But I seem to recall a time (up until perhaps 15 years ago) when Google would not have been expected to engage in such blatantly Machiavellian tactics as placing fake op-eds.
Nowadays though, I don't put anything past Google.
Any ideals that survived going public will slowly be ground out by repeated exposure to management consultants from McKinsey and the hordes of MBAs attracted to the smell of ibanker excitement.
You can't go public, or become part of a public firm, and not become more like the rest of the big players.
Any proposed solution is going to have to explain how to change the very strong financial incentives that lead to people doing the same things over and over.
Now, there are different people, with varying morals. When they advance to major positions in a company, they make various decisions. Unfortunately, our culture rewards the actions and attitude of people like Gates who deliberately made many grey-area decisions that we might call "egoistic" or just plain "evil" if they were aimed at individuals, or like Bezos, who treats human beings in his warehouses like cattle. So I'm sorry, we are not the ones being cynical here.
The third stage seems to be surprisingly rare, as most people either get stuck in stage 1, existing in a kind of shared delusion that all things are fine, despite the evidence that some aren't, or in stage 2, that all things are falling apart, despite evidence that some aren't.
Stage 3 reconciles the previous stages, first by zooming out and seeing how transient and precious life is, civilization is, and how in this perspective, power is itself rather silly. There have been great kingdoms, entire societies, that have arisen and died, even in our brief recorded history. Lowering the stakes like this lets us relax and remember: nothing is forever. No law lasts forever, almost everything we try is an experiment, and it may fail. Armed with a profound knowledge of the absurdity of our large-scale situation, now we can zoom in and do our judging, knowing properly how ignorant we are, how ignorant the actors are, the abuser and victim alike. And we can begin to see opportunities for change. Small scale stuff, firing that abusive person, or even lightweight activism where you change something about your behavior to change things, if only a little. You are not going to have the grand-slam insight that fixes everything, or anything. Such an insight doesn't exist - or maybe it can, but it cannot be transmitted without great care, which presupposes a society that supports transmitting delicate ideas, which is already a society that is functioning pretty well.
Essentially your comment is stage 3, because you remind the reader of the essential mutability of the system, and zoom out and show how its changed, and that there is every possibility of changing back to an earlier state where antitrust was actively enforced (read: successful antitrust enforcement gave political juice). If I could wish a thing into existence, it would be to engender a feeling of lightness to political discussion that comes from realizing this is all an experiment, nothing is written in stone, and we should feel free to try new things, knowing that they might not work, that real lives will be harmed when those experiments fail, but we also get good data about it for future decisions, so it comes out in the wash.
I'm not an anti-capitalist, and I don't expect such a government to just fall into my lap without a Herculean effort on the part of somebody, but I don't see any point in sugarcoating the current state of affairs. Corporations and other wealthy interests aren't just a symptom of our current malaise—they're a direct contributor to it.
anyways, IMHO, the beginnings of the end were: * when google search first landed in china * the initial few mass hiring events (2005-2008) * when they cancelled "social TGIFs" (TGIFs that your non-google friends could attend). i think this was 2008?
the whole social debacle was just evidence that google had already lost that fight years previously...
Which one is often a function of the people running it at the highest levels. Very often companies are founded by good people with good intents, who end up leaving for one reason or another, and are taken over by people with a different set of values.
I don't know enough about the internal workings of Google to say that's the case here. But from what I've read on HN, it does appear that Google's morals changed dramatically when its founders lost control of and influence in the company.
Are there any large companies, that stayed good?
Yes. However, the complication is that different people have differing ideas of what constitutes "good."
The billion-dollar healthcare company I work for does stupid things sometimes, but overall I still quantify it as "good" because I see that the number of good things it does outnumbers the number of "bad" things it does by about 10,000:1. But if you're that one person, then you might consider it a "bad" company because you don't see the other 10,000 people who ended up with good things happening.
But obviously organizations change. Much of Google's infrastructure now exists and nobody needs to be convinced to build it. Google/Alphabet also has new corporate leadership that is more beholden to the company's shareholders. Of course, one could point out that this was inevitable from the beginning: corporations can temporarily behave in "moral" ways, but (absent outside pressure) they won't necessarily stay that way.
A lot of large companies clearly do look at unions as something that forces them to pay more compensation for less work, which they'd have to justify to shareholders and the board. Even if the board would be cool with it, and they could make it fly with shareholders, leadership bonuses and stock grants are tied to performance. I really don't see where this is an incorrect statement to make.
0. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
They may not have a legal duty to maximise profits, but investors will expect them to do so - and negative reactions in the stock price would be expected if they were to support unionisation within their business, as it would (rightly or wrongly) be expected to reduce profits going forward.
Boards don't like unhappy shareholders.
I'm not defending an anti-union stance - I'm simply saying that company leads will most certainly see it as a threat to their job if they are unable to increase profits or keep margins fat in perpetuity.
The highlighted explanation in your link supports this assertion.
This reads to me like characatures used to construct a straw person argument. Your inevitability decoration is denied by observable fact.
EDIT: Hyperbole here, and it was lost on some. Despite unions in germany, German companies are exploiting their workers compared to lucrative salaries that non union US software engineers are enjoying. The gap beteween the lifestyle of a german software engineer and a US one is quite large.
All helps keep me sane, anyway.
Perhaps a German citizen living in Germany with young children that is supported by local family; "only" speaks German, Afrikaans, and Chinese; and is independently wealthy but enjoys writing software might disagree.
I know that since I dramatically changed my contexts the way I look at roles changed dramatically.
To think it is just Google CEO/Founders/Executives who forced this "Evil" stuff would be hilarious.