She’s an entertaining writer & co anchors a podcast called
Odd Lots, for those unaware. Entertaining and informative on various niches of money & markets.
Uber is an interesting company in that they were always shady, but initially in ways that customers liked (somewhat illegal taxis ripping off their drivers, for below cost, subsidized lifestyle by VC).
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
I've been saying this about Google since the 2000s. The "don't be evil" slogan meant "prioritize growth over profit for now." And if anything, I find profit-taking more honest than loss-leading.
This is why I found GOOG engineers I’ve met the most insufferable. Note I’m east coast so sample size is under 10…
But they all universally had a rather smug attitude that what THEY were working on was morally above what the rest of us were because they were just doing non-commercial r&d loss making stuff.
They didn’t sully themselves with anything to do with the core business!
Of course this steps over the darker aspects of the core business which funds their generous “non commercial” fun jobs…
It can happen. I thought the Internship movie was just a movie and Google engineers don't really say things like "I'm busy trying to make the world a better place," but turns out that's sometimes what they say. At least before layoffs started.
I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
I mean sure, I get it, but companies like Uber leave edge cases like that out when it hurts them (customers cancelling) but move heaven & earth to remove them when it helps them (I bet its easy to re-join within 24 hours of cancelling?).
There really is something to this. Living in NYC you meet a lot of people from different walks of life and levels of wealth.
Over and over the most stressed out anxious people I meet are the underemployed/nonworking spouse in very wealthy couples. Especially the childless ones.
As far as I can tell, the algorithm can really harm people during times of mental illness/stress/anxiety. Part of it is that it is like a feedback loop.
When we lost our pet and my wife was very upset for a while, the algo kept showing her more and more content associated with pet loss. It got to the point that some random content pushed to her social media was upsetting her daily.
I can imagine someone experiencing depression, suicidal thoughts, etc can easily be pushed over the edge by the algorithmic feedback loop.
In a way this perfectly captures my experiences too, despite my struggles revolving around a different topic, and sometimes it wouldn't even be algorithmically inflicted, but self-inflicted.
I'd keep coming across, and sometimes seeking out, threads with political content. But beyond that, I'd keep stumbling upon or even seeking out people who are being (in my view) inciteful or misleading. This would then piss me off, and I'd start to spiral. Naturally, these are not the kind of people who'd be posting in good faith, adding even more fuel to the fire when I engaged with them and their replies would eventually come about, which of course I'd "helpfully" get a notification for.
There's something about the social media influencer industrial complex that short circuits women's brains worse, as far as I can tell. Most of my friends quit social media years to a decade ago but our wives are all on it. Men seem to get sucked into Youtube wormholes instead.
I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.
My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.
It is anecdotal but eg. me and my brother and some of my male friends "burned out" on silly meme feeds on sites like Memebase and what not before there was any very addictive feeds. Maybe fewer women was full of it by the time Instagram came?
When my girlfriend told me on our first date that she doesn't use social media, I nearly proposed on the spot.
And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty well.
There may be an apparent contradiction but I think she's right.
You want to know the gist of whats being reported so that you know directionally what is going on / what other people may be talking about.
That is - you don't need to read 18 different articles about how Pete the drunk defense secretary (and probable assaulter/abuser) likes to text on his personal phone about war plans (including to non-govt officials), but when you see the article pop up in enough of the less biased news places you browse, you get the idea that it's true & bad.
Generally I find business news like FT/Bloomberg/CNBC and (if you ignore the opinion section) WSJ are best for the less-biased news sourcing.
I also browse a bit of known-biased news on each side to understand what each side is going to talk about (and makes it clearer what each side may be BSing about). This is helpful so I don't get jumped by some of my more left/right wing nut social circle when discussing a topic with a known-false partisan argument (as 99% of people just repeat what they see in their-sides news).
Well US companies now take the cowards way out generally - tell everyone to WFH that day (despite prior RTO mandates) and then just disable peoples access so the first way the laid off find out is when they can't login for the day.
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