That's literally the opposite of what he did in the book, and in subsequent interviews.

Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative...

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...

Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.

I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?

    "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.

Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)

I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.

I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.

Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached analysis ends and where it becomes just actually not caring about or not seeing the moral issues here.

There are other sites on the web that are attempting to organize people for large-scale social change, ones that are presumably watched (and cared about) by the FBI, as opposed to just being watched (with idle curiosity) by the FBI.

It's not about changing the world it's about not dehumanizing everything.

1. Make millions of dollars doing grey area work

2. Grey area work is now identified as black hat work

3. "Thats just the way it is"

It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.

For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.

This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".

To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.

Make me a star Harvey...

The parent comment was referring to the general election of 49%, and the "grab by the pussy" story broke after the primary was over, so point 3 is a straw man argument.

Edit: Sometimes I underestimate how in the dark people really are on the subject so I did a quick search to find this op ed which shows that, yes, there really were issues that voters were concerned about from a national security perspective, namely the contributions to multiple civil wars. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...

I mean, as a "Clinton is the worse option" quote, that hasn't aged well this week, has it? Mind you, the entire article is just the same old "Trump is visibly awful and we can work with that" many idiots ran with and were completely wrong about.

she convinced Obama to back military coups against the democratically-elected leaders of Honduras and Egypt.

The Intercept (no friend of the Clintons!) writes:

A retired U.S. military intelligence officer, who helped with the lobbying and the Honduran colonels’ trip, told me on condition of anonymity that the coup supporters debated “how to manage the U.S.” One group, he said, decided to “start using the true and trusted method and say, ‘Here is the bogeyman, it’s communism.’ And who are their allies? The Republicans.”

A network of former Cold Warriors and Republicans in Congress loudly encouraged Honduras’s de facto regime and criticized the newly elected Obama administration’s handling of the crisis.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/honduras-coup-us-defense...

By the time Clinton got involved the coup was complete.

The others are the same.

Read the US reaction to the Egyptian coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Egyptian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t.... It's easy to criticise it, but hard to come up with what the reaction should have been. It's worth noting that both parties had fairly similar reactions here.

Does anyone really believe that Clinton and Obama were backing militant Islamists in Syria and Libya? The countries were a mess and they were stuck trying to find a way forward - they didn't (and shouldn't have!) wanted Gaddafi or Assad in power, but both conflicts were multi-sided messes where one group would get taken over by another.

It's Syria that is mostly destroyed and has millions of refugees. Libya is bad but not quite as bad.

I agree with your point that there is degrees of destruction though.

You'll see occasional media content stressing the horrors of Syria, but there's never anything about Libya. That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there.

They both started in 2011. The Syrian conflict maybe winding down, but has started a new phase (in Syrian Kurdistan).

Syria had slave markets too.

The UNHCR data[1][2] shows a lot more refugees from Syria than Libya (don't forget Libya is often used by refugees from other parts of Africa as their outgoing port to Europe, so news reports on refugees arrivals from Libya don't mean the refugees were Libyan).

One source on the Wikipedia article claimed 1/3 of the Libyan population had fled to Tunisia. This seems non-credible: Neither Tunisia nor any refugee agency makes this claim. [3] claims "there are 2 two million Libyans abroad, mostly in Tunisia", but this is still less than half the number of Syrian refugees (over 5 million) and less than the number of registered in Turkey alone (over 3 million).

I think your "That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there" statement is also unfounded - in Syria journalists were targets of both ISIS and the Syrian state, and frequently murdered by either of them.

[1] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria

[2] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/lby

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2015/03/17...

Right. There was a reason he was Russia’s preferred candidate, and it wasn’t because they had too much kompromat on Hillary to know what to do with.

If Russia had a preference, theories of kompromat look pretty weak compared to theories that maybe Trump just looked less likely to topple regimes basically on Russia's southern border. Hillary was probably going to continue in the same vein as either Bush or Obama, at least Trump would have appeared as a new draw from the deck.

Trumps "peace with Russia" pronouncements are one of his best features. It is a good year when the US president isn't flattening countries a la Bush. If there was a path to swapping out the missiles for insulting tweets that is a big win for everyone. Not to say Trump is particularly good, but really the US has an impact on the world and wide-eyed anti-Russia conspiracy theories help nobody. At least his administration has been better than Bush's for the Middle East.

This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were.

There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.

I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.

Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.

Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.

She's not exactly squeaky clean either.

Plenty of decent single men out there, she went for the married one with kids.

Not disputing the guy's behaviour seems appalling; so her due diligence on his character and his actual single status appears to have been poor.

Did he commit a fireable offense while on the job?

It's not an employers responsibility or right to dismiss someone for conduct in their personal life.

Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain.

If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.

Being good at business does not make you a "good person".

Power and influence allow one to be a shitty person without having to deal with the consequences that other folks might, so the situations where that happens are outrageous and rightfully get a lot of exposure. However, this is a consequence of the fact that you already need to be powerful. Unless you get lucky, or otherwise hit the jackpot, you generally have to be a nice person to work your way up to that point.

Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.

Vinod Khosla. Robert Bolton. Samantha Power. Practically every dictator bar Lee Kuan Yew.

If you’re already powerful, the same rules don’t quite apply.

People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there. People know of Chinese factories with anti-suicide nets but they keep buying iPhones.

Sorry, but this has nothing to do with the point I was making.

If someone screws you over in business, you're going to try to avoid working with that person in the future. That's just common-sense.

One had a complex relationship at the time that he refuse to believe the kid was his. And he didn't "abandoned" her, he reconciled.

I don't think Jobs was diddling his employees though. Big difference.

As but one example: Google once gave us money for a non-profit event, in no way related to their business, with explicit instructions not to mention them.

https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai...

>American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United.

>Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success.

>“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”

I know anecdotally My employer constantly gets in trouble during earnings calls from shareholders for doing anything remotely environmentally responsible because it impacts margins. It's pretty clear capital has no intention of being ethical at the cost of profit

So, yes, maybe they did it because they knew I'd be going around using them as an example of altruism in business, 12 years later.

Not to mention businesses have customers and investors who care about these things.