Maybe it's a long term strategy - get everyone on your SaaS platforms and then, once everyone is dependent on you, start picking winners.
Or just keep raising the bar and watch people go crazy because you already have something like 1% of all the money ever printed. Why? For the sheer cruelty of it, seems to be a good answer.
A lot of decisions being made at the moment seem to be 'we could be empathetic and kind but where's the fun in that, lets rinse them out like rags' type of decisions.
They focused on growth before. Growth phase and then greed phase is very common in this industry, you start out offering everything for free to grow, then you remove the free offering and force people to pay to stay with you, that is the greed phase.
With diminishing access to venture capital we see companies go to the greed phase faster than usual.
If they had given you a seat that gives you power, money and influence, and you had the knowledge to expand it both for yourself and them, what would you do?
Nothing? Well that seat would vanish pretty quickly.
But won't someone think of the shareholders? Surely we can't deprive them of positive financial outcomes over something as silly as a living wage for workers?
You've clearly never been on a bike path in America! Road cyclists wearing spandex suits are the most universally obnoxious group of assholes you'll meet here. They make Tesla and BMW drivers look polite, and will openly roid range on anybody that doesn't dive out of their way while they ride shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the path.
This is so universal that I’ve noticed that when I am wearing spandex when cycling, pedestrians seem to be really fearful of antagonizing me and act surprised when I do just what is right, like yielding for them, or breaking when they inadvertently get in my way. They clearly expect to be berated by me, probably because of their former experience with other spandex wearing pretend-pro cyclists
I know a converted railroad paved with asphalt decades ago going through woods for miles and an absolute respite from the chaos of human activity around my area. However, dealing with these "gangs" of spandex laden, wannabe pro-cyclists telling me to "get over" while shoving their way past me has made it stressful and confrontational. They remind me of the entitled suburban mom shoving her way up to the front of the line to grab her caramel macchiato because she's in a hurry to her botox appointment. And since this is Ashburn, VA...we have mega sized datacenters looming over both sides of the path like the heads of sentinels staring at you. I need to move further out :)
It's insane because Discord has the usage stats to see that the first thing a majority of users do when joining a new server is to force mute group @ notifications.
I honestly wonder why this is even a feature they support, but it should absolutely be defaulted to mute and/or have a checkbox for it in the new server join banner. They force collect phone numbers while highlighting the fact that they will spam the ever-loving fuck out of your notifications.
I'm certainly not trying to defend the guy. If anything, I think a lot of people in the "autism community" want to defend him (even if only to a degree), in part because they feel some emotional attachment to the label of "Asperger's" and are trying to shoot down the argument "we shouldn't use that label because it is named after a Nazi collaborator"
For all of Asperger's sins, he was too humble to actually name a disorder after himself – he called his disorder "autistic psychopathy". Lorna Wing renamed it after him, because the word "psychopath" had become very stigmatised, and Asperger was using it in an older and broader sense than current discussions of "psychopathy", which is prone to confuse the uneducated layperson. Wing was actually one of the people trying to defend Asperger–before her death, she wasn't aware of the further historical research published on this topic after she died, and who knows whether she would have revised her position if she'd lived to see that–it is understandable she'd want to defend one of the major decisions of her career–and she was (at best) dimly aware of this aspect of Asperger's history when she made that decision
I will admit to myself sometimes using "Aspergian" in describing some of my own personality traits, not because I necessarily agree with the term, but simply because it is a useful shorthand which my listener is likely to understand, and as much as I'd love to dump all these details and more on them, it risks overwhelming their time, attention and comprehension
I myself am of two minds about it. On the one hand, I'm very appreciative of shows like Extraordinary Attorney Woo and the contemporary diagnostic criteria which does seem to assist many people who otherwise wouldn't get very far in this world. There is definitely some sort of disorder called "autism," and you know it when you see it.
On the other hand, Autism Spectrum Disorder basically doesn't exist, it was designed specifically to cover as many possible definitions of Autism such that nearly anyone, under the right circumstances, could be labeled as Autistic and be given expensive treatment, and I think there is something dangerous in people self-identifying with this label as it only feeds into the larger psychiatry-industrial complex. It's similar to depression--some people legit can't get out of bed in the morning, but the drugs we use to treat it are handed out like candy, are not approved to be used for the terms that they are, and don't even perform better than a placebo.
The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent--everyone is "perverse," as Freud famously elucidates in his theory--its just that those who are labeled as "other" under the system get exploited, and everyone else, for fear of the same fate, hide all their psychological proclivities from everyone except from their most intimate acquaintances. And there are some who are lucky enough to avoid both fates, but they are rare among the ruling class, and the commonality of ostensible abnormal psychology among the working class is considered a "problem" to be solved by endless mental health facilities, treatment programs, etc. meanwhile the real pains of being a working class American forces many into addiction, and what they are offered can do nothing much to alleviate the underlying problems which led them there (often times problems, as in the case of the opioid crisis, generated by the very corporate structure which also drives people to treatment for their addiction).
I learned about all what you discuss because I wanted to find a genealogy of "Autism" as a why of critiquing it as a medical category. But I don't know, as I said there is definitely some constellation of symptoms and ways of treating them that would fall under an Autism diagnoses, its just that how such a diagnoses came to exist was not through some pure empirical scientific process but a historical, social process that can't be disassociated from the other socio-economic realities.
He criticises the "autism spectrum" saying that it "is a convention that changes over time and belongs more to the history of science than neurobiology" (a rather scathing remark but put it in an understated way)
On the other hand, he insists that "prototypical autism" should be retained as a real target of scientific investigation, and he proposes that our failure to discover its causes (despite immense research funding into the project) is largely due to going astray by broadening its definition (through the "autism spectrum") to the point that it is approaching meaninglessness
For a different viewpoint, see Lynn Waterhouse et al – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x – who argue the whole category of "autism" (whether a broad "autism spectrum" or a narrow "prototypical autism") is a dead-end, and researchers ought to abandon it and look for new concepts to replace it with. In her book, she proposes (as a temporary measure) replacing "autism" with phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment – which unlike "autism"/"ASD", are only defined in terms of deficits in the social communication domain, but allows those deficits to coexist with deficits in other domains (repetitive behaviours, restricted interests, impulsivity, attention deficits, dyspraxia, dyslexia, epilepsy, intellectual disability, etc)
And then there's Sami Timimi et al's book "The Myth of Autism" which, as well as criticising the science of "autism" (as Waterhouse and, to a lesser degree, Mottron do), goes beyond that to criticising it as a cultural construct, arguing that the harm it causes outweighs its benefits
> The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent
Bonus points if the NSA/CIA can steal it to fund black ops.