Are Tech Companies Squandering 'the Good of All' for Extractive Behaviors? (oreilly.com) 67
"If I worked in tech antitrust policy, I would really want to understand why all the cases against Microsoft 20 years ago were such an unqualified failure." That's what venture capitalist Benedict Evans (formerly an Andreessen Horowitz partner), is asking regulators on Twitter.
"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the thread of reminiscent reactions from Microsoft employees prompted this response on the blog of software developer Dave Winer "to lament the collateral damage of a winner-take-all mentality." "Microsoft could've played a senior role, and helped the rest of us add all kinds of editors and databases to the web, and at least try to bring across some of the GUI innovations of the 1980s. Instead all that was lost. Today, decades later, because of the chaos Microsoft brought us then, the editors on the web still suck. They are really inferior. Far less useful than the editors we had before the web.
"What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children."
But are we facing the same issues today? In The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?, geek publishing icon/seed investor Tim O'Reilly checks in on tech's latter-day missed opportunities: The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits"...
It's a sad time for Silicon Valley, because we are seeing not only the death of its youthful idealism but a missed opportunity. Paul Cohen, the former DARPA program manager for AI, made a powerful statement a few years ago at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences that we both attended: "The opportunity of AI is to help humans model and manage complex interacting systems." That statement sums up so much of the potential that is squandered when firms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook fall prey to the Friedman doctrine rather than setting more ambitious goals for their algorithms.
I'm not talking about future breakthroughs in AI so much as I'm talking about the fundamental advances in market coordination that the internet gatekeepers have demonstrated. These powers can be used to better model and manage complex interacting systems for the good of all. Too often, though, they have been made subservient to the old extractive paradigm."
"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the thread of reminiscent reactions from Microsoft employees prompted this response on the blog of software developer Dave Winer "to lament the collateral damage of a winner-take-all mentality." "Microsoft could've played a senior role, and helped the rest of us add all kinds of editors and databases to the web, and at least try to bring across some of the GUI innovations of the 1980s. Instead all that was lost. Today, decades later, because of the chaos Microsoft brought us then, the editors on the web still suck. They are really inferior. Far less useful than the editors we had before the web.
"What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children."
But are we facing the same issues today? In The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?, geek publishing icon/seed investor Tim O'Reilly checks in on tech's latter-day missed opportunities: The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits"...
It's a sad time for Silicon Valley, because we are seeing not only the death of its youthful idealism but a missed opportunity. Paul Cohen, the former DARPA program manager for AI, made a powerful statement a few years ago at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences that we both attended: "The opportunity of AI is to help humans model and manage complex interacting systems." That statement sums up so much of the potential that is squandered when firms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook fall prey to the Friedman doctrine rather than setting more ambitious goals for their algorithms.
I'm not talking about future breakthroughs in AI so much as I'm talking about the fundamental advances in market coordination that the internet gatekeepers have demonstrated. These powers can be used to better model and manage complex interacting systems for the good of all. Too often, though, they have been made subservient to the old extractive paradigm."
Word salad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Word salad. (Score:4, Interesting)
Companies are only as concerned with profitability as their shareholders demand. If CEOs seem overzealous in their pursuit of more money it's only because they've seen the pile of former executives that failed to accomplish what we demanded of them. And yet we all act surprised at this.
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So basically it's one more victim of the top 10% being greedy? (and really, mostly the top 1%?) Everybody else combined doesn't own enough stock to have any influence.
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Even the people who supposedly aren't actually are. No one wants environmental regulations because it's the right thing to do. They just don't want
Re:Word salad. (Score:4, Interesting)
>Anyone who has an IRA or a pension owns stock
Yes, but my point is that the overwhelming majority is owned by the top 10%, and most of that by the top 1%. Everybody else combined owns such a minority stake in any corporation that their views are completely irrelevant to any but the closest of shareholder votes. Even if we all agreed on something in opposition to the 10% , we'd be hard pressed to elect even a single member to the board of directors to reflect our will. And it probably wouldn't matter since the rest of the board could easily outvote them.
>Odds are that you're in the global top 10%
Globally, quite possibly. However, wealth is not the issue - power is. If I took my wealth to one of the poorest nations on Earth, I could buy some local influence. Not much, since the 1% have their fingers deep in those pies too, but some. Anywhere else - nobody cares what me an my pittance of wealth wants.
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Yes, but my point is that the overwhelming majority is owned by the top 10%, and most of that by the top 1%...
