I worked at Google for -10 days
A Russian was hired at Google after a lengthy and onerous interview process. He took an English exam, mandatory tuberculosis tests, received a visa, quit his previous job, vacated his apartment in Yekaterinburg, packed, and got ready to move to London. But he was terminated ten days before he started work, following layoffs and a hiring freeze at Google.
As for what to do next, I am not entirely sure yet. I held a “garage sale” and sold most of my belongings. The remaining items were either discarded, recycled, or packed into two suitcases that I had planned to take with me. Moving to a new country is a difficult task that typically requires months of preparation. Changing these plans on the fly is challenging and somewhat painful. However, I feel that I should say something optimistic at the end. All will be good 🙂
Quart addresses “the meritocratic delusion of the ‘self-made man,’ Doctorow says. He adds: “America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances are very good you inherited it.”
… as Abigail Disney has described, in a rare glimpse behind the scenes of American oligarchs’ “family offices,” American wealth is now dynastic, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles’ worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives:
But it’s not just that the America rich stay rich — it’s that the American poor stay poor. … If you change classes in America, chances are you’re a middle class person becoming poor, thanks to medical costs or another of the American debt-traps; or you’re a poor person who is becoming a homeless person thanks to America’s world-beating eviction mills:
As a factual matter, America just isn’t the land of bootstraps; it’s a land of hereditary aristocrats. Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans — and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.
Horatio Alger is remembered as the 19th century author of many stories about “street urchins” who raised themselves from poverty to wealth and power. In reality, “19th century American street kids overwhelmingly lived and died in stagnant, grinding poverty.” And Alger’s stories weren’t about self-made men; “the young boys befriend powerful, older men who use their power and wealth to lift those boys up.”
Also:
Alger was a pedophile who lost his position as a minister after raping adolescent boys.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books “recounted her family’s ‘pioneer’ past as a triumph of self-reliance and gumption, glossing easily over the vast state subsidies that the Ingalls family relied on, from the military who stole Indigenous land, to the largesse that donated that stolen land to the Ingallses, to the farm subsidies that kept the Ingalls afloat.”
Wilder collaborated with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,
… who used the Little House royalties to fight the New Deal, and, later, to create a school for oligarchs, the “Freedom School,” whose graduates include Charles and David Koch:
All this mythmaking convinces the vast majority of Americans that if they’re struggling, that’s their problem, and they should not “seek redress through mass political movements and unions.” And the myth keep rich people from listening to their consciences.
Quart makes a case that American progress depends on breaking free of this myth, through co-operative movements, trade unions, mutual aid networks and small acts of person-to-person kindness. For her, the pandemic’s proof of our entwined destiny, at a cellular level, and its demonstration of whose work is truly “essential,” proves that our future is interdependent.
I very much like command palettes as an alternative to buttons, icons, menus, and other ways to control a computer.
But I regularly use two apps with command palettes—the Arc browser and Obsidian—and I also use Raycast, which is a system-wide command palette. That gets confusing.
Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship:” Better to Suffer Than Collaborate (Open Culture).
Arendt identifies a third moral choice when living in an oppressive society: You can go along, which is evil. You can resist, which can get you dead. Or you can simply refuse to comply … which can also get you dead.
Also:
“It was precisely the members of respectable society,” Arendt writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another,” without reflecting on the morality of the entire new system.
If I lived in an evil society like Nazi Germany or the Confederacy, I like to think I would have the moral and physical courage to resist, or simply refused to comply. But that’s hard. Easier to just look the other way.
As the [20th Century] managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be ‘just a job’ and that their career cannot be “just a career”: Their job must be their calling.
…
Workism is not a simple evil or virtue; rather, it’s a complex phenomenon. It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization. And it is characterized by the irony that, in a time of declining trust in so many institutions, we expect more than ever from the companies that employ us—and that, in an age of declining community attachments, the workplace has, for many, become the last community standing. This might be why more companies today feel obligated to serve on the front lines in political debates and culture-war battles.
Remote work and AI are challenging the ascendancy of workism.
Perhaps the disappearance of the workplace will increase modern anomie and loneliness. If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance?
— Derek Thompson, from an upcoming book.
By me: Tech layoffs surge—again—but mainstream businesses are hiring techies.. Tech layoffs this year already exceed all of last year, but workers are finding jobs in industries such as aerospace/defense, business consulting, and finance/banking.
Whoever said there’s more than one way to skin a cat is not someone I would want as a pet sitter.
Easter Sunday. Lake Murray was packed with picnickers.
It doesn’t look packed in this photo, but trust me, it was packed.
Is there any way I can subscribe to a Mastodon user’s RSS or Atom feed that includes boosts and media attachments? Is that supported on mastodon.social?
Texas governor Greg Abbott says he will pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of killing a protester at a Black Lives Matter march.. (Austin American-Statesman) Garrett Foster, who was killed by Perry, was carrying an AK-47. Perry claimed Foster pointed the gun at him. But prosecutors pointed to social media posts that they said pointed to Perry instigating events.
Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus at The Washington Post:
One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.
The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.
‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers. Research suggests bees have emotions, dreams, and even PTSD, raising ethical concerns. (The Guardian)
Gruesome cache of severed hands is evidence of trophy-taking in ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian warriors took enemies’ hands as trophies, using them to account for battle casualties, and often presenting them to the Pharoah. (Ars Technica / Jennifer Ouellette)
Was this week’s “Picard” the first time “Star Trek” dropped an F-bomb? Did they boldly go where they’d never gone before?
The gambler who beat roulette. For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game. (Bloomberg / Kit Chellel, with Vladimir Otasevic, Daryna Krasnolutska, Peter Laca and Misha Savic)
Smart glasses developed by Cornell researchers can read silent speech, tracking lip and mouth movements, to control smartphones and other devices. (Cornell Chronicle / Louis DiPietro)
I remember technology like this featured in science fiction by John Varley in the 1970s, and have wondered why it doesn’t exist in real life.