Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

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nosimpleway
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby nosimpleway » Sat Sep 22, 2018 3:21 pm

Oh yeah, that happened when I was working for Turner. A new office in California opened to house the editorial staff (which hadn't been hired yet, editorial staff up to that point was me) so the VP could move out of Atlanta to run it.

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Mongrel
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Thu Sep 27, 2018 7:46 pm

According to Musk, he calculated the $420 price per share based on a 20% premium over that day's closing share price because he thought 20% was a 'standard premium' in going-private transaction," the SEC alleged in its suit. "This calculation resulted in a price of $419, and Musk stated that he rounded the price up to $420 because he had recently learned about the number's significance in marijuana culture and thought his girlfriend 'would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price.'"
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Sat Sep 29, 2018 7:54 pm

As part of the SEC plea deal, Muskie's going to step down as the CEO of Tesla.
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Grath
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Grath » Sun Sep 30, 2018 1:13 am

Mongrel wrote:As part of the SEC plea deal, Muskie's going to step down as the CEO of Tesla.

He'll stay CEO, but step down as Chairman. The part that stings the most, though, is that he's settling "without admitting or denying the allegations of the complaint" which means that he can't claim to have done nothing wrong.

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Grath
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Grath » Sun Oct 07, 2018 9:32 pm

From elsewhere:
So..amazons "15" dollar cheapskate
We usually get a 16% bonus per month for peak (oct-Jan)
Since this change...they adjusted pay to be around a 6% bonus
So amazon is cutting 10% per worker with praise
And 2% off peak
So its effectively a pay decrease

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Sun Oct 07, 2018 9:58 pm

Grath wrote:From elsewhere:
So..amazons "15" dollar cheapskate
We usually get a 16% bonus per month for peak (oct-Jan)
Since this change...they adjusted pay to be around a 6% bonus
So amazon is cutting 10% per worker with praise
And 2% off peak
So its effectively a pay decrease

It's also a long-term plan to put competitors out of business by encouraging higher minimum wages.

Amazon's plan as we know is to automate everything as much as they possibly can, so the theory some observers have floated is that Amazon hopes that they'll eventually lay everyone off while their competitors will still be burdened by the weight of a large workforce, now with high wages, OR will lay off their own labour in favour of clearly inferior automation in a desperate attempt to keep pace with Amazon.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mothra » Sun Oct 07, 2018 10:09 pm

Goddddddddd

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Sun Oct 07, 2018 10:37 pm

Geeeeettttt Ouuuuuuuut! (Your stock vested yet?)

It's basically the same model behind Google's Waymo - notice how all the other companies (Tesla, Uber, etc.) are working with fewer resources, yet are desperate to to try and compete with Google. They're completely boned if Google comes out with a reliable self-driving car and they haven't got anything to match it (and in Uber's case, they also run out of money and die anyway due to their unsustainable business model).

Of course we've already talked about how no one can really say if even Google will succeed. But automating a retail store is looking more feasible every day, and obviously none of us here needs to tell you about automating warehouses or other parts of the supply chain.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Fri Oct 12, 2018 1:35 pm

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby beatbandito » Fri Oct 12, 2018 1:50 pm

Man, the /b/ Queen will lend her name to anything these days.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:51 pm



It rewrote the rules for pen design with its virile, majestic, imposing form. Now, the Chaos Pen conceived by Sylvester Stallone has its story told in true Hollywood fashion. Available to view here is the Chaos video, a masterful visual experience that conveys the might and power of the Chaos Pen and the recently-introduced Chaos Watch, through a widescreen creation by filmmaker Wendell Marinho da Silva.

lolololol omgwtf

If the Chaos Watch doesn't just spit out random times, I will be severely disappointed.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Thu Oct 18, 2018 5:06 pm

Yogi Berra's famous aphorism about nobody going anywhere because it's too popular is apparently perfectly possible if you have owners who are simply too rich and stubborn to care about actually making money.

Atlantic: How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby WingSounds » Thu Oct 18, 2018 10:59 pm

Ah, I do love the Atlantic...

