Ooooh god....
Jan. 13th, 2010 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoWednesday will kill me yet. It's just tooooooo long.
One reason that I am NOT applying for my boss's job now that it's posted. She's responsible for personnel and scheduling, which means she gets to fill in when people are sick or otherwise absent and there's no one else to do it. I was never any good at late hours, even when I was 20 years old. I'm even less tolerant now. If there were a reference desk shift that started at 7 am, I'd be fine with that, but of course there isn't. (In fact, I used to get the 8 am slots at the college. No one else wanted them, and as far as I was concerned, there was no problem with the time and it was less busy as well.)
I see I may have to freeze the discussion on yesterday's entry (at least, over on LJ) because it's getting a bit too flame-ish and hostile. For the record, in my opinion all American corporations are equally bad about these things, so singling out Google or WalMart misses the point. They are all greedy, irresponsible, evasive, dishonest, and have absolutely no regard for either their customers or their employees. It's so bad that there's little point in nit-picking among them. Those that do well on one occasion do equally poorly on another. It is utterly impossible to live in the US without feeding these monsters in some way. You can't avoid it.
So I was surprised that Google claims to have second thoughts about aiding and abetting the Chinese government. Unless of course, the claim is really based on profits. If they aren't making enough money, or the expected level of money, of course they are going to pull out of China. And of course they will try to put a good face on it by spinning the truth and making it look as if the move was triggered by Chinese human rights violations. But they knew the Chinese have no respect for individual rights even before they moved into the Chinese market place and demonstrated their own lack of respect for individual freedoms by agreeing to the demand for censorship. Like the morally and mentally bankrupt political parties, Google has already demonstrated its lack of trustworthiness. Could they be censoring the results they deliver in the US as well? Yes. While I don't think they censor in the same way they do in China, what they really do here is sell the top slots on popular search terms to the highest bidder. I feel quite confident of that.
One reason that I am NOT applying for my boss's job now that it's posted. She's responsible for personnel and scheduling, which means she gets to fill in when people are sick or otherwise absent and there's no one else to do it. I was never any good at late hours, even when I was 20 years old. I'm even less tolerant now. If there were a reference desk shift that started at 7 am, I'd be fine with that, but of course there isn't. (In fact, I used to get the 8 am slots at the college. No one else wanted them, and as far as I was concerned, there was no problem with the time and it was less busy as well.)
I see I may have to freeze the discussion on yesterday's entry (at least, over on LJ) because it's getting a bit too flame-ish and hostile. For the record, in my opinion all American corporations are equally bad about these things, so singling out Google or WalMart misses the point. They are all greedy, irresponsible, evasive, dishonest, and have absolutely no regard for either their customers or their employees. It's so bad that there's little point in nit-picking among them. Those that do well on one occasion do equally poorly on another. It is utterly impossible to live in the US without feeding these monsters in some way. You can't avoid it.
So I was surprised that Google claims to have second thoughts about aiding and abetting the Chinese government. Unless of course, the claim is really based on profits. If they aren't making enough money, or the expected level of money, of course they are going to pull out of China. And of course they will try to put a good face on it by spinning the truth and making it look as if the move was triggered by Chinese human rights violations. But they knew the Chinese have no respect for individual rights even before they moved into the Chinese market place and demonstrated their own lack of respect for individual freedoms by agreeing to the demand for censorship. Like the morally and mentally bankrupt political parties, Google has already demonstrated its lack of trustworthiness. Could they be censoring the results they deliver in the US as well? Yes. While I don't think they censor in the same way they do in China, what they really do here is sell the top slots on popular search terms to the highest bidder. I feel quite confident of that.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-15 02:30 pm (UTC)Further and more to the point, why would they bother compromising their corporate reputation and the biggest reason most people use their service, in order to make more money doing something subtle that they could have done openly? Google's reputation and one of their biggest selling points has always been the fairness of their algorithm, and the fact that it's supposedly not gameable. They've revised it several times to make it more resistant to gaming.
Why would they risk destroying this cornerstone of their business? To make a little extra money? Sure, they might do that. But would they risk it when they could make the same or more extra money by simply adding another sponsored link or two at the top? They can do that openly, and nobody cares, because it's out in the open. It doesn't make sense to me that they'd take such a risk in order to do something by stealth when they could get the same rewards without the risk.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-15 03:56 pm (UTC)While Google claims that its algorithms are not susceptible to influence, I have never believed that, and in fact have seen several claims to the contrary that seem just as reasonable as any Google itself has presented. I also find, alas, that whatever Google's algorithms may be, they don't always do a very good job. When that is added to the fact that very few people bother to dig past the first page of results, reliance on Google for information becomes a growing element of social behavior that I find extremely disquieting at best.