This is probably going to be a hard problem for a lot of companies. Spending quite a lot of money on Democrats and little on Republicans looked like a good strategy given the polling, but now they have to deal with a office holder that is not the least concerned with building bridges and has a bit of vengeful streak.
Not to mention all the contacts they have built up in the permanent staff might not be there as long as normal[1]. The typical hire former government workers to lobby current government might also be in danger if the President goes through with his anti-lobbyist rule changes. This is actually a big deal for a lot of people, because these permanent employees are a lot of organization's touchstones that cross administrations and party lines.
I would advice Google to have a small talk with their doodle team to not rock the boat this year. That might be a signal on how aggressive they really are.
> The typical hire former government workers to lobby current government might also be in danger if the President goes through with his anti-lobbyist rule changes.
This is one thing that I'm really looking forward to.
I mean I understand that we don't want stagnation of ideas and certain sects continuously ruling government. However, the reason that they are lobbyists is because they are generally experts on the subjects, in no small part due to their government experience. Removing all former government workers as lobbyists a blanket move is heavy-handed and poorly thought out.
Your version sounds good, but that's not the majority of what happens. They are lobbyists because they know people and its often a cushy, legal payoff for employees who helped the company secure and manage contracts while in government service. The most common reward is as an employee hire after they retire from government services, but the lobbyists often have their origin in the same process.
I don't disagree. My statement sounded far too overarching. Obviously, a lot of jobs are handouts in form of repayment. I don't think this should be encouraged but I don't think a law banning former federal employees is going to diminish the numerous concerns that lobbying brings up and potentially diminishes the quality of people advising current government.
I got your meaning (and think the down voting on your original comment is a bit harsh), but the pendulum is probably due to swing the other way, hard. I really don't know what a good balance point is. I have heard a 5 or 7 year ban bandied about, and maybe something time-based is the answer. I think until it goes to a total ban we won't find the true balance point.
The pendulum anaolgy is an excellent way of describing how politics in this country works. I've used it often over the past several weeks.
One option would be to limit how long someone can work for a lobbying organization (instead of how long must wait before lobbying after government service).
What if we restored the importance of civic duty in our society? Top talent could be incentivized to work for the government for non financial reasons.
I don't think anyone knows the answer to this problem (yet), but it is a large problem worth solving.
Personally, I do feel strongly about civic duty. But after having (briefly) worked on government contracts I found an incredible amount of waste, cronyism and general ineptitude to turn me off. So I joined the software startup world instead ;).
Trump's proposal is a five-year ban on becoming a registered lobbyist after leaving a government job. This sounds good on paper -- but the more likely reality is that it will simply lead to lobbying becoming more covert, as former government employees working on behalf of corporations won't register as lobbyists.
It's also hard to believe that the Trump administration would do much to rein in backroom deals, considering the President himself hasn't released his tax returns nor taken any credible steps to solve the massive conflicts of interest posed by his holdings.
"but the more likely reality is that it will simply lead to lobbying becoming more covert, as former government employees working on behalf of corporations won't register as lobbyists."
Even if it's not 100% effective, won't this significantly reduce this behavior? Certainly adds risk to the equation.
Many of his policies are questionable, but this one always sounded pretty good to me.
> This sounds good on paper -- but the more likely reality is that it will simply lead to lobbying becoming more covert, as former government employees working on behalf of corporations won't register as lobbyists.
And then they'll be breaking the law.
Pushing the practice underground will make it less effective and less common. The appearance of propriety goes a long way toward convincing people that there isn't enough profit in being improper.
> It's also hard to believe that the Trump administration would do much to rein in backroom deals, considering the President himself hasn't released his tax returns nor taken any credible steps to solve the massive conflicts of interest posed by his holdings.
I don't understand why people continue to revisit things like this when there are so many legitimate problems with Trump.
His tax returns are going to tell you how much money he made and how much tax he paid. How does that help you? It's bike shedding.
And the conflicts of interest are inherently unavoidable. Even if he put every cent of his money in a blind trust (which is obviously expensive if the assets are illiquid real estate holdings), what about his family's assets? What about his business partners? The only reason anyone cares about this is the appearance of impropriety. If that matters in this case then why not in the other?
Say you're one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of asteroid mining, and are employed by an asteroid mining company for a tremendous salary.
Suppose you decide that your industry as a whole will be both more productive and fairer to the world at large if you are able to spend a bunch of time educating senators about the intricacies of your field and the effects of different policies that they might introduce.
If you convince your employer to keep paying you while you do that, are you now a lobbyist? Are you being corrupt? Must you forego any income in order to make Congress more informed or to argue for universally beneficial policies?
You have all the same problems with prohibiting bribery of public officials. The governor gives a contract to Foo Corp and Foo Corp hires the governor's brother for $5M/year, is that corruption?
The conclusion to draw from this is not "oh well, guess we might as well legalize bribery."
Pushing the practice underground will make it less effective and less common.
That's also the logic of the "war on drugs". It may or may not work in this case -- I don't know -- but it will definitely make lobbying less documented and regulated.
What are the sanctions for undocumented lobbyists going to be? How will they be enforced, when the Trump administration is so strongly biased against transparency everywhere else?
Trump brags about exploiting loopholes: he said he would be smart to not pay any taxes (while not actually answering the question of whether he does). Applying that mindset to lobbying will lead to a situation where corporations pretend not to be doing it, the administration pretends not to see it -- and one campaign promise is delivered.
His tax returns matter as the very minimum expected gesture in transparency. At present Americans have no idea what the President owns and how he makes money (or maybe he doesn't -- in which case he would have a strong incentive to use his office to prop up the failing parts of his business empire). It's hard to believe this situation exists in a Western democracy in 2017.
The war on drugs isn't a failure because it failed to reduce drug use. It probably has a bit. The failure is that it did so only at the cost of massively increased violence, the erosion of civil liberties, mass incarceration and the debasement of the criminal justice system.
Do you predict lobbying cartels turning to violence to protect their business and so many citizens charged with breaking the law that it debases the justice system?
> It may or may not work in this case -- I don't know -- but it will definitely make lobbying less documented and regulated.
