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So when do people think the first stragglers will start to drop? Pundits seem to be insisting that a minor recession is set to come any second now, so that seems like a good time for it to happen. If it doesn't happen for a while how long will companies like Yahoo hold out?
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Feb 7, 2016 19:29
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Gazpacho posted:I hope the current crop of online "do my chores so I can bask in bourgeois awesomeness" companies all get screwed. Read that as "Hang Selves" at first
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Feb 8, 2016 05:04
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The idea behind Uber and its labor model is to strip away any remaining comforts or security for the working class, so they can finally get back to toiling 12 hours a day from the cradle to the grave for the convenience of the bourgeois upper middle class, like god intended
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Feb 9, 2016 20:38
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So one of the Facebook board members just essentially said that colonialism was good for the third world, in reaction to Indian regulators banning their new walled garden subscription plan: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/facebook-and-the-new-colonialism quote:Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now? icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 19:22
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Note that this isn't just a board member, this is Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, who is now one of the leading Silicon Valley VCs. His opinions have sway not just over Facebook, but over who gets funded and who doesn't. Yeah I had a feeling reading up on this guy and his opinions would just make me mad, but I like being mad, and sure enough...
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Feb 11, 2016 20:13
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Someday in our lifetimes you're going to see Youtube Superstars organizing to form a union
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Feb 11, 2016 20:19
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Woolie Wool posted:Sometimes the behavior of investors makes me wonder if they are not actually human but instead some sort of ungulate. Autistic, sociopathic robot
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Feb 11, 2016 22:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:To be honest that's kind of one thing that confuses me about some of the attitudes in software land. What's so wrong about having a little niche that you fill? Why does everything have to grow exponentially forever? welcome to capitalism
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Feb 13, 2016 08:05
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Discendo Vox posted:I am an idiot. Someone explain alibaba to me. Everything I read about it is unapproachably dense. It's Amazon except only the part of Amazon where they list stuff "from other sellers". Although I think they might be moving into selling stuff directly Mr.Radar posted:Uber is burning cash at a rate of $1 billion per year to try to take over the "ride sharing" market in China. I'm sure the board of directors have prison cells waiting with their names on them for dumping and selling below cost, right? lol
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Feb 20, 2016 03:31
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axeil posted:so who do we all hate more now, finance or tech? Tech. At least the finance people don't have any starry-eyed libertarian dreams about themselves as saviors of humanity
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Feb 23, 2016 05:23
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I don't think they really believe what they're saying there, it's just pro forma stuff to keep the peasant meatbags satisfied. The tech-libertarians really do believe they're the saviors of humanity icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 21:05
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Software developers could theoretically have the same standards as real engineers, but they don't. The tech industry is a singularity of priviliged wealthy white manchildren, without even a shred of the public duty or discipline associated with traditional engineering fields. OG engineers were part of the army for fucks sake, remember? Can you imagine the average 26 year old tech bro working at a Silicon Valley startup in the army?
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 11:01
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Emacs Headroom posted:Twitter is public, so it's more like they're worried (sanely) that their shrinking user base will mean slow death. But yeah, they need growth. Has Twitter made a single cent of profit in its whole existence?
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Apr 6, 2016 05:28
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Popular Thug Drink posted:consistently it's the largest organizations we work with that have the most problems and the most hosed up god awful procedures and idiotic trouble spots that could easily be avoided, because small fish are either competent or they go out of business Monopoly capital FTW
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Aug 9, 2016 08:06
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MiddleOne posted:But that's every startup. it's all enterprises under capitalism, comrade
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Aug 14, 2016 05:43
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The thing that might actually make regulation of SV happen is cold warrior/natsec liberals getting so eye-bulgingly enraged at these media being used for purposes contrary to American empire they demand something be done to stop it. I don’t think domestic public opinion or economic arguments about monopoly etc are anywhere near enough on their own
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Mar 18, 2018 11:15
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I find it sort of fascinating how the capital-t capital-w Tech World, after 30 years of deep libertarian ideology, has now come around to the idea that maybe capitalism is bad, but with still seeming no or trivial knowledge of/interaction with the last 200 years of political economy and the social sciences. Not even heterodox Marxist stuff, an insight like “severe overwork and crunch time is bad, therefore overtime pay should exist” is something that extremely normie mainstream economists like Krugman would tell you. But for the folks at Polygon and The Verge this is a mind blowing revelation, not a problem that was solved 100 years ago
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May 8, 2019 17:28