Please provide proof of this statement because that sounds made-up.
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Re:Word salad. (Score:5, Informative)
The second* relevant link when I searched for stock ownership by shareholder income claims 84% held by the top 10% https://money.com/stock-owners... [money.com]
But really, why would you think that sounds made up? Wouldn't you expect stock ownership distribution to (very roughly) track overall wealth distribution, which is itself wildly unequal? Lest you find that also difficult to believe, here's the first result from searching for wealth distribution in the US - from the federal reserve this time: https://www.federalreserve.gov... [federalreserve.gov]
To summarize, in Q4 2020
Top 1% owned - $38.61T
90 to 99th percentile- $46.99T
50% to 90% - $34.81T
Bottom 50% - $2.49T
Total - $122.90T
So, the top 10% own (38.61+46.99)/122.90 = 69.65% of all wealth in the US, while the bottom half own about 2.03%, and the upper middle class and lower upper class combined own the remaining 28.3%
* the filter was absolutely *convinced* the first link was ascii art, lord only knows why. WTF is up with the filter lately? It can't be that hard to distinguish large blocks of gibberish from a typical web address.
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Oh, and as for "they're just like us"
1) They're not - they have power, and are accustomed to wielding it. Their motives may be similar, but their methods are very different.
2) In a just society, with great power comes great responsibility.
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Nope, that is the delusion. The reality, the corporate executives they actually get, yes, they are devote 100% of the efforts on profit, morality gets 0%. Do you think that makes rich corporations or poor corporations?
It makes temporarily rich corporations because the sole focus of those corporate executives is on 100% on profit and 0% on morality, which means they are laser focused in on their own individual short term maximised profit. What happens to the customers who cares more profit for me, what happ
Re:Word salad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely right, but your reasoning starts on step 2. Step 1 is, who decides which executives to hire? And who decides how the executive bonuses, etc. are decided (i.e. the incentive structure that motivates the executives)? The board of directors, as elected by the stockholders (which is to say, the rich who own the overwhelming majority of shares).
So long as the executive bonuses are based on quarterly earnings, *of course* the executives are going to sell out the company to maximize quarterly earnings. Just like basing programmer bonuses on lines of code will result in pointlessly longwinded code. Skip the bonuses in favor of stock options that vest in ten or twenty years, and you'll get executives that will seek to maximize the long-term value of the company instead of quarterly earnings.
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...If CEOs seem overzealous in their pursuit of more money it's only because they've seen the pile of former executives that failed to accomplish what we demanded of them. And yet we all act surprised at this.
And when piles of broke companies lay on the trash heap of Chapter 11, former investors shouldn't act surprised when the CEO manages to do the dumb predictable thing because of Greed.
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This is it right here.
Public companies are not the only form of business organization in life. They are a great way to quickly raise money and expand. Yet, if you were to invest in a company, you'd also wait it to focus on returns.
I find this the most frustrating part in the public psyche. People think things are either public corporations or government run. In reality, there's so much in between.
Non-Profits are a huge thing. It might surprise people to know that in the US, most healthcare is actually non-p
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When you start a company, you have expenses; salaries of personnel, bandwidth, office space, in order to advance the mission of the company. To deal with those costs, you have broadly 3 scenarios:
1) Pay for it yourself. if you're a billionaire you can likely afford a loss-leader company if the mission matters to
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Yup. Another incoherent navel gazing article about the death of Silicon Valley.
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Some would say that Silicon Valley was over by about 1990. The idea that 'the web' and 'the internet' defines the era of Silicon Valley is a little silly.
Does the Pope wear a funny hat? (Score:1)
Dave whiner is naive... (Score:5, Interesting)
What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone
This quote shoes a terrible naivette on behalf of this slashdotter, Microsoft and the rest are accelerating their plans towards hardware + OS drm marriage. Since the game industry in 1997 with ultima online the entire software industry has been jealous of what the game industry has gotten away with mmo's (aka stolen rpg's, where companies can determine whether software lives or dies) - literally stolen and back ended every piece of big budget game from the public and are raking in ridiculous profits.
Windows 10 is the first serious attempt at establishing trusted computing, UWP is where the are changing how executables work and are working towards encrypted and locked down file systems users can't access via Active directory/Winnt permissions tech and managed remotely. For those who don't know what trusted computing is see here:
Trusted computing [cam.ac.uk]
Corporations are gaining state powers to impose their political will over the network, because the internet is one giant computer. Two or more machines in a network behave as and become a single device. So the entire tech industry see's the global tech infrastructure as their own personal mainframe, they are taking us to a world of mainframe computing again where customers PC's will be locked down dumb clients.
