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Comment by dogleash | Hacker News Reader

>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review.

Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?

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Further, why do we continue to accept the fiction that rules and laws apply to the elite as for the masses? Even the not-so-elite, the Stanford swimmer who brutally raped and assaulted Chanel Miller, though convicted, was given light sentence because of his "bright future", according to the judge.

Is there anyone walking around that actually believes that rules and laws apply to the elite?

Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.

Depends on the rules and laws. The system tends to be very good at punishing rich people that swindle money from other rich people.

In other words, when the elite are impacted the full force of law will be brought to bear on the perpetrator of the injustice. This used to be called aristocracy. We've spent the past 250 years pretending it doesn't exist here in the States.

I find it funny how we use phrases like "Russian oligarchs" all the time without batting an eye, but we never use them when referring to the Bushes or the Clintons in the US.

There's a minor genre of imagining US journalism standards for world reporting applied to reporting on the US: https://slate.com/tag/if-it-happened-there

LOL. It's telling that even in these satires they don't quite get the tone right - it still has a tinge of US- centrism in there

The power resides in generational wealth not some commoners who got lucky. These people don't need to hold elected office because they can buy whatever they want, including manipulating government in their favor.

Nobility is specifically included from Forbes wealthiest list. They really don't want to draw attention.

*excluded

The Clintons and Bushes are not really oligarchs. They represent a monarchy maybe of inherited wealth and status.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg are better examples of oligarchs because they managed to create their own wealth and with that obtained political clout.

> they managed to create their own wealth

Haha, there's that fiction. See how deeply it pervades all thinking about power and success in the US?

I take that politicians are more of useful tools. Not the people who have any real power or wealth.

> The system tends to be very good at punishing rich people that swindle money from other rich people.

… Eventually? I'm surely not the only one who thinks of Madoff first, and he got away with it for almost a decade after suspicions were first reported.

Ah, but Madoff was also making money for other rich people, so the system took some time to decide what to do.

Madoff got 150 years once he was convicted, though you are correct, I probably should have stated that the system is very good at punishing rich people that are CAUGHT swindling other rich people.

It's a convenient fiction the rich/elite propagate through funding stupid plot lines in books/TV/movies while hiding that the elite get off scott-free and later expunge the records.

Convenient because it allows the state to continue to pass more and more draconian laws that prevent any change to the status quo in which the rich get richer and poor are further dehumanized.

I often debate this with HNers, so yes, there are quite a few that believe the world is perfectly fair, more so in “democratic” countries.

Yeah I wonder why this is. Perhaps misplaced idealism of human nature and authority. The Judge, CEO, or the Journalist despite their lofty titles are human too and can be influenced by others. They also are not immune to their own personal desires and biases as well.

A simpler explanation would be that it's just the way it works in every human society ever.

Maybe we could consider it an easier explanation rather than a simple one. It seems like splitting hairs but its important

The rule of law however has been continuously pursued across centuries and different societies in an attempt to subvert this 'default' operating mechanism.

I would argue the nature bit is where you favor yourself. Its hard to find people who will disfavor themselves in the name of egalitarianism.

The rest is the result of resources/funds being concentrated in the hands of people who also end up with power due to said resources/funds.

Brock Turner wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance into Stanford, which had been revoked. His father was an electrical engineer and his mom was a nurse.

Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.

GP referred to "not-so-elite." In this case, the small bit of "eliteness" would be white, male, athlete (All-American), upper middle class, accepted into a good college.

And that's probably enough to justify saying he has a "bright future," in this country and day and age.

That's white, male, athlete, upper middle class, accepted into a good college, living in America.

From a global perspective, the eliteness is far more than a "small bit".

Sure, but in this case we're comparing the treatment (by courts, etc) of the elite vs non-elite in America.

There are peculiarities of eliteness in America that matter here. Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society and don't have the legal framework of a caste system, what counts as elite in America affects how the world views American elites, and how Americans view elites in other cultures. We don't for example, care how many cows in a bride's dowry.

The number of cows in a bride’s dowry is just a straightforward proxy for wealth, and that’s pretty universal.

Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too.

All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how this is somehow unique to the US at all.

Can you imagine a judge in the US letting someone convicted of sexual assault off with a light sentence because he has a lot of cows? The point is that the elitism is not just relative to other Americans, but to the rest of the world.

> Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society

There is nobody in the US that believes US society is classless. Talk about fictions.

Everyone knows upper class, middle class, lower class segmentation. So how is it you reconcile your premise of Americans not thinking there are classes when everyone in the country defines themselves by such structures? Americans are taught the class structures all throughout school. Americans are informed about the class structures 24/7 by popular media and news, from the NYTimes to CNBC and everything inbetween.

The hyper rich and the poor have been an always part of US society. There are no exceptions in terms of grasping the distinction, nobody fails to get it. The US has had hyper rich and poor since its founding and everyone here has always been aware of the divisions. It's in our history books, it's in our earliest literature. It's omnipresent as a thing.

Before there was the industrial wealthy and working poor, there were the land barons and British lords, farmers, agrarian workers and the slaves that were brought to the US by the conquering European empires. The class systems here quite pre-date the country, so yes, Americans are fully aware of it all. It has never not been part of US society.

The fiction is that there's class mobility. That's part of why others commenting here have tilted towards minimizing the eliteness of a criminal convicted of sexual assault: they want to think that his "hard work" landed him where he is and that they, too, might accomplish as much once they grasp their own bootstraps.

> All-American swimmer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/3...

Athletics are another sense in which he was elite.

Seriously, top athletes live on another planet in University. I remember working at the UT-Austin textbook store in my 20s and while everyone else had to find what they needed on their own, the football team had special permits they could bring you to not only get their books for free but you had to go get them for them

> wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance into Stanford

Pardon my rudeness, but if that's the only thing someone sees as elite, I'd suggest that the person's own elite status is just a notch below them.

> Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.

Just as a matter of terminology, I think one doesn't usually speak of judges being fired. He lost his seat in a recall election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Persky#Repercussions_to_...

My understanding is that he also had a history of giving light sentences, not just to upper middle class defendants, and that his banishment has gone well beyond losing his job.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/09/11/recalled-ju...

> Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.

(By recall election right?)

Yes, he was recalled. It's unlikely that if he'd been an appointed-for-life judge that the legislature would have removed him.

A white male All-American athlete attending arguably America's most prestigious university isn't elite?

He is far from the only case of the rich getting differential treatment under the law. These stories are really a dime a dozen. How about this case of a rich boy from the affluent suburbs of LA (palos verdes estates, where Trump's golf course is), decides its cool to become a gang banger, gets involved with a murder, and is acquitted.

https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/07/23/cameron-terrell-a...

The existence of a remedy isn't a good excuse for avoidable injuries. The resolutions you allude to in that case took place after the public became incensed at the delicate treatment handed out to a guy who was literally caught in the act of humping a passed out woman behind a dumpster.

He was given a light sentence, but its worth noting that the judge was following the recommendation of the probation department. This wasn't a judge going rogue on his own.

1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...

Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good outrage.

as the principal adjudicator, the judge can't be absolved of his responsibility by pointing to advisories. that the probationers were biased in their recommendation doesn't absolve him of his own biased judgment, and whether he's actually biased or not is a matter of the totality of his judicial record, not just this case.

This isn't just an issue with the elites, though. Locally I've noticed that when you look into the perpetrators of a lot of violent crime, they often have a string of prior cases where they were let off with almost no punishment (pleading down to a lesser crime, given probation that's not followed up on, suspended sentences, etc.). Then you have other cases where someone has done something relatively minor (or doesn't seem to have done anything at all), and the book gets thrown at them.

I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.

> a string of prior cases where they were let off with almost no punishment

Ever tried to get a job with a string of convictions? The criminal justice system in the US doesn't need to imprison a person for them to be punished.

replying to cratermoon as a English born nearly retired child of a now almost entirely American family, whose parents totalled 100 years of life and was taught to program and think by my uncle who would be 121 years old if alive and who worked intimately with with the American war command, I have no answer to your question other than that is the defining of the American Way to believe that the rules apply for all of us equally. The definition of 20th century British nature is to be the inbred product of generations of ancestors who never doubted the rules for the privileged are not even comparable to those for the populace.

I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a investment linked naturalisation process, but the development in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me that I would be committed to doing everything possible to reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.

But it is illegal for the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges and to beg in the streets.

The law, in its infinite wisdom, decrees it so.

