I think the candidate should pass on the company. It's always good to provide a cost for their mistake. There is no job worth getting jerked around before they even start paying you.
It's their hubris that lead to this. For some reasons companies always seem to believe that they have an upper hand over even the most powerful governmental structure.
The very powerful people at the helm of Apple, Google and friends seem to forget that on the other side of the table there are powerful people as well and that those are quite similar to themselves.
I believe a large contributing factors were the public appearances (or lack thereof) of Tech Execs in front of government bodies (think Zuckerberg in the Senate) where it became clear that they think themselves above the rules of mere mortal man.
They committed the capital offence publicly "ridiculing" powerful politicians (and by proxy the people who elected them) all over the world and that is something that won't fly in the long term.
Come on Mark, suck in your ego, grovel a bit and agree to some semi-token compromises to keep the money train going.
And for the love of god spend some real money in Europe and pay your taxes if you want political leverage.
Apparently that was too much of an ask and now that the eyes of the public and regulators are on Big Tech they will be taken down a notch to "just" being profitable companies.
Do you realize how it sounds to compare the power of a private corporation that sells phones and computers to government agencies that wield the power of literal violence?
Do you honestly think that the incentives are that simple? Personally, I find that private companies provide me with way better, faster and more efficient services and benefits than any government agency ever has. But maybe that’s just the experience in the US.
How many of these governmental bodies look after the best interests of their citizens?
For example:
This year when I was traveling in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, most everyone I talked to (surprisingly) wanted big governmental changes there and would welcome a governmental collapse. The two main concerns were high theft rate of valuables and phones as well as politicians campaigning with big promises and then doing nothing but playing on their phones and getting paid for it. There was no accountability in government.
From my own perspective, Ecuador needs foreign intervention and foreign security to help to at least keep mayors and presidential candidates from getting regularly assassinated because the way it’s going there, it looks like a collapse is probable. Ecuador’s government was one case of a government body not performing in the best interests of its citizens.
Ecaudor's current government is fully supported by the current U.S. administration as they are leftists that lick Washington's boots while making all the right noises to secure support.
“Ecuador has emerged as a model in Latin America and the Caribbean for its ongoing efforts to strengthen democratic governance and human rights,” Senator Bob Menendez,
"We admire the strong voice for democracy that you have shared with the Ecuadorian people, but also for people throughout our hemisphere”, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during his visit to Ecuador in October last year.
“You and I are united not only in our values but in our vision of the future, one that’s both free and democratic”, President Joe Biden said after meeting the Ecuadorian president in December.
'Foreign' aka U.S. intervention will only happen if Lasso pisses off Washington - like Libya's Gadaffi did. But he knows whose feet to keep massaging to stay in power. Doesn't matter how many mayors or candidates get assassinated as long as he hops to Washington D.C.
I think this apply to most leftist governments in Latin America and I believe this is a deliberate posture from Washington.
Using Brazil as a example: Lula government is doing an economic collapse and authoritarian slide speed-run while supporting Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. By all means Lula government don't align with US values and its actions goes against US interests. But at the end of the day it doesn't support Trump and share a similar "democratic/progressive" narrative.
I mean, the original intention was that developers would just write web apps for the phone. It seems like they really scrambled at the beginning to right the ship. That being said, it’s been 14 years.
Butler: "My own wife, do not take these things too bitterly to heart"
It seems to me that most of the other translations I can find are closer to the Wilson translation. I don't know any version of Greek, but the name Andromache doesn't appear in that line (book 6 line 486) at all, and nobody else seems to interpret the line as a rhetorical question.
All this just to say, maybe Wilson's is closer to the original text?
I just googled GitHub and the top results were ads for circleci and gitlab. Buying ads for competitors keywords is extremely normal. Gitlab would love to dissuade me from using GitHub, just as a crisis pregnancy center would love to dissuade me from getting an abortion.
If you google GitHub you’re probably looking for source control. GitLab offers source control.
If you google “abortion providers” you’re looking to get an abortion. The ads you see are specifically for people who want to look like abortion providers but actually seek to stop you from getting one and don’t provide any abortion services at all.
