Loads of senators are happy to side with oil companies and deny climate change, in spite of all the evidence and threat to the planet.
No-one among legislators is in favour of pointless bureaucracy - and yet tax preparation software companies are somehow able to get legislative support for making the process more difficult and block efforts to make it easier.
And no politicians are publicly pro-subsidy or pro-unhealthy-food - yet they're happy to give loads of public money to the corn industry.
Hell, go back a few decades and the government will literally invade countries on behalf of banana importers, of all things.
Why is it other industries have such vast power, while the Tech industry - some of the richest corporations in the world - can't even get the Bay Area to build some houses?
Food abundance, even if it's can be barely called that like corn syrup, is the most basic soma. No politician would even think risking it.
Meanwhile you could swap out Facebook for any other social network with barely any noticeable change in the economy and world. People can scroll through Twitter or Netflix instead. Big tech has very little leverage because they rely on network effects and censorship while being otherwise imminently replaceable.
That they're run by nerds doesn't help either.
Sure - but that's also true of computers.
Oh, I'm not saying tech companies should be equal to oil companies. But today's tech companies don't seem to have even 5% the power of oil companies.
Another place you can see this illustrated is when the CEOs of these companies testify in front of congress. The bank CEOs all stay more or less on the same message. Comparatively on the tech side there is a lot more variance in message. Some of this is changing, you can clearly tell Zuck is getting much more coaching and Sundar Pichai is well prepped. Then you have Dorsey who is always a complete wild card.
And if they cared about the housing situation they 'd have turned the workers to remote long before covid. In fact i d wager many of the tech millionaires benefit from the high prices of their own real estate investments. Plus the high prices ensure a continuous churn of eager immigrant workers, concentrated in a small area.
I'd wager that this one difference is the root of all the discrepancies you noticed.
You mention building houses. The answer is of course big tech can get that done - it’s just not a priority regardless of what they say
When I look at patents I see a system almost everyone in tech thinks is a joke, doing nothing but enriching a few Texan lawyers and judges.
When I look at immigration laws like H1B visas, I see a bizarre system that works for a few places like WiPro who are willing to scam the system, but that's useless for most of the tech industry.
When I look at Ajit Pai being appointed head of the FCC, I see an appointment telephone companies love - but that everyone in tech thinks is a recipe for rent extraction.
The fact that the guy who was president before the guy who was the president before the guy who's currently president once had dinner with some tech bigwigs doesn't count for much in comparison.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/california-today-strip...
Calling it "nihilistic" is a bit strong considering the robe matches her policy positions and congress votes.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
>In 2020, Microsoft pledged to become carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to have removed all the carbon the company has ever emitted. Apple has committed to become carbon neutral across its whole supply chain by 2030.
>And Google has pledged to power its operations with 100% carbon-free energy by 2030, without using renewable certificates to offset any fossil-generated power. “The science is clear, we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable course for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a video announcing the policy.
>Yet this strong pro-climate rhetoric is not being matched by action at a policy level, according to the report. “These gigantic companies that completely dominate the stock market are not really deploying that political capital at all,” said InfluenceMap executive director Dylan Tanner.
So it seems that Big Tech is actually taking concrete steps to become carbon zero, and even carbon negative. The article is complaining that they are not spending enough money lobbying for climate legislation.
I actually think that they are doing the right thing, taking concrete steps to prevent adding more carbon, and actually removing carbon from the atmosphere (Microsoft). And they are at least spending some money lobbying for more climate policy.
However, with regards to climate policy, most governments are where pro-climate rhetoric is not matched by actual action (see Paris Accords, for example). I think Big Tech is actually doing a lot better than a lot of other institutions.
Yes. It is good that they are cleaning up their own house, but to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need all the leverage we can get.
We are out of time, we need to act now. In other words, big tech also needs to step up their lobbying, because federal legislation is the biggest lever we have.
> "His comments disregarded the values of our whole team, our partners and much of our broader community," the company said, noting that vice president Alan Wilson is now interim CEO.
If businesses aligns perfectly with establishment power structures on everything else, why would they not on this?
I don't blame them, they are after all bottom feeding power hungry money grubbers, it's just what they do, they can't help it. Tripwire had no choice but to get rid of their CEO, and their CEO was naive for thinking that his opinion would be tolerated. That would basically be suicide for the business if they tolerated it as all establishment power structures would do whatever they can to penalize them.
Some more:
https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/defending-drivers-and-womens...
> This law is incompatible with people’s basic rights to privacy, our community guidelines, the spirit of rideshare, and our values as a company.
The $65M denominator on that percentage is also very low compared to typical industries, so the combination of low percentage and low denominator sticks out. Though I tend to credit tech for not lobbying a ton, unilateral disarmament is not always viewed positively.