This was the agenda from the very beginning. Microsoft and the rest have always wanted to kill piracy and remove control of PC's from the user. Everyone's seen the ridiculous profits on mobile a locked down platform.
Making the internet worse and locked down kids, is all about profits, if you think tech companies want open platforms, I got news for you, you haven't been paying attention to the numbers.
Locked down software on mobile profits vs pc and console [newzoo.com]
Re:Dave whiner is naive... (Score:5, Insightful)
The market has spoken. People might complain vocally about privacy and control-of-hardware issues, but that will not stop them from continuing to use Windows in the name of convenience. Convenience reigns supreme. The ordinary computer user will give up their mother's soul for a little convenience. Microsoft knows this, as do all the other Tech giants.
Some of us reject this and use Linux instead. For this decision we receive mockery and derision, and are judged as weird and possibly criminal (only HACKERS use Linux, after all). And anyway there are too few of us.
So long as people continue to do whatever Microsoft tells them, these problems will continue to get worse, and no amount of starry-eyed hippy-dippy blogging will change any of it.
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Some of us reject this and use Linux instead. For this decision we receive mockery and derision, and are judged as weird and possibly criminal (only HACKERS use Linux, after all).
But don't we sometimes see similar things on the Linux side? Some of the decisions Canonical has made, for instance, seem to go against the Linux way (and possibly even go against the GPL) - but people still use Ubuntu because it's easy. Or Linux users who still chose Nvidia graphics cards despite their binary blobs because of perceived performance gains.
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'easy'?
Ubuntu's GUI nightmares made me install raw Debian stable.
They took Gnome 2 (aka Mate), replaced it with Unity (aka Lomiri) and now have some frankenstein looking Gnome 3 abomination. FWIW I did recently try installing AMD64 Xubuntu, but even Gnome 3 polluted that experience by silently installing some kind of systemd session daemon so that I couldn't even logout of xfce.
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Or Linux users who still chose Nvidia graphics cards despite their binary blobs because of perceived performance gains.
I think the perception is that nvidia has working drivers and AMD doesn't. Although the OSS AMD driver has advanced by leaps and bounds, embarrassing things like DPMS still don't work out of the box.
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There isn't really a choice, for non-nerd users. That is the problem and always has been, and it's the only reason the steaming pile of dogshit that is Mic
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Specifically, China is catching up to the US in everything tech. They are still largely in the "copy and improve" step, but we are talking a few years until they will surpass the west, at the current rate of highly educated people their universities churn out. Laugh about them all you want, by chance alone there will be enough geniuses among them to replace much of Silicon Valley within the next two or three decades.
Likewise, we don't even have Africa on the radar, but they leaped right past ISDN and Cable
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The fatal flaw of open platforms like Linux is that there is a tension between choice and standardization, and too much choice fragments the market. Android vs. iOS is the same problem.
The ordinary computer user thinks of their computer as an appliance they use to get to the internet, run software, and maybe play games. To beat Windows, you need to be able to run Microsoft Office or better and a reliable consistent user interface. Apple has both, Linux has neither.
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short attention span? (Score:4, Insightful)
"What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children."
WTF, was this guy not around back then ??
The reason why they didn't make anything better for anyone, is because they were trying to make everything better for themselves, and fuck everyone else. You know, maybe they actually *are* spoiled children. And stupid is as stupid does.
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Normally I'd say the guy wasn't born yet, but there are exceptions that stay naive all their lives.
Antitrust policy and Microsoft? (Score:1)
Microsoft started donating on Capitol hill.
"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"
In what parallel universe did this happen? They own the desktop and with their subscription model in the cloud, you're totally locked in to the "experience".
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You're not alone, the person is delusional, the last 20 years the tech industry was granted it's wish by the public buying back ended everything so we've lost control of our pc's.
Re:Antitrust policy and Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"
In what parallel universe did this happen? They own the desktop and with their subscription model in the cloud, you're totally locked in to the "experience".
I think the point here is that MS doesn't call the shots like it once did, when IE was burying Netscape and Windows smothered OS/2 in its crib. These days MS is engineering *nix interoperability into its OS and basing its browser on Google's codebase - that's a far cry from their position 20 years ago. If anything, the pushing of the subscription model is actually a symptom of their loosening grip on the industry.