And this is why I believe law should be truly blind. Any details such as race, gender, sex, education, political leaning in cases should be hidden and only public prosecution and defenders be allowed. We could easily handle whole process via text.

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France

In short, I'd guess that's because the companies reporting on them are owned by billionaires, and shareholders with bags of fossil fuel, war, banking, etc, stocks.

For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?

Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.

Yeah, better to listen to someone with unknown credentials on Substack, or whatever I dig up on Facebook. That will put the MSM in their place.

By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.

Let's not overestimate the critical thinking skill advantage separating journalists from other people. I can check the citations as well as any editor, sometimes better because I know some things about math and have no reason to be biased.

When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to add. Spending years pouring over account records? Interviewing a eyewitness to get the real story from a hundred conflicting ones? Combing through a million tweets to find one with a video of a natural disaster? Those are things that a journalist could conceivably do better than I could.

Most journalists nowadays seem pretty gullible and hard set on their preconceived world views. I fail to see any advantage in critical thinking skills on the media class.

Is that based on empirical analysis of the data?

I'm thinking not.

Journalists fail all the time, for sure, but there's a lot of journalists in the world churning out content every day. We tend to focus on the failures, but I don't see any evidence that the failures represent even a majority of the content.

Well here's one thing: they tend to cite sources. Do you have any actual data on your assertion? What you "fail to see" is merely a statement of your observation skills. I would like to compare that with other sources that aren't so clearly biased.

Primary source: "persons familiar with the matter".

Ahh, well I don't know or care who would be familiar with your observation skills. Im asking for data, do you have that or not?

Yeah, I've got it. Citing the source is kind of basic. But, by itself, alone, it doesn't amount to much, if they can't even keep fidelity to the original source, if they can't even begin to understand the content they are citing. And this thing happens all the time.

Can you provide data about this? Can you provide data over time - like is this a new thing?

Until then you are just doing the same thing as the parent: making a bunch of unsubstantiated claims based on what can only be labeled as "your own bias".

I'd think that you "media hater" folks would act differently than you are. Like you claim to hate the media for misrepresenting the truth, but then refuse to actually back up your claims with any real data. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny.

That's kind of the problem: the "legacy" media are unreliable, but people seem to take that as license to transfer total trust to some completely random media organisation that has god-knows-what agenda. Because it's very difficult to operate in an environment of total paranoia about every statement.

"Total paranoia" might be overselling it a bit. "Total skepticism", that is, "presumed bullshit until otherwise substantiated" is much more reasonable, and it can be applied to all media sources, legacy and otherwise.

Unfortunately it seems like skepticism is increasingly being branded as lunacy.

WSJ is respected because of its reporting track record, compared to other sources.

That's really all you can go on.

You can't just say "cut them out" without some replacement way of disseminating similar knowledge around. The media has plenty of issues, but as a whole, they are still the best way we have of doing that. At least with media we have a good sense of where their bias is from outfit to outfit and can take in additional information or get it from multiple sources to combat those biases.

So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).

> Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?

Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies

Whenever I see such a corporate communication, my mental process is to immediately imagine the meeting that led to its creation, having attended many such meetings.

Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."

Clearly we need to setup the Social Media Agency and regulate them. We'll staff the agency with high level political appointments comprised entirely of Twitter and Facebook executives.

Works for the FDA, anyway.

We can call the the Ministry of Truth.

It was inconceivable before 9/11 that we would ever have something called "Department of Homeland Security" or be "asked for our papers". Yet, right afterwards, we were given the "Department of Homeland Security" and the "Patriot Act", which has been extended every single time, despite how it has been regularly abused. My children have grown up into adults not knowing anything else. Just wait a short while. If you don't do something, you will live under the "Ministry of Truth".

The scary thing is now this is one step from the government policy. And in some countries, it's already becoming the government policy.

My personal pet theory is that -- whether we admit it or not -- most people are somewhat... spiritual? Humans tend to see and believe in meaning where none exists.

Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us, because it's a constant reminder that either:

1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or

2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.

Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest they admit to #1 or #2 above.

I can only guess why, but I do know that it’s not new. For example, around 1920, journalists were praising Hershey town as a town without crime even though the town had many incidents (Michael D‘Antonio).

For some journalists, idealism trumps integrity.

Do we have that collective fiction? I don't personally know anyone who thought that Facebook applied its rules to all equally, and certainly nobody here in the HN comments seems to be surprised.

