No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her
theregister.com
theregister.com
This is part of Apple's general heavy-handedness which caused him to quit, not an attempt to block Khan in other outlets.
It's worth asking how we can make our systems safer against large corporations shady influence.
Just to be clear, this story is about Apple exerting editorial control over content that they paid for, not about them trying to influence the content on the Daily Show.
Anyone who's worked in media has stories of topics being suppressed by the owners, and that's definitely something that could stand to be more transparent, but this article isn't evidence of large corporations having any influence over unrelated media outlets.
unless you're watching state-run / state-sponsored media, which comes with it's own challenges, they're all large corporations.
we'll never know, and those corps have the right to do whatever they want.
Guilt by association is now not only restricted to superficial advertising and will influence anything that can be controversial. For Apple it is even more relevant because it conflicts with their clean image.
It's a business and people have been numbed to companies being dishonest, but it's still a betrayal to hire so much, have them generate more money for your company, then drop them when convinient for the company.
Did that revenue double because of the contributions of the extra headcount, or because of the temporary artificial economic situation of that period that doesn't apply anymore?
From where I was standing, the revenue massively spiked during the pandemic way before the mass hirings even happened, let alone have those people become productive enough to have a positive impact on the bottom line. It was an open secret that a lot of newly hired people during that period were just keeping seats warm at home collecting nice compensations while playing videogames and doing next to no work (a lot of people were gloating about it on reddit and in my circles).
Given that knowledge, was it any surprise for anyone that this was not a sustainable increase and a correction would follow at some point in the future?
> but it's still a betrayal to hire so much, have them generate more money for your company, then drop them when convinient for the company.
Agree, but most tech companies aren't there to provide social services, but to make a profit, as much of it as possible. If people want ethical employers that will never let them go, maybe they should give up on 400k+ TC big-tech jobs, and become school teachers, nurses or social workers instead for much less money.
There are plenty of tech jobs out there that won't crash or won't let you go the moment the shit hits the fan, but they also won't pay anywhere big-tech TC.
It's like gambling, big money also comes with big risks. Similarly to 2008, the ones with the biggest compensations tended to also be the first ones to be let go in the process of reducing operational costs.
People aren't complaining about making bank, earning orders of magnitude above average pay during the good times, right? Then why do they expect sympathy when the charade that made them bank for a while comes crashing down?
A mix of both. Clearly if they thought they could get double the money with the same amount of people they would not have gone on a hiring spree.
If you want to take an inference: most companies post layoffs are still larger than 2019. So that implies that the inflation wasn't all temporary.
>but most tech companies aren't there to provide social services, but to make a profit,
Sure, companies will be as evil as regulation allows them too, nothing new. As I said, just becsuse people are numb to it doesn't mean we shouldn't call it out.
>There are plenty of tech jobs out there that won't crash or won't let you go the moment the shit hits the fan, but they also won't pay anywhere big-tech TC.
Oh it's okay. I work in games. I get the worst of both worlds, this isn't about chasing total comp for me.
My #1 goal is growth and it just feels like it stagnated in the professional conrext. Spending as much time looking for a job these past 2 years as I am working jobs. I've just kind of accepted the plataeu and am doing some indie work. But I still need some stability, and it's not like "lower paying" (so, well paying but not close to 400k total comp) are biting any better in this market. So may as well apply yo what I know.
>People aren't complaining about making bank, earning orders of magnitude above average pay during the good times, right?
My sector is :)
>why do they expect sympathy when the charade that made them bank for a while comes crashing down?
Outside of the above reasons: becsuse it's not sustainable. Stability is a big factor in any job market and in All sectors it feels like an all time low. Loyalty/tenure is dead and that's going to cause a huge brain drain across all white collar work as the seniors who live in an age of proper retention take off. It's a ticking time bomb.
I don't care about sympathy, we're on the internet. I do hope at least some people can look at the grander picture of it all, though. A storm is coming, not necessarily I the next 5 years, but maybe 10-15.
Though made up of a bunch of “free choices” the situation was still kinda shit for both consumers of film and actors.
So it may or may not be a good description of what’s happening, but it’s not a ridiculous notion.
>“It kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us.”
>“They were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards,” she said. “It was a very strange time to work there.”
https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/workers-at-meta-salesforce-say...
People who are dismissing this as "well they got paid well" aren't seeing the bigger picture. Artists in the 40's-70's or so were paid decent wages. Then when the company breaks critical mass, they can squeeze out the talent and replace them with starry eyed newbies who'd work for free if they could. 40 years later, we have VFX sudios work on award winning billion dollar moneymakers and still end up shutting down because the studio can't get a good bid going (oh yeah, they are bidding their talent for work now. Another issue).
People need to heed the lessons from other industries. These strategies aren't new.
> Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe will shell out $415 million to put to rest an antipoaching civil lawsuit that accused the companies of conspiring not to hire each other's employees.
> Filed by former employees of the companies involved, the lawsuit shed a light on the practice of some major tech industry players of allegedly working together to agree not to poach employees from each other. The affected employees had argued that such agreements limited their ability to rise up in the industry and stifled their attempts to earn higher salaries. Email exchanges among such top executives as late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs and former Google CEO and now executive chairman of Alphabet Eric Schmidt revealed how requests were made not to hire certain employees away from each other.
They hoarded talent by conspiring to make it harder to leave, which had the bonus of not having to pay them as much.
Most people at Google, to name one, are free to walk out the door tomorrow.
They were actively attempting to avoid that.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/jobs-e-mail-to-schmidt-suggests...
"In another e-mail exchange between two vice presidents at Google, the pair talk about ways to 'never get into bidding wars' on potential talent with Schmidt and longtime Apple board member Bill Campbell being copied in on it."
> But it's lot like they're chaining people to their desks or generally forcing people into unbreakable long-term employment contracts. In CA, there aren't even non-competes generally.
This wasn't contractual. This was direct anti-competitive conspiracy between top executives.
>The FAANGs, including Apple, have committed serious anti-trust violations especially their hoarding of talent during the 0% interest rate years to prevent them from starting competitors then freezing hiring and laying off en masse once the interest rates started rising.
The upthread comment stated "hoarding of talent during the 0% interest rate years", which is 2008-2016.
I'd be pretty disincentivized to leave if I started getting the message that Jobs could personally get offers rescinded and recruiters fired at competitors as powerful as Google.
So I'm pretty sure it intended to refer to overhiring during the pandemic.
(People are often pretty loose when they use the ZIRP term.)
Overall I don't think it's a winning proposition for the companies involved. So if they want to have an internal rule that forbids them from hiring people, they're just shooting themselves in the foot and will suffer consequences and give up eventually or cheat since it's unenforceable
> One email exchange recounted how Jobs asked Schmidt to stop Google from trying to hire one of Apple's engineers. "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Jobs wrote to Schmidt on March 7, 2007.
In the situation you're hinting at, social media companies regularly and frequently said "no" to those requests. That does not appear to have been the case in the Google/Apple non-compete conspiracy.
In other words, it's only a conspiracy if both sides conspire.
https://www.trade.gov/us-antidumping-and-countervailing-duti...
You could probably say that's basically a complaint about giving consumers too good of a deal, but it is deeper than that.
Manipulating the labor market is far worse than manipulating the consumer market. People can choose to live without computers even if that's increasingly challenging. People can't survive in a country like the US that lacks a basic social safety net without stable employment.
I generally get that things are tougher for juniors--especially juniors with questionable credentials--but I have trouble drawing a line that developers are generally worse who were showered with money at a few companies in 2021-2023. And there are always industry periods when things are tougher for some cohorts (or even all of them).
Perhaps they cannot? Monopolies can apply to the purchase of labour, too. Indeed, the lack of viable competition, would be circumstantial evidence, to support the argument that there is a monopoly. Monopolies will sometimes overpay for labour in the same way they will undercharge for products - it can squeeze competitors out.
Sorry but you're not going to convince me that high wages are a bad thing.
that's like saying all movies on demand for one subscription is a bad thing. It isn't... until it creeps into being a bad thing.
The high wages were the attractive bailey no one can argue with and we're seeing the motte rear its ugly head in a time where they are nigh impossible to compete with. I don't think "encouraging more engineers" is a good mechanism to encourage a monopoly.
> What is "hoarding of talent"? These are human beings and they have a right to work where they want. Let's be clear, apple "hoards" talent by offering them competitive pay and benefits.
The thing you're missing is that FAANG exploited short-term individual level incentives to create an environment that was more hostile to those individuals in the long term.