It’s like googling GitHub and the top result being a religious group that considers source control to be an abomination, disguising themselves until you’ve paid for an account when they can inundate you with propaganda.
People searching for GitHub are more likely to use git and therefore are gitlab’s target audience.
People searching for abortions are more likely to get an abortion and thus the target audience for anti-abortion orgs.
It seems logical from an advertising perspective even though you may not agree with it.
As a pregnant woman deciding what I do with my pregnancy, this isn’t even a bad ad as the info is probably something I’m interested in. Sometimes I know exactly what I want. Sometimes I’m researching options.
> the info is probably something I’m interested in
So if you were a pregnant woman you’d agree that these ads are bad because they deliberately misrepresent themselves. If you’re researching what to do with your pregnancy you’d surely want your search results to be accurate?
> As a pregnant woman deciding what I do with my pregnancy
For what it’s worth I’m pretty sure someone googling “abortion center near me” has decided what to do with their pregnancy anyway.
> For what it’s worth I’m pretty sure someone googling “abortion center near me” has decided what to do with their pregnancy anyway.
I think it’s hard to speak for everyone in such a way and everyone is different. Personally, I’ve googled this exact thing and hadn’t made up my mind yet.
This is a hard problem to google to solve, but they do make one off exceptions for banned types of ad buys. Off the top of my head, they voluntarily add restrictions for who can advertise for drug names. Not sure how they decide, but I suppose some abortion rights advocacy group could write a letter asking google to limit who can advertise related to abortion.
Although I could see this being a Supreme Court case if the anti-abortion folks are willing to pursue.
It would be all totally fine if the pro-life totally not abortion clinics didn’t masquerade as abortion clinics. There is no problem with presenting people with option, but there is a problem with misrepresenting what the options are.
The screenshots in the article show pro-life clinic that is advertising itself as “abortion pill”. Google literally had to implement the “provides abortions” and “does not provide abortions” tags because the results are otherwise indistinguishable.
I totally respect people’s right to choose.I can understand the stance that life is precious. I am not against the ads for pro life clinics, because pregnancy can be scary and it can be a way to find some resources and support.
However it doesn’t feel right that pro life clinics try to trick you into it.
The situation is more similar to Googling "nearest emergency room" and getting results for Christian Science Churches, where they don't believe that physical maladies are real.
The point is that Google is effectively denying medical care.
1. When you say "desirable" here you're speaking relatively. Abortion isn't intrinsically something that the vast majority of women want, what they want is to not be pregnant for one reason or another.
2. Many, many people have middle-of-the-road opinions about abortion. Nudging them into carrying the human to term and giving it up for adoption isn't akin to selling fake services, it's more akin to organ donation.
Go to r/RegretfulParents and read about some of the stories of women who wanted abortions and were manipulated by these places at a vulnerable time in their life. It’s pretty horrifying.
Most of these places won’t help a lick once the baby is actually born.
Yes. It's a pro-birth movement, not life. Life lasts a long time and that's expensive and "something she should have thought about before having kids" or some such gymnastics. These same folks will gladly spit on a child because their parents are poor or talk about it like it's some kind of lesson they deserve.
Well I can't speak for these places since I've never worked for them or used them, but that being said, giving up a child for adoption is very, very easy. Even fire halls take children, no questions asked.
I understand that there are regretful parents, but keep in mind these things:
1. These very parents were given the gift of making it to adulthood to make a choice they regret, something that unborn children do not get to make.
2. Adults regret many things and the choice for carrying a baby to term while adoption is such a viable option is far from the top of the list of things that someone regrets in life. It is much more likely for someone to regret getting married than for them to regret giving birth.
3. Ethics truly do matter. It is not what someone does when the manager of the bank is standing over them and they check their balance with their debit card that matters. It is what they do when the ATM erroneously displays a much higher balance in the middle of the night in a dark and seedy bar that counts. In the same way, resisting the dehumanizing characterization of unborn humans matters most in societies where this is common place enough for these decisions to carry weight, and there are many example from history that highlight the same type of moral dilemmas. It seems strange standing in the present and being confronted with a challenge that we may very well be "the bad guys" but the same was true of slavers and many other horrible types of people.
