“Ironically, the Times reports that Crossover’s own employees so resented the company’s intrusive monitoring of them (as they created and sold intrusive monitoring tools) that Crossover hemorrhaged employees and struggled to hire replacements. Eventually, Crossover had to turn off its most intrusive features so that it could keep the employees needed to make and sell its bossware product.”
“They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry.”
“For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human. In this sense, it reflects its owners perfectly.”
“Here, rare earth extraction cleared 90 percent efficiency, taking 67 hours to get there. By contrast, leaching didn’t max out until 130 hours after extraction started, and its maximum efficiency was only 60 percent. Again, the extraction that used electricity had fewer contaminating metals.”
“It feels like a bait and switch: my loyalty in buying products that are better for me as a user is being tested because shareholders need to see more services revenue. … [I]t will feel a little bit scummier every time I go to download an app or get directions.”
“[Leasing] agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. ‘We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,’ he said. ‘This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.'”
“[T]hese hacks ultimately become a labor issue. It would not be so taxing to make a TikTok drink … if stores were well-staffed, if workers were paid a living wage, if corporations weren’t intent on busting unions, and if customers were patient and understanding when their desires just aren’t possible.”
“Even at their absolute best, targeted ads are seen by viewers as creepy. People do not want irrelevant ads, but they do not want to feel followed or harassed either. Targeted advertising enables the latter.”
“The panic over Quiet Quitting is that bosses realize that they have used almost every mechanism to control and incentivize workers other than actually incentivizing them.”
“Doing this only excuses the messaging that we have been seeing everywhere we look … that crypto is an ‘investment’, or the future of money, or the democratized version of finance that will finally give the average person a fair shake.”
“Worse, the ‘dog-pushers’ — the lowest-level scammers who initiate conversations with victims — are often workers from around the region, tricked into indentured servitude, held captive in dormitories and offices, and beaten by the managers and bosses.”
“Zillow’s formulaic purchasing strategy virtually guaranteed that it would get the slice of the inventory it had most overrated. Any time there’s a problem with the home not captured in the Zestimate … Zillow’s iBuying program was likely to overpay. And the people getting a great deal from Zillow would be those most likely to take the deal.”
“But it was [Tré Seals’s] typeface ‘Ruby,’ named in honor of Ruby Bridges, the first child to integrate a previously all-white elementary school in the South, that grabbed my attention. Ruby is Vocal Type Co.’s reclaiming of ATF’s Jim Crow.”
“The less optimistic possibility is that financial engineering is all crypto can do. It may make money transfers more efficient, maybe it makes collecting royalties quicker and more transparent…. Those are all great, valid use cases. But they are narrow in scope: they were already financial transactions.”
“When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much ‘better’ in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. … However, if they had built a platform to buy and sell images that wasn’t nominally based on crypto … I don’t think it would have taken off because this is a gold rush.”