The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.
Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.
Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?
I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.
I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.
Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).
My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.
What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.
Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.
(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).
A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…
…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?
I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.
Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.
I hate Google.
I think the word you are looking for here is “cowards”
I think it is rather that conservatism has nothing to do with being conservative really at the end of the day, that is just the team colors these people wear to identify what team they are on.
Conservatives are conservative so they can hate without guilt and so they can control and possess with violence and be rewarded for it. From this angle the synergy heinous shitheads see in being a Republican and being a pedophile (but also defining your public persona completely around hating pedophiles too) is pretty straightforward in my opinion. Also probably the most pathetic thing on the face of the earth.
The FBI already investigate LEO across the country more than a decade ago and found that white supremacists were actively infiltrating our police force. Nothing has been done about this finding.
White supremacists are “infiltrating” into police forces in the same way I infiltrate into my buddies house… when they specifically invite me over to hang out with them at their house and stand up and come over and hug me with a warm greeting when I show up.
There is NO sense of infiltration here, rather we are looking at a fresh turd on a hot day (police), and there are flies all over it (white supremacists).
The way I see it is that pedos are the perfect thing for the childlike, immature psyche of republicans to focus on and unify around as the evil baddies they have to fight since an actual pedophile is one of the closest things to a disney evil villain who is evil just because.
Republicans really can’t emotionally handle problems in life being more nuanced and complex than a secret cabal of pedophiles that have to be righteously hunted down in witch-hunts. That is satisfying, that gets Republican’s to sit up and pay attention because they get to hate without feeling guilty about it.
Republicans actually can’t handle the world being complex and nuanced, they can’t handle solutions not involving them rolling out a vile hatred for people, so fighting pedophilia is one of the few places left republicans can retreat to, gripping onto their pathetically simplified and hateful world views.
I don’t really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?
Yes
Bro I bet if you did allll that work and took all that risk just to make your life maybbeee better that at the end of the day the people living in the place you made it to would be blown away by your incredible bravery and resolve and would welcome you with open arms into their society and economy!
………
Or maybe they would just pay their coast guard to troll around drowning migrant boats with heavily armed speed boats with expensive lights on and an automated voice message that says “go home” and shrug and say “well we tried!!” as families drown right in front of their eyes.
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.
Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.
A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting “some genocide!” and it is incredibly pathetic.
Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.
I mean, academia can define “liberalism” however it wants, that isn’t how I define it and most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs
This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.
I don’t understand the confusion here. My point is that centrism in the US is largely a political position constructed in reverse. If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.
Call it whatever you want, people that try to disappear in a crowd by just mimicking the behavior and beliefs of people around them are not doing the same thing as people in the crowd who are behaving according to their morals, ethics and understanding of the world and either are blending into the crowd or not because of it.
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards, they are unwilling to imagine right and wrong outside of the comfortable and established narratives that determine right and wrong in their head (and are described within the Overton Window). Centrists will for example happily join progressives in attacking Trump for doing awful things like draconian and cruel immigration control measures, and as soon as Biden takes office and keeps doing the same shit they will flip to yelling at progressives for attacking Biden for doing the same thing.
Centrists are the kind of political position that has substance, it is purely an average of the Overton Window, no matter distorted and fucked up the Overton Window has been made by conservatives and the rich.
Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.
I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.
Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.
At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.
Sure, team vs team games create the immediate game design consequence that if your teammates are terrible they can ruin your experience even if you are playing extremely well.
As a result good game design should limit the capacity of a single player to ruin the rest of their team’s experience. Obviously, this is a balance to find, limit this too much and the player no longer feels like they can impact the game for better or for worse. It goes beyond a balance though into the basic incentives and framing of the gameplay.
Take for example match length time, one of the ways a game can handle a player getting dealt a shitty hand with teammates is to have the match length be short enough that a player can just shrug their shoulders and discard the next 10 minutes or so from their competitive goals and just play the match out until it ends and they get matched with better teammates. Rocket League is a perfect example of this. Imagine if Rocket League had League Of Legends length matches. Imagine how much more toxic rocket league players would be to each other if getting matched with a shitty teammate meant having to play 40 minutes of frustrating, unfun gameplay with no coordination between teammates.
Another way team based competitive games can mitigate teammates being frustrating and not coordinating is by building the gameplay around it being easy and natural to coordinate with teammates. Take for example Apex Legends with it’s brilliant pinging system along with automated call outs, it makes coordination natural for players who might otherwise just fuck off and not coordinate (not that this doesn’t still happen). The equivalent system in a LOL type game would a simple way to non-verbally telegraph the rhythm of your next attacks to your teammates so that they could easily chain their moves with yours. Make it so the game is always displaying to your teammates what you are planning to do next so that it is maximally easy for your teammates to coordinate even if they don’t give a shit.
I have other examples but I think RTS games also struggle often with these things, in team games that go on for 20+ mins the losing team almost always starts to get angry and frustrated at each other even though… losing is literally 50% of the experience in playing a competitive RTS. That is bad game design in my opinion, losing isn’t going to be as fun as winning but there are ways to make players less likely to get genuinely upset with each other when they are losing. Take for example Titanfall 2’s end of the match blitz where the losing team has to try to get to escape drop ships, it gives individual players on the losing team something to fixate on pro-actively doing that can benefit them meaningfully instead of just letting the losing team check out from the gameplay and start blaming each other.
What I really don’t respect about the design of League Of Legends is it is one of those types of games that really puts teammates at odds with each other and it creates a lot of toxic conflict because of it. It is just bad design, people joke about the toxicity of games like LOL but it isn’t a joke.
I think it is a weirdly important time to imagine the future of electric bicycles.
