Cowardly sycophants giving their “divine” leader his wishes without question
Corporations, at their core, are profit-generating engines—nothing more, nothing less. The corporate board’s one legal imperative is to ensure the shareholders see a return on their investment, by any means necessary. Morality? A marketing gimmick when convenient- not an operating principle.
All companies are evil. Google is not any more or less evil than any other company. The difference is they have a significant power base and therefore have a lot to gain or lose in the transition to fascism. They understand that Trump is spiteful and willing to bend and even break the law to punish those who defy him. They also understand he rewards those who bend the knee. Therefore, the most profitable path of action is bending the knee.
This should not surprise anybody. You substitute Google for any large corporation and they would have done the same thing. Don’t believe me? Google around (while you still can freely search for information) for the Coca-Cola saga in Colombia, where union leaders were getting forcibly suicided by narco-paramilitary death squads hired by Coca-Cola.
You know- the commercials that make you feel all warm and fuzzy around Christmas time with the polar bears and Santa Claus? Yeah, they’ll murder you if you threaten their bottom line. It’s just what they do.
There’s a simple math equation:
Let
P = Probability of getting caught,
F = Expected fine or penalty,
R = Potential revenue or profit,
Constants
α = The weight assigned to the probability of getting caught ( P ). If this constant is high, the corporation is more cautious… if it’s low, the corporation is willing to make more risks. In Colombia, this is much lower than in the US.
β = The weight assigned to the probable size of the penalty ( F ). A high β means there’s a serious potential danger. However, if β is low (like when Ford decided the cost of simply paying lawsuits from deaths due to known car malfunctions was probably lower than the price of recalls) then they’ll be more likely to push forward
γ = The weight assigned to the impact on their bottom line ( R ). For example, if Boeing thinks they will lose a lot of money from whistleblowers, they will find a way to suicide them. If the impact is small, then it’s not worth the potential risks.
C = ( αP ⋅ βF ) − γR
Let’s give an imaginary example. Let’s say a corporation is considering dumping toxic waste illegally into a river, potentially giving thousands of people cancer. Let’s say they’re gonna save $10M a year from doing this.
R = 10,000,000
The probability of getting caught is 10%
P = 0.10
The expected fine is $5M
F = 5,00,000
Let’s try out some constants
α = 1.5 ⇒ they’re somewhat cautious about getting caught
β = 1.2 ⇒ they’re moderately concerned about the penalty
γ = 2.0 ⇒ they’re really motivated by profit (maybe their profits went down 10% last year, a big no-no)
Plug in the values
C = (1.5 · 0.10 · 1.2 · 5,000,000) - (2.0 · 10,000,000)
C = (900,000) - (20,000,000)
C = -19,100,000
C is less than 0? Dump that toxic waste, baby. It’s the logical position if you’re trying to maximize profit. Sometimes you will get caught, but imagine you did this in a simulation 1,000 times. Most of the times, you will be more profitable because of it and therefore you dump the waste.
It’s like a poker player. If you get AA, you raise pre-flop. Sometimes you will lose on the flop to some dunce who goes in with 2-7… but in the long term, most of the time, you will win. Therefore it’s the right move.
This is what companies do. People need to realize and internalize this. They are profit generating engines. Nothing more, nothing less. They are not your friends. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t care about the future of the world or anything. Literally nothing at all.
They are a math formula and if destroying everything you love happens to be the most profitable move most of the time, they will do it without second guessing. Because they aren’t people. They are a machine.
Great write up, I appreciate the modeling.
All companies are evil.
Disagree. Publicly traded companies are amoral, so whether they do something good or evil depends on what’s profitable.
Healthy competition tends to make “evil” actions unprofitable. Google doesn’t have healthy competition, hence the current situation.
These companies aren’t the bad guys in the same way that weeds in your garden aren’t “bad.” If you don’t want weeds to take over, make sure there’s sufficient competition and incentives so desirable plants crowd them out, and stay on top of the handful of weeds that take root. We’ve neglected the garden for decades and allowed some truly nasty weeds in, but that doesn’t make the weeds “evil,” that means we were poor gardeners.
To me, apathy and amorality when the consequences are harm towards others is evil. It’s sort of like if a driver was in a rush and ran over a protestor on his way to work.
Sure, he did not wish any harm on the protestor. He just simply needed to get past them and chose the most effective and efficient path.
