bleah1000

That case could still be appealed and overruled. And then it could go to the Supreme Court, which would likely take years to resolve. Better to be safe than sorry, rather than hope that the case will stand.

It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.

I can guarantee you this made more people adverse to the cause than for it. They did everything wrong, and many of the people who might have had a chance at trying to change things are out of Google and will not be able to do anything.

It's also likely that people who saw this might now not want to be involved at all for fear of losing their job.

This action likely did nothing but make it less likely that anything will change, and been the absolute worst way to attempt to persuade people.

But that assumes that Google would settle. Without that happening, you are looking at years before getting a result, thousands of dollars of attorney fees and a high likelihood that if they lost they would appeal.

This might be more of an emotional lawsuit than a logical one.

I see this all of the time, but without any evidence. Even your edit says they get a "butts in seat" tax break. But how much is that? I can very easily see the savings of remote employees being way higher than this tax break. You might need to spend a bit more on IT and maybe on equipment. Then again you save on cleaning (not needed as often), garbage, electricity and anything else related to maintenance. Maybe it's slightly more expensive, or slightly less expensive. I've never seen anyone break the numbers down before making this claim. It feels like an appeal to emotion, those bad companies only care about money. Even if that's true, this argument doesn't prove it's true in this case.

And this all assumes long term leases or you own the building. It's possible to pay to get out of leases some time, and you can sell the building if you think it's going to cost millions to keep owning it.

Also, we are seeing lots of smaller businesses also requiring people to come back to the office. If they are getting some huge tax break for a 100 person company, how much is that? I'm happy if I'm wrong, and this is some huge tax break that saves companies millions of dollars, but I think it's fair to ask for evidence that this really saves the money people claim it saves.

I think there are other dumb reasons people are being called back, it just doesn't feel like this is one of the reasons.

While most of this comment is true, there are lots of youtubers that can make it full-time without getting millions of subscribers. The key is that you can't rely on adsense, you need to get as many different ways of getting income as possible (patreon, sponsors, merch, etc).

From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.

The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.

I mean, if they went after someone civilly, Twitter doesn't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, only that there is a 51% chance it happened.

So proving that someone downloaded all of the source code right before the leak would be pretty strong circumstantial evidence. It's not impossible to prove it just because you don't have a smoking gun.

What references do you have for this? As I understand it, any quotas are also illegal, and this would be a quota.

I think you might be confusing affirmative action programs with whatever might be happening at this hypothetical corporation.

Adn AA programs are going up before the Supreme Court, so could be ruled illegal within the next year.

The problem is with all of these new devices using AI related features. They all seem to decide that it's a good idea to use contractors to "verify" or "categorize" the pictures. There is always a leak because they have to rely on the contractor's security protocols to make sure that these pictures don't get out. And, surprisingly, contractors might not have the best security, and it doesn't seem like the companies have any incentive to verify the security.

It's kind of sad to see so many people just take this story at face value. Is it really 1am? I could certainly believe it, but some random picture doesn't make it true. Also, even it is 1am, it's possible that work ended hours ago, and that some people are staying late to talk to Musk. Who knows, but to assume that everyone is being forced to stay, maybe, maybe not. I guess I'd like a little evidence.

The number of people saying all of these completely unsubstantiated things about Twitter, and everyone believing them without any questions is weird.

In addition, how could this person know if mostly H1-B workers are present. I certainly can't tell who is and isn't on a H1-B. Or is it because the bulk of the people are not white that this person assumed they were? That seems like an immensely racist assumption.

PIPs require a tremendous amount of effort and work. It also doesn't guarantee that the person would be fired. There are many times where the employee might do just enough to get off the PIP, but still be a really low performer.

It also sucks for the employee, a PIP is really stressful not knowing what will happen next, will you get fired, should you start looking for a new job.

In addition, the PIP can take months to get to the finish. Maybe even six months in some cases.

A layoff takes way less time, but it does suck for the employee. I don't know which is worse. But if you have a good employer, you still might be able to transfer to another part of the company. Being on a PIP usually means your only choice is looking outside the company for a new job.