It's not as though there are currently such rigorous and effective regulations that everyone follows.
> What are the sanctions for undocumented lobbyists going to be? How will they be enforced, when the Trump administration is so strongly biased against transparency everywhere else?
The change is to who can be a lobbyist, not in the answer to any of those questions.
> His tax returns matter as the very minimum expected gesture in transparency.
Transparency is for what government officials do in office, not what they do in their private lives.
> At present Americans have no idea what the President owns and how he makes money (or maybe he doesn't -- in which case he would have a strong incentive to use his office to prop up the failing parts of his business empire).
If what he does is good policy that happens to coincide with his business interests, that is not actually a problem. If what he does is bad policy then it's a problem independent of whether it aligns with his business interests. Because what matters is what he does in office, not what he does as a private citizen.
I want his tax returns so we can get some clue as to whether his obsession with Russia is a childish crush on authoritarian bullies, which is a theme of his, or whether in fact there is a financial connection.
I want his tax returns to find out just how badly he's been lying about his net worth.
I want his tax returns because I honestly believe he'll be humiliated by us seeing them.
> I want his tax returns so we can get some clue as to whether his obsession with Russia is a childish crush on authoritarian bullies, which is a theme of his, or whether in fact there is a financial connection.
Which tax returns probably wouldn't tell you because even if there was it would only show up as revenue from some nondescript corporation in Delaware.
> I want his tax returns to find out just how badly he's been lying about his net worth.
Which tax returns probably wouldn't tell you because they deal with income rather than assets.
> I want his tax returns because I honestly believe he'll be humiliated by us seeing them.
Google as a company gives equally between the 2 parties[0] (via it's PAC(s)). Google employees that donated to candidates or various government entities definitely leans towards the democrat side[1]. So the company knows to hedge its bets and give equally both ways. (Most large companies do this, like Comcast[2]).
"The total of contributions to candidates from Alphabet Inc individuals is 2 times larger than contributions from PACs"
I'm pretty sure they can do the sums and figure it out. Plus, they already have had a lot of news about claims of unfairness of searches. That employee number is going to influence things.
It's not just the money, though...it's the relationship, time, favors, etc. There's stuff like this organization: https://thegroundwork.com/ that Eric Schmidt set up for Hillary.
It shouldn't be "Google" that gives money to politicians. It should be individuals. And the sums should be capped at $200 (local/Congress elections) to $500 (presidential elections).
Even "lobbying" shouldn't exist. There should only be public hearings. I don't want some other party to whisper secret stuff to my politician. I want it all on the record.
Yeah, I can't count how many Googlers have argued with me based on the claim that OpenSecrets is highlighting donations of individual employees, and that the company itself isn't buying these politicians... but that's what Google NetPAC is for. Google gives to their own PAC, which gives to their paid-for Congresscritters. Just a (thin) layer of obfuscation.
But Google both provided that cash (presumably, to it's employees as pay) and then got to decide how to spend it on political favors. And the lion's share of the donations are likely from high-level executives who have at least some stake in the company.
So, I guess, you could clarify that it's still somehow routed through an individual at some stage in the process. But that's the sort of technical trickery that is used for this corrupt behavior in the first place... which is why individual donors are required to disclose their employer. As I said, thin level of obfuscation.
does as you suggest and order them to not say or do anything that might anger Trump.
Could you clue me in on where I said that? If you mean my doodle comment, then that's really not about Trump per se, its more about lack of attention to things his base cares about and might lead to problem.
I would advice Google to have a small talk with their doodle team to not rock the boat this year certainly comes off as 'keep your head down' even though you may not have intended it that way. I mean, what sort of things do you think they should avoid that might rock the boat?
If Google employees were going to revolt, they'd have done so already. Many have left on various grounds, but those that are left either have heavily bought into what Google's marketing team is selling about the mission, or simply don't care that they work for a company that has such a corrupt influence in government.
A Googler I follow recently posted an angry social post about the recent Congressional proposal to gimp the Office of Congressional Ethics, and how that was "not normal" and such. I pointed out that Bob Goodlatte, the congressman who introduced it, was bought and paid for by Google, and has acted as a lobbyist for Google while supposedly serving the public. He largely dismissed the point, but I suggested that rather than blame Trump, who hadn't even been inaugurated yet, that he should maybe ask his employer to stop bankrolling this guy.
He largely just dismissed my point and then closed the comments. I have no doubt Google's executives have drastically different social and moral views than their rank and file engineers, but they don't seem too inclined to do anything about it.
"now they have to deal with a office holder that is not the least concerned with building bridges and has a bit of vengeful streak"
Where is evidence for that? As a matter of fact, during the post election period Trump extended olive branches to his opponents and critics, such as Romney, Cruz, Bushes, etc.
Olive branch to Romney? He dragged him through the press like a trained dog. He said some nice things about the Clintons, but I haven't seen a lot of bridge building or olive branches.
I'm more than willing to give him a chance, and I really want him to do well, but I don't think he suffers opponents gladly.
I did not see Romney on the list of Appointees. It was a nice show with a lot of backchannel negative comments to the conservative press by Trump's staff.
I'm pretty sure I didn't mention President Obama in my comment, so why ask me that question? Are you probing for what party I support and trying to draw some equivalence?
Gross. I thought a Google in bed with the Obama administration was unsettling. One in bed with the GOP and Trump is terrifying. Google has the keys to the muslim registry, and every other kind of registry you could imagine in every country it operates.
I doubt Google or any other SV corporation would ever agree to help with a Muslim registry. Even if somehow the top leadership of such a company were to agree (which I doubt), you'd see defections, sabotage, and heavy leaks almost immediately.
Pedantic aside: This isn't the right way to use this phrase. The exception that proves the rule is the data point that demonstrates that it makes sense to call it a rule and not just something which is always true.
'Dogs bark' is proven a rule by cats meowing, not by a dog that doesn't bark
The original sense is "No parking on sundays" proves that parking is allowed on other days.
The colloquial sense is that if something is a surprising, it shows that its opposite was a useful rule of thumb, or at least one you'd established in your head. (E.g. if you are surprised by a dog that doesn't bark, this surprise is meaningful and says something about what you think about dogs and barking.)