1. You think adoption is the answer? Well, how many children have you adopted?
2. In the US, there are currently 60,000 children 2-years or younger in foster care. Based on that, I’d say putting a child up for adoption isn’t all that easy.
3. There are many reasons a person does not want to carry a fetus to term. Maybe they are a rape or incest victim? Maybe they don’t want to their body to permanently changed by pregnancy? Maybe they don’t want to risk death during childbirth? Or maybe maybe it’s none of our fucking business why they want to have an abortion.
GP "got it in one." This is SEO 101. Just because you don't like how it worked out doesn't mean the system broke. It's working exactly as designed.
More and more of us hate it, for ALL the reasons that it doesn't take us to exactly what WE think it ought to show us. Like having several ads at the top, and then the next several links leading us to YouTube videos asking us to "like and subscribe" for more source control "content."
This entire thread is now devoted to how much censorship, ethics, and literal mind reading we need to program AI with to make it work in our new, evolved, and COMPLETELY overly-sensitized society.
If these anti-abortion ads were honest about what they are I’d agree with you. But they aren’t, they’re deliberately portraying themselves as something they are not in order to ensnare their target market.
Google makes value judgements about search results all the time. PageRank has always been a value judgement. Spam filtering is a value judgment. Any result, ad or not, portraying itself as something other than what it is? That’s a bad search result and Google would be a better search engine if it didn’t have them.
What do you mean "nope?" You're implying that PageRank makes MORAL judgements about the content, and you know it doesn't. It CAN'T. All it can know are metrics like incoming links and traffic. You're using "value judgement" here in a completely wrong way. Your definition of "value" and Google's are very different. And, honestly, I'm flummoxed why this is so confusing.
You're the one injecting morals into the debate. At no point am I making a moral argument.
I'm saying that PageRank is just one of many value judgements Google makes. Google is not impartial. Not all incoming links are equal, Google makes a value judgement about which domains are more valuable than others. Google also makes value judgements about what is and isn't spam, which includes results that try to game the system by appearing to be something they are not. This is the latter. These are anti-abortion activists attempting to look like abortion centers, something they are not.
If it helps you remove the moral angle here: let's say I place an ad against the search term "cars for sale" with an ad saying "great value cars available to buy here!" and when you click you end up on a page that sells bikes. Is that a good search result? No, it is not. Is that likely to satisfy a user searching for a car? No, it is not. By the rules Google themselves outline they would remove my ad:
> We don’t allow ads or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products, services, or businesses.
You're so focused on trying to push a contrarian view that you're losing sight of the fact that Google is a business, and it serves their business interests to give users relevant results.
I don't know how I could any clearer than "Google has an interest in providing relevant results to users". If you're still not getting it then you might need to look inwards.
And I have absolutely no idea how Google is supposed to do that in this context without making a human decision, based on morals, and then you accuse me of injecting morality into the discussion. How can you not see how confusing this is?
I'm looking inside, and I just see that you're talking out of both sides of your mouth.
I do not understand why you keep going back to morals here. Google's ad policy is very, very clear:
> We don’t allow ads or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products, services, or businesses.
These anti-abortion activist ads provide misleading information about the products and/or services they provide. No moral judgement required: they are misleading ads.
And I can't understand how you keep trying to say that this doesn't involve morals. FTFA, only 38% of these "centers" do not provide any sort of abortion services at all. Fine. Throw them out. But what about the other 60%? They apparently do perform abortions. Do they just get a pass at that point?
What if they do so only in the cases of "the life of the mother," and try to talk people out of it in every other circumstance? Do they still qualify to win auctions on those keywords? The article itself makes it very clear that this whole decision tree is problematic and requires human pruning. Once you start down this road of vetting whether a clinic is offering abortions or not, there's going to be a bunch of grey-area cases that need to be decided, and those decisions are implicitly moral in the general case.
The nature of the search question itself is moral to start out with. Should "abortions near me" return results including "crisis centers" -- if it's really a "health care" or "pro-choice" question -- or is that search really code for "where can I get a DNC for the least money and hassle?" There are morals involved in every part of this topic.
Fair. It’s valid to present options. The problem here is not that pro life orgs show up as ads in abortion searches.
