- cross-posted to:
- technologie@jlai.lu
- cross-posted to:
- technologie@jlai.lu
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This was always going to happen. Companies in Germany when Hitler rose to power didn’t protest and speak up against him - they needed to sell his army goods. They made his uniforms and cars and didn’t say a peep about the extermination of people around them. The companies that spoke up were crushed. A corporation’s bottom line is their bottom line, no matter what horrors they need to assist in perpetrating.
They did not merely passively “assist”. They established factories in close proximity to the death camps so that they could profit off of the slave labour deemed too fit for immediate extermination.
Any one who doesn’t know what happened should go watch Schindler’s List.
Corporations are not people. They are machines
The Nazis organized a closed door meeting with the leading German industrialists and told them about their plans to rebuild the German military to take revenge for WW I. They agreed and many of those same asswipes escaped the post war prosecution.
Most of the key people behind the Civil War and 1st Business Plot also were excused from justice, for the sake of soothing political tension. IMO, executing them would have been better for curtailing the corrosion of our society.
Now these closed meetings happen at MaraLargo
Companies have decided to cut the crap and just focus on their core mission of being evil
Bow!
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
We’re a long long way from those lofty goals of yesteryear, aren’t we Google?
The audacity to still have this quote up, right now, is off the charts.
This is a screenshot from today. Get fucked Google. What a fucking lie. You’re busy changing information to capitulate to a government that wants certain information hidden.
It’s true though, Google search does make it easy to discover a broad.
Hot broads in your area want to talk to you!
Hot shingles? In MY area? And I can lay them?
Don’t forget your Shingles vaccination before you lay them! You don’t want a Shingle Transmitted Infection. You know, an ShTI (pronounced Esh-T-I).
A haunting reminder that rainbow capitalism is 100% about profit and convenience.
Corporations were never your friend. They were never going to defend you.
It’s not even “rainbow capitalism.”
This goes all the way back to women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights era.
They didn’t start accepting women into the workforce and blacks into the workforce because they saw them as valuable humans just for existing.
They realized they were leaving money on the table. If women had money, they could be marketed products, if blacks had money, they could marketed products. That was “opening up new markets.” Hiring them meant they would get paid and have money in their pockets to spend at your business.
Every single group that got attention and understanding was about being able to exploit them for more money. The only color they’ve ever cared about is the green on their money. This is also why it’s been such an uphill battle for anyone disabled, because if you can’t maximize your output by absolutely destroying your body and mind for capital: they don’t want you.
Further, if you get enough money to do some capitalism yourself and create something like “Black Wall Street” they’ll bomb the living fuck out of you to put a stop to it.
They never thought of us as humans, just as “Human Capital Stock.” We’re just units to be used and discarded like millions of mistreated farm animals every single day.
POTD
10 out of 10
Reading about the Tulsa race massacre is so crazy, like World War 1 planes, some say up to 12, others at least 8 of them doing stuff like: “… turpentine or nitroglycerin bombs being dropped and men shooting from planes”. Some also suspect the use of dynamite, so it’s possible they were quite literally dropping bombs.
If you’re left leaning and want to send a message, do it with your wallet. Switch to tutanota for mails, search with duckduckgo, use f-droid as an app store… No one needs google, it’s just somewhat inconvenient to get used to alternatives
As stupid as it is… You have to buy a fucking Google Pixel to really be able to get away from Google because it’s not as simple to get an alternate OS that is de-Googled on any other phones.
The Pixels, for example, are the only ones supported by GrapheneOS, widely considered one of the most secure phone operating systems with no Google nonsense in it.
LineageOS on the other hand you have to do a boatload of stuff to de-Google it.
LineageOS on the other hand you have to do a boatload of stuff to de-Google it.
???
LineageOS doesn’t come with Google Play Services on board at all, you have to flash it (or MicroG) if you want it. Why just make shit up?
GrapheneOS is awesome, wish more phones had it. Has really brought a feeling of control wity my phone. Just kind of ironic wearing the Google logo on the back lmao
Way ahead of you. I already use an alternative paid email service, don’t use Android, and don’t use Google search.
Thanks. Made the swap to Tuta as it’s the only thing I haven’t moved away from Google yet. See Tuta mention 2 years ago they’re making a drive alternative but… that’s still not a thing. Kinda sad would definitely like that.
