As a newly self-employed person, I’m learning that the weekend is a thing you schedule. My most recent weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m planning my next one for Friday and Saturday.
Sadly, those of you who need to hear this the most are too stupid to realize I'm talking directly to you. #johncleese #stupid #people pic.twitter.com/TdpO6nBvgc
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 21, 2020
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
++ The pandemic could make Big Tech our permanent overlords
++ Hospital CEOs are making millions while slashing health care worker salaries and hours, announcing layoffs and furloughs. “The average hospital CEO gets $3.1m/year. The average nurse gets $75k.”
++ Workers at Wired Magazine are forming a union.
++ How open source has failed: The focus should be “on protocol documentation … in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.” That’s in addition to legal protections against monopoly practices.
The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them. [But these] rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since."
Billionaire Larry Ellison has turned the Hawaiian island of Lanai into a luxury health resort, and plans to use it to save the world. Philanthropy, he said, is the definition of unsustainable. Profit is sustainable.
He “is tackling three sets of complex issues on the island: the global food-supply chain, nutrition and the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources.”
Ellison also distances himself from Trump, saying he has worked with every President.
AWS engineer Tim Bray resigns from Amazon following worker firings – Bray quit Amazon in protest over the company firing vocally critical employees. Bray was an Amazon Web Services VP and distinguished engineer, who previously did stints at Google and Sun.
“… remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” he said. “The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people…. "
He adds: “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”
Inspired by a conversation with Mike Elgan yesterday, I’m going to do Facebook a lot less for a while.