If palantir is shocking as a SV company, this says something interesting about what you think about SV companies.
I read a bit of this during the election cycle but must have got sidetracked. I read through the whole piece just now and I am really impressed by its depth and subtle humor. It's lengthy but I really recommend it.
You can wear your heart on your sleeve, but you won't win a hand of poker doing it. Refusing to participate when there are plenty of people who can replace you accomplishes nothing. Appearing to go along while sabotaging the process is far more effective. You've helped no one by proudly showing your hand. If anything, you've shown you aren't willing to do much of anything beyond sign petitions online.
You're right. I don't know anything about you. I know Snowden. I know Manning. I know who they are because of how they operated. Most people give themselves away before they could possibly make a difference. I'll never know them.
You assume that they'll be able to find an equally qualified replacement quickly enough. Having observed how hard it is to hire good people, I doubt that.
(Full disclosure: my name is also on the list linked above.)
I am skeptical. If you really want to make the promise of "never again", maybe you shouldn't participate in massive data collection efforts such as those of Google in the first place.
That was for for non-citizens. Big difference from Trump's implication during the election that Muslim citizens are keeping their mouths shut and not reporting terrorists.
Trump's previously proposed Muslim registry covers Muslims already authorized to live in the US.
It's the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System that was set in place in the wake of 9/11. Basically Obama dismantled it to make Trump look bad since he now has to reinstate it and liberals & press cry wolf.
I'm not optimistic, but I hope that the Trump era finally puts an end to the illusions people had about tech giants as a vehicle for social progress. We're stepping into an era of extreme inequality, authoritarianism, and intolerance, all borne on the back of their rise. They may not be the origin of these trends, but they certainly rode them to tremendous wealth without anything besides the most superficial concerns for their social consequences.
You're blaming tech giants for the rise in inequality, authoritarianism and intolerance?
It's like blaming Apple or Spotify that your favorite artists aren't as good as they used to be.
Fine, be happy the veil is off (tech giants are corporations and when push comes to shove are about money), but honestly you need to look at the petroleum industry, security & prison industrial complexes and their bought politicians to see the worst.
> Fine, be happy the veil is off (tech giants are corporations and when push comes to shove are about money), but honestly you need to look at the petroleum industry, security & prison industrial complexes and their bought politicians to see the worst.
I must admit, the difference is hard for me to see. Though the tech companies may not be getting rich directly off the backs of the poor, they are just as destructive in funneling large sums of money to a subset of society.
Guess who actually clicks on ads? Guess who allows for advertising loans up to 35% APR? That definitely falls within usury/payday/predatory loan range. The 36% restriction would only exist because people actively fall for those scams, and it also indicates Google is ok with people falling for the 35% rate.
I also remember them recommending a payday loan company, but I can't find the link.
TL;DR Google is rich off people who can't tell they're being scammed.
That is like blaming commercial landlords for letting payday loan companies / <insert-business-I-don't-like-here> rent space to these people or letting telecoms let criminals communicate on their networks. When your infrastructure, the good and the bad will use it and you don't want to be in the job of determining who is good or bad.
Doing it for profit is hardly a better excuse than following orders. Should we not hold it against Trump that he ran casinos which preyed on the intellectually and financially disadvantaged?
If we hold Trump responsible for that, then don't we hold cigarette companies responsible for lung cancer? Weapons companies for murders? BitTorrent for piracy? Soda and fast food companies for obesity and diabetes? Where does it end?
Said every despot in the history of the world. Once you start trying to save people from their baser instincts by restricting what you can and cannot do by force, you are infantilizing them.
Seatbelts, motorcycle helmets, ensuring food is free of contaminants (rather than relying on people to read the label and decide), ensuring that pharmaceuticals and other procedures are safe (rather than relying on people to shop around and decide for themselves), building codes to prevent homes and buildings from catching fire due to cheaper, shoddy wiring. People's baser instincts will often not drive them to make decisions in their own best interest—even if you were to ask them themselves—in the short term.
"Once you start" implies drawing a line that any kind of regulation is infantilizing them. There are some people who think that this is wrong. However, many more understand that there are some forms of regulation that help not only society as a whole but individuals themselves. Yes, there are questions as to the degree and kind of regulation. And reasonable people can discuss this. And these people are not asking for despots.
> "Once you start" implies drawing a line that any kind of regulation is infantilizing them.
I never said infantilizing was a bad thing. Most people aren't really able to make the optimum decision in their lives about most areas.
For instance, some of the most proficient programmers I know who make otherwise good decisions neglect their diet and exercise.
Should we enforce mandatory vegetable and exercise regimens for them? On a more prosaic level, should we limit the size and shape of knives that private citizens should be allowed to own because of violence concerns?
Realizing that there is nothing qualitatively different about these measures from the measures being described is a first step on evaluating all measures of this sort.
You are right and that is a difficult problem. When I was younger (15-20 years ago) I was against any government control; now that I met many people and read many books and lived a few decades more, I think the government should govern far more than it does; basically I became very sceptical about the ability of many people to run their lives in almost every way. I have no clue (as I am that programmer who does not exercise enough; diet is good though) how to have free people mixed with a despot(meaning the absolute ruler, not abusive ruler)-like control without it running into abuse fast. But yes, I would not be opposed forced exercise regimes for people like me. I do not believe that kind of freedom is good for me or anyone else. Besides the basic concept of freedom which great thing, but then you get into what you say; what do you and what don't you enforce.
I know it's not PC in SV to say so, but I REALLy hate sin taxes. Smokers die younger, have fewer of the oh-so expensive end-of-life years, cost less as a result and yet still are social pariahs who have the privilege of paying extra taxes and extra for health insurance. Fair how?
Smokers may die younger, but the way they die is more expensive than living longer (years of respiratory illness). Also, smokers cause collateral damage through secondary smoke inhalation.
You can call it a sin tax, but another term is "disincentive tax".
Actually NE Journal of Medicine says that mass smoking cessation would increase total health care costs in long run. So not sure the logic for the disincentives, other than paternalism run amok.