It is quite a bit shit that pro life organizations advertise themselves as abortion clinics. You can see it in the screenshot in the article, the ad is talking about abortion pill, no mention of pro life whatsoever. It is literally indistinguishable from actual abortion clinics, and it is by design.
Why do we need to trick women into it? Why do you have to wait weeks for your appointment with a fake abortion clinic only to find out hours into your appointment that they will actually not provide an abortion?
Third trimester abortions are extremely rare (less than 1%) and are overwhelmingly performed for medical reasons, not because of personal choice. There aren't tons of women carrying babies around in their bodies for six months then spontaneously deciding they don't want it after all, it's always been a disingenuous talking point.
This conversation is about ethics. Google has no ethical obligation to help GitHub outcompete Gitlab; but it does have an ethical obligation to prevent anti-abortion centers from using Google services to trick young women into a lifetime of difficulty and poverty by misrepresenting themselves as medical providers.
And what is more, we have an ethical obligations as Google's users and customers to force Google to behave ethically, since massive international corporations never will do so on their own.
Abortion is a complex and controversial issue. Google does not have an obligation to only show pro-choice material when searching abortion, because that would be a form of censorship and bias that would violate its own principles of neutrality and diversity. I am not persuaded by your argument that these search results will harm users.
Google does not have an obligation to only show pro-choice material when searching abortion
Your twisted words here aren't helping your argument. In this situation someone is looking for healthcare options and they are being shown options for scam services that have no intention to ever provide any healthcare.
Just as if someone was searching for prescription medication and it directed them to sites that sold what appeared to be medication and instead were just sugar pills made to look like real medication.
Boy, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. You twisting the definition of "healthcare" to only mean abortion is just as bad. "Healthcare" to a teen on the fence might mean EXACTLY looking for an agency that can help them deliver and give the baby up for adoption.
Nice attempt at intimidation - and I hope you enjoyed scrolling through years of my comments hoping to find something to sling since you can't address my actual arguments - but there's a reason people don't use alt accounts when voicing their support for abortion rights, because, again, the overwhelming majority of people are in favor of them.
"Healthcare" to a teen on the fence might mean EXACTLY looking for an agency that can help them deliver and give the baby up for adoption.
Are you arguing that clinics don't provide services that help women deliver babies or guide them through adoption? That's ridiculous. My two children are proof that doctors aren't going around fighting against women giving birth.
Are you arguing that search results for "how do I put my baby up for adoption" should lead to "abortion" clinics getting the top results, purely from either an English-language or PageRank metrics point of view?
I am pretty sure there would be a fair bit of outrage if woman searching for prenatal adoption services were directed to abortion clinics adverting as prenatal adoption centers that then stear people towards the "options" of abortion.
The main point is false representation; which Google if they value their relationship with their users .. they do have an obligation to carry advertising towards some degree of truth in representation of product or service being offered.
> I am pretty sure there would be a fair bit of outrage if woman searching for prenatal adoption services were directed to abortion clinics adverting as prenatal adoption centers that then stear people towards the "options" of abortion.
Well yes, because you're supposed to steer people away from killing, not towards it. After all, it's a good thing for searches about suicide to return results about treating depression, but it'd be horrible if searches about treating depression returned results about how to commit suicide.
> The main point is false representation; which Google if they value their relationship with their users .. they do have an obligation to carry advertising towards some degree of truth in representation of product or service being offered.
Continuing with my above example, is it false representation for Google to give you anti-suicide results for searches about suicide? Should they have to be truthful by only giving you results with instructions?
Your writing the words down does not make it so. It isn't particularly complex, and it isn't particularly controversial in the United States, even among Republicans; people want abortion rights and fringe groups want to deprive them of it.
Edit: also, I can't believe you baited me into arguing about whether abortion should be allowed or not.
Just in case you aren't actually familiar with these "crisis pregnancy centers" and how they work, this is about physical buildings that literally masquerade as abortion centers who are ready to help people get their needed abortions, and instead string them along until it's legally or medically too late.
Of course people who believe abortion is problematic should be allowed to freely say so. That is not the activity that these frauds are engaged in.
I’d hardly call extremist right-wing Christians a ‘fringe group’, as much as I think most people wish they were...
