A billionaire wrote this letter to Google a year ago. How likely is that Google's layoffs and actions since then are at least partly because of this?
A billionaire wrote this letter to Google a year ago. How likely is that Google's layoffs and actions since then are at least partly because of this?
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Doesn't even question what employees are possibly doing. Just says there are too many and they must be put out on the street. Says the people who are left are making too much money.
I say this a lot but....seriously....when do we start burning things?
Hedge fund. He doesn’t care about the employees or the company. Just the money he can make trading the stock.
So an inhuman greed monster sociopath, then.
I don’t have a problem with people who create value and become wealthy. They earned it and created good jobs, more power to them.
Hedge funds, most Private equity, etc can go fuck themselves. They strip wealth and destroy things.
I'm not for people only interested in benefiting themselves being the ones rewarded most by society, let alone being the ones effectively in charge of society as they are.
It isn't heroic, benevolent, or even minimally pro-social to spend your life trying to accrue private profit for the sake of private profit. It just makes you greedy and selfish. Or as they call it with their orwellian language manipulation, "rational self-interest." being greedy, selfish, and unconcerned with the effects your actions have on others makes you a vile, broken, contemptible person, and humanity seems to have forgotten that entirely, or at least we've been propagandized to forget it by the owner class.
We punish people that dare to pursue vocations that benefit society, like teachers and paramedics, and reward selfishness.
I can't root for my own species in this state. Slitting eachother's throats when there's another dollar to be had by it. If this is truly what our species has chosen as it's most practiced purpose and meaning, I want no part of it, and I will be grateful when it's time to leave it.
Comment on semantics:
I’ve heard humanity described as being composed of “self-interested, rational economic actors” to help us understand economics.
Like, we all want the eggs from the farmers’ market that were laid by the happiest hens. A farmer can assume we’re rational & self-interested when pricing her eggs so she can try to sell enough of them to make a living. $2/egg won’t fly because stores sell them so much cheaper.
Think I’m saying morally bankrupt, anti-social hoarders have rational self-interest but so do normal people like you & me. I’m fizzling out here but either way hoarding’s bad :)
Right, but there's no term for being greedy, sociopathic, or engaging in hoarding in economics.
They fall under Orwellian double speak terms that make them complimentary, "rational self-interest, creating externalities, curtailing redundancies" etc. Language designed to turn their sins into their achievements.
Considering the central prominence of greed in our economy, it's a glaring ommission that the capitalists and economists themselves seem to have forgotten that word, or to create an economic term for greed that isn't complimentary.
They are driven almost entirely by insatiable greed, yet the term is never uttered in their earnings reports or economic news.
They seem to want the concept of greed as the pejorative it is to be forgotten entirely, despite it demonstrably being their core value.
Greed is the best descriptive word and incredibly negative as you've said. No reason to make a more negatively charged word. The tale of Midas, and others, demonstrate how destructive and harmful greed is.
Midas has always stuck with me since I first heard the tale and in a way informed who I am today, especially my political leanings.
With the amount of people who get manipulated with sales and other tactics I don't think we can argue that humanity is composed of rational economic actors. There are some rational economic actors, but the vast majority probably isn't acting rationally with regards to their economics. And that's okay, because humans aren't rational beings first and foremost. We're primarily emotional beings. We make most of our decisions based on emotions, then we may try to rationalize our choice.
It takes a lot of effort to be rational about things.
No one creates wealth alone. When one becomes that rich, they've stolen it.
The former are actual producers, the latter are parasites.
Don't get it wrong, he is completely human.
In the sense that Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper were also completely human, sure.
Although that's not fair to them, the damage they inflicted on humanity was of a ridiculously smaller scale.
Misery is capitalisms best friend.
Notice also how he starts each paragraph with “I” and not to be an armchair psychiatrist but that says a lot about his motivation.
I want to make money off of Google stock too, but I also want their shit to work so I can make more money in the future.
I mean if he catches wind their products stop working to the point consumers react, he can just sell his stock and move on to destroy another company.
Hey remember when Google Drive lost thousands of customers data for the past 6 months? That was in November.
OOPSNEXTLOL
I own a little Google stock. I don’t mind they pay their employees a shit ton. I want them make good products. I’m not a fan of most their products but that’s just me
lol sorry to break it to you but a few bucks in fractional shares doesn’t count as “owning a little stock”
🤣
I own about 250k of Google stock. So a little bit. I don’t own more because I don’t like that you are the product.
So what you're saying is we start the burning with him?
I'm a fan of Madame Guillotine.
My hatred of the owner class is matched only by my disappointment in my fellow humans for not only taking it, but often defending it.
The people we struggle for have abandoned their humanity. That's what it takes to be one of society's supposed winners or be in their good graces: practiced sociopathy.
And half of the peasants fantasize about being the sociopaths instead of ending their reign and this despicable con game of an economy.
Summed up concisely. I've unfortunately given up hope that anything can be done or can improve. It feels the fight, whatever fight there ever was, has been lost.
Fuck that. I will not go gently into that good night. I will rage against the dying of the light.
Oh ya? Is your rage posting on lemmy? How’s that working out?
I don’t have to prove myself to you, nor would I post details here that could reveal my identity.
Permanently Deleted
Same boat club.
