2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

Almost literally ran into Jeff Bezos the other day as he was walking out of and I was entering my friend's bar, Bevy, here in Honolulu. I was wondering what the black cars outside were for... It was my chance to tell him to treat his warehouse workers better but I was caught off guard and missed it :(

Jeff B has personal protection security. It's paid for by the company so they have to disclose it in the annual report every year.

Heh, I figured the tough looking drivers were also his bodyguards.

http://mashable.com/2017/10/23/facebook-explore-publisher-post-organic-reach-drop/#VEQYakHvYPqS

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-its-good-to-have-a-real-audience

The sourcing on this seems somewhat opaque. But Mashable is reporting that Facebook is testing a new system which would remove publishers from your Facebook timeline unless the publishers pay Facebook. This, frankly, doesn’t terribly surprise me. It’s how monopolies operate.

The Mashable article says the test is only underway in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. (Here’s a similar write-up in another industry publication.) Notably, those are countries I suspect would generate considerably less industry attention than if you ran the test in the US or France. As I said, the sourcing on the story seems a little fuzzy. We may find out the details are a bit more complicated. But the broad outline seems clear: Facebook is testing a new regime that will require publications to pay Facebook if they want to show up in users feeds.

but *i* want publications to show up in *my* feed when i put them there

Facebook doesn't give a shit what you want!

crying

News: Facebook 2016 elections team provided advertisers with a blueprint of a divided America, carving up electorate https://t.co/LJFbm7tzii pic.twitter.com/ehMvCAodMC

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) October 30, 2017

While we're on Facebook...

New by me: Facebook misinformation is fast becoming a global humanitarian crisis. https://t.co/VHcRn32EV7

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) October 30, 2017

Horrifying. Maybe I change my vote to FB next year

Welcome to app hell. You need an app or a printed QR code to use the bathroom here. pic.twitter.com/hYbHcsOOrN

— One Bright Light (@onebrightlight) November 5, 2017

This is quite something:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/this-city-hall-brought-to-you-by-amazon/

Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers. This is truly perverse. Called a personal income-tax diversion, the workers must still pay the full taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads or whatever, Amazon would get to keep it all instead.

what the fuck

nationalise the tech giants

I hope we get it!

I can accept that with great wealth comes great fraudulency, but lol! - this is seriously taking the piss!

"Most of the HQ2 bids had more traditional sweeteners. Such as Chula Vista, California, which offered to give Amazon 85 acres of land for free (value: $100 million) and to excuse any property taxes on HQ2 for 30 years ($300 million). New Jersey remains the dollar king of the subsidy sweepstakes, having offered Amazon $7 billion to build in Newark."

New Jersey deserves it

Maybe they can put it next to American Dream

This is quite a useful resource:

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=amazoncom

this is ridiculous. these municipalities should be redirecting their constituent's money toward subsidizing new stadiums for major sports teams instead

Which I thought was Chicago's plan in the first place.

https://i.imgur.com/RldxxB5.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/U05bz8X.jpg

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-now-worth-100b-thanks-black-friday-n823911

may his wealth trickle down upon us all

https://i.imgur.com/suP1MtC.jpg

And those top 10 dipshits let the Kochs run half the country that most of them live in. Fuck all of them.

The cult of rich people is capitalist Jonestown with hexavalent chromium instead of cyanide in the flavor-ade. Takes longer, turns your own body against you.

At Business Insider's IGNITION conference, Scott Galloway gave a blistering presentation on why "The Big Four" — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — should be broken up.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-apple-facebook-google-should-be-broken-up-scott-galloway-2017-11

I'm not linking to the Poynter.org write-up of the presentation because it's terrible but here's a good pull quote

Galloway, the author of "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google" derided Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg as making an argument akin to McDonald's claiming it was a "fast food platform." There's no company in world history more a "media company," he contended, than Facebook. It just wants to "operate without accountability."

When the big platform companies declare they have "to do better," Galloway said, that should be translated as, "We know we do wrong but have no intention of doing better."

didnt post them but ive been reading all the bezos/amazon news as of late and its p much tied for the worst w fb

thinking of ways to avoid it but its more unavoidable than fb

Amazon is definitely the worst at this point.

It's still Google and I can't imagine a worse company.

what's the worst thing abt google

The worst? I'll just sum it up in that they are the entry point for most of the Internet and know more about us than any other giant tech company and are scaling in a direction to know even more and become even more powerful. The company that knows the most is the most powerful. And it's not a company obsessed with privacy.

I'm curious about who's gonna win the AI war--my vague recollection of things I've read suggest Amazon has the tech necessary to make big leaps but its Google that has the largest (and so most useful) data sets.

AI is probably better described as machine learning, and Google is way ahead of AMZN.

haha i typed and then removed the phrase "machine learning" on the expectation tombot would arrive to shit upon it from a great height for some reason

I anxiously await him to arrive and shit on both of us, it's always glorious.

alexa cannot even tell me "what a choo choo sounds like"

we've gotcha covered big guy

it's

CHOOO CHOOOOOOO

dirupted machine learning

After I read that Gizmodo article I unplugged my Echo Dot and put it in a drawer

it's still listening tho

its in a drawer in a BAG ok

it can still hear your bag

*hoos receives push notification*

"customers who stuffed their echo dot in this bag also bought:
--128-pack wolf brand chili (no beans)
--good housekeeping (12-month subscription)
--amazon ginsu knife (neck-sized)

"Alexa, what does a hoos bag sound like?"

"shamone"

Genuinely do not know why any of you nutbags voluntarily PAY to have a big tech company spy device in yr homes

http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/ecommerce/timemagazine/intro.jpg

this was a good read. about things that are awful. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook

reposting from the Weinstein thread, h/t Simon H for catching this: https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valley-s-worst-apologies-of-2017-1821064631

I think the Best Buy one doesn't qualify (they're brick & mortar retail, their corporate hq is in the minneapolis burbs, and they committed a regrettable human error and said so) but there are some really good ones in there. key graf, imo:

As I mentioned earlier, tech companies love to point fingers at machines behaving badly. They spend a lot of time exalting their beloved algorithms as a solution to many of life’s grand problems, but they will not skip a beat before throwing them under the bus for the latest fuck-up. There is a hypocrisy in trying to boost one’s image using the same tools you’re exploiting as a scapegoat.

Was it a resentful AI bot that wrote that

This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter