I mean I would still think it’s a non trivial amount of revenue for companies. Haven’t really looked that deeply into it.

Im conflicted on RFK. He’s right on his takes about nutrition and over reliance of Americans on prescription drugs, and he may be right about flouride (which we have always known had risks). He also wants to ban drug advertising which is 100% necessary. Yet his takes on vaccines are so so bad that it counters all the good he could do if he was really able to clean the food toxic food environment of the US and curb the power of big pharma.

I’m gonna hope for the best here. Vaccines are big business, so Trump might not let him make too many changes there. But so is food so who knows?

I think trying to force communism is bad. Communism in my mind is inevitable, but we’re no there yet. Only when human labor is worthless and capitalism crumbles under its own weight will communism finally be viable and good.

You’re still talking about DEI as a concept, which I’m in favor of. But you understand that in corporate settings things need to be quantifiable and diversity as a concept is nebulous, so in order to make it quantifiable corporations turn it into checklists and quotas. I know DEI as a concept doesn’t say that you HAVE to hire minorities and women over more qualified candidates. But I do know that corporations in order to quantify how diverse they are, and to be able to say they are diverse under whatever criteria someone at the top is using to judge said diversity will put policies in place like: we aim for 40% of our workforce to be minorities and women. And now the hiring managers have a very specific number of how many people in their team should be minorities.

I do not have any extreme beliefs about DEI, I just know that many orgs implemented DEI in this way and when you do, the incentive becomes to meet the quota rather than hiring the best person for the job.

Also you can’t just imply that I’m a bigot simply because I’m criticizing a fundamentally flawed implementation of an idea. That’s just being intelectually dishonest. I can be against DEI programs (because they are badly implemented most of the time, at least in my experience: anecdotal I know) and still be in favor of diversity.

That doesn’t answer what I asked at all, you only answered once more what DEI is in theory. I’m also not an edgelord though you are welcome to think that. I understand exactly how diversity is good and how it helps, being non white myself.

But I’ll repeat my question. How did organizations implement DEI hiring policies? How did they put what they supposedly learned in those classes in practice?

Could you explain how DEI works in practice. Not in theory or what it is supposed to do, but rather how companies implemented it and carried it out.

I would argue that Apple has actually done more to increase the quality of working conditions in China than any other company. Is it still a horrible environment, yes, but without Apple I’m not sure that it would have been better.

I don’t find a problem with exploiting tax loopholes because 9/10 times the loopholes are there by design, this is something to take up with the IRS and the government, because corporations HAVE to take advantage of said loopholes to stay competitive.

But to address directly your comment, I didn’t say that them retaining DEI was a moral choice. I believe it was a business decision, which is why I framed it as them historically beating the market while these firms don’t. Apple has clearly seen the value of DEI in their revenue and operations, otherwise they would be cutting the program real quick.

Tim is a very pragmatic man, and like any CEO he’s not an ideologue so he paid the bribe. It’s the cost of doing business under the corrupt Trump administration. Is he a coward for doing so? Maybe. But if he didn’t pay it and Trump acted against Apple the blame would fall on Tim and he would be replaced with someone friendlier towards Trump. Maybe Tim figured it was better he stayed in charge to minimize damage, as gay man who has no doubt faced his fair share of persecution and prejudice.

Then again Peter Thiel is also gay and he’s the puppet master behind Silicon Valley’s sudden heel turn. So is Sam Altman who is also donating.

Yet that’s how many orgs implemented it which is why so many people are against it. It’s not that DEI is bad, it’s that badly implemented DEI is worse than no DEI at all. But the pendulum ever swings and always with more momentum towards progress.

Man they really botched his last update.

You know who hasn’t abolished DEI efforts yet and asked shareholders to vote against abandoning them? Apple. And historically Apple tends to beat the market. So imma go ahead and make a the wild statement that these companies will eat a bag of dicks in 10 years and end up adopting DEI under another name while Apple stays the course.

I do think that badly implemented DEI is worse than no DEI and many orgs implemented it badly so this could be a net positive in the end.

Through the discussion I’ve had here I can see that I should have been more specific and defined what kind of algorithm is the problem. But that was the point of making the post in the first place, to understand why the narrative is not moving in that direction and now I can see why, it’s nuanced discussion. But I think it’s well worth it to steer it in that direction.

Exactly my point. In lemmy I can still see all the posts, Meta’s algorithm will remove stuff from the feeds and push others and even hide comments. It is literally a reality warping engine.

I dunno, old forums were fun as fuck and they had no algorithm beyond sorting by most popular, new etc. Hey if it makes people spend less time looking at their phone it is still a win in my book— I type as I spend hours on my tablet. I’m a hypocrite, won’t lie.

I think the point of that article is closer to my own argument than what I myself would have thought. I do still think that the problem is the design of the algorithm: a simple algorithm that just sorts content is not a problem. One that decides what to omit and what to push based on what it thinks will make me spend more time on the platform is problematic and is the kind of algorithm we should ban. So maybe the premise is, algorithms designed to make people spend more time on social media should be banned.

Engaging with another idea in there I absolutely think that people should be able to say that Joe Biden is a lizard person and have that come up on everyone’s feed. Because ridiculous claims like that are easily shut down when everyone can see them and comment how fucking dumb it is. But when the message only makes the rounds around communities that are primed to believe that Joe Biden is a lizard person, the message gains credibility for them the more it is suppressed. We used to bring the Klu Klux Klan people on tv to embarrass themselves in front of all of America and it worked very very well, it’s a social sanity check. We no longer have this and now we have bubbles in every part of the political spectrum believing all kinds of oversimplifications, lies and propaganda.

I still cannot abolish personal responsibility. But I agree with you, that that is also a big part of the issue but for me a skeptical eye comes from being well educated on at least basic stuff. When you don’t know much about anything it’s really hard to decide what is fact or fiction and because trying to untangle the lies from the truth is hard work most people just default to taking everything at face value and accepting it without much skepticism.

The easy answer for me would be to ban algorithms that have the specific intent of maximizing user time spent on the app. I know that’s very hard to define legally. Maybe like I suggested below we can ban what kinds of signals algorithms can use to suggest and push content?

Like I said below I think the distinction is that a) I have access to a algorithm free feed here and b) lemmy (as far as I understand it) simply sorts content, rather than outright removing content from my feed if it thinks it will make me spend less time on it. I could be wrong about that second point though.

But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.

I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.

So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?

While transparency would be helpful for discussion, I don’t think it would change or help with stopping propaganda, misinformation and outright bullshit from being disseminated to the masses because people just don’t care. Even if the algorithm was transparently made to push false narratives people would just shrug and keep using it. The average person doesn’t care about the who, what or why as long as they are entertained. But yes, transparency would be a good first step.