I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.
I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites.
At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it.
Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context.
It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business.
At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way.
At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events.
I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work.
That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point.
However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns.
Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site.
All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.
> I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others.
To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level.
In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated.
I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted?
This is an interesting article [0].
This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so.
Unless you have a union, there's a dramatic power imbalance between you (the employee) and the employer at the negotiating table. I'd urge you to read up about the 19th century labor movement and what conditions prompted it.
I don’t know if there are other ways eBay could lose money on returns. But my single data point: the very first thing I sold on eBay (a manual lever espresso machine) got returned because the buyer clearly didn’t know how to use it, and claimed it was defective. And because eBay has a money back guarantee, they just reached their hands into my back account and withdrew the earnings from the sale + the shipping costs for the delivery to the buyer + the shipping fees for the return. They even kept their listing fee and the sales tax. So… I don’t think eBay stands to lose money directly from returns. Maybe they risk pissing too many sellers off with an increased rate of this horrific experience?!
eBay needs to focus attention, efforts and resources on this if it's an increasing problem so the alternative uses for those resources is a cost.
If sellers like you get mad and don't list that costs them too.
Like etsy, they long since worked out that most volume is through dropshippers of products mass produced in China. Or a few physical businesses like houseclearers which can manage a high throughput. If you're a random private seller with a single item, you're an inconvenience to them.
"Power Sellers" - there was a statement that your business (for marketplace-type-business) needed to have an avenue to support "mega" suppliers for eventual symbiotic success.
There was a business a while back that was like "pay $50-100 to carpool from SF to LA" and the post-mortem was: "your earning potential was limited, no power-seller support" b/c eventually just turn into a bus-driver/bus company. (Uber is an interesting contra-example).
It's stuck with me as a quick analysis of business-types: how does the power-seller eventually make 10x, or at least 2x median wages?
Thinking a bit more, it would be quite handy to have a "power seller" AI for all my random junk. Spread it out on a table, pan a camera over it, then leave it to the computers until someone's willing to pay an amount for one of those objects that's worth the work of packing and shipping it.
This is a really cool idea. A sort of table where you just leave the stuff that you want to sell. There could be a dedicated tablet / computer where to interact with the AI (adjust prices, receive orders) and a little printer to print the shipping labels.
Until that AI can take the item, take photos, describe the item properly, drop it off a post office - I assure you, dedicated AI will only slow you down.
> There was a business a while back that was like "pay $50-100 to carpool from SF to LA" and the post-mortem was: "your earning potential was limited, no power-seller support" b/c eventually just turn into a bus-driver/bus company. (Uber is an interesting contra-example).
I think Uber would absolutely turn into a bus company if their risk tolerance allowed for this. It did change from "I have a car and free time" to "I'm buying a car to be a full-time Uber driver"
Damn, I thought Etsy was supposed to be handmade, artisanal products from individuals or small businesses. But maybe they did that initially to build a reputation and then transitioned to chinese product dropshippers.
I don't think it's Etsy fault other than allowing it. If someone is selling artisanal wooden cutting boards, someone will see it and think how they can do the same-ish, but with less overhead. Someone will also make "How I make money of etsy" video and sell their courses, probably to double-dip.
Anecdotally, I see a lot of small sellers using FB marketplace. Those are cash/venmo type deals done in person. That might just be because I live in a big enough metro area to support that.
It's about a difference of degrees. If experiences like yours happen very rarely ebay is fine with it but if it become too common then sellers will leave which is obviously a huge loss for ebay.
I only sell stuff on EBay as-is, no returns. I'm not sure if this protects me from their money back guarantee, but it gives me a little peace of mind until I too get bitten.
My listing was as-is, no returns. Didn’t matter. And I tried challenging it. Recorded a video where I opened the returned machine, assembled it, and pulled a perfect shot of espresso. Based on my server’s access logs, nobody at eBay even viewed the video. Whole experience cost me over $200 in shipping fees. Horrible experience.
IANAL: but if a seller misrepresents what they’re selling then “As is” doesn’t help them. If I sell you a Ferrari “as is” but I send you a kit car that looks like a Ferrari, “as is” ain’t gonna help.
Yep. Therein lies the rub. eBay inserts themselves as the middle-man here. But they take 0 responsibility for assessing disputes if a buyer claims an item was not as described. They just arbitrarily refund buyers, and automatically pay for the shipping fees from the sellers' connected bank accounts. To make matters worse, as a seller, as far as I know, you can't limit how much the buyer can spend on shipping. So, e.g., if someone on the other side of the planet buys something from you, pays for shipping, then says "item not as described", you're going to be on the hook for a large sum. I guess this happens rarely enough for most big sellers that it's worth continuing to use ebay. But for average schmo use-cases (like selling old household goods), it's a ridiculous risk.
Selling as is helps a bit but it only covers regret returns. If the item is not as listed such as claiming to be new but the packing is opened, you're still obligated to accept a return
It blows my mind anyone can hold this opinion after 10+ years of Trump very publicly spewing racist garbage. Let's just review a few recent examples:
- Claimed Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors' pets
- Currently claiming Somalian immigrants have setup vast networks of fraudulent daycares
- While he's worked diligently to stop immigration from, what he calls, "shithole countries" like Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan, he's advocated for increased immigration from "nice" or "beautiful" countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. He also specially carved out a special South African Afrikaner refugee status for white South Africans.
- Repeatedly called SARS-CoV-2 the Chinese virus, "kung-flu", etc.
- Told four congresswomen of color (3 of whom were born in the U.S.) to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came". A bipartisan resolution was passed in The House condemning these comments as racist.
- And we can go back a long time ago, and remember the Central Park Five, where he relentlessly attacked five innocent black and latino children, calling for the death penalty for them. Even after DNA evidence proved their innocence, Trump never apologized or acknowledged wrongdoing.
Each of these you could try to individually explain away as a misunderstanding or whatever. But there's an abundantly clear pattern of racism, not just with Trump, but much of his administration.
Think about the magnitude you’re talking about here. Every internal combustion engine on earth is emitting CO2. Every volcano, forest fire, coal power plant, etc. The atmosphere is massive. We’ve been, basically, doing our best to pump it full of CO2 for the last 150 years, and this is what we’ve got. Ignoring the chemical challenges with your idea here, the scale is impossibly gargantuan.
If I'm understanding your example correctly, these types of firings are possible thanks to Right-to-work laws. Which political party introduced and continues to advocate for Right-to-work? Which has generally opposed Right-to-work and has supported workers unions, which would protect workers from arbitrary firings?
I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
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