Honestly I've reached the point that I hope climate change, that's presently accelerating, fucks our species shit up to the core and forces our species to start again, because existing like this, subsisting for a tiny group of proud monsters that see us as livestock in perpetuity, sounds like most people will be born into damnation going forward, and as much pain as civilization level collapse would be, it pales in comparison to this system persisting and finding new cruelties to profit from for generations.
Human civilization in its current form seems to exist to find new efficiencies with which to torture most of humanity. Maybe we'd be better off knocked back to depending on one another in smaller groups. Maybe we'd find empathy again. Maybe our planet could start to recover from our damage
Yeah, you're not alone. I've basically become an anti-natalist. I don't think the ruling / owning class will budge unless their lives are affected. And that won't happen until there's no more slaves to support their insane lifestyles.
I’m genuinely not super revolutionary but I didn’t get halfway through this letter before coming to the realization that this person needed to not exist anymore and same for anybody else of the same ilk.
If you don't have a list of people in society that need to burn you aren't paying attention hard enough.
I can't afford that much paper
Which is another reason we need to start burning things. can't even afford paper.
“Man, if I just had the Death Note.”
Holy hell, if some fairly rational person got such a book and did their research on who needs to be written down the world would probably look a lot different in a short amount of time.
He says they aren't needed "operationally" but Alphabet is not supposed to be merely operating anything. They are supposed to be inventing and experimenting and pushing the envelope. This discontented billionaire just wants ever-increasing rent on existing IP and should be called out as a simple landlord and not called an investor at all.
Yeah, I'm not sure I really get this whole "reduce employment" logic. Like if some product just isn't profitable and you lay off the employees you hired to work on it, that's not surprising, but if the employees are doing something profitable, and you actually needed to hire that many to get whatever it was you hired them for done, shouldn't it be more profitable to a company to keep them, even if one had a large number?
Moreover, if all the oligarchs are doing it, and they are, who will be left to buy their products/services?
They're breaking their own ponzi scheme economy for a few more quarterly profit boosts because there's nowhere else to grow/metastasize. Media companies are making less media. Food makers are making less product types. Their profit is coming out of gutting workers and their ability to produce what their economic sector produced in the first place.
This is a terminal stage market capitalism fire sale. The snake is eating its own tail having conquered the board.
Because this is the End of the Line. The snake has found its tail and Oroborous awakens to transform the end into the beginning. An ideology of everlasting consumption will eventually consume itself.
Especially on a finite world with finite resources.
Bold of you to assume the stock market has anything to do with finite resources.
When the ultra wealthy and their companies run the system into the ground they will buy up the failed stocks and cheap land that nobody else can afford then come out ahead when the economy recovers like they have in the previous economic crashes. They can afford to buy low and cash out when it is high because they have zero pressure to act at any given point in time due to their ridiculous wealth and zero legal repercussions.
But even then there reaches a point where they run out of things to buy, and people to buy them from.
Eventually they poison the one thing they worship: the sanctity of private property rights. It has to serve at least some portion of the populace if it's going to remain tenable, but they're doomed to discover and undershoot that number.
The Western world spent a century demonising socialism with "they'll take your home and car" but it rings hollow when you have neither.
I cannot afford an emergency. Bring in the socialist, if it is houses they take, and cars they enamor, surely they will leave me be.
Bold of you to assume they were talking about the stock market
Upthread:
This is a terminal stage market capitalism fire sale. The snake is eating its own tail having conquered the board.
And? How do you get stock market from that? They are obviously talking about the economy as a whole and not the stock market
The stock market is the reason for chasing quarterly profits and a massive part of what gets counted as the economy. It is the main driver of all the shitty late stage capitalism practices we are discussing.
The stock market is certainly part of the problem but it’s not everything.
Capitalism in its entirety is the issue. Capitalism is based on infinite growth which is unsustainable and impossible.
The stock market is just a tool to extract wealth from the populace. Without the stock market it would still happen but with less efficiency.
You have the same problems with or without stocks.
They’re not thinking long term, they want immediate and maximum profits
It makes quarterlys look good immediately before the problems show up later
It's the mindset of someone who wants to cash out which is usually all ultracapitalists
Most of them are not. That’s the beauty of a cash cow like Google. They’re working on things that may be profitable in the future. By cutting the future, you’re cutting future growth.
It’s why I dislike hedge funds. They’re stripping value instead of creating value.
The source matters, too. This is a dude exploiting people and hoarding so much needed wealth. To an obscene amount. Like, he has more than enough to do everything he could possibly dream of, for the rest of his life. And long after he's gone, all his descendants will be set and will never have to worry about money for their entire lives...
So what does this psychopath obsess about? "Please kick people out into the street and reduce the pay of anyone who remains. Number go up... Fuck em, got mine lol"
Because he doesn't care. He's looking out for himself.
"Hey Googs, you have too many employees and that's cutting in my investments. Shitcan 150,000 so my investments go up and I make more billions kthxbye"
The funny thing is... what are the operational requirements of an R&D organization?
As far as I can see, it's nothing, by definition.
Anyway, does the rich person there not understand that? Also, what is the value of an R&D organization where people are demotivated?
The rich person only cares about short term profits. They want to liquidate any good will and long term preparedness. Once the host corporation has been sufficiently bled of value, the parasite will move on to the next source of value it can find.
Don't need to burn things, the letter is already addressed by that which needs to be burned.
Well yeah I mean eventually that as well but....you know....things in ....its....general vicinity first.
Do you think Google was going to get 20% better if they sustained that workforce over 3 years?