I use filen.io as a web drive. Can recommend
Wallets mean nothing to people and corps with more money than the rest of humanity combined.
The people calling the shots need to be… Uh…
You live by the sword you die by the sword.
Plug for https://kagi.com/ for those who can afford to pay for search engine. Best search engine experience, love the personalized results where you manually raise and lower specific domains.
Much like the current hullabaloo about the head of ProtonMail being suspect because of his support of Trump, there’s a ton of shady shit about Kagi, too. They’re Venture Capital funded. What’s the deal with the T-shirt company? Why did they lie stupidly about stuff like “we don’t do paid advertising… oh wait whoops now we do.”
Further, the CEO of Kagi just has that techbro attitude of “You are required to listen to what I have to say.”
https://mastodon.social/@lori@hackers.town/112258758788834454
Discussions with Vlad are him telling you his side and expecting you to accept it as the truth and not keep arguing. His goal isn’t to discuss, it’s to keep talking at you until you agree or go away. HE thinks he discusses with people, but he talks AT people. So I don’t feel bad making a blog post and forcing him to be talked at for once (which I never even expected him or that many other people to see it, I’m trying to figure out how many hits I even got rn to see how bad he Streissand’d this).
But yeah I knew that already, and that’s why I didn’t engage with him. I know what a Vlad conversation is and I wasn’t willing to be lectured by the CEO of a company I criticized on my tiny personal blog. Thats an insane proposition. And it’s really not even irony–I suspected this is exactly what would happen. I knew that arguing with Vlad would only benefit his own ego, but I knew that bluntly repeating “I will not discuss this with you quit emailing me” will just prove what I already knew, that he does not care what people say (and probably barely reads what they say given that he linked me the same post I already read twice) and that he will do whatever he’s driven to do no matter what. The only options were he quits emailing me (great!) or he digs himself in deeper and deeper (great??? idk but it proves a point)
Seriously, his behavior is unhinged.
Ah, so Duckduckgo leadership is still the only one in thr clear?
Yeah, I definitely haven’t seen as much sketchy stuff about their leadership, that’s for sure. It’s really hard to find a trustworthy group doing this kind of thing, partially because of the sheer amount of money needed to get such a thing off the ground to begin with… which usually ends up meaning VC money, which ends up meaning shady decisions to be able to pay it back.
Well, appreciate the headsup. The battle is always staying informed.
While at it, any recommended alternatives to ProtonMail?
Tutanota is a common recommended alternative, (which is now just called “Tuta”).
Tutanota, as specified in my initial reply
I have had reasonable experiences with startpage as a search engine.
Find a searx / searxng instance or run one yourself! Depending on corporate software will continue to be a cat and mouse game.
Aside from political leanings of services like Protonmail and Kagi, I look at one key thing: where they are headquartered. Kagi is in California, while Protonmail is in Switzerland. IMO, this means that if a civil war breaks out, they are less likely to poison or remove their service.
It is all about whether the workers and leadership are within reach of the law, be it official or the jungle.
Kagi includes search results from the big search engines, which would mean Google and Bing. So while they do some of their own crawling to improve the results, some of your money will still be going to Google and Microsoft. It’s still a step in a better direction though. I don’t know whether Kagi has any plans to become more independent in future.
Ah, does Duckduckgo not do that too anymore? I thought there wasn’t a fully independent search engine.
DDG uses Bing primarily.
I can’t think of a fully independent one.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
I tried finding API pricing for Google but it’s probably buried somewhere. They make it sound “free” but with usage limits, which surely Kagi exceeds? Either way, it’s probably on a “per-call” basis, and Google gets a lot less money that way compared to crapping out money driven search results.
“Our unique algorithms down-rank pages with a lot of ads and trackers (which we have found correlate with a decrease in content quality) and promote content from independent, ad-free sources and personal websites.”
I’m sure it’s not perfect, but my experience with Kagi has been very very good. With DuckDuckGo I’d often have to revert to Google to find what I was looking for, but not with Kagi.
I pay for Kagi, so my opinion might be clouded by confirmation bias.
They were going to defend you for as long as doing so remained profitable.
I like to say that corporations will never go out of their way to be charitable. There’s always a bottom line, being it PR or direct profit. Even PR and Marketing spend has to eventually lead to increase in profit.
