That is very ordinary behavior in US corporations. It might be illegal where you live, but it’s common SOP where we live.
Sorry I misspelled: Employees installing spyware on purpose? For foreign governments? Without oversight?
Now that is a different situation.
Since I have twitter comprehensively blocked on all my devices, I don’t see hardly any of the cites in this thread. Just the poster’s commentary about their cites.
Here’s an article in the current Foreign Affairs on the topic of ubiquitous spyware and the radical danger it poses to western civilization. It’s probably paywalled, but I don’t know their policy on “free samples”.
Not according to Elon apparently.
Now this is wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to start, and whether to blame utter stupidity or extreme racism.
First population decline due low birth rates is not a danger to our civilization. Our planet is heavily over populated and the threat of civil unrest due to limited resources and environmental damage due to this overpopulation is much more of a danger than under population. The human race would be much more sustainable long term at 10% of our population so long as we could make a smooth transition, and declining birth rates is the smoothest way to get there.
Second even if declining birthrates were a problem (suppose they suddenly dropped by half) they still wouldn’t be as bad as global warming. It would take much longer for the human population to reach critically low levels and the simple solution of encouraging more procreation would solve it. Compared with the immediate risk environmental devastation of climate change and the only solutions available involving painful sacrifice, its no contest.
Third lower birthrates to the point of population reduction aren’t even happening. Our population is continuing to grow not shrink. At worst our population increase is slowing down such that we are expected to flatten out at around 10.4 billion by 2100 (around the time the truly apocalyptic climate change effects start kicking in )
The only place where populations are actually decreasing due to low birth rates are in the more wealthy (i.e. more white) countries. So the only reason one could “legitimately” be worried about declining birth rates leading to the colapse of civilization is if one subscribed to the replacement theory, that the danger is that the swarthy uncivilized heathens might out produce us and so replace our civilization with their barbarism.
So either Musk is lacking a basic understanding of math, biology and environmental science or he is a confirmed racist.
Look, I could be completely invested in Twitter… say, a stockholder who does TED talks about the platform and moonlights as a barista in their Market Street headquarters…
And I’d still be savoring the schadenfreude, and hoping the crash and burn is spectacular.
Why choose?
Yeah, I encounter people all the time who are looking for some sort of data analyst role or whatever and put SQL on their resume. So I’ll ask them a simple question like “How would you write a SQL statement that SELECTs ALL records FROM a TABLE A?” Typically they can’t even answer that and I’ve basically given them the answer.
The attitude across many professions these days seems to be “fake it until you make it”. Combine that with an interview process that tends to be very superficial and abstract and a culture where most actual work is outsourced and you end up with a whole lot of people with highly superficial understanding of topics padding their resumes and able to pass themselves off as “experts”. They can slip in and hope they can “hustle” or charm or otherwise fake their way through the job until they get settled. And often it works. Or at least for a year or so until they can find a new job.
I’m dealing with this now on my current project at work ( a mid-sized management consultancy). There’s me (a 50 year old project manager with 25+ years experience doing this shit) and my lead architect (same age and experience level in his area of expertise). And then we have a rotating team of about a half dozen business analysts who are all functionally useless ranging in experience from right out of college to a 40-something. I can’t give them any tasks more complex than “take meeting minutes” or “proofread this deliverable and pretend to understand it”. And we haven’t even started onboarding the actual technical resources yet who actually need real skills.
And unfortunately I’m incentivized to not fire them because bigger team means more client revenue which means my performance looks better.
Agree completely with all you’ve said. I never played your game at your rarified level, but at my more modest level in IT in several eras I saw the same sorts of BS.
But …
That employee behavior in turn stems from a business culture that simply assumes employees with the desired expertise exist out there to be plucked at no cost as low-hanging fruit. Rather than treating employees as a crop to be sown, fertilized, raised, and finally used / consumed. With some seed saved back for the next generation.
It’s the difference between hunter/gatherer culture and agriculture. We certainly know which is the more productive approach to creating plentiful food supplies. It’s interesting to me that business collectively is so blind to what it takes to have a reliable employee supply.
By and large they insist on hunter-gatherer mode, then when the pickin’s are slim their answer is “Oh noes, I guess we’ll have to starve?”
There’s even a name for it - “Tragedy of the Commons”
I don’t know about “rarified”. But I started out as a developer and over the course of my career became more interested in the hows and whys of what I was developing for companies. But actually seeing how the sausage gets made, I’m surprised any of this shit actually works.
If you read it as: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to wealthy capitalists than global warming”, it makes more sense. Having fewer people to sell to means less money to be made.
Yup.
The extreme rarified tip of that orbit-tall capitalist pyramid requires an awful lot of proles to be crushed at the bottom to hold the apex waaay up there. If there are only half the proles available to crush the apex is barely 10% as high. Can’t have that.
Just curious if any of the recent events have caused anyone that believes Musk is a genius inventor/businessman to reassess that notion?
Great chance for those who worship Musk to get some easy cash.
The Silicon Valley executives still greatly admire Musk or say they do. Twitter journalists less so.
How they they going to get cash? Musk is selling shares of Twitter. Twitter gets the cash.
What is a better investment than in Business and Science God Musk?
Short selling certain auto companies?
I guess someone else doesn’t see his genius either.
He’ll find enough price-insensitive equity investors to “own the libs”.