Today I asked the public transportation company here to either enforce their mask mandate, or to let it completely be so people who actually care can decide for themselves how big of a risk they are willing to take. By having a mask mandate which is not being enforced many customers might get a false feel of security.

Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being fact checked and false information content is being taken down after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down must be true.

ah, but you are assuming that the inconsistent enforcement is an accident. "for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"

Every FAANG company compulsively lies to it's customers, and it's a shame because it only encourages up-and-comers to "imitate the best". Making matters worse, American politicians are utterly ill-equipped to handle this kind of deception. Not only do they likely profit off the success of Facebook, there are numerous domestic interests in preserving their control. On top of that, nobody can pull the plug because it's wrapped up with the CIA, FBI, FCC and FTC.

That's not the only collective fiction that's problematic. At this point, the lies are the only thing keeping everything going.

Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

I dont actually see a reason to believe that _any_ of them would be telling the truth _ever_. There's no incentive to be honest and there's plenty incentive to not be.

I recall Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon to have lied a ton.

I put all of the companies you name in pretty much the same basket, and avoid them as much as I can. I don't shop on Amazon, I don't use Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter. I don't use Apple products. I do use Android and Google Docs/Drive/Mail but my next phone will probably be an open one and I could drop the GSuite stuff without too much pain, mostly laziness that I haven't already.

I'm in the same boat. Trying my best to de-FAANG my life. Self hosting as much as possible, with as little management overhead as possible, but I'm still stuck on Android and I don't know how to break free.

It's not quite ready for the prime time, but there are some open source phones in the works. The two most notable are the Librem 5 (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/) and the Pinephone (https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/).

Which self-hosting software do you recommend?

I'm self hosting Ghost for blogging, Home Assistant for smart home controller, and in the middle of setting up Vaultwarden for passwords. I also run a lot of stuff off my Synology - Synology Drive instead of Dropbox or Google Drive, Synology Photos instead of Google Photos. I don't have a great solution for email or phone - emails is paid hosting through Zoho and use Android for phone. I'd like to get off those. It's all a long drawn out process.

Flip phone. People laugh at mine, whatever. Honestly though I use a flip because it does what I need and it's tough as nails.

De-Googled android distros are definitely out there, but I also think flip phone plus small portable laptop is a very powerful combo.

In a few years this will be considered the only sane approach to digital life. There is still some road to travel though in terms of making it easy for the majority of people.

In retrospect the "big tech" era will be such a sad, dark, insidiously toxic period. So much hypocrisy, so much in-your face failure to honor basic social contracts, so much misallocated talent...

In this particular case, it's only Facebook and Twitter that are significant social networks and they are responsible for the biggest spread of misinformation. Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important).

I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets - like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of favorites - will be surprising.

Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a big chunk of their annual revenue.

Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then, Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on things.

TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make them the most money.

> Facebook and Twitter [are] responsible for the biggest spread of misinformation

I really wish it was that simple. if it was, we could just ban it all and have done with it. For the US this is a symptom of the splitting of a country into multiple warring parts. Partly whipped up by news networks, print journalism and all by the constant war for your attention.

TV news picks up some stupid tweet, offers it as an morsel for 5 minutes of hate. This pissed people off, they got online and berate the original tweet, the "other side" counter attacks, rinse, repeat. (see critical race theory)

The general public are being played, so that a number of large corporations can get attention enough to sell advertising space.

> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results

why wouldn't you? I mean they are well known for allowing advertisers to manipulate results. They track your location, what your reading, who your talking to, and sell the products to third parties. If we should be keeping an eye on anyone, it should be google. The level of questioning that FB gets must be applied to any of the internet giants.

> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important).

If you include the videos that YouTube recommends, they pull even with Facebook and Twitter.

They are all optimizing for the ability of content to keep eyeballs glued to the screen (so they can show more ads), and nothing else.

>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...

Microsoft was a serial liar for decades over its efforts to quash competition for DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and its "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Amazon's statements about working conditions in its warehouses and its treatment of workers trying to unionize directly contradict documented actions. Twitter says one thing regarding abusive and hateful users but does another. Google finessed its theft of Java.

Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are required and acceptable

> Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes about him being a robot or alien.

Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the same level of creepy even though they also want to own your data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much as Facebook.

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