Layoffs always hit good and low performers, there is no way it can't. But if a company wants to get rid of a number of low performers at the same time, PIPs are not the way to go.

This isn't strictly true. I do think they are going to lose some number of the highest performers because they have options and they will realize they can go somewhere else.

However, there are still people who are bad at their job and are not good enough at politics/networking to survive a layoff/firing. And there are a set of people who are not liked by an incompetent manager and will also probably be managed out who do not deserve it and are good workers.

So you lose some at the top, some at the bottom, and some in the middle. The issue for Meta, will these actions be able to get rid of enough of the unproductive people to be worth it?

The other issue: morale always goes down after these kinds of things. So I think there is a good chance that overall productivity will go down as people do enough not to be marked for firing, but are not motivated to go above and beyond.

I personally think that Mark Zucherberg doesn't have the charisma to deliver this message in a way that doesn't actually cause harm to the company. But time will tell.

The problem is that right now everyone is still looking to switch jobs.

If you assume that recessions bring out some really talented engineers looking for jobs, that's not happening yet. A good company strategy would be to stop or slow down hiring, wait for the recession to start in full swing, then restart hiring when the good talent is on the market. At the same time, you could use it to re-evaluate projects. If you've ever worked at a big company, I'm sure you can think of a few projects that should be killed because they are a waste of resources. This gives a big company a chance to remove some poor performing employees. Unfortunately, this will also get rid of good employees too, because of politics and bad managers.

This can be bad for the employees because you aren't sure if your project is going to be cancelled. You are less likely to look at new jobs, so if your current job is really bad you are stuck. This also puts downward pressure on salaries.

I don't know if this is the ethical thing to do, but I think it makes business sense.

I don't know if the garbage can is good, but I found the last picture with the new garbage can in the foreground and a ton of garbage behind the can on the ground funny.

This article is not very good, because it doesn't say what they are trying to do with the garbage cans. Is it making them harder to be damaged? To make it so people use the cans instead of throwing the garbage on the ground? To make it easy to service?

I would guess, the primary purpose is so they aren't damaged, but who knows.

To be fair, you've fallen into the same trap. One person says they don't have a problem, you believe them and start saying the first statement must be misinformation.

It's possible that both people are correct and the circumstances that cause the battery to drain require being connected to a AirTag, not just near any old AirTag. Or there are other circumstances that cause the battery to drain.

How would you enforce this? In the US this is completely illegal.

In addition, you would have to ask extremely invasive questions of everyone. So is your proposal that you require that your company ask for the detailed ethnicity of everyone? What happens when people refuse, do you just not allow them to interview or manage?

What about people who were born in the US, do you assume that if they are of Japanese descent they can't interview someone of Chinese descent?

Oops, mixed up my terms. Thanks for the clarification.

I don't think this is even worthy of being reported on. There is a high likelihood of this being thrown out in summary judgement. You can't claim something without at least some facts that indicates that Apple was going to build a search engine and the payments made by Google made Apple stop development. My guess is this is more of a PR stunt than a real lawsuit.

What are you talking about? The media consistently write articles about ongoing trials. Think about some of the major trials recently, and you will find many, many articles about them before they are done.

I mean look at the Elizabeth Holmes trial. There have been multiple articles from Ars Technica before the trial was even over.

Yeah, remember when CNN threatened to dox someone? Remember, this is the network with Chris Cuomo, who was allowed to interview his own brother, giving him softball questions. The network where Chris Cuomo faked part of his Covid-19 quarantine. The network that was talking about peaceful protests while showing flames from the riot in the background.

CNN is the lowest of the low. At this point, it's simply Weekly World News with a thin veneer of fake respectability based on past accomplishments. I think people are remembering what it used to be and not what it has become. I think many media outlets are coasting on previous reputations since most people do not read most of their news from a single source. So you might not notice the bad CNN stories, if you only see the few stories that are mostly okay. But those stories are definitely becoming fewer and fewer.