We like to imagine hover cars, spaceships, jet packs blah blah blah… what about a far future e-bike that can be peddled by a person, is light enough to pick up and carry a reasonable distance and also has a battery big enough to go 1000 miles on a charge? An assumption of almost every sci-fi is that humans figure out how to make immensely powerful engines and store huge amounts of energy in small devices and yet the most obvious application, electric bicycles, is always ignored.
Landing on an alien planet with a group of people and need to make a camp? Make dirt biking trails and boom you have a transportation system that is extremely low maintenance and simple to maintain. Is there some kind of obstacle like a river? Bicycles are easy to carry to the other side of the obstacle were you can get back on.
Are we in a far future post apocalypse but with advanced technology? Literally everybody is going to be riding around electric bicycles.
What makes electric bicycles such a weirdly invisible technology in media is they don’t seem futuristic like a segway or electric unicycle. They just look like a gravel bicycle with a battery strapped to them… but that is what makes the electric bicycle paradoxically such a sure bet for being used absolutely everywhere in the future no matter which direction things go. We already perfected the mountain bike design, the road bike design, the gravel bicycle design…. it’s like we spent the 20th century developing the perfect chassis for an electric motor and battery meant to transport a single person and some cargo and now we are finally getting around to dropping the electric motor and battery in.
Less futuristic cities with flying car traffic, more solar punk futures with electric bicycles having replaced the vast majority of personal transit on lightly developed planets, large space stations ships and…. just about everywhere else too.
I’m not a Rogan meathead, but women are absolutely super choosey these days. Dating apps have given women an inflated sense of their own (dating) worth, and they largely want tall, handsome, well-off, slightly older men.
If this is happening even a little bit it is because of the distorting forces of capitalism and addictive phone apps are warping peoples interactions on dating apps.
I promise you, if you are genuinely a pretty nice human being who tries to be a good person there are plenty of women out there who want to fuck you. Really, the world is full of horny women who get hot and bothered by realizing that cute man they just met is also really sweet and kind. You don’t need fit any particular idea of a man, I understand it feels like you do and that is an awful feeling but it is a feeling not the reality.
Also women are probably more choosey because they are by large exhausted from work places that grind them down, trying to make rent, healthcare bullshit and any number of other struggles of modern life, just like you. They want to make sure that use their vanishing amount of free time, energy and money pursuing somebody that isn’t going to be a dead end.
If you want the quickest route to more men finding women who are interested in them, then support unionization, the social safety net, workers rights, and progressive legislation on housing. We need to take better care of people so that they have more free time, energy and money to pursue love and sex.
using a devastating neurological diseases as an insult, is wrong, but using it a a reason that he shouldn’t run a country is fair.
I don’t necessarily disagree but you also run the risk of distracting from the most dangerous part about him. He is a fascist, that is what is wildly dangerous about him and as much as it is fun to make fun of fascists for being dumbshits, it isn’t a lack of mental capacity that leads to fascism. Those two things are perpendicular and as tempting as it is to equate fascism with stupidity the far more terrifying truth is that it only really equates with ignorance.
Lights can represent hope, and Israel is very focused on destroying that in Palestinian’s hearts right now.
I was being bitterly sarcastic but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if Israel was being that cruel.
Hi Keith it’s your Mom’s friend Charen (pronounced with a hard Ch) she met at a weird multi-level marketing candle scheme she didn’t realize she was getting trapped into a miserable full length evening advertisement for (I should remember, I hosted it!).
I barely know you but I just wanted to raise awareness for my community Facebook group Leopards4FacesInNeed that connects vulnerable third world children with Christian Leopards.
Also stop smoking pot Keith, it is a SIN and I think talking about it publicly here as a thinly veiled attempt to shame you in a totally out of context fashion is totally appropriate and it’s not like I am going to face any consequences so maybe just log out of facebook and stop checking it for years at a time so you don’t have to deal with people like me. Also have you talked to my son Kevin? I lost him to the terrible woke plague and he won’t talk to me unless I take off my maga hat and I’m afraid to since I think I can hear the sound of the good old days of America playing from within side the hat, it must be a sign from up above (you should hear the tiny angles sing my name) and even my love for my son can’t get in the way of those types of messages!
the portal straight to the depths of Facebook rendered into the raw flesh of reality screeches as it destabilizes and collapses shut 🚪 💥
The peaceful silence of the night resumes. 🐿️ 🌙 🦨 🦗 🦗 🦉 🌟 💤
I don’t think you are listening, people were saying this over and over again BEFORE Biden stepped down, we didn’t need hindsight, YOU did because you refused to listen.
I love that y’all admit you were wrong superficially but then insult people who have been making strong arguments for quite a long time that Biden should step down and not run again with statements like “well, who could have known!” with a happy shrug.
We did and people like you almost cost us the election. Do you understand how dangerous a role people like you played in shutting down criticism of Biden and attacking concerned Democrats like they were all Russia trollbots or something?
You speak of the danger of divisiveness, of having democrats split up and fractured… hopefully you do realize that is PRECISELY what democrats shouting down concerns about Biden were doing? Can you at least see that in 20/20 hindsight?
What have you learned that will lead you into NOT making the same potentially catastrophic miscalculation next time around?
…because you realize y’all look like clowns in the wake of Harris raising 200 million and 170,000 volunteers in a week right?
Honestly, you need to stop commenting on politics until you dismantle your world view and understanding of how US politics works please, you don’t understand very basic shit here. I don’t know what more proof you need than the last month or so of politics.
Don’t give me this “Wow, happy surprise! Who woulda thought things could go so well!” nonsense, it is insulting and minimizing to those of us who have actually been paying attention and understood the political forces at play.