I had a management class years ago in college where the professor made the argument that in order to be ethical, every single action a business makes must be done to increase profits for its shareholders.
Charitable donation? Only if it increases public perception in a way to be justified the cost.
Pay your employees well? Only if paying them less would cause you to lose them to your competitors.
The list goes on. It’s a very depressing way to look at the world. But as time goes by, I’ve realized just how accurate that professor was. Companies don’t give a shit about you and will turn on you the second it makes their quarterly numbers look better.
That’s the problem of thinking of companies as people. Company operate like ruthless people people they usually responde to several stakeholders that all control the company like an ouija board.
Or avoid a decrease in profit, which is why you get so many posturing bandwagons which slow down once enough people have forgotten that it won’t affect profits anymore, eg all the statements and policy, name, logo etc changes due to BLM in mid-late 2020
Yeah, it’s essentially a weathervane or thermometer. You can indicate the state of a country by it.
At this point the US has joined the ranks of, well, grim theocracies. Not that the people at the top in the US worship anything but Mammon.
Right. If you react to this news with disappointment, and believe me I’m disappointed, maybe it’s more a wake up call the support was never real to begin with. I feel we’re better off without such hollow gestures. Then again I’m not a part of a marginalized group and maybe it’s not that black and white.
“maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” says the company, which also states that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, has the explicit goal of “mapping the entire world” and has, for example, already captured tens of millions of miles of Street View imagery… 🤣
It’s a shame, but fuck Google regardless of this :)
Just shows that companies show their support to please the people in power and that’s just []-washing
Opinions are still divided on whether companies should have a political opinion
Remove Google (Alphabet), Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (Meta), and Amazon from your life (and more, of course, but these are the big tech ones). Difficult but 100% necessary these days. De-Google your Android phone/tablet (basically Android without Google is possible), use Linux, order from small businesses, don’t use social media owned by big corporations, etc.
Cowardly sycophants giving their “divine” leader his wishes without question
Remember when they removed “don’t be evil” from their code of conduct back in 2018
Pepperidge Farm remembers. And so do I.
“Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote and certain people weren’t allowed on golf courses? Petridge Farm remembers. It was back in 2025.”
They didn’t. They moved it from the foreword to the final line.
To be clear, Google is absolutely evil, and the unofficial motto was always worthless. I am just annoyed everyone ate the clickbait reporting about something that never happened and is repeating it to this day. I guess “Google moved Don’t be evil Clause to a less prominent spot” doesn’t click as well.
I cannot believe this is the first time I’ve heard this.
Honestly I wish they had a setting for only federal holidays. The ones where banks close.
I also want to be able to switch back to general holidays too though. These people at google are chicken shit cowards.
Honestly I wish they had a setting for only federal holidays. The ones where banks close.
Those are bank holidays.
Ok
well, it’s not that they removed anything, it’s that the company google paid to create the holiday events told google how much it was costing to include every substrata of celebration (i.e. national bean day, national micronesia first peoples remembrance), so google said, you know what, we’re just going to have federal holidays on our calendar and people can add the rest as they like. which i think is fair enough.
I’m sure it cost them a whole $500 to update the entire system every single year after adding the feature.
What a savings!
By Grabthar’s hammer…
Sooooo.
Any recommendations on a replacement for Google calendar?
I’ve got shot of maps with that Gulf of Mexico business. The search engine due to ads, the mail client for the same reasons (still using the mail address but Fairmail as a client).
Nextcloud Has been fairly reliable for me
I use Simple Calendar from Simple Mobile Tools.
It has been bought. Please switch to fossify apps. Same dev and foss.
Right, thank you. Fossify is what I use, force of habit with the old name.
It’s no longer available on FDroid for some reason.
on account it has been bought. Consider fossify apps. same dev and foss.
I would only want actual state/local holidays anyway.
If I actually care about an event I am more than capable to set the event mysekf (e.g. Sysadmin day)Is there an alternative to Google Drive that doesn’t lock me into using MS Office. I particularly need to ability to share and edit files online.
Cryptpad
Tuta is supposed to be developing one that’s using their post-quantum encryption but it’s been 2 years so, womp.
AES is already post quantum crypto so that sounds a bit marketingy.