That said, this summary is still a mess of disjointed thought. It's not so much that the problem isn't clear, as that there are several unrelated ones, entirely disconnected to the information presented. The words are in a proper, grammatically correct order, they just don't mean anything.
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MS calls the shots on what spreadsheet I use. If I use anything else, I can't be sure that my spreadsheet will look the same to the person I mail it to.
Same thing with Word, if the document is complex, or required for any legal handling.
If I'm writing software, MS calls the shot that it has to work under their OS, which may limit the software's ability to take advantage of any better things about any other OS.
Those three things call a LOT of shots for a LOT of types of work; hundreds of millions of people
Wait...I don't understand the problem? (Score:3)
Late-1990's and early 2000s Microsoft was not the company you wanted working on the web. ActiveX, IE6, IIS5? There's a reason why all of that is passe...because it sucked. It made the web suck. And if the recent Exchange hacks are any indication, there is zero reason to wish those products back into dominance.
What GUI innovations are 'lost' here, exactly? Plenty of the research done in the 1980's are still available for use. Perhaps MS hasn't made every single study or UI paradigm public domain, but I don't get what the issue is. UIs have generally been moving away from most of the 80s paradigms for a while now. Depth, skeuomorphism, text labels, high contrast color pallets, professional language choices, and similar things that were core tenets of software in the 80s are all basically gone in favor of...basically the absence of all of those things.
As far as editors and databases go...Visual Studio still exists, and MS SQL exists, with nothing stopping the author from using either of them. Or, the arguably-superior Eclipse, MariaDB, and Postgres can be used instead, and that ignores a plethora of other options for niche applications. So what, exactly, is it that there is a desire to exist, but doesn't? And what's stopping the author from either coding it, or commissioning it to be coded?
Finally, we turn the corner into discussing AI...but AI has a whole lot of far more fundamental problems. Self-driving cars face a liability problem that remains unsettled. Many sorting and ranking algorithms end up showing bias, which raises the uncomfortable questions as to whether the test data wasn't a good cross-section (and thus makes such an algorithm dormant until 'good' test data can be accquired), or it was (and companies like Google must embrace the uncomfortable realities stemming from both the data and algorithm are correct). If we get all the way to truly-sentient AI, a whole lot of sci-fi starts coming to life. ...so, forgive me for not reading the article, but shy of waxing nostalgic for the brief window of time somewhere between 2006ish and 2008ish when there was a 'changing of the guard' between MS and Google/Facebook having an uncomfortable amount of control over the web, the summary, at least, fails miserably at establishing a problem.
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Netscape was working to be the proprietary backend to the Web when Microsoft defeated them. No, I'm not saying Netscape is guilty and Microsoft is innocent. But the reverse story gets tossed around on forums like this all the time.
Netscape had a vision of 'taking over the desktop' with their proprietary server backend and their 'free' browser. Neither 'side' was controlled by starry eyed idealists. The once independent team at NCSA had been purchased by Netscape.
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Depth, skeuomorphism, text labels, high contrast color pallets, professional language choices, and similar things that were core tenets of software in the 80s are all basically gone in favor of...basically the absence of all of those things.
They're gone in favor of things that non-artists can build.
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For productivity-oriented applications, rich GUI's are still superior to web oriented interfaces. Mobile UI's are a crippled subset of GUI's. If you want to play in social media, it's fine, but not for do
These.... are the experts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regarding the anti-trust action against Microsoft - it never really went anywhere because THE PROCESS ACCOMPLISHED THE GOAL. Despite how many forum posts there are about MS being a monopoly, it never really was. Not like the monopolies of the early 1900s and before. Now, those were REAL monopolies. In the late 1800s you wanted to ship something large? You bought the ticket from Pennsylvania Railroad and the oil was purchased from Standard Oil. You paid whatever prices they set, licked their boots and thanked them for the privilege.
Microsoft was just starting to tickle the edges of true monopoly. Left unchecked, they would have finished putting Apple out of business, strangled the open source movement, Google would definitely have never existed, they would have made sure that Facebook was either absorbed or stillborn, etc. etc. Instead, regulators put them through the wringer. Made a huge stink, publicly investigated them, hauled Gates before congress and ripped him a few new ones, etc. etc. No need to actually break them up because Microsoft (read: Bill Gates) got the message and changed course. Gates rescued Apple and they played reasonably nice with the rest of the ecosystem. Nothings perfect, but MS is most definitely NOT a monopoly in computer tech.
And the other guy: lamenting about MS not playing a senior role in guiding tech development - that it EXACTLY the purpose of anti-monopoly laws and actions. If MS had been in the drivers seat, the rest of the ecosystem would have been subsumed by them. You don't want any single company guiding too much. No company can handle that responsibly. The drive to monetize power is simply too great. That power is for a democratically elected government to wield... if it is to be wielded at all.
I, too, live in a bunker (Score:2)
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Wait, you went into a bunker for 20 years without *nix?
You either had a huge library, or suffered badly.
Wait, you're going back down there?!?! Download some free software before you go. A lot has changed.
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Guilty of "Extractive Behavior? (Score:1)
That would be the drug companies [msf.org]. Big Tech® only takes what is given to them
On a good day, being good is OK. (Score:2)
In my experience, large corporations are usually unconcerned about the general welfare of the people or even of their own industry until their own profit is optimized. After they have taken care of themselves, they might think about what is best for everyone else. I am not certain this was ever true with Microsoft, though. They always were predatory and concerned with their own dominance. To illustrate this I can paraphrase Neal Stephenson's metaphor in his "In the Beginning Was the Command Line.": For
Gone (Score:4, Insightful)
At one time:
Altavista was the #1 search engine by a wide margin
Myspace was the #1 social platform
Yahoo was the #1 home/start page
Digg was one of the top web sites
Internet Explorer was the top browser, by a WIDE margin
Palm and Nokia made the most popular smart phones
They've all been replaced, sometimes by something that itself was replaced with something else.
The trick with the internet is to make sure things can keep getting replaced. The problem with regulations is that, more often than not, they make sure things *cannot* be replaced.
What reality is this person living in? (Score:3)
"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"
Who won? When has Microsoft's dominance gone? Try dealing with any company without MSOffice. Options exist but the proprietary tools that Microsoft controls are almost unavoidable. About 40 years into it and the only reason we can share with Microsoft is because of open standards. The biggest impediment to innovation in technology was Microsoft. The reason Microsoft is loosing traction is because people chose open standards like the web instead of MSN.
Microsoft's dominance on the PC is still holding firm. Look at the sales figures.
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A few things here...
1. The 97-2003 file formats have been usable for decades now. The 2007+ file formats have been usable in OO/LO and other tools since shortly after their inception. Yes, complex formatting and nested Excel formulas can get weird, but do the same sort of things in LO and open it in WordPerfect and you'll have similar issues. Pretty much every document is going to become less and less cross-platform as the specifics increase.
1b. Plenty of other industries have similar issues. PSD and AI are
What is adopted is random (Score:2)
Expect too much (Score:1)
Microsoft is Better; the Industry is Worse.. (Score:4, Interesting)
After Steve Ballmer left, Microsoft opened up and embraced much of the rest of the world of operating systems and software developers. Under Gates and Ballmer, there was utterly no real innovation in technology but only masterful, highly aggressive, and predatory sales. Microsoft's positioning by ownership of DOS lead to Windows and Microsoft Office. Until XBox, these were the only profitable divisions of Microsoft. And XBox only succeeded because it slipped through the cracks and broke out before Microsoft Executives gave it any real notice.
Post-Ballmer, Microsoft has done well with more and has turned the company around, more or less -- which was an impressive feat during the rise of Google's office suite and so many popular alternative software development environments and languages.
Today the industry is rife with investors who seem to be seeking more to make money from other investors--or at least so has been the predominant experience I have seen in startups. They teach and guide with great attention to imagery and legal paperwork. They pump a startup team up, sell to other investors, and then cash out themselves before it fails. At the very least, the team members learn a lot in the process, even if it leaves a bitter taste... as it often does.
I started writing software when a was a teenager thinking it was an industry in which you don't need money but only time to be successful in. It takes time to write good software. I still think that is really the case. Many of the most successful startups began in down economies. And it's true inspiration in one's work and its potential that makes for great products and services. Investors put that far on the back burner in favor of imagery and marketing.
Making a product better is creating something simpler that does more. That is called "beauty" in mathematics. Success depends on if it is useful or fun with very little effort. I once assisted with proof reading of a graduate student's manuscript for a study that discovered that uglier web sites were more popular. Ugliness was the strongest predictor of popularity. Why? Follow up studies demonstrated that it was because they also tended to be the simplest to use. The ugliness was because less experienced developers tended to make uglier but also simpler web sites. A prime example is Craigslist. In my own experience, some of the most popular software for within organizations has been on teams with the least experienced developers. More experienced developers tend to over engineer and loose touch with regular users.... and typically don't notice.