It’s an amoral act but the act (and the driver) is still evil. Evil is not just a mustache twirling genocidal dictator or sadistic serial killers… In fact, the amoral does infinitely more harm than the malicious. The Nazis did not come to power because of malice. They did not kill millions of Jews because of malice. They got there through apathy and amorality.
They didn’t want to kill the Jews at first- they wanted to deport them. But once they got them in the camps… it was impractical to supply enough logistical power to actually move them all. So while they figure out a plan, let’s have them do slave labor.
And then after a while, since we can’t move them, we may as well just kill them. It’s the most effective path to where we want to be. The driver driving over the protestor.
If this isn’t “evil”, what is?
Healthy competition tends to make “evil” actions unprofitable
Competition helps. I agree that this negative aspect of capitalism is exponentially magnified when monopolies form.
The thing is, in capitalist the wealth tends to snowball. Wealth is power and wealth buys influence. Look at how Disney singlehandedly changed copyright law when Mickey Mouse was about to enter public domain. Once you reach a certain size, you can modify the rules of the game. So it creates a self-perpetuating cycle.
This position we are in is the natural consequence of free market capitalism. I agree that free market is better. But this is the grown up version of free market. There was never going to be any other scenario but the one we are in.
We’ve neglected the garden for decades and allowed some truly nasty weeds in, but that doesn’t make the weeds “evil,” that means we were poor gardeners.
We can debate on the ontology of the world evil. It really is an interesting debate. But for all practical purposes, if the weeds are killing the crops that feed your family… what is the difference? Whether they want to kill you indirectly through starvation or don’t want to kill you- you’re dead either way.
The issue with your driver analogy is that the driver has to make a conscious decision that their convenience is worth more than a human life. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the driver is evil.
Likewise for your Nazi example, the choice to arrest and deport people because of their religious, ethnic, or cultural affiliation is evil. That should absolutely go without saying, as should killing people for convenience or profit.
Corporations are rarely in that situation, and if they actively choose to kill people, the decision makers should join the driver and Nazis in prison.
wealth tends to snowball
As it should. And snowballs tend to burst on impact. Look at GE or Sears, they used to absolutely dominate, but they imploded because they couldn’t adapt to the competition.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, innovators profit massively from the value they create, and when they stop innovating, they fail.
The problem is that large businesses rarely fail and get bailed out. We should’ve had a ton of banks close in 2008, but instead their execs got golden parachutes and failing businesses just consolidated into even larger entities. The message that sends is that companies can get away with murder, as long as they are “too big to fail.” The problem there wasn’t the cheating (it was a problem, don’t get me wrong), but the lack of consequences. We should’ve seen execs being carted off to jail, having their assets confiscated to help make restitution for their crimes. But instead we rewarded them.
This isn’t a failure of capitalism, it’s corruption in government.
Once you reach a certain size, you can modify the rules of the game.
And that’s the problem. My point is: don’t hate the player, hate the game. Demand better representation, and real consequences for corruption.
I’m guessing if you looked into Google/Alphabet, you could find dozens if not hundreds of crimes committed that helped them get the market share they have, and most of those likely went unprosecuted or had ineffective penalties. Likewise for other large orgs like Microsoft and Amazon.
Yet everyone seems to blame the corporations and not the government. You blame Disney for our terrible copyright laws, yet Disney didn’t pass or sign that law, they merely lobbied for it. The problem isn’t Disney, the problem is Congress.
, if the weeds are killing the crops that feed your family… what is the difference?
Weeds killing your crops is a symptom of the problem, which is the lack of maintenance of the garden. The weeds didn’t kill your family, your lack of preventative action did.
Likewise, corporations taking advantage of an ineffective government isn’t the problem, the ineffective government is. Fix ththe gardener and the garden will prosper. But a bad gardener is worse than no gardener, because nature at least finds a way for crops to survive without anyone plucking the weeds.
You blame Disney for our terrible copyright laws, yet Disney didn’t pass or sign that law, they merely lobbied for it. The problem isn’t Disney, the problem is Congress.
I think one thing we need to get out of the way is that the political system and the economic system are intertwined. There is no way to have a democratic capitalist society without having one influence the other.
If we go back to Adam Smith- he’s seen as the father of economics. But he didn’t consider himself an economist. He considered a moral philosopher and a political economist. The political system and the economic system are one and the same.
You believe these large corporations gaining too much influence is because of poor maintenance. Because of a corrupt government. You believe it’s because we’re not enforcing our anti-trust laws and so on.