"If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs."
The responses raise legitimate concerns about the article's analysis, and they also support my assertion (which continues to be the mainstream view of the costs of smoking-related health-care). For example, the analysis you cited ignores secondhand smoke health costs entirely and ignores a number of conditions associated with smoking. In the author's reply to the criticism, they paper over these concerns in an inadequate way.
..Yes?
It ends when people aren't being harmed or the negative externalities of their actions are offset by some kind of sin tax used to pay for the aftermath?
> Doing it for profit is hardly a better excuse than following orders.
Profit motive has nothing to do with it. You could just as easily be blaming a shelter for "harboring" an adulterer. It isn't their job to be the morality police.
And you don't want them to be, because they have no accountability and little incentive to get it right. Better that corporations provide service to everyone than that they be the ones deciding who gets denied service.
> Should we not hold it against Trump that he ran casinos which preyed on the intellectually and financially disadvantaged?
Trump didn't force them to bet their money in the casino. They chose to do that, and we chose not to pass a law against it.
As it happens, you did not read the article. If you did, you'd see that "Google will not display ads from lenders who charge annual interest rates of 36 percent or more in the United States."
And the parent post is talking about loans with 35% APR still being quite predatory.
Hi, it looks there is a factual dispute about the linked article. I think I might be able to add some value to this conversation (but that's of course for you to decide).
It appears the parent poster is arguing Google did ban [all payday loans] while you are arguing that the article says Google did not ban [all payday loans], but instead only banned [loans with interest rates >=36%].
My viewpoint: The article says both points, i.e. Google banned [all payday loans] and Google also banned [all loans (i.e. of the non-payday variety) with interest rates >=36%]
Evidence / Recitation from article:
"...In addition to the broad payday loan ad ban, Google will not display ads from lenders who charge annual interest rates of 36 percent or more in the United States. The same standards will apply to sites that serve as middlemen who connect distressed borrowers to those lenders..."
"...Google announced Wednesday that it will ban all payday loan ads from its site..."
As seen from the first above recitation, the words "in addition to" appears to mean that two separate bans have been enacted: The first ban is for any loan classified as a payday loan. That means a payday loan of any interest rate (i.e. 35%, 25%, even 3%) will be banned. The second ban is for a loan of any type where the interest rate is >= 36%.
> look at the petroleum industry, security & prison industrial complexes and their bought politicians to see the worst.
Why would the tech industry be any better? The industries you name are somewhat more dependent on government, but Google and 'big tech' are still heavily dependent.
Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal, CIA black sites, the list is long. The level of either incompetence or pure indifference to human and environmental cost is just incomparable.
Could the IT industry ever cause this much harm? I suppose if an IT failure caused major infrastructure to fail, or propaganda caused a war ... or if propaganda enabled a Russian mole and fascist to become President of the U.S. (if that's what he is).
I literally said, "they may not be the origin of these trends," so no, I'm not blaming them.
Of course the stranglehold the companies you mention have on American society is far more extensive and corrosive. But I grew up in an era where we were constantly proselytized that "these corporations are different." I was always skeptical, but that wasn't the zeitgeist. Now, I hope that my generation (millennials) will see the error in this judgement, but again, not terribly optimistic. In the pursuit of self-indulgence, we saw the Baby Boomers turn into Wall St Reaganites and still seemed not to learn. We just invented a "cooler" version of this story.
Im not saying they're a silver bullet, but they do seem to provide shareholders and boards tools to resist being sued for putting concerns besides short term profits at the forefront.
> I'm not optimistic, but I hope that the Trump era finally puts an end to the illusions people had about tech giants as a vehicle for social progress.
I hope so too. Even if corporations really were sincerely pursuing social progress, that would be bad. In a democratic society, social progress should not be determined by a small group of unaccountable organizations.
Say what you will about governments pursuing social progress -- at least they are somewhat accountable and need to be elected. (Another potential upside of Trump's election: hopefully fewer people who believe that voting never changes anything because the establishment always wins.) Nobody outside of a corporation's board has control over who ends up in charge.
> Even if corporations really were sincerely pursuing social progress, that would be bad. In a democratic society, social progress should not be determined by a small group of unaccountable organizations.
I disagree. Progress shouldn't be dependent on a small group of unaccountable organisations - but if such want to get out there and run their businesses in an, progressive manner that benefits society as a whole, I'm going to cheer them on.
> Progress shouldn't be dependent on a small group of unaccountable organisations - but if such want to get out there and run their businesses in an, progressive manner that benefits society as a whole, I'm going to cheer them on.
What would you think if big companies like Google and Apple pursued a conservative agenda? What if they were against same-sex marriage or legal abortion?
The sword cuts both ways. There is no guarantee that corporations will always be on the right side of the culture wars, but they have enormous power. It's not a good idea to support corporate power because it happens to be on your side this time.
The problem is the excessive power of corporations, rather than how they conduct their business. The combination of publicity, lobbying, and donations gives them too much control for a healthy democracy
> What would you think if big companies like Google and Apple pursued a conservative agenda? What if they were against same-sex marriage or legal abortion?
I would think it was bad and would think less of them.
That's why I said 'Progress shouldn't be dependent on a small group of unaccountable organisations'
We shuldn't depend on good things happening because corporations do them. But by gum, if corporations do good things I will applaud them - and if they do bad things I will criticise them.
They could be made accountable in theory, but in practice they are held to much lower standards of accountability than either the government or individual persons.
There is no evidence, at least not for such a general claim. Each human has a wildly different experience. For many of us, we never left this era. For others, we have been out of it X years. Etc.
I think it’s more like, we had an era where we conflated things like independence, security, knowledge, and diversity with prosperity, and now we are seeing signs that those things were marketing slogans. Thus the new era looks bleak.
I think this undersells the social good Google is doing today.
They designed, built, and maintain top shelf software products that are powering the world. They're giving them away for free. And unlike their competitors, they're not limited to running on Google platforms.
Tensorflow, Go, Android, Angular, Dart, Kuberbetes, Chromium are some of the most well known.