I think this is a problem on both sides of the fence, this is the second coming of yellow journalism. I hope it doesn't last too much longer, because it's so hard to sift through biased stories and figure out what is fact and what is opinion.

As I understand it, Japan doesn't have any fair use provisions for copyright. So this is clearly illegal there.

I do thinks it's stupid that anybody would bother to punish people who do this kind of thing though.

As much as Disney sucks, it looks like Redbubble is being overly aggressive in removing things that are kind of like Disney's Loki. The specific part:

In most cases, this means that the rights holder did not specifically identify your for removal, but Redbubble has detected potential similarity between your removed work and one or more words, phrases or images included in the rights holder's removal guidance.

It looks like Redbubble is the one that doesn't understand how to enforce copyright properly.

I said in my comment that I think that it might be that lock downs worked in certain situations, but not all. From your comment, it sounds like there is no amount of evidence that will convince you that lock downs are more nuanced than the statement that they are 100% effective in all cases.

Remember, they weren't really full lock downs, they were these partial kind of lock downs. Even in the US, some places did curfews, some did not. At the very least, you have to admit that there have been some measures under the lock down umbrella that were not as effective as others. If you can't even examine your faith in your statement, you are right that there is no point in discussing this subject further.

What evidence is there that this is true?

The problem is assuming that no mask mandate means nobody wears masks. As the top poster said, people still wore masks, but it wasn't forced. I suspect this is true of a number of places that didn't have mask mandates.

Also, what we are calling lock downs, weren't really good lock downs. People still went out, people still went to the grocery store and other stores, and other places. I happen to be friends with a contact tracer, and the problem was the lock downs actually made the pandemic worst in a number of cases. If someone got sick in a household, everyone in the house got sick. I would argue if everyone is stuck in the house together and someone gets sick, there is no escape. By the time the person has even figured out they are sick, it's too late because everyone is home all of the time. Now, that's not to say without lock downs this wouldn't have still happened, but the lock downs practically guarantee that someone sharing a house with a sick person is spending most of their day in that location exposed to covid.

I think it's too early to know if lock downs were that useful. I don't think we will know for years as more data is gathered and people look at the kind of lock downs, and places that didn't do lock downs. Maybe some places that didn't do lock downs did well due to a different climate, or because they were more rural. But this would lead to the conclusion that maybe lock downs are not the best solution for all places, maybe they are good for cities and not as useful for rural areas. I think that's something that we might find out in the future.

What evidence do you have that this is what happened? I do think that conservatives in California are definitely behind this push, but so what. Are they not allowed because they are conservative and maybe some powerful people are also pushing it?

I know it's hard to see, but Newsom is a terrible governor who doesn't know what he's doing and has done a lot of things that appear to be based on who donates to him. He labeled hollywood as essential while keeping many small businesses locked down without providing any kind of reasons. It's true that they did have stringent rules for the productions, but it's not clear that some kind of rule for other businesses could have been created that allowed something like indoor dining to stay open, or even outdoor dining. He seems to have been bending over backward for the teacher's unions, and keeping schools closed until the recall effort got more and more real. The people this hurts are lower income students, and the other issue is that millions of school age children stopped going. Want to guess who this affected the most, yep, the lower class, who are more likely to be minorities. There are schools in many states that have been open for months, so if that is a terrible problem we should have the data, and he could use that as a reason to keep the schools closed. But the rules in California don't appear to be based on science, they seem to be how the people at the top feel that day.

In addition, he locked down the state and then went to dinner with people indoors. He lied about it at first until the photos showed up. He was caught multiple times in gathering against his current lock down orders, a typical do as I say not as I do politician.

