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Google does not operate re-education camps which kill people now and then. Correct me if I am wrong. If I am, let's go liberate the people it's holding with the

Google does not operate re-education camps which kill people now and then. Correct me if I am wrong. If I am, let's go liberate the people it's holding with the help of the US military.

gibba999 7y ago
You mean the one which (still) runs Gitmo? Or perhaps we should get our law enforcement to help out. But then who would we have to do the very important work of putting kids in cages on the border? I think you're making the mistake of viewing Google and the US military as autonomous entities. We have 7 billion people in the world. Organizational structures, whether governmental, corporate, or otherwise are abstractions generally designed to keep people happy, healthy, organized, and productive. Systems define how those abstractions interact. Most bad systemic behaviors come from those interactions. It makes sense to understand good and bad behavior on an individual level (e.g. an person who spends 3 years at Google and then moves on to Facebook for 6 months, finds it doesn't work out, and gets a job at Apple). It makes sense to understand how organizational structures interact to cause healthy behavior or oppressive behavior at an overall level. It usually makes very little sense to look at individual organizations without looking at the overall systems they operate in. At this point, Google seems to do a lot of bad in the world. That's not a criticism of Google the organization. It legally can't do otherwise. The CEO of Google has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, while the regulatory regime makes the behavior it's engaging in do exactly that. The trick is to fix the ecosystem around Google so it can do good. That's actually a place where Googlers and similar could do a lot of good, if they can get past the ego issues which lead to defensiveness like from the post like yours.

Google does not operate re-education camps which kill people now and then. Correct me if I am wrong. If I am, let's go liberate the people it's holding with the help of the US military.

gibba999 7y ago

You mean the one which (still) runs Gitmo? Or perhaps we should get our law enforcement to help out. But then who would we have to do the very important work of putting kids in cages on the border? I think you're making the mistake of viewing Google and the US military as autonomous entities. We have 7 billion people in the world. Organizational structures, whether governmental, corporate, or otherwise are abstractions generally designed to keep people happy, healthy, organized, and productive. Systems define how those abstractions interact. Most bad systemic behaviors come from those interactions. It makes sense to understand good and bad behavior on an individual level (e.g. an person who spends 3 years at Google and then moves on to Facebook for 6 months, finds it doesn't work out, and gets a job at Apple). It makes sense to understand how organizational structures interact to cause healthy behavior or oppressive behavior at an overall level. It usually makes very little sense to look at individual organizations without looking at the overall systems they operate in. At this point, Google seems to do a lot of bad in the world. That's not a criticism of Google the organization. It legally can't do otherwise. The CEO of Google has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, while the regulatory regime makes the behavior it's engaging in do exactly that. The trick is to fix the ecosystem around Google so it can do good. That's actually a place where Googlers and similar could do a lot of good, if they can get past the ego issues which lead to defensiveness like from the post like yours.