It’s amazing how Trump, a man who has never had a single successful business in his life, has been successful in intimidating much more successful businesses.
I will be damned if he does not go down in history as the most accomplished conman in history. Forget about the people who invented the Brooklyn Bridge scam (ever heard the expression ‘if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you’? That’s where it came from) or the guy who sold the Effel Tower, or Ponzi, or whatever. Trump demolishes all other conmen in how he managed to time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again fool so many people into giving him their money for his failed ideas, but also told them to eat shit all the way and told them to kiss his ass harder next time he comes along to demand money for more failed businesses.
In that end he is remarkably competent. The only thing he is good at.
I don’t think it’s Trump at all. Who did Musk have suddenly contact with before veering far right? Who had several meetings with Trump in his first term that no-one was allowed to record? And who is waging a cyberwar of misinformation and propaganda right out of “Foundation of Geopolitics” since at least 2014?
It’s Putin. Trump is just the smokescreen. He tries to achieve globally what he did in Russia, aligning all oligarchs under himself with the promise of even more obscene riches. And with the US the first domino has fallen for good. Next he will try to destroy the EU (Brexit was only the trial run).
At this point, only China might put him in check and they will only do it if it helps their own plans of global domination (they seem to prefer a soft approach for now). A truly united EU might also help, but I don’t have a lot of hope for that.
I think he was unexpectedly successful in winning the 2016 election.
I also think that by mid 2017 “his” administration had built up collection of “advisors” who have been increasingly calling the shots since then. They give him “on brand” scripts to read, but he’s not personally orchestrating much of anything.
Oh yeah, by all means, stop using all Google related services, then realize that about 50% of web services for banking, agriculture, logistics, infrastructure, telecommunications, research and development, industry, transportation, healthcare and energy are hosted on GCP
“Oh but my service is hosted on AWS/AZURE”
Yeah and what do you think is the fallback in case of DRP?
Which is a long way to say that Google exists as a prime failure of the government’s onus to regulate businesses. Google should never have been allowed to creep its tentacles into so many facets of life.
Just as with most technology, the Feds have been turning a blind eye, and pocketing cash while tech robber barons privatized existence.
I agree with the sentiment, but GCP typically isn’t the fail over. Most people will start with AWS and fail over to Azure, or start with Azure and just fail into nothing.
To stop using Google you would need to find every app that used Firebase and ignore them, that would be one of the hardest parts. You couldn’t use GitLab or other SaaS tools that work out of GCP. You’d likely need to just get offline to avoid their ads.
AWS is the professional one. Azure has Microsoft power. GCP tends to be less well through of. Alibaba isn’t far behind GCP. Even a fistful of smaller providers will collectively have double the users/revenue or more It is usually 30% for AWS, 20% Azure and 10% GCP these days.
Not to say GCP is bad, I like BigQuery as much as the next guy, but alluding that it’s the fail over or fallback for professional companies is not accurate.
Capitalism
Don’t be evil.
Tech megacorps are wusses, in other news fire is hot.
They’re not wusses, they were just biding their time to unveil their true selves.
See, this assigns a level of human personality to corporations that I don’t think we should be doing. It implies there is a “true self” to be revealed, when in reality the “self” of any corporation is entirely plastic and follows what the Excel Sheet tells them will make Line Go Up. Most corporate suits aren’t Elon Musk (who is, in fact, a human being, just a terrible one). Most corporate suits are dead inside and haven’t had a soul or a human emotion since 1985.
No, they just do whatever they can to appease whoever is in charge, because that is how they make money. They only became “LGBTQ friendly” when that was mainstream-acceptable and government-endorsed. And now that the culture is swinging the other way (more than half of americans wanted this fascist descent, never forget that) and the US is going all in on white supremacy and puritanism, they switch tunes right away. Case in point dia da consciência negra, the Brazilian equivalent of a black-history thing is still labelled on my Brazil-facing Google Calendar, because it’s still a government-sponsored and mainstream commemorative date here.
The thing is, corporations are run by people. Sometimes it’s a singular personality like Musk or Zuckerberg, sometimes it’s a board, but every one of those decisions is made by one or more human beings.
A corporation is not a person, but don’t deny the agency of the people that run it. They created the awful world we live in, and they did it with the explicit goal of taking from us.
