The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.

Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.

Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…

…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

Bro I bet if you did allll that work and took all that risk just to make your life maybbeee better that at the end of the day the people living in the place you made it to would be blown away by your incredible bravery and resolve and would welcome you with open arms into their society and economy!

………

Or maybe they would just pay their coast guard to troll around drowning migrant boats with heavily armed speed boats with expensive lights on and an automated voice message that says “go home” and shrug and say “well we tried!!” as families drown right in front of their eyes.

using a devastating neurological diseases as an insult, is wrong, but using it a a reason that he shouldn’t run a country is fair.

I don’t necessarily disagree but you also run the risk of distracting from the most dangerous part about him. He is a fascist, that is what is wildly dangerous about him and as much as it is fun to make fun of fascists for being dumbshits, it isn’t a lack of mental capacity that leads to fascism. Those two things are perpendicular and as tempting as it is to equate fascism with stupidity the far more terrifying truth is that it only really equates with ignorance.

true, but there isn’t even real human feces in these shitposts, it is just AI shit that don’t smell

Is this the future of memes? Just lazily typing prompts into an AI that feeds out Cards Against Humanity style “zany!” combinations of dumb shit?

It all feels like the same fucking photo, the same lighting, the same boring reductive lowest common denominator responses to people asking “wouldn’t it be funny if?” that don’t carry any deeper meaning. I feel like I am looking at advertisements, except nobody is selling me anything other than a less vibrant future where human artists are even less valued than they are now.

Memes aren’t supposed to be “high art” or whatever, that is the fun of them they are handmade, stupid and janky. These AI images don’t feel like that though, instead of feeling silly and handmade they just feel…. disposable and it makes me sad that people are so excited to relate to art in a way where the future is exciting because of the limitless disposability of art that AI unlocks….

wow, didn’t know that, I had no idea Moscow has such a big metro system that is a lotttt of people

Gotta love that one of the most powerful cities on earth with empty luxury apartments rising into a speculative sky above homeless and the precariously homed (one rent raise away from eviction) is so full of rich miserly conservatives that the everybody has to pay to use one of the most efficient collective forms of transport on the planet. It is like charging people to use an escalator, but even dumber because making mass transit free supercharges commerce by putting a couple extra bucks in the pocket of everyone who uses it (to inevitably spend at the coffee shop, or grocery store, or restaurant… economy go brrrr).

Jump those turnstiles fam, the rich are stealing so much from you that you could jump turnstiles all day like an Olympic hurtle jumper and it wouldn’t even begin to settle the score, at this point no amount of money can.

Fun fact, the NYC metro moves more people daily than ALL flights in the entire continental US by a wide margin, I think it is close to twice the amount of people.

This is just textbook fascism.

It frustrates me that fascists like this can claim “this is the way of nature, the strong survive and the weak perish in competition” and no one challenges them. We are so primed to see everything through a fascist lens by neoliberalism because neoliberalism doesn’t provide any path forward but a broken, insufficient narrative.

Nature is full of cooperation, the interplay between fungi and trees for one is a dizzying network of relationships. In most ecosystems flourishing is a mutual process not a zero sum game, diversity begets stability, capacity to adapt and efficiency.

The ideology of fascists like Netanyahu will never lead a society to strength, because the point of adopting such a cruel and hateful ideology is a violent disinterest in understanding others, which is the precise opposite of an expression of strength.

The ultimate strength is realizing what others are capable of that you could never accomplish yourself and developing a mutual relationship to gain access to those things, the type of “warriors” Netanyahu are talking about here are just sad, isolated people with very little power to do anything meaningful in this world but needlessly kill and maim, they are incapable of even beginning to understand the rich, dizzying tapestry of different kinds of genius that a functional society requires to thrive and grow. They are incapable of doing actual work to retain status in their community so they clumsily fumble at violence and fear to try to fill that void of uselessness.

Seriously, Instagram and Facebook would also need to to delete the CIA’s account for this to make any sense (hating how extremist Iran is without acknowledging it was an explicit consequence of the CIA forcing regime change is just naive jingoism) but this is just about pissing on Iran to curry favor with other people.

I wonder if you took the comments of Iran’s evil leader and mixed them up with statements from conservative US politicians, removed obvious references to Christianity, Islam, and countries and then sat people down and tried to get them to guess who said what it would be pretty damn hard.

fuck harry potter, read terry pratchett