Google Calendar removes Pride Month and Black History Month
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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.
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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.
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What's your setup for self hosting? Do you use a vps or host on your own network?
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I would only want actual state/local holidays anyway.
If I actually care about an event I am more than capable to set the event mysekf (e.g. Sysadmin day) -
It's not migrating my email 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can also use Kagi's video search AI to vet the political alignment of a video before watching. I don't want to waste my time on facist-leaning content, be it political or economic.
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Aside from political leanings of services like Protonmail and Kagi, I look at one key thing: where they are headquartered. Kagi is in California, while Protonmail is in Switzerland. IMO, this means that if a civil war breaks out, they are less likely to poison or remove their service.
It is all about whether the workers and leadership are within reach of the law, be it official or the jungle.
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Their tuta email already is post quantum so it’s not that they can’t do the security part. Idk honestly, it’s probably just the logistics of getting a lot more servers if they’re trying to make a secure cloud. I just know they posted they’ll be developing that in the future 2 years ago, now would be a great time for it to release as an alternative.
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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.
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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.
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Any one who doesn’t know what happened should go watch Schindler’s List.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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A good alternative. I moved across too.
Youtube is the only thing there isn't a really viable alternative to at this stage.
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Cowardly sycophants giving their "divine" leader his wishes without question