I disagree and say this was always inevitable. It is impossible to keep your garden free of weeds starting from a free market economy. Again- wealth snowballs and wealth buys influence.
It’s a simple cause and effect. As long as the profit incentive is the main motivator in our political economy, the political system will be shaped by those with the most money. And they have the incentive to remove those free-market systems in order to maximize their own profit.
It’s a deterministic cycle. Free market capitalism -> late stage capitalism -> fascism
Fuuuuuckkkk I wish I could degoogle again
Don’t be evil, lol
Fuuuuuck… I was really hoping I didn’t need to migrate away from gmail… But looks like this is it.
I went to proton about a year ago, and I don’t live it. I’m not ready to leave yet, but I’ll tell you to do as much research as you can and consider a paid service if you have to. I wish I had.
I’m happy to say I’m officially degoogled in my personal life/computer.
I still have legacy accounts with gmail that I can’t migrate though.
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.
I had a management class years ago in college where the professor made the argument that in order to be ethical, every single action a business makes must be done to increase profits for its shareholders.
Charitable donation? Only if it increases public perception in a way to be justified by the cost.
Pay your employees well? Only if paying them less would cause you to lose them to your competitors.
The list goes on. It’s a very depressing way to look at the world. But as time goes by, I’ve realized just how accurate that professor was. Companies don’t give a shit about you and will turn on you the second it makes their quarterly numbers look better.
That’s the problem of thinking of companies as people. Company operate like ruthless people people they usually responde to several stakeholders that all control the company like an ouija board.
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.
Reading about the Tulsa race massacre is so crazy, like World War 1 planes, some say up to 12, others at least 8 of them doing stuff like: “… turpentine or nitroglycerin bombs being dropped and men shooting from planes”. Some also suspect the use of dynamite, so it’s possible they were quite literally dropping bombs.
POTD
10 out of 10
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.
Right. If you react to this news with disappointment, and believe me I’m disappointed, maybe it’s more a wake up call the support was never real to begin with. I feel we’re better off without such hollow gestures. Then again I’m not a part of a marginalized group and maybe it’s not that black and white.
I’m not angry at this point. Just sad.
It’s disheartening how quickly everything was washed away.
This was always going to happen. Companies in Germany when Hitler rose to power didn’t protest and speak up against him - they needed to sell his army goods. They made his uniforms and cars and didn’t say a peep about the extermination of people around them. The companies that spoke up were crushed. A corporation’s bottom line is their bottom line, no matter what horrors they need to assist in perpetrating.
They did not merely passively “assist”. They established factories in close proximity to the death camps so that they could profit off of the slave labour deemed too fit for immediate extermination.
Any one who doesn’t know what happened should go watch Schindler’s List.
The Nazis organized a closed door meeting with the leading German industrialists and told them about their plans to rebuild the German military to take revenge for WW I. They agreed and many of those same asswipes escaped the post war prosecution.
Most of the key people behind the Civil War and 1st Business Plot also were excused from justice, for the sake of soothing political tension. IMO, executing them would have been better for curtailing the corrosion of our society.
Now these closed meetings happen at MaraLargo
Corporations are not people. They are machines
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.
I am hoping that Google bites the dust from this. Having stuff like Peertube becoming common, would go a long way towards mitigating media moguls from controlling narratives. As we have seen, the media organs of the right are staying silent or downlplaying what has been happening.
Also, it would be nice if the folk didn’t have to deal with baseless copyright takedowns. A lot of culture has been lost to feckless corpotacracy.
I agree with your points, but what do you think are some of the specific things Google or other similar tech companies in such a similar capacity could realistically and meaningfully do object the Musk-Thiel-Trumpian destruction machine?
I would like to learn more
They could decide not to give 1M to Trump, but they did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/09/google-microsoft-donate-trump-inaugural-fund They could use their reach and make a clear public statement: “we don’t support this”. But I’ve never seen any. They could give higher rating to actual useful information and try to show less fascist propaganda to people. I have to assume that’s going wrong as well.
Because of their giant impact, they send a message to all others. “We go with the fascists, we are not on the side of humanity but on the side of profit”. That creates dangerous dynamics.
Google has always been fuckers, they are still fuckers and going with the fascist flow they’ve proven that they will remain fuckers. Even if they switch side once the Trumpian monster stumbles, the can never be trusted.