I mean, maybe he's just a typical corrupt politician and that's life, but California is a super majority democrat state, so you don't generally get the best politician, you get who the democrat party decides is the best. I think this leads to corrupt politicians who don't care about the people, they care about the biggest donor, more so than in places where the parties are more balanced. The recall is representative of people finally having enough. Maybe it's being pushed by some major conservative media outlets, but you would be surprised how much of it is actually grass roots. Most likely the recall will fail because on the other side, the major media outlets are definitely very friendly to Newsom and the democrats. I mean look at the ratings for cable news outlets. While Fox News generally gets the best of all the outlets, if you add up the totals of all the other outlets, they easily dwarf Fox. And those other outlets are not in any way shape or form conservative or controlled by Murdoch.

This is just a few people explaining how they de-radicalized. Now imagine the opposite, someone with some slightly bad opinion suddenly finds themselves shut out of the main platforms because of hate speech rules. They now become more radicalized. Due to the number of people constantly being suspended/banned I think there is a greater chance that these people will become radicalized, than someone will realize they have a bad opinion because they got suspended/banned.

I'm reminded of Daryl Davis, and the way he de-radicalized KKK members. He did it by talking to them, engaging them in speech. It feels like hate speech censoring could actually lead to more radicalization as people feel persecuted and become even more radical than if you had let them talk. It's a hard problem because you can get radicalization if you allow people to create their own echo chambers of hate. How do you balance trying to avoid creating these kinds of echo chambers, versus creating radicals by pushing them to other sites where there are no restrictions?

That may be, but I think it's all for show. It's unlikely that anything will happen for years, and by that time there will probably be a different president. Look at the Microsoft anti-trust action, which started in the 90's but didn't really finish until the early 2000's. If the government tries to force something like a breakup, then I imagine any company will spend years in court going through appeals before anything will be resolved.

Most likely is that after a few years, any company targeted with anti-trust action will agree to some changes in the way they do business and maybe a fine. Then all will be forgotten. It's likely that the changes will be pro-consumer, but I think it's unlikely that any company will be broken up.

Hmm, the article is a little light on what I think is a bigger question. Are wealthier people leaving the state and being replaced by less wealthy people?

They mention that the report found that the "movement patterns for wealthy areas were similar to those in less wealthy areas". This is kind of vague and I don't know what they mean by "wealthy areas". It would be interesting to see if they looked at homeowners versus renters who left wealthy areas. I didn't look at the study itself, so maybe they did that kind of analysis.

The reason this is important, because even a small percentage of really wealthy people leaving the state, would cause a large dip in taxes collected. So even if it turns out 1% of the wealthiest Californians left the state, that could cause big deficits in the state budget. Even if there is a bailout by the feds for this year, it could cause a lot of problems going forward.

I think they probably mean that they get feedback from each person, then formulate an anonymous survey that goes out to the group.

The problem is that Google will be fine, but if a lawsuit takes an e-mail and uses it to say that this person is sexist/racist, or multiple people are sexist/racist, it could be bad for those people. Google will be able to provide context in a legal reply, but that doesn't mean that if the people are named with a quote, that they won't be mobbed. And this has happened with other lawsuits related to Google, where e-mail quotes in a legal document resulted in that person getting death threats.

I'm also not sure what you mean by employees are allowed to discuss working conditions. Are you assuming that the only e-mails/documents that she took are related to working conditions? There is no current evidence that is what she took. Or do you mean something else? Because the only public statement from Google alleges she took a large number of e-mails/documents from Google, not that she was fired for discussing working conditions. We'll have to wait for a lawsuit from her to find out further details though.

I'm not sure I understand your claim. Assuming she could get an exemption from an NDA, I don't think that means she can just grab all of the data she wants. Do you have some cases in mind where a whistle blower, or a worker was able to grab large volumes of data and send them to their counsel without repercussion? I think if she had taken a small number of targeted e-mails and documents and sent them to legal counsel, that might stand up. But it appears that she took thousands of e-mails and some number of documents (or maybe the e-mails contained attached documents). We'll have to wait for whatever lawsuit comes to find out if Google is exaggerating the total number of documents, and she only took a small handful. However, I would find it odd if an automated system would trip if she grabbed only a few tens of e-mails/documents. But maybe after the Uber incident, Google is a little more paranoid about when documents are taken off Google computers.