A decade ago this would have been an expensive suite of tools out of reach of the majority. You'd need staff dedicated to dealing with licensing from Oracle, MS, Adobe and the rest.
So they have to play the politics game. In particular with this administration, they either do it or run the risk of being labeled an enemy of Trump. We've seen how he plays favorites and makes decisions based on the last person he talked to.
If Google doesn't, the last people he talks to about tech would be Oracle and MS reps.
In conclusion, this simple black and white view is naive and harmful. It lacks reflection on the reality of how the world works. It omits complexity and opines for a fantasy.
Please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts; we ban those. HN is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
The internet as we know it was born in a very unique time in history. Two ideologies feuded for most of a century, and one collapsed at the same time that the other created the internet. The side that created the internet believed that their way of life, government, business, and so on would become the standard around the world, the "end of history." We believed that the world would stitch itself together and become gradually more liberal and tolerant of the many cultures on this planet. The internet and the collapse of the Soviet Union made that narrative believable, even perhaps inevitable.
As a result, we have a very skewed idea of what the internet is or should be. It is no coincidence that the domain for 99% of sites we use is ".com."
The truth is, corporations for decades have become more powerful and detached from their geopolitical circumstances. The subtleties of how the world works is of little relevance to McDonald's as long as they can sell more hamburgers. Corporations want to protect themselves from risk so they can continue to amass profits.
Therefore, the newfound genuflecting to the GOP should be of no surprise. Google ultimately has a mission to itself and its shareholders first. For a company whose product is its ability to amass information, there is little to be gained in promoting social or economic causes that do not benefit the corporation.
Yes, it does suck that the utopian dreams of Silicon Valley have divorced themselves from the liberal idealism of Northern California's Vietnam-era glory days, but that is why I left.
If you consider yourself liberal and you work for any of these companies that are aggressively courting Republicans, I would be very interested in hearing your perspective.
> It is no coincidence that the domain for 99% of sites we use is ".com."
I sort of agree. Actually getting a .gov, .mil, .edu was pretty tough. I vaguely remember people being quite prickly about .net, and a little fussy about.org
Depending on how Protectionist Trump actually becomes, global companies like Google and Facebook may have huge challenges.
Russia and China already had the idea of local alternatives and the EU was pushing for data protection for a while.
Governments might decide that it is not good idea give that much information about their population to the USA and maybe we will see the end of truly global companies.
It might be good for Apple though, as with it's strict data collection limitations.
I think you mean, "the end of truly global companies in the U.S." I firmly believe a protectionist stance here is hurting the US as much as anyone else.
The end of the truly global companies in the US or anywhere. Especially the companies relying on mass adoption and data collection will probably be forced to scale back and if feasible run separate Data centres in individual countries and be strictly regulated.
Maybe...VK and RenRen are definitively the Facebooks of Russia and China, respectively, but I doubt you'll see widespread adoption of a "Facebook of Senegal" or Kiribati or Ecuador anytime soon. I couldn't even imagine an analogue to Facebook within the West.
Personally, I think the distribution is a good thing. It's not as if Facebook is creating better people. It's more likely that social networks are exacerbating biases, and so a global social network only creates an easier subset of people to manipulate.
Global capitalism hasn't exactly been a boon to humanity. Cheaper stuff comes at human costs, whether it's sugar or cotton or diamonds or iPhones. If a global institution is to better humanity, I wouldn't bet on it taking the form of a for-profit corporation.
They need to get out in front of Oracle, which is probably the Silcon Valley company least associated with the hippie liberal stereotype and thus most likely to get Trump's ear if they want to make life hard for their competitors.
It's January. Mark this as "least surprising story of 2017" and it will still be true at the end of the year.
Political parties sell themselves to voters as "be on our team". The other team wants to rape women or murder babies, don't vote for them.
Corporations vote with money instead of with votes. When you vote with votes and the other guy wins, you lose. When you vote with money and you pay both sides, you always win.
Google doesn't pay Republicans because they hate women or want to Build A Wall, they pay Republicans because Republicans are now in a position to destroy network neutrality, they don't want that to happen, and politicians don't listen to corporations who don't pay them.
Parties constrained by a system do what you would expect them to. If you don't like it you have to change the system.
I'm going to very amused as Google's "don't be evil" facade comes crumbling down, having lost their revolving door with the US government and protection from antitrust enforcement.
Google has a very small business, search & ads, that basically prints money. They then spend almost all of that money on unprofitable operations that crush competition by 1) setting the price-point for many services at free, 2) intercepting customers (e.g. Google Flight and Hotel bookings at the top of search results), and 3) poaching all of the best talent and wasting it away on these terrible side businesses.
So long as the government contracts and regulatory favoritism are such a big part of picking winners and losers you can bet this sort of thing will happen. Now we have a President who knows he won in spite of many of these big money interests (who overwhelmingly backed Clinton). That people here are complaining about the companies for now acting in their own self preservation, while also condemning money in politics is just... well it's the sort of double think that is best explained by political tribalism.
Democrats have been on an incredible losing streak in the past 8 years. Lost the Presidency, House, Senate, Supreme Court, most Governor seats....As a CEO, you'd have to be pretty crazy to continue supporting the losing side, right?
It is weird to begin with that Google would put all their eggs into one basket. Silicon Valley would have looked all idiotic but for Mr. Thiel who invested in Trump.
I can't believe they're stupid enough to think that Trump is a Republican. He's neither. Both parties shat all over him during his entire campaign, so he owes them not just nothing, but less than nothing, hence the promise to institute the congressional term limits and anti-lobbying laws. And as everyone discovered over the last week (much to everyone's surprise), Trump is the first politician in history that will actually fulfill his campaign promises. There are a lot of really old geezers in Congress, especially on the Republican side, which won't like term limits one bit, so it'll require some negotiating skill to shove it down their throats. I hope Trump actually manages to pull this off in a way that's not easy to undo for president Michelle Obama in 2024.
> Both parties shat all over him during his entire campaign, so he owes them not just nothing, but less than nothing, hence the promise to institute the congressional term limits and anti-lobbying laws.
How will he pass laws without the support of at least 50% of Congress?
