.

The announcement, made quietly in a small, town-hall-style meeting with the software giant’s leadership on Thursday, then planned to be published on a blog Friday afternoon, underscores the radically different paths these leading American technology firms are taking as they struggle with their role in creating a new generation of cyberweapons to help, and perhaps someday replace, American warriors.

But the divergent paths taken by Google and Microsoft also underscore concerns inside the American defense and intelligence establishments about how the United States will take on a rising China.

The Chinese government has, in just the past two years, set goals for dominance in the next decade in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies that it believes will allow its military and intelligence agencies to surpass those of the United States. Pentagon officials have questioned how committed domestic technology companies are to keeping the United States on the leading edge, the way Raytheon, Boeing, IBM and McDonnell Douglas did in the Cold War.

Google encountered fierce opposition from young engineers to the company’s participation in “Project Maven,” a program to improve how drones recognize and select their targets. Google declared a few weeks ago it would not bid on a multibillion dollar contract to provide the Pentagon with “cloud services” to store and process vast amounts of data. Amazon, for its part, appears willing to supply its services to the military and intelligence agencies, and it runs the information cloud services that power the Central Intelligence Agency.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/us/politics/ai-microsoft-pentagon.html

https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.html

Whenever there's a big Google story in the news, I always think of this, the funniest thing ever written about Google, from the New Yorker profile of the writers of "Silicon Valley" https://t.co/RAfCJITMOg pic.twitter.com/y48bNI1NeK

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) October 25, 2018

I've been thinking about it, and here's my ranking of tech companies by how evil they are:

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Facebook
3. Uber (tied)

— Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen) November 13, 2018

BTW, after watching this my vote for most evil is FB.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-asked-police-in-spain-to-intervene-warehouse-strike-2018-11

Amazon asked police in Spain to intervene in a mass strike at a warehouse on the outskirts of Madrid, according to local reports.

Amazon wanted a police presence at the warehouse to ensure that productivity remained high within the fulfilment center, while workers staged their protest outside, according to Spanish newspaper El Confidencial.

A source at Spanish union CCOO, which helped coordinate the strikes, told Business Insider that Amazon "wanted to send the police inside the warehouse to push people to work."

Amazon strongly denied the claims and called it "the worst kind of misinformation."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/24/mps-seize-cache-facebook-internal-papers

Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.

The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.

bring iiit

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dt836zdXQAA-30N.jpg:large

An open letter to @Facebook, @Twitter, @Instagram and @Experian regarding algorithms and my son's birth: pic.twitter.com/o8SuLMuLNv

— Gillian Brockell (@gbrockell) December 11, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/what-sund4r-pichai-couldnt-explain-to-congress/577903/

Google’s admittedly liberal employees, Republicans said, must, somehow, be tinkering with search rankings. “You’re so surrounded by liberality that hates conservatism, hates people who really love our constitution and the freedoms it has afforded to people like you,” Texas Representative Louie Gohmert told Pichai. “You don’t even recognize it. You’re like a blind man who doesn’t even know what light looks like.”

i don't exactly feel sorry pichai, but getting lectured about the truth by Louie Gohmert when you can't really respond must be the most agonizing thing on earth

Where would Alice Walker even find antisemitic conspiracy theories? Well... https://t.co/lMU8h9ftWN pic.twitter.com/JdzpdWAa3Z

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) December 17, 2018

I read that whole thing thinking it was Alice Waters

that's really weird and depressing

uh

did she get like hacked or whatever like that one twitter lady

if she was hacked, it was by people who've mastered google SEO

https://www.splcenter.org/20170118/google-and-miseducation-dylann-roof

google deemphasized specific sites named in this 2017 article after it made the rounds. but their engine still operates under the same principles.

She said in the NYTimes that she’s reading a David Icke book, it’s not a hack. YouTube and social media claim another Baby Boomer.

Is there a thread on Theranos anywhere? I've been totally oblivious to the story up until now (not seen it/her on TV or anything) but have just finished the Carreyrou book and have loads of questions! I know there's a podcast starting today and a film in the pipeline...

discussed in detail on this thread: Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

although you have to go back a couple years

cheers

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/30/mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-stronger-regulation-of-internet

Fuck this clown. Disavowing all responsibility for the monster he has created whilst practically declaring it an institution worthy of protection.

Qualcomm has been in the running for this prize for many years.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cell-phone-industry-for-almost-20-years/

A couple of crazy bits (and I've experienced these in my job):

Qualcomm's patent licensing fees were calculated based on the value of the entire phone, not just the value of chips that embodied Qualcomm's patented technology.

The other one that was nuts?

patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips.