A haunting reminder that rainbow capitalism is 100% about profit and convenience.
Corporations were never your friend. They were never going to defend you.
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.
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
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
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
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.
I have had reasonable experiences with startpage as a search engine.
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.
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.
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.
Wow Google's licking boot like there's no tomorrow.
Fucking shameful.
Remember when they removed "don't be evil" from their code of conduct back in 2018
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.
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.
Every time a straight person has wondered why I hate rainbow capitalism, shit like this is why.
"Oh but it moves your kind forward, you should be thankful they support you now!" They only supported us when the government wouldn't take away contracts and people were sure they supported queers.
Same thing for every other company and every other minority. I can at least mask that I'm queer, black people can't mask being black.
God I hate being right about horrible things.
Google managed to create a very clean image of themselves in most heads, but looking closer it is an ugly profit maximization machine. It cares about shareholders. If it cares about you, then probably for spying on you and learn how to manipulate you and others better. I hope people start realizing finally.
And let's state it clear: Google could have a voice. They could object to the Musk-Thiel-Trumpian destruction machine. They could be there for the world. But they're not. Not at all. They serve the money. And if it pays off, then they are willing to ruin peoples lives.
Google is on the wrong side of history.
Seems like their motto isn’t „don’t be Evil“ anymore for a reason.
It was limiting them. To truly maximize profits they need to strip off all limits. I'm not joking. Really not. This is why capitalism and fascism go so well together.
They also removed Holocaust Remembrance Day. Probably because it's going to have to be renamed Holocaust I soon.
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
Companies have decided to cut the crap and just focus on their core mission of being evil
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.
Lmao, damn… I was done with them before this announcement but thanks for reinforcing my decision.
I'm not angry at this point. Just sad.
It's disheartening how quickly everything was washed away.
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
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 don't understand why was this ever a thing. Fuck google, and fuck rainbow washing. They never really cared, and where just taking advantage of a noble cause.
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...
Next thing you know Facebook is going to get rid of Daughter's Day!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
