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I come from a very rough rural town in Kansas, I've personally known dozens of people who worked super hard their whole lives and still died in poverty and despair.

I'm not sure what the correlation is between hard work and success, but it's much weaker than at least ten other factors.

I think we should add a new stat for C-level execs on financial websites, in addition to compensation and tenure and whatnot we should have a "body count" number listed.

Maybe add this to crunchbase as well?

MCAS is the dumb bandaid they invented to save money on pilot retraining. Turns out that bandaid was so poorly built it killed people.

In the 777x It's not exact same software system, but the exact same "cheapest option on the menu every time" mindset that seems to be pervading Boeing and causing lots of problems.

Because it's called "autopilot" and Tesla has already fraudulently sold millions of people on the false claim that it is an autopilot for your car. Gating or segmenting how it works exposes this falsehood immediately.

We were supposed to have a million fully autonomous Tesla taxis by the end of last December, remember that nonsense claim too?

Google and other large tech giants have been working on precisely that sort of AI with those types of data for at least 10 years now. They are famous for tinkering with their hiring process based on mountains of data, with mostly bad results.

Which aspect do you find farfetched?

I had a moment of excitement when Google announced their practical quantum computing breakthrough, then I instantly realized it meant they will just find a way to track me at a quantum level and anticipate my consumer targeting brand preferences 10000x more quickly or something equally as awful.

Not so exciting after all.

I would love to see tech pivot away from being an industry that is 100% about tracking & advertising more and more every year and towards something, anything that was an actual real new product or service.

We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more ads on the page.

It's pretty wild that he was there since 2002, he's practically a founder.

People are drinking less and less every year, this is a real thing with lots of data and has no correlation with religion. This is Denver, one of the first cities in the world to decriminalize marijuana and the first state to legalize it completely, you think the prudes did that?

The one thing about getting old that I really enjoy is telling people about how things used to be and having them not believe me. Like how I browsed the web for years before it had any advertising on it.

This week it's the story about how insulin was $20 a month when I was in high school, I remember it well because I had two friends who needed insulin and they complained about this $20 constantly.

Americans under a certain age just flat out refuse to believe that it was ever possible to get important medicine that cheaply. I've had people call me a liar and been branded with various political slurs for making this $20 claim. It's hilarious.

Aren't we supposed to need congressional approval to start a war?

So many things I was taught in civics class turned out to be complete fiction.

Well they are pretending to be a tech company to wall street and consumers, so someone is lying.

A former Tesla software engineer posted a thread on twitter a few months ago describing their development/release process and it was a total mess of hacky bad practices that barely worked at all.

It does not seem like software is much of a priority for them.

There are many 10+ year old linux kernels in embedded devices all over the place, and much less secure systems and services on top of that. It's often called the internet of shitty things.

The first time I bought wireless headphones was in 1998. It's great that they got smaller and sleeker and more reliable since then, but removing ports and then forcing people to buy another accessory that you then boast about how good the margins are on in your earnings call is not innovation.

I'm just getting quite tired of companies taking two steps backward, one step forward, and then marketing the hell out of this process to pretend like they made things better for us.

I'm not merely anti-Apple, it feels like half the tech industry is stalled and just forcing nonsense like this on us while pretending it's "innovation" and "progress". It's innovating in how high the margins can go, nothing more.

Oh please, they sold us on a fake problem and then the cure by removing ports. That's not innovation. That's not a platform.

iPhones could all have usb ports and audio jacks and removable storage. Nothing is preventing any of that. Stop pretending Apple is moving the ball forward here.

There are many things that are "standard industry practice" that will be illegal some day, and using some other company as a defense for anything is supremely lazy.

I made a joke years ago about how Google would shut down GCP on a whim, ending the last shred of goodwill they had in tech.

Too absurd for reality.

I thought Bloomberg banned their journalists from discussing the democratic side of the field?

Regardless, any political commentary about any topic coming out of this organization is highly suspect and shouldn't really be linked to while Michael Bloomberg is in the race or in office.

Much, much worse. We passed the legendary inequality of the gilded age about 15 years ago, and the rate at which the divide has been growing has been increasing ever since. We created the richest people who have ever lived by a wide margin, and all trends point to the margin increasing.

Absolutely. What we are witnessing is people extracting as much money as possible from healthy and unhealthy companies just because they can. This has been going on in the private equity/hedge fund world for decades, buybacks are the mechanism that is now being used on the public markets in similar, unethical ways.

Oracle is betting on not having a future, they are extracting as much money as possible from the vehicle before it goes off a cliff.

The divide in this society is becoming so deep stories like this almost seem like a parody.

If you're at a high enough level you get paid in equity-based compensation or benefit from a close relationship where someone gets paid in equity, then you're golden. These are the greatest times in history, every number keeps going up and everything keeps improving. Endlessly increasing buybacks and endlessly increasing equity compensation is doing nothing but accelerate this massive growth at the high level.

For everyone else it's a nightmarish hellscape of gig jobs and poverty and debt and zero healthcare. It's such a different experience that rich people might as well be living on the moon.

It is drowning out real investment, this conclusion is correct because the companies themselves are saying so in their statements. Some companies are taking on huge debt to keep up in the buyback races despite having bad products that are losing market share. Oracle is probably the biggest example of this buyback insanity via debt, but there are many other companies doing the same thing.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/05/oracle-shows-buybacks-can-go...

Other companies have committed in their financial statements to "returning 100% of free cash flow to investors via buybacks and dividends", so they are actually committing to not invest in the company at all regardless of how much money they make. Chevron and Texas Instruments are two big examples of this, there are dozens of other companies with similar buyback first strategies.

If you're interested in privacy or protecting your email address and you're still using Chrome or GMail you need to start by eliminating those and de-googleifying your life as much as possible.

Although it seems like a lot of people are forced into Google products by work, I can see the value of this for them.

Open pit copper mines are one of the most horrible environmental extractions imaginable. I grew up next to one, it was pretty unpleasant. Not quite as nasty as uranium mining, but it's getting up there.

As far as I can tell nobody has reported on the "neighborhood portal" offered to police yet, looking at how this works along with the bizarre, giddy culture around how empowering this is for law enforcement is just disturbing.

In the past major corporations used to launch speculative research projects and risky ventures, but that rarely happens any more. All the resources are being shifted to stock buybacks, everything else is a secondary priority.

Some companies like Chevron and Texas Instruments have even committed in writing to "returning 100% of all cash flow in perpetuity" to buybacks and dividends. So yes, they have legal contracts saying they won't agree to invest in future growth or investments or research no matter how much money they make, they are so committed to this buyback first model.

Google is a true leader in the buyback wars, they were the first company to commit to $25B in buybacks per quarter, which used to be a shockingly large number for these programs. Lots of other companies have followed that pattern since.

Are you Mark Zuckerberg?

Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that the most important things in the universe are productivity growth and the number of people citing your publication and talks about ways we can make these numbers go up more in this podcast.

Are those really our biggest priorities right now? Should they be? How many more decades are we supposed to pretend the pie getting bigger will cause all problems to ~magically tricklesolve themselves~, because this there is lots of evidence that this is not happening.

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For a flat blog post? Like, seriously?