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, because it's not. Every time anyone brings this up it turns out there is no actual data showing it and it's just some weird gut feeling that people demand must be true, despite polls never showing it and like, voting trends never going that way either to show the polls were all lies. Maybe "fanatical, committed libertarian" isn't quite true, although there do seem to be very many people of that bent in prominent places. Like the SMBC comic guy just released a book with Bryan Caplan, a psychotic ultra-libertarian who thinks that public schools shouldn't exist and dabbles regularly in Just Asking Questions stuff about racial and gender discrimination not being real because they wouldn't be rational https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/discrimination_2.html https://smbc-comics.com/openborders/ It's more that there seems to be 0 knowledge of the mainstream/non-crank social sciences in that world. There's tech/STEM people and media/arts people, and a big gaping hole where fields like political science or economics or sociology or even law or history would be, and so you get these people trying to solve problems that were solved literally 150 years ago like the 8 hour work day and unions, or politics as a vocation instead of Andrew Yang saying he's going to run the federal government like a tech startup. It’s not even that those fields are perfect or without problems, it’s just strange to see is all icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 18:09 on May 8, 2019 |
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May 8, 2019 18:01
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Last Chance posted:“Safety third. There’s not even a Rule Number Two. But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.” I just made the connection that Musk is literally the insane inventor/entrepreneur guy from Portal 2. Game came out in 2011 and Musk was around in 2011, it must actually have been based on him to some extent. Amazing how spot-on and fresh that game is for something that is now eight (8!) years old icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 07:13 on May 18, 2019 |
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May 18, 2019 07:06
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suck my woke dick posted:Breaking up these companies will not work because part of their appeal is that they're monolithic and offer a range of services instead of being 20 different companies with 20 different websites with 20 different user accounts you definitely forgot about if you can even remember the company at all. If you split up amazon, the only workable way to do it is to separate the shopping part from the AWS part. At that point, the shopping part might be slightly less able to subsidise itself from the AWS part, but ultimately it's already huge and you'll just get two borderline monopolies owned by two companies instead of two borderline monopolies owned by one company. Anything else will just lead to one of the amazon splinters growing to its original size and the rest dying because they're redundant. Yeah, the problem with the Warren/Tim Wu-esque “Market Capitalism Can Be Woke With Appropriate Antitrust Regulation” position is that capitalism by its inherent nature tends towards monopoly. That’s why the book’s called Monopoly Capital. I was listening to some interview with Tim Wu and he literally just dismissed the idea of "economies of scale" in a single sentence and moved on. Turns out that may be a part of why Amazon is so big? The solution is either to nationalize them or just accept that they are natural monopolies and regulate them icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Sep 14, 2019 |
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Sep 14, 2019 01:13
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https://newleftreview.org/issues/II113/articles/richard-stallman-talking-to-the-mailmanquote:RICHARD STALLMAN
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Sep 15, 2019 03:13
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Might be time to restart the thread with a new poll: how long until SoftBank goes under: Never, because he's got an ungodly huge ball of capital fed by a very profitable core telecom business that is implicitly backed by the Japanese government? icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 09:18
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Shooting Blanks posted:This article is probably worth reading for folks in this thread: Not a full critique but lol at this in the fifth paragraph: quote:McNamee was convinced that Facebook was different. Then, in February, 2016, shortly after he retired from full-time investing, he noticed posts in his Facebook feed that purported to support Bernie Sanders but struck him as fishy. That spring, the social-media-fuelled vitriol of the Brexit campaign seemed like further proof that Facebook was being exploited to sow division among voters—and that company executives had turned a blind eye. The more McNamee listened to Silicon Valley critics, the more alarmed he became: he learned that Facebook allowed facial-recognition software to identify users without their consent, and let advertisers discriminate against viewers. (Real-estate companies, for example, could exclude people of certain races from seeing their ads.) There's definitely criticism to be made of Facebook but that it is overwhelmingly afflicted by centrist-lib-brain-disease seems problematic to me
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Nov 30, 2019 05:15
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evilweasel posted:He’s claiming he spotted the Russian ads that were titularly pro-Bernie but were actually about just getting Bernie and Clinton supporters mad at each other. I actually didn't read much further than that, I'm assuming though that the New Yorker columnist is taking any support for Bernie at all as having no legitimate basis and just being about "sowing discord" or whatever. If they elaborated on that later never mind
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Dec 1, 2019 01:56
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PT6A posted:The willingness to take drugs for ostensibly cosmetic purposes despite horrific side effects is bizarre to me. Propecia is an especially weird one for me; who would look at the side effects, including decreased sex drive and erectile dysfunction, and decide "hmm, yes, having hair is better than reliable orgasms!"? Anticheese posted:I have several times since starting hormones recently asked "why am I doing this to myself" You can crush finasteride/propecia up into powder and dissolve it in minoxidil, a liquid hair growth drug with no hormonal effects, and the end result is you get the same effect as taking pills with a small fraction of the normal hormonal effect, which anyways is only marginally different than placebo at least according to the FDA study it was approved under. That combo will freeze your hairline in place for a long time, and there are lots of vain, sad middle aged dudes out there who will do it. Seems ill advised to take the pills orally in any circumstance though icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 05:38
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