--Matthew C. Tedder
How about if we cowboy up and... (Score:2)
Before it is too late
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It's already criminal... mostly.
It's just not enforced. Because it's seen in a different light. Mostly because "it's only business". As if that would excuse anything.
Real GUI's, I miss you (Score:2)
We could have had a nice state-ful GUI markup standard for CRUD and productivity applications. Instead we have the convoluted shit-ball known as DOM/CSS, and garbage like Bootstrap meant for social networks.
It's not too late.
Dystopian Salad Dressing (Score:1)
"These powers can be used to better model and manage complex interacting systems for the good of all."
people = "complex interacting systems"
manage = "control"
calcifying power and restricting freedoms = "for the good of all"
Be weary of abstract language like this because it often hides an insidious underbelly. In my view, big tech has already gone too far in controlling opinions and being the judge of who is allowed to have a real voice. The algorithms are not impartial based on the people's vote and there's
Milton Friedman? (Score:2)
Never let a sociopath define your social responsibilities.
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Well, according to studies, the vast majority of US students of the past decades were sociopaths/psychopaths. (Medically, it's the same thing actually. At least according to tho ICD.)
And according to those studies, it was also only in the US and some of the western world where this was the case.
So it's less "a sociopath" and closer to "the species homo psychopathis", to be frank.
Not trying to offend or put anyone down. My own brother is a major case of this, outdoing even Friedman. I still love him. I'm jus
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Well, according to studies, the vast majority of US students of the past decades were sociopaths/psychopaths. (Medically, it's the same thing actually. At least according to tho ICD.)
And according to those studies, it was also only in the US and some of the western world where this was the case.
I could perhaps posit that people like Friedman are responsible when you look back at the psychometric testing that rolled in from him and his kind in the 70s and 80s and went into Corporate America's boardrooms to guide who got hired and promoted - the extremists.
These people are then held up as paragons for others to emulate; the whole of society is distorted by a handful of economists who think that the goal of the economy is to make profits instead of to improve life.
Of course, capitalism encourages thi
Euphemisms for psychopathy (Score:2)
Let's be honest: If these were people, not corporations, the diagnosis would be psychopathy.
Profit, no matter what. No matter any harm done to anyone. Zero conscience, zero empathy. That's the textbook definition right there.
But corporations are *made of* people. (Mitt Romney "forgot" to add those middle words.)
So while they may not be psychopaths, they will still act like ones.
And most importantly: We must start treating it as such.
It *is* an illness or a crime to put profits over things that are actually
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But look at the top comments.
People don't even get what TFA is about.
They are so grown into it, they think it's normal.
At some point I realized that it is better to look at the world like one of these scifi/fantasy where society got taken over by a satanic cult and everybody are pretending that virgin sacrifices are a normal and sane thing. It's better to just accept that these stories reflect the real world rather than to wonder how could it be.
Innovation and Risk Mitigation (Score:2)
Nothing has changed (Score:2)
In 2000 I was using icq yahoo and aim to messenger people via text and yahoo and icq for random video calls. I was using dragon speaking naturally to talk to my computer and have it issue commands.
20 years later you still need multiple messenger and video service because none of it is compatible.
Dragon is wherever but alexa ,siri, and google use cloud based servers to process audio quickly. That then issue commands to a local computer which push it out the network.
So network infrastructure is easie
Stagnent browsers (Score:2)
Microsoft-sourced chaos? I doubt that - we're talking about browsers, who for a long time had Backspace move one page back, thus wrecking the user's flow should they lose track of where they're located.
The first chaos I remember is Netscape being overtaken by Internet Explorer, Firefox starting to edge out IE, then Chrome becoming the lead standard. The second chaos was deciding that NPAPI-type plugins w
More whining (Score:1)
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society a large (Score:2)
This extractive practice is just a function of capitalism.
Computers have enabled corporate profits to accelerate and increase their slice of the world financial pie.
Networking those computers has taken the computer accelerator effect to obscene levels.
This is deeper than "tech companies" this is a problem with the basis of world society -
Capitalism
Socialism isn't a dirty word, it is about caring for each other more than money.
This is fundamental to man's and earth's survival.
Friedman answered Evans (Score:2)
Benedict Evan's question was answered by the last words of The Friedman Doctrine.
"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"
"... engages in open and free competition without deception fraud."
the balances of "social responsibility" "free market" "voluntary cooperation" "sightedness" "unanimity"