This days it’s plain obvious. Before was slightly better hidden.
Literally nothing. A corporation, especially a publicly traded one like that, can’t do much but maximize (ideally long-term, but usually short-term) shareholder returns.
The Activision-Microsoft merger is a good recent example of this. During the anti trust trial, the CEO of Activision literally came out and said that he believes it’s a bad idea that will be bad for the industry and bad for the company in the long term, using the impact of consolidation in Hollywood as an example, but he has to side with the board. He’s basically legally obligated to.
I’m not saying it’s unjust or a bad system (and I’m definitely not trying to paint Bobby Kotick as a good guy), I just want to point out that corporations are very simple in their purpose, and nobody should be expecting anything more from them. If you’re disappointed that Google made this 180, that’s on you for falling in love with a corporation. They’re useful tools for producing goods and services, but terrible as a political tool for democracy.
But for some reason, it became popular to fetishize tech companies, and that spawned megalomaniacs like Elon, Zuckerberg, Horowitz, Thiel, etc who feel like they should be the supreme rulers of our civilization.
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.
Can they even argue they following washed version of “do the right thing”
Well „the right thing“ says nothing. Doing the right thing can be making tons of money, which it apparently also is.
Wow Google’s licking boot like there’s no tomorrow.
Fucking shameful.
The only thing I need to drop is my gmail account. Everything else went into the circular file.
I bought a domain and use Fastmail, I’ve just been switching what I need and letting the rest go to a dead Gmail.
It’s been fairly easy.
A good alternative. I moved across too.
Youtube is the only thing there isn’t a really viable alternative to at this stage.
It is a bit nuts how hard it is to switch email accounts. Although conveniently I believe gmail has a forwarding feature. Protonmail unfortunately doesn’t in its free tier (I recently switched from protonmail to self-hosted postfix/dovecot), and paying for a protonmail subscription just to forward my emails to a different email seems to defeat the point of paying for an email service.
I used Thunderbird to simultaneously access and download my gmail and protonmail, gradually migrating my ecosystem to the latter. The way I figure, Protonmail would be good, on account of being based in Switzerland. That means assorted EU protections - and now with Vichy America likely to become a thing, having the servers in a safe spot seems really helpful.
The odds of us having military action in our neighborhoods has shot up by a disturbing degree.
It’s not migrating my emails I need, it’s forwarding new emails sent to my old address. I mostly use duck addresses these days so luckily I can just change the address ddg forwards to in future, but prior to starting to use ddg’s email service I’d have a ton of services I need to change the email address for. Proton offers this service but I’d have to pay a subscription for it, and obviously I need it indefinitely if some service sends me an email eg 5 years down the line. Of course emails sent to an old email 5 years later are probably not important but it’s just convenient to not have to log into Protonmail to check if I’ve got any mail sent to my old address.
What’s your setup for self hosting? Do you use a vps or host on your own network?
VPS in order to go offshore due to being a political organiser/having state interest in me. If my domestic state was not interested in me I would use a home lab though; it’d wind up cheaper in the long run I reckon, better performance as it’s bare metal (though my VPS is KVM so performance hit is negligible), and better control since you both own and have physical access to the server. For most people’s purposes I’m sure an old laptop or a raspberry pi would work fine so you don’t need to splash out either. I probably wouldn’t suggest a VPS unless you have the same threat model as me (ie likely to get raided & server seized, or likely to have active monitoring of your internet activity via ISP); I don’t really think it’s worth the money long term. Or I guess if you do just have general privacy concerns you could rent a VPS in a country known for decent privacy, but just for peace of mind reasons instead of a tangible threat to you.
Edit: Also depends on what you use the server for. If you want it to not be linked to your real identity you’d probably want a VPS, otherwise every time someone emails you they find out the IP address of your home network.
They sent it all to the Gulf of Mexico…
They also removed Holocaust Remembrance Day. Probably because it’s going to have to be renamed Holocaust I soon.
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.
I cannot believe this is the first time I’ve heard this.
Pepperidge Farm remembers. And so do I.
“Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote and certain people weren’t allowed on golf courses? Petridge Farm remembers. It was back in 2025.”
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.
Hot broads in your area want to talk to you!
Hot shingles? In MY area? And I can lay them?
Don’t forget your Shingles vaccination before you lay them! You don’t want a Shingle Transmitted Infection. You know, an ShTI (pronounced Esh-T-I).
