Depths of Corporate Evil

Google, the not-so-evil empire. Google provides real high-quality  services at the cost of viewing unobtrusive advertising. The corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil" and the Google employees I know take it seriously. They're not saints, but you can do business, and not need to count your fingers afterwards. They are still a commercial empire, however, and they are rather snoopy.

Amazon and Apple, medium-evil empires. Commercial empires of a more evil sort. Both do genuinely valuable things. Unfortunately, every now and again they try to take over the world.

Microsoft, cell phone companies, Facebook, evil empires.The are price-gougers, monopolists, oligopolists, spies, intellectual property thieves, sellers of your time and attention. Microsoft charges hugely more than anything reasonable for their products; cell companies are probably making gross profits of 500-1000%. In dealing with cell companies, expect to feel like a chump; get the best deal you can & don't worry about it. Shorter Facebook: "You are the product" and "You have no privacy, get over it."

Exxon-Mobile the eeeeeevil empire. Destroy human civilization, lie about it, and make a profit at it.

Haliburton and Xe (Blackwater) the spawn of hell. Provide overpriced contracting services and undersea oil wellheads that don't do the job. Hire out mercenaries and security personnel who make their own law.

Croak!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Richard M. Stallman and the Failure of the Free Software Foundation

(Note: since the writing of the following, the Free Software Foundation has tweeted: “The FSF board unanimously condemns misogyny, racism, and other bigotry as well as defamation, intimidation, and unfair attacks on free thought and speech.” They are rejecting the criticism of Stallman as unfair and, in so doing, they aligned themselves with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. They have put themselves beyond redemption and any fair hearing for their ideas. No-one wants to listen to the logic-chopping of rape apologists – it is as bad as listening to Southern racists excusing slavery.)   This is outside of my usual ambit, and it is about cooperative software development rather than market economics, but it seems to belong here more than anywhere. People who follow free and open source software by now know that alleged harasser and rape apologist Richard M. Stallman has, by a secret process, been restored to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman has lon
Read more

The General Intelligence of Robots

“Artificial intelligence” researchers mean by the phrase “general intelligence” two things. One is simply a machine learning system that can, like humans, use its knowledge for many different tasks. This is not something that has currently been built; language models produce language, stable diffusion models produce images, and neither seem to have any concepts of the underlying realities these words and images reflect. The second is the “general intelligence,” g , derived from intelligence tests, which is believed by some to be a unifying reality behind intelligence test scores. In a paper on GPT-4 from Microsoft a Wall Street Journal Editorial by Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence is cited as providing a definition of general intelligence. It’s an appalling piece, repeating debunked claims about racial differences in intelligence and claiming as scientific consensus hypotheses that are at best debatable and at worst outright false.
Read more

A Grand Unified Theory of Bad New Economy Firms

The wildly successful internet economy firms mostly operate by evading laws. New technology which has allowed firms to move their business to less-regulated jurisdictions and a generation of deregulation and favorable court decisions have allowed these firms to be bad places to work and bad places to do business with. Here’s a catalog of some of their abuses: Evasion of local laws through national operations . Amazon notoriously picks jurisdictions with lax labor laws for its warehouses. Uber simply ignores local laws until penalized. When penalized, they initiate political campaigns to get the laws overridden at the state level. Extortionate business practices . Doordash infamously underpays its workers. Grubhub notoriously overcharges restaurants . Uber has the resurrected long-illegal practice of raising taxi rates when demand is highest. Monopolistic practices . Enforcement in this
Read more