Light a cigarette anywhere in my house, and you’ll be dazzled by the flow of the smoke—up and around, through doorways, swirling toward the ceiling and then back to the floor, inscribing elegant arcs through the air—never resting until it finds its way out a window.
Many pundits seem to delight in observing that the board can’t fix any of the “real” problems with Facebook, a view that is true at the level of questions like “how do we fix our broken information sphere and polarized society?”, and false at the level of many questions of vital importance to to individual users. Questions like: why did Facebook delete a post in which I criticized the government? Why can’t I see strikes against my account? Why are policies enforced inconsistently? Why are US politicians held to a higher standard than foreign leaders? Why aren’t the community standards available in Punjabi? People who don’t see those as “real” problems with Facebook have strangely little empathy for the billions of people who use the company’s services, even as those same critics style themselves as noble sentinels of a free society.
If you’re a programmer and you have no equity and no union representation, then you have no form of ownership or leverage. Any employer who’s trying to make you feel like an owner is setting you up for a rude awakening. So don’t be a chump and buy into it.
Employees are going to vote with their feet and I feel for People Ops teams who are going to be having a tremendous number of emotional conversations.
And in any case, the fact remains that this is a company co-founder calling out an employee in front of all of their peers, and then following up by sharing that post publicly on the web, redacting little more than the employee’s name. Unlike the co-founder, the employee can’t risk responding in public without fearing for their job. The power dynamics here are ugly — the sort of thing that could make you think twice about wanting to work for someone.
Most Americans don’t have a news source they trust, and more than half of Americans
Often, there are two company cultures. There’s the glossy, official, Comms Department-approved culture — and then there’s the real, lived experience of showing up every day and working at a place. If the difference between those two versions is large enough, the result is generally serious, sustained, employee-management resentment. Let’s call that “culture gap.”
The only benefit of Obama’s restraint was as a source of lessons for his vice-president Joe Biden. Most obviously, the lesson is that erring on the side of restraint is worse than erring on the side of stimulus. Second, that the likelihood of securing Republican support for anything is minimal, so there is no point in proposing an inadequate response in the name of bipartisanship. The final lesson is reflected in the fact that neither Emanuel nor Summers has been given any role, formal or otherwise in the Biden Administration.
Shopify merchants now represent 3.6 million jobs around the world, and every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur makes their first sale on Shopify.
the idea that science should be devoted to finding the fact is itself an ideology. It’s an ideological belief that humanity is better off knowing the facts than not knowing them. That’s a deeply humanistic ideology. Knowledge is power, and the idea that human society always deserves more power — that in some general sense, we’ll eventually do the right thing with the knowledge science gives us — is an article of faith. It’s easy to find cases where reality tests that faith — the most obvious and famous example being the building of the atom bomb. Like many of the people who built it, I still wonder whether it was right to give humankind the power to wipe itself out; my faith in the goodness of science is not absolute.