Also, the only reason this editorial/article is being written at all is that tech is viewed as "friendly" and amenable to persuasion.
Though I do find it offensive that the tech companies are members of the Chamber of Commerce without refuting the Chamber's bad actions. That would be free! In fact, that's probably the biggest red flag for me in the article.
It is not anti-business to support climate action, quite the opposite. Yet somehow the Chamber pushes forward ridiculous and outdated politics that will harm most business in the end, while only benefitting fossil fuel companies and investors.
Tech really needs to stand up to bad organizations, or drop their membership. Their membership is a political action that is in direct contradiction to their stated goals.
Well, I agree with that, but I think this implies that the article is disinformation. The author knows that millions of dollars spent on climate policy advocacy is pretty good compared to a lot of businesses; she writes "their engagement is almost nonexistent" not because that's an accurate assessment, but because she was paid to frame it this way by a climate policy group (https://www.theclimatepledge.com/us/en/Signatories) which four of the five companies haven't joined. (Did you see the sponsored content tag? I didn't the first time through!)
And really, in the end what's it matter if a few million humans kick the bucket?
No one's gonna miss us and there's gonna be plenty of space for everyone else.
ALL "ESG" is 100% fraudulent and not one bit about "Environment, Social & Governance". They are literally the very opposite of their stated morals, objectives and means. Completely "doublespeak"!
With no lobbyists, lawmakers are likely to be fairly clueless. With too much money and influence, lobbyists really call the shots, and Congress is basically subservient to them. There's a space in between where lawmakers are informed but don't owe lobbyists anything.
works about as well as their 'self-driving' shtick
And "concerns" about that mining would carry far more weight if there was also concern about one or both of 1) extracting 1000s of tons of rock for steel and other parts of car manufacturing, or 2) extracting many multiples of that from the earth in the form of fossil fuels, which end up in the atmosphere and change the climate.
If a typical car travels for 200,000 miles, and gets 30mpg, then that car will consume 47,000 pounds of gasoline (requiring even more oil extraction), and emit 128,000 pounds of CO2 in its lifetime.
Though all of my personal political effort is directed at ways for people to live their lives with less car and still live their life as happy or happier, I find gripes about lithium extraction to be completely counterproductive to my goals. For all their faults, EVs' extraction of lithium is an order of magnitude better than the alternative and the status quo. And the people complaining about lithium are not proposing anything better, the are proposing sticking with fossil fuels.
For non-imperialists:
If a typical car travels for 320,000 kilometers, and gets 13km/l, then that car will consume 25,000 liters of gasoline (requiring even more oil extraction), and emit 58,000 Kgs of CO2 in its lifetime.
And any EV charged with non-coal electricity is far more climate friendly than ICE https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/jec/activities/wtw, and with improvements in battery production, EV design and more renewable energy on the grid everywhere, it just gets better year over year.
What's your point?
but yes self driving space is scam
If anything, tech weight far more power than any of the other industries you mentioned.
Tax the rich is a fully coopted slogan and is in fashion among the ruling class. Wearing a dress that reflects their fashion is not storming the Bastille or making them uncomfortable at all. They loved it and it worked great, considering how many peasants are defending their largesse during a pandemic. Get back to me when Senators worth $50M and the attendees who paid $35,000 for a ticket are actually getting taxed.
So things have a strong incentive towards "if it aint broke don't fix it". You can argue a lot of it is in fact broken on some fundamental levels and the side effects of those two industries are massive but, at the moment, we have power and we have food (speaking for the US, not globally where that isn't the case).
The risk tolerance is very, very low. An unwillingness to accept any potential failure, regardless of impact, is frequently the single greatest problem for any change or reform.
For for a couple of places yes. For the literal global economy it will take years to make the switch. I think renewable energy is great and we should definitely switch to it. But the sheer scale of the transition is enormous.
Also about the energy production doubling do you have a source?
By the way, I see the value in electric vehicles, but we need to recognize that the electricity has to come from somewhere and that all these new vehicles and batteries require raw materials that have to come from somewhere.
So in fact, it requires a whole lot less raw materials (even when you include the other materials needed in a solar panel and all the processing required) to provide human civilization with solar electricity (even with storage) than with coal.
That’s 2.5 doublings in 23 years, or a bit better than one doubling per decade. Growth was still high after that, but doubling slowed a bit (we were running into limitations of gas and especially oil availability… we kind of stopped using oil for electricity after the 70s). Point being we absolutely can scale, particularly if we’re scaling something that is not as inherently limited as oil is. Solar in particular can scale out massively (as could nuclear if we got our act together).