‘Terrorist group’? Sure. Spot on. ‘Fringe’? Sadly not at all.
Look at the ongoing trans genocide as another example as to how big and how powerful these truly hate-filled people are.
EDIT: saw a disgusting uneducated dead comment below here saying it’s offensive to call the very real trans genocide a ‘genocide’ to others because I guess they’ve either done no research or are more likely just transphobic.
It’s sad to see even in usually amazing communities like this; that the denial of the trans genocide continues.
We can’t begin to fix a problem, before we acknowledge the problem exists, and this isn’t a deniable or debatable issue - it’s happening. Let’s not be ignorant hateful cretins by denying it. Please.
Abortion is a complex and controversial issue for one religion and one political party. If every religion or political party’s “complexities” need to affect MY google searches at that point it will likely need to look like some castrated caricature of a page trying to answer the actual question I asked.
That's how human rights get violated and start getting worse for the people who are impacted, by calling it "controversial", wanting to be "neutral". It's typically people who have no skin in the game that call it that way and will never lose anything by debating it.
> but it does have an ethical obligation to prevent anti-abortion centers from using Google services to trick young women into a lifetime of difficulty and poverty by misrepresenting themselves as medical providers.
"Ethical" and "moral" are often used interchangeably because they mostly mean the same thing. Have you ever stopped to consider that your moral code may be wrong, that what you consider "good" is actually evil and vice versa?
"Compared to women who deliver, those who miscarry or have TOP face significantly elevated rates of psychiatric disorders, substance use, suicidal behaviors, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, a decline in general health, and elevated rates of recourse to medical treatments in general, most of which have been observed within the first through ten years following the pregnancy loss."
"Among a sample of women seeking counseling for post-abortion distress, 64% felt “forced by outside circumstance” to have an abortion and 83% indicated they would have carried to term if significant others in their lives had encouraged delivery"
Planned Parenthood tried arguing in court that they shouldn't have to disclose the statistically significant risk of increased suicide to women seeking an abortion, or any of the other risks. It's almost like they have their own agenda that goes against what is best for their patients. It's also almost like what they are doing isn't really health care!
And all of this isn't even taking into account the moral and ethical claim that the unborn child has the human right to life. Do not be so confident that your sense of morality and ethics is correct, and that therefore one of the most powerful information companies in the world should direct its resources towards your chosen ideology or religion. Free spech doesn't exist so bad people can say evil things; it exists because what is good and what is bad is hard enough to figure out that everyone needs to be able to speak their mind and discuss the issues at hand so that we can reach the best consensus.
I’ve actually thought it was weird Google was allowed to advertise competitors for keyword searches. Like how is Google not leveraging GitHub’s brand to sell ads to competitors in this case?
It's the digital equivalent of a protection racket. I hope we eventually address this as part of anti-trust regulations because it's been a money sink for every company I've ever worked at.
There’s zero chance this message was not shaped by social media companies. Any message like this, regarding any industry, would get that industry’s input.
That said, it sure seems like social media companies got this to be as neutral as they possibly could, considering the very strong evidence that social media is extremely bad for kids. We’re definitely soft rebooting the tobacco experience, this time with psychology instead of lungs.
It's interesting to see beauty, appearance, and eating disorders called out, along with racism and bullying, but little else. Those are absolutely problems, and rabbit holes to keep out of, but I'm not sure that calling some specifics out really encompasses the whole problems, or the higher level problems that exist above the topic of content.
At a higher level, short video content has become a super refined version of americas funniest home videos and mtv. There is no narrative between videos, and it just constantly presses the dopamine button.
Then you get the split videos where you have a sensory video playing alongside someone talking.
It also doesn't talk about faux excitement. Every other youtuber that isnt Miss Rachel is yelling or screaming, and basically producing entire videos of hysterical feigning of shock, mouth agasp. That transcends nearly any topic.
It also doesnt talk about learning to navigate youtube vs being fed youtube by youtube.
It also doesnt talk about advertising, especially the organicish kind. Teaching kids that the video about a guy making pancakes with Prime is a Prime ad.
It also doesnt talk about replacing friends with celebrities.