He can play them against Democrats. In fact I bet he will have to. He owes no allegiance to anyone but people who can re-elect him in 2020 if they think he did a good job. He understands that.
I know of at least one subset of a top-tier federal agency that uses Google's .gov services, this[0] I would assume. I wonder what the size of .gov business is for Google and to what extent (vs anti-trust concerns) it factors-in to making nice with the new regime?
152 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadNot to mention all the contacts they have built up in the permanent staff might not be there as long as normal[1]. The typical hire former government workers to lobby current government might also be in danger if the President goes through with his anti-lobbyist rule changes. This is actually a big deal for a lot of people, because these permanent employees are a lot of organization's touchstones that cross administrations and party lines.
I would advice Google to have a small talk with their doodle team to not rock the boat this year. That might be a signal on how aggressive they really are.
1) http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/politics/top-state-department-...
This is one thing that I'm really looking forward to.
One option would be to limit how long someone can work for a lobbying organization (instead of how long must wait before lobbying after government service).
What if we restored the importance of civic duty in our society? Top talent could be incentivized to work for the government for non financial reasons.
I don't think anyone knows the answer to this problem (yet), but it is a large problem worth solving.
Personally, I do feel strongly about civic duty. But after having (briefly) worked on government contracts I found an incredible amount of waste, cronyism and general ineptitude to turn me off. So I joined the software startup world instead ;).
It's also hard to believe that the Trump administration would do much to rein in backroom deals, considering the President himself hasn't released his tax returns nor taken any credible steps to solve the massive conflicts of interest posed by his holdings.
Even if it's not 100% effective, won't this significantly reduce this behavior? Certainly adds risk to the equation.
Many of his policies are questionable, but this one always sounded pretty good to me.
And then they'll be breaking the law.
Pushing the practice underground will make it less effective and less common. The appearance of propriety goes a long way toward convincing people that there isn't enough profit in being improper.
> It's also hard to believe that the Trump administration would do much to rein in backroom deals, considering the President himself hasn't released his tax returns nor taken any credible steps to solve the massive conflicts of interest posed by his holdings.
I don't understand why people continue to revisit things like this when there are so many legitimate problems with Trump.
His tax returns are going to tell you how much money he made and how much tax he paid. How does that help you? It's bike shedding.
And the conflicts of interest are inherently unavoidable. Even if he put every cent of his money in a blind trust (which is obviously expensive if the assets are illiquid real estate holdings), what about his family's assets? What about his business partners? The only reason anyone cares about this is the appearance of impropriety. If that matters in this case then why not in the other?
Will they? You don't have to be a registered lobbyist to have access to your congressman. That would be thoroughly undemocratic.
Say you're one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of asteroid mining, and are employed by an asteroid mining company for a tremendous salary.
Suppose you decide that your industry as a whole will be both more productive and fairer to the world at large if you are able to spend a bunch of time educating senators about the intricacies of your field and the effects of different policies that they might introduce.
If you convince your employer to keep paying you while you do that, are you now a lobbyist? Are you being corrupt? Must you forego any income in order to make Congress more informed or to argue for universally beneficial policies?
The conclusion to draw from this is not "oh well, guess we might as well legalize bribery."
That's also the logic of the "war on drugs". It may or may not work in this case -- I don't know -- but it will definitely make lobbying less documented and regulated.
What are the sanctions for undocumented lobbyists going to be? How will they be enforced, when the Trump administration is so strongly biased against transparency everywhere else?
Trump brags about exploiting loopholes: he said he would be smart to not pay any taxes (while not actually answering the question of whether he does). Applying that mindset to lobbying will lead to a situation where corporations pretend not to be doing it, the administration pretends not to see it -- and one campaign promise is delivered.
His tax returns matter as the very minimum expected gesture in transparency. At present Americans have no idea what the President owns and how he makes money (or maybe he doesn't -- in which case he would have a strong incentive to use his office to prop up the failing parts of his business empire). It's hard to believe this situation exists in a Western democracy in 2017.
The war on drugs isn't a failure because it failed to reduce drug use. It probably has a bit. The failure is that it did so only at the cost of massively increased violence, the erosion of civil liberties, mass incarceration and the debasement of the criminal justice system.
Do you predict lobbying cartels turning to violence to protect their business and so many citizens charged with breaking the law that it debases the justice system?
> It may or may not work in this case -- I don't know -- but it will definitely make lobbying less documented and regulated.
It's not as though there are currently such rigorous and effective regulations that everyone follows.
> What are the sanctions for undocumented lobbyists going to be? How will they be enforced, when the Trump administration is so strongly biased against transparency everywhere else?
The change is to who can be a lobbyist, not in the answer to any of those questions.
> His tax returns matter as the very minimum expected gesture in transparency.
Transparency is for what government officials do in office, not what they do in their private lives.
> At present Americans have no idea what the President owns and how he makes money (or maybe he doesn't -- in which case he would have a strong incentive to use his office to prop up the failing parts of his business empire).
If what he does is good policy that happens to coincide with his business interests, that is not actually a problem. If what he does is bad policy then it's a problem independent of whether it aligns with his business interests. Because what matters is what he does in office, not what he does as a private citizen.
I want his tax returns to find out just how badly he's been lying about his net worth.
I want his tax returns because I honestly believe he'll be humiliated by us seeing them.
Which tax returns probably wouldn't tell you because even if there was it would only show up as revenue from some nondescript corporation in Delaware.
> I want his tax returns to find out just how badly he's been lying about his net worth.
Which tax returns probably wouldn't tell you because they deal with income rather than assets.
> I want his tax returns because I honestly believe he'll be humiliated by us seeing them.
At least you admit it.
And let's face it, he's so thin-skinned that practically anything angers him.
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pac2pac.php?cycle=2016&cmte...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000067823&c...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pac2pac.php?cycle=2016&cmte...
I'm pretty sure they can do the sums and figure it out. Plus, they already have had a lot of news about claims of unfairness of searches. That employee number is going to influence things.
I would be a bit more worried if I was Apple though http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/apple-wont-aid-gop-con...
It shouldn't be "Google" that gives money to politicians. It should be individuals. And the sums should be capped at $200 (local/Congress elections) to $500 (presidential elections).
Even "lobbying" shouldn't exist. There should only be public hearings. I don't want some other party to whisper secret stuff to my politician. I want it all on the record.
So, I guess, you could clarify that it's still somehow routed through an individual at some stage in the process. But that's the sort of technical trickery that is used for this corrupt behavior in the first place... which is why individual donors are required to disclose their employer. As I said, thin level of obfuscation.
Could you clue me in on where I said that? If you mean my doodle comment, then that's really not about Trump per se, its more about lack of attention to things his base cares about and might lead to problem.
what would be intended result? to go against orders from the upper management?
A Googler I follow recently posted an angry social post about the recent Congressional proposal to gimp the Office of Congressional Ethics, and how that was "not normal" and such. I pointed out that Bob Goodlatte, the congressman who introduced it, was bought and paid for by Google, and has acted as a lobbyist for Google while supposedly serving the public. He largely dismissed the point, but I suggested that rather than blame Trump, who hadn't even been inaugurated yet, that he should maybe ask his employer to stop bankrolling this guy.
He largely just dismissed my point and then closed the comments. I have no doubt Google's executives have drastically different social and moral views than their rank and file engineers, but they don't seem too inclined to do anything about it.
Where is evidence for that? As a matter of fact, during the post election period Trump extended olive branches to his opponents and critics, such as Romney, Cruz, Bushes, etc.
I'm more than willing to give him a chance, and I really want him to do well, but I don't think he suffers opponents gladly.
Edit: A reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/the-secret-agenda...
'Dogs bark' is proven a rule by cats meowing, not by a dog that doesn't bark
The original sense is "No parking on sundays" proves that parking is allowed on other days.
The colloquial sense is that if something is a surprising, it shows that its opposite was a useful rule of thumb, or at least one you'd established in your head. (E.g. if you are surprised by a dog that doesn't bark, this surprise is meaningful and says something about what you think about dogs and barking.)
If palantir is shocking as a SV company, this says something interesting about what you think about SV companies.
but okay....
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-workin...
(Full disclosure: my name is also on the list linked above.)
Registry used to track Arabs and Muslims dismantled by Obama administration:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/22/nseers-arab-...
Trump's previously proposed Muslim registry covers Muslims already authorized to live in the US.
Guardian: Registry used to track Arabs and Muslims dismantled by Obama administration https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/22/nseers-arab-...
It's like blaming Apple or Spotify that your favorite artists aren't as good as they used to be.
Fine, be happy the veil is off (tech giants are corporations and when push comes to shove are about money), but honestly you need to look at the petroleum industry, security & prison industrial complexes and their bought politicians to see the worst.
I must admit, the difference is hard for me to see. Though the tech companies may not be getting rich directly off the backs of the poor, they are just as destructive in funneling large sums of money to a subset of society.
Guess who actually clicks on ads? Guess who allows for advertising loans up to 35% APR? That definitely falls within usury/payday/predatory loan range. The 36% restriction would only exist because people actively fall for those scams, and it also indicates Google is ok with people falling for the 35% rate.
I also remember them recommending a payday loan company, but I can't find the link.
TL;DR Google is rich off people who can't tell they're being scammed.
Said every despot in the history of the world. Once you start trying to save people from their baser instincts by restricting what you can and cannot do by force, you are infantilizing them.
"Once you start" implies drawing a line that any kind of regulation is infantilizing them. There are some people who think that this is wrong. However, many more understand that there are some forms of regulation that help not only society as a whole but individuals themselves. Yes, there are questions as to the degree and kind of regulation. And reasonable people can discuss this. And these people are not asking for despots.
I never said infantilizing was a bad thing. Most people aren't really able to make the optimum decision in their lives about most areas.
For instance, some of the most proficient programmers I know who make otherwise good decisions neglect their diet and exercise.
Should we enforce mandatory vegetable and exercise regimens for them? On a more prosaic level, should we limit the size and shape of knives that private citizens should be allowed to own because of violence concerns?
Realizing that there is nothing qualitatively different about these measures from the measures being described is a first step on evaluating all measures of this sort.
You can call it a sin tax, but another term is "disincentive tax".
"If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs."
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199710093371506
The responses raise legitimate concerns about the article's analysis, and they also support my assertion (which continues to be the mainstream view of the costs of smoking-related health-care). For example, the analysis you cited ignores secondhand smoke health costs entirely and ignores a number of conditions associated with smoking. In the author's reply to the criticism, they paper over these concerns in an inadequate way.
Profit motive has nothing to do with it. You could just as easily be blaming a shelter for "harboring" an adulterer. It isn't their job to be the morality police.
And you don't want them to be, because they have no accountability and little incentive to get it right. Better that corporations provide service to everyone than that they be the ones deciding who gets denied service.
> Should we not hold it against Trump that he ran casinos which preyed on the intellectually and financially disadvantaged?
Trump didn't force them to bet their money in the casino. They chose to do that, and we chose not to pass a law against it.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...
And the parent post is talking about loans with 35% APR still being quite predatory.
[1]Non-AMP link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/11...
How is that? 35% APR for short term unsecured credit seems predatory, but it is well in line with what most major credit card companies offer.
It appears the parent poster is arguing Google did ban [all payday loans] while you are arguing that the article says Google did not ban [all payday loans], but instead only banned [loans with interest rates >=36%].
My viewpoint: The article says both points, i.e. Google banned [all payday loans] and Google also banned [all loans (i.e. of the non-payday variety) with interest rates >=36%]
Evidence / Recitation from article:
"...In addition to the broad payday loan ad ban, Google will not display ads from lenders who charge annual interest rates of 36 percent or more in the United States. The same standards will apply to sites that serve as middlemen who connect distressed borrowers to those lenders..."
"...Google announced Wednesday that it will ban all payday loan ads from its site..."
As seen from the first above recitation, the words "in addition to" appears to mean that two separate bans have been enacted: The first ban is for any loan classified as a payday loan. That means a payday loan of any interest rate (i.e. 35%, 25%, even 3%) will be banned. The second ban is for a loan of any type where the interest rate is >= 36%.