Sure, they may have gotten paid more for a little while, but where are they going to go when FAANG decides to dump them, because they didn't actually need them? The FAANG's actions inhibited the creation of those opportunities, because those opportunities competed with FAANG.
Free speech laws protect against government supression of speech, not corporations.
Yeah we know they can do it. The extremely obvious point is that they should not.
If you're a fan of reigning in the big tech companies, the admin that appointed someone like Khan deserves another four years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/business/media/jon-stewar...
> Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives
They did succeed in pressuring the podcast to not have her on.
He should have asked her opinion about that.
Judging by the sole existence of South Park on CC, it seems they put a fairly high bar on what they allowed.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903345
During a technical talk at a nieche conference, a speaker had an apple logo on a slide, along other logos, to illustrate devices.
An Apple employee stood up and shut down the whole presentation, demanding that the presenter, RIGHT NOW, edit the slides to remove the apple logo, or he would not "let" the presentation continue.
Representatives from other companies did not care about their logo also being up there.
The correct behavior is to go up to the speaker after the talk and tell them that they really should verify that they have permission to use other company's logos before using them in presentations. (Large companies have multiple people who vet references and the use of logos in things like keynotes and customer presentations.)
The average American would be happier with Amazon taking over the feds, than the other way around.
I think the average American is aware of the Amazon warehouse worker conditions (and probably don’t care)
Any beef is between Amazon and their workers, not Amazon and me.
In the US, needing health insurance has kept me at a job against my will and I’m a white collar worker.
> Any beef is between Amazon and their workers, not Amazon and me.
It becomes ur beef if Amazon becomes a government entity as OP was saying in their hypothetical.
And no, working at a job you don't like just for the heath insurance coverage does not count as being "held against your will." Check your privilege.
If my choice is either work at a job I don’t like or risk my life by foregoing medical procedures that I need… It’s not really a choice.
It’s the same situation as holding a gun to me and saying “work at this job or I’ll shoot you.”
This is far from the only way people are forced to keep people working against their will.
Threat of homelessness, dependents like children, family members who need medical support, H1B visas, etc.
I was saying how, even in a decently paying job, I’m forced to work there under threat of serious medical complications because of the state of healthcare in the US.
> Check your privilege
I’m not the one making blanket statements about why people work shitty jobs.
No, it doesn't, no matter how many times you assert otherwise.
I’m not the one making blanket statements about why people work shitty jobs.
Yes, you are.
Either you’re implying that neoliberalism is the same as anarchocapitalism, or you’re suggesting that Apple embodies both at once. In the grand argument over how much government we need “neoliberals” would answer “less”, but a long way from answering “none” like the ancaps. Try and find an AnCap who wants government police, a state military, etc and then try and find a neoliberal who doesn’t want them. That is a pretty impactful difference! I know of no evidence to suggest that Apple falls into either camp let alone both at once! Perhaps these are examples of terms that for a certain crowd have become mere epithets used with only superficial understanding. It might also explain the alleged sins you then list off assuming we all would agree they apply.
...is an inherently unserious and self-contradictory idea. It's the Ununoctium of political ideologies: it is so unstable that if ever realized it will decay in a microsecond to something entirely different. Anyone who treats it as something that could be stable and realizable should be mocked or ignored.
So, that said, I think the usage should in the GP should just be auto-corrected to "extreme capitalism" and left there.
Incorrect uses of specific terms shouldn’t be changed to questionable uses of incredibly vague terms unless this is mere activist slogan homework instead of an actual discussion meant to persuade.
> "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"
It works for internet comments, too.
Neoliberalism certainly has had an effect, but can you point out the anarchocapitalist political and cultural elements that have had any significant influence on any part of society anywhere let alone Apple? It is an extremely fringe political movement even within libertarianism which is itself a small minority movement albeit large enough to occasionally be noticeable.
My bad then, I consider(ed) anarcocapitalism as a synonim of libertarianism
https://www.amazon.ca/Technofeudalism-Killed-Capitalism-Yani...
To me the 20th century leaders completely failed to understand the immensity of the changes brought by information tech and so failed to use the legal tools available. The anti-monopoly laws were only applied to Microsoft, as I recall, around the browser/Operating-System combination. That showed they had little understanding of the big picture IMHO.
So they missed that one, imagine how badly they are going to miss the AI revolution...