Hired 10,000 people in Q2 this year alone? What percentage of those people actually do anything of value besides cash the company’s checks? That’s actually staggering to me. Cloud division I can see growing. What else?
This doesn’t sound right at all. The classic story is “he/she took me to the cleaners”, fighting over every possible asset, being forced to sell a house or property you don’t want to because the spouse demands half. I don’t know the frequency but it happens. My own parents fought hard over the house in particular and my mother ended up having to buy my father out at a huge loss to avoid selling it.
In my mind it is the same problem everywhere. Supply is too low and is kept low for many reasons. There is insane demand from around the world to live in Manhattan.
I would love a Crazy Eddie’s Discount Domains website built using 90’s html where the domains are sold like timeshares. Do I even own this domain? Not clear, but at $0.90 cents a year who can complain. A counter for page visits and Eddie’s cocaine budget.
I have read a lot of financial crime books and can’t recommend Billion Dollar Whale enough. What’s so astounding is the immediacy with which he went on one of the biggest spending sprees ever. A case study in how to disprove people who say, “you could never spend that much money in a lifetime”. The fact he used stolen money to finance The Wolf of Wall Street is the cherry detail on top.
To me, using women to sell a product reeks of a bygone era and a certain mentality we’re working to get away from. I think that alone is a perfectly acceptable reason to think a company sucks and not use their product. Voting for behaviors with your dollars is important.
True, we’re trying to produce bots that reliably do things (make people laugh) that humans can’t even do reliably. People who can feel out a room and use the right joke, or the right reassurance or whatever, are not even very common.
There is no centralized way to drive that change on the needed scale. Most humans don’t even view what we’re doing in civilization as shared project, let alone agree that this is required to protect it. I think they fundamentally lack the abstract thinking required. They won’t change until they feel the pain themselves. A poor fit for an abstract, not quite “here yet” problem. In the United States we can’t even get them to agree it’s a problem at all. But I think once we are collectively feeling the pain, solutions will be swift and surprising.
I don’t see this at all. They didn’t make less than you because of some moral failing by society at large. They made less because there is such a glut of artists that the bottom pay rate is literally less than zero, hence “do it for the exposure”. There is more art created every day today than ever before. The old school art forms you think are so crucial just aren’t.
I’ve become convinced that hiring more people is generally a warning sign. A team of between a few and about twenty people seems to produce all the good stuff. Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically, and your cost per employee goes up as you need to offer higher and higher salaries to stay in competition. A company going on a hiring spree is now a negative indicator for me. I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products. Sometimes one person can be much more productive than a whole team. This is obviously unscientific, just a feeling I’m getting lately.
I have to chuckle a little at your “is it just me”…this is literally one of pop culture/the internet’s biggest flame wars these days. No offense intended. It commonly spirals off into tangents about the modern definitions of racism vs. prejudice and many other threads. Sometimes I wish alongside articles like this there was a pre-prepared list of the 10 most common takes about a subject. So we can stop rehashing all that and get to the meat. I’m guilty of it too.
Really no video game lets you do a free trial. To me the start of all this was Google. Google completely changed the way we interact with services and technology. It’s amazing and completely “free”.
Honestly it feels a little like blog posts I read titled “X software is full of bugs” and then the first line is “so I installed X on my custom Arch Linux setup…”. Sure, not ideal, but the conclusion might not quite match the playing field.
This point about donations comes up on literally every single one of these posts. Them throwing their wealth into the treasury maw would be a meaningless blip. They are arguing for the real systematic change that would bring in substantially more revenue than a few one time donations. Supposedly.
I sit upon a silk cushion, my servants fanning me as I pluck a grape from the bowl. “The plebs don’t understand how hard I work too”, I complain to no one in particular. “Don’t they realize a union will only hurt them? If they’d just brought me their concerns, I’m sure I would have changed those policies.” My guards chuckle as they spear a nearby peasant and toss him from the ramparts.
I mean I don’t know about screwed it up. You can’t expect any artist to just consistently produce pure hits. The creativity seems to come and go, the zeitgeist and the cultural context matter so much. Nobody (except, I would argue, Marvel) is able to be really consistent with their art. They were always doomed to fail producing their own content.
These aren't hard and fast rules. A civilization growing doesn't mean they automatically eat more meat. And having more population doesn't mean we automatically eat more meat. It's cultural and can be changed completely at any stage of development. And you even make another assumption that feels off, that less meat means less quality of life. Come on! None of these are a rule.
I often have the feeling that if almost everyone at Google just took a 1 year vacation, the thing would run itself. It's a money printer (search + ad auctions) surrounded by all this other busy work. Just leave the Borg to its business and take a break already.
I believe that technology and other workers who are paid these salaries are actually just the only workers lucky enough to be getting a fraction of what is their fair share. You shouldn’t let a CEO walk with 300x their workers wage and say “well at least I’m not in poverty like those other workers”. You should almost always fight for more.