That being said, although I do not like the process, I think there is some good in megapoli' sighing and falling in on themselves. In the US in particular, there are many places that are a virtual one-party machine because their population is monolithic, insular, and dead - or dying, at least.

Who knows, though. Maybe I need to buy a MAJESTIC and VIRILE chaos pen.
Perhaps it's what is missing in my life.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:23 pm



The full article is great too. Apparently Amazon's similar attempt resulted in a systematic bias which straight-up excluded all female candidates, and they had to chuck 10 years of work in the dumpster when they couldn't fix it.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Joxam » Wed Oct 24, 2018 12:44 am



In light of their consistantly terrible responses to the 100 hour work week stories about their company over the last month or so this is fucking nuts.

OOPS Its a joke.
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Mongrel
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 24, 2018 12:57 am

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EDIT: Oh... I'm pretty sure that's actually a parody article.
“Yeah, every orphan in the game is named after a developer’s kid who became orphaned upon their parents’ death,” revealed Vice-President Dan Houser. “We didn’t include kids whose parents died outside the office from, say, crashing their car on the interstate after leaving work at 3 AM bleary-eyed and emaciated from programming for 16 hours straight. That’s not on company time so it didn’t count.”

As of press time, Rockstar was experimenting with applying their extreme attention to detail to non-gameplay elements by adding an achievement called “Honorary Rockstar Employee” that is awarded to gamers who play for 100 hours straight without dying.

Still... I got got for a couple minutes there.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Blossom » Wed Oct 24, 2018 1:41 am

Mongrel wrote:

The full article is great too. Apparently Amazon's similar attempt resulted in a systematic bias which straight-up excluded all female candidates, and they had to chuck 10 years of work in the dumpster when they couldn't fix it.


Hard to tell whether this was the result of a bad algorithm, or the accurate results that a good algorithm would produce when fed Amazon's own historical hiring data. These things don't generate their results from nothing, after all - they need a sample of who's been hired to be able to guess who'll be hired.

The fact that they scrapped it silently, and we know about it because a couple employees told some reporters under veil of anonymity ... well, speaks to the latter, doesn't it.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 24, 2018 2:14 am

TA wrote:
Mongrel wrote:

The full article is great too. Apparently Amazon's similar attempt resulted in a systematic bias which straight-up excluded all female candidates, and they had to chuck 10 years of work in the dumpster when they couldn't fix it.


Hard to tell whether this was the result of a bad algorithm, or the accurate results that a good algorithm would produce when fed Amazon's own historical hiring data. These things don't generate their results from nothing, after all - they need a sample of who's been hired to be able to guess who'll be hired.

The fact that they scrapped it silently, and we know about it because a couple employees told some reporters under veil of anonymity ... well, speaks to the latter, doesn't it.

Yes, that's implicit, at least I think so.

There's no way a computer becomes irrecoverably biased against women without something funny done by humans having happened somewhere along the line.

That said, it could have been faults with the dev team rather than human resources. I can totally see a largely white, male dev team failing to see the forest for the tress, completely unable to fix biases and shitty premises they themselves programmed in. Not that Amazon's human resources dept isn't full of assholes, but Bezos seems to want to exploit absolutely everyone absolutely maximally. Or it could be both.

But yeah, it's not like that isn't damning.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby mharr » Wed Oct 24, 2018 10:48 am

The thing I can't quite fathom is the "we cannot fix this" angle. Surely you can patch this by not giving it the data and just having it process every applicant as male. Or use Toni's old bosses approach of discarding CVs entirely at random on the basis that it'll ensure only hiring lucky people.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby WingSounds » Wed Oct 24, 2018 11:51 am

From my experience 'we cannot fix this' is often as simple as 'the two guys who've declared themselves high holy overlords of the project say it's borked and nobody else can see the sourcecode.' On the flipside... I've seen a lot more people with your belief (mharr), and that gives me a lot of hope for the future, even when my optimism is null, set, and match...

That's all the comedy gold out of me for today, I'm afraid, ahaha...

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