Hope that helps, thanks for your time : )
Why would the tech industry be any better? The industries you name are somewhat more dependent on government, but Google and 'big tech' are still heavily dependent.
Name one such for the tech industry.
Ux that deliberately encourages addiction and compulsive behavior is also pretty bad, and is highly pervasive.
Could the IT industry ever cause this much harm? I suppose if an IT failure caused major infrastructure to fail, or propaganda caused a war ... or if propaganda enabled a Russian mole and fascist to become President of the U.S. (if that's what he is).
Of course the stranglehold the companies you mention have on American society is far more extensive and corrosive. But I grew up in an era where we were constantly proselytized that "these corporations are different." I was always skeptical, but that wasn't the zeitgeist. Now, I hope that my generation (millennials) will see the error in this judgement, but again, not terribly optimistic. In the pursuit of self-indulgence, we saw the Baby Boomers turn into Wall St Reaganites and still seemed not to learn. We just invented a "cooler" version of this story.
They didn't "ride" anything.
Maybe all those people that are fawning over "B-corporations"
Im not saying they're a silver bullet, but they do seem to provide shareholders and boards tools to resist being sued for putting concerns besides short term profits at the forefront.
I hope so too. Even if corporations really were sincerely pursuing social progress, that would be bad. In a democratic society, social progress should not be determined by a small group of unaccountable organizations.
Say what you will about governments pursuing social progress -- at least they are somewhat accountable and need to be elected. (Another potential upside of Trump's election: hopefully fewer people who believe that voting never changes anything because the establishment always wins.) Nobody outside of a corporation's board has control over who ends up in charge.
I disagree. Progress shouldn't be dependent on a small group of unaccountable organisations - but if such want to get out there and run their businesses in an, progressive manner that benefits society as a whole, I'm going to cheer them on.
What would you think if big companies like Google and Apple pursued a conservative agenda? What if they were against same-sex marriage or legal abortion?
The sword cuts both ways. There is no guarantee that corporations will always be on the right side of the culture wars, but they have enormous power. It's not a good idea to support corporate power because it happens to be on your side this time.
I would think it was bad and would think less of them.
That's why I said 'Progress shouldn't be dependent on a small group of unaccountable organisations'
We shuldn't depend on good things happening because corporations do them. But by gum, if corporations do good things I will applaud them - and if they do bad things I will criticise them.
Do you have any evidence to support the same? It seems a bit like fear mongering.
They designed, built, and maintain top shelf software products that are powering the world. They're giving them away for free. And unlike their competitors, they're not limited to running on Google platforms.
Tensorflow, Go, Android, Angular, Dart, Kuberbetes, Chromium are some of the most well known.
https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects
A decade ago this would have been an expensive suite of tools out of reach of the majority. You'd need staff dedicated to dealing with licensing from Oracle, MS, Adobe and the rest.
So they have to play the politics game. In particular with this administration, they either do it or run the risk of being labeled an enemy of Trump. We've seen how he plays favorites and makes decisions based on the last person he talked to.
If Google doesn't, the last people he talks to about tech would be Oracle and MS reps.
In conclusion, this simple black and white view is naive and harmful. It lacks reflection on the reality of how the world works. It omits complexity and opines for a fantasy.
As a result, we have a very skewed idea of what the internet is or should be. It is no coincidence that the domain for 99% of sites we use is ".com."
The truth is, corporations for decades have become more powerful and detached from their geopolitical circumstances. The subtleties of how the world works is of little relevance to McDonald's as long as they can sell more hamburgers. Corporations want to protect themselves from risk so they can continue to amass profits.
Therefore, the newfound genuflecting to the GOP should be of no surprise. Google ultimately has a mission to itself and its shareholders first. For a company whose product is its ability to amass information, there is little to be gained in promoting social or economic causes that do not benefit the corporation.
Yes, it does suck that the utopian dreams of Silicon Valley have divorced themselves from the liberal idealism of Northern California's Vietnam-era glory days, but that is why I left.
If you consider yourself liberal and you work for any of these companies that are aggressively courting Republicans, I would be very interested in hearing your perspective.
I sort of agree. Actually getting a .gov, .mil, .edu was pretty tough. I vaguely remember people being quite prickly about .net, and a little fussy about.org
Russia and China already had the idea of local alternatives and the EU was pushing for data protection for a while.
Governments might decide that it is not good idea give that much information about their population to the USA and maybe we will see the end of truly global companies.
It might be good for Apple though, as with it's strict data collection limitations.
Personally, I think the distribution is a good thing. It's not as if Facebook is creating better people. It's more likely that social networks are exacerbating biases, and so a global social network only creates an easier subset of people to manipulate.
Global capitalism hasn't exactly been a boon to humanity. Cheaper stuff comes at human costs, whether it's sugar or cotton or diamonds or iPhones. If a global institution is to better humanity, I wouldn't bet on it taking the form of a for-profit corporation.
Political parties sell themselves to voters as "be on our team". The other team wants to rape women or murder babies, don't vote for them.
Corporations vote with money instead of with votes. When you vote with votes and the other guy wins, you lose. When you vote with money and you pay both sides, you always win.
Google doesn't pay Republicans because they hate women or want to Build A Wall, they pay Republicans because Republicans are now in a position to destroy network neutrality, they don't want that to happen, and politicians don't listen to corporations who don't pay them.
Parties constrained by a system do what you would expect them to. If you don't like it you have to change the system.
quite literally in the election of 1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_zTN4BXvYI
Google has a very small business, search & ads, that basically prints money. They then spend almost all of that money on unprofitable operations that crush competition by 1) setting the price-point for many services at free, 2) intercepting customers (e.g. Google Flight and Hotel bookings at the top of search results), and 3) poaching all of the best talent and wasting it away on these terrible side businesses.
what the hell are you on about?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13503315 and marked it off-topic.
GTFOH with that dog and pony shit.
usurp. disrupt.
Cmon people please wakeup and open your eyes.
How will he pass laws without the support of at least 50% of Congress?
[0] https://gsuite.google.com/industries/government/