1. Who among us has not been surprised by needing people to do things
Spotify's Daniel Ek is shocked, shocked I tell you, that laying off 1,500 workers has actually made the efficiency of his company worse. It's almost as if those people did things which were, perhaps, important to the business. Seriously though, if you allowed your company to hire 1500 people who weren't actually needed, then you're a bad leader and should pay the price for that. What actually happens because capitalism, is that the leaders get a bigger bonus for “taking the hard calls” even when it was their decision to approve those hires in the first place.
2. Just how bad are the tech barons?
Bad enough to want to subvert democracy and establish their own dictatorships. Balaji Srinivasan is one of the worst, but he's not alone in this endeavour: Marc Andreessen is equally awful. As an internet veteran, I always feel I should apologise that we didn't spot these men -- and it's always men -- were this terrible a lot sooner. But we were all carried away in fever dreams of tech utopianism for a while. Sorry.
3. Remember, a sustainable society is a bad society
Speaking of Andreessen -- yes, I know you don't want to, but to stop things going completely to shit, we must -- this article about a dinner with him is full of moments of hilarity and absolute horror. Here is a man with few redeeming qualities, who used government funding to create a web browser which he turned into a large pile of cash for himself, railing against the government. You might as well print t-shirts with his chubby, milk-fed face on it and the words “why you should be a communist” on them.
4. Speaking of cheating
The part of me that loves sensational counter-narratives would love this story to be true. Qualcomm cheating on the benchmarks for its upcoming “nearly as good as Apple's chips, no really, this time we're not lying” Snapdragon X Elite would be a fantastic scoop. But I don't believe it. Why not? Simply because the stakes are too high, and the rewards too low, for it to be worth Qualcomm doing it. As soon as the new ARM-based Windows computers come out, everyone will benchmark them, and if they don't perform anywhere near as well as touted, the company will not get another chance.
5. That sound you hear is your old iPhone being shredded without mercy
When you trade in an iPhone for recycling, it's basically shredded. Why? Because Apple desperately wants to avoid parts from old phones getting back into the market to be used for repair by third parties, who will do the job more cheaply than Apple. Why does it want that? Because it wants you to buy a new iPhone, rather than getting your perfectly good one repaired. If there isn't a more obvious symbol of why the present system is broken and isn't going to stop climate change, I don't know what it is.
6. I feel seen
I posted about this one all over the social medias but reading it back again it still hits home. I'm in the home stretch of my career, too, and the best advice I can give anyone is to realise early on that some day your career will end. Don't get so drawn into it that you have no idea what to do when it does – or how to wind it down gently.
7. The man who killed Google search
It's a beautiful shared truth that Google's search has, for the last few years, been getting worse. You'll hear it from experienced SEOs, publishers, and normal users too. But why has it happened? Ed Zitron wrote a good piece which not only explains the “why”, but accuses the “who”. The key question now is: How does Google get out of this mess – and, in fact, does it even want to?
8. And speaking of dreadful corporate behaviour
HERE'S GOOGLE AGAIN! Like lots of corporations, Google had rules about how its suppliers treated their workers. Unlike plenty of corporations, as soon as that became a problem, it changed the rules so it could work with suppliers who paid worse wages, didn't provide health insurance, and so on. Google, of course, is blaming someone else – in this case the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled that these rules meant Google was effectively a co-employer of its partners' staff. Blaming other people is, of course, standard corporate behaviour these days. Corporations who want to take responsibility for their actions are a dying breed – if they ever existed at all.
9. I will laugh so hard I'll poop
Could Tesla go bankrupt? Motorhead neatly avoids Betteridge's Law by adding “The odds are rising” on to this headline, but I would have been willing to extend an indulgence to them because yes, Tesla could indeed go bust. The company has a weak product pipeline – the Cyberdog… sorry Cybertruck is a distraction – and its share price has collapsed because it's no longer considered a growth stock. This is why Musk is desperate to pivot the company so it's seen as an AI leader, which would hitch it firmly on the latest bubble of excitement rather than the old hat that is electric vehicles.
10. And speaking of Elon
Former US secretary of labor Robert Reich points out the obvious: that what Elon Musk indulges in isn't capitalism. Essentially, it's extortion.
