The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency
If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
You emphasize "sustainably", but how is it more sustainable to give 500k/year to capitalism until you don't make that much / retire / die? In either option, that 500k/year is there until it isn't. With charity, you'd help more people but it would be no more or less sustainable.
Something can however be a lot more valuable than any action by which value is destroyed. Destroying value, by the way, can by definition not be sustainable. Alas, opportunity cost is (also by definition) not directly observable, so it gets dismissed. Hence, e.g., the broken window fallacy.
You don’t “give to capitalism”, you engage in voluntary transactions with other individuals and legal entities, such that they are a net (expected) gain in value for all parties involved.
By your definition, selling arms to dictators and using the money to buy a yacht and private security qualifies as "service to humanity."
EA charities estimate that the cost of malaria prevention that will save a person's life for 1 year is ~$150. So what is a 'better service for humanity'? Buying yourself one night of sushi & wine or donating one year of life to somebody who wouldn't have it otherwise?
Food for thought: Do you think slavery is or was a “service to humanity”? Because that is what you are advocating: Forcing some set of people to work for free for another.
Also why do you think it has become so cheap in the first place?
This is not to say that eradicating malaria might not make a lot of sense by the way. But you are being incredibly disingenuous, and your argument is based on bad premises.
In other words, be useful. You don't have to worry about "being good" or "doing good" though many do and it's quite admirable to do so. But that's not the bar you have to clear.
The bar you should try to clear is to be useful. If what you're doing all day is helping people have shelter, or raise families, or be more healthy, or have more knowledge, or even be entertained or amused, you're being useful to people.
If what you do all day ultimately serves to make people poorer, more divided, more addicted, and more unwell, then what you're doing is not useful, it's harmful.
If what you're doing all day primarily contributes, even indirectly, to making people's lives worse, then nothing you do after that will erase it. Arguments to the contrary are just rationalization.
Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech.
There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.
But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.
It's only $50 if the government pays for the rest of the ticket. $50 per passenger won't even cover track maintenance. Source: My ass, but I still think I'm right.
I have some bad news to tell you about the overall number of dead related to that government
Funny thing that now many people don't even know that it was Russia and Germany BOTH that started the war. And they were supposed to attack Poland simultaneously, but Stalin, PR animal that he was, delayed Red Army's attack by one week, thereby creating the legend that it wasn't Russia that started the war.
This is in no way tangential.
VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way.
And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".
It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR.
If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.
Ads are actually horrible. Holy moly I'm so glad I can just ublock my way through the sea of garbage that is the internet nowadays. The fact there are people still indoctrinated by commercials makes sense, I'm just sorry you see that as a marker of maturity.
Advertisement isn't showing you something you might be interested in. Advertisement is an industry of psychoanalysts spending untold man hours of effort crafting ways to psychologically manipulate the population into serving the needs of a given corporation.
Instagram doesn't just show you cool clothes you might want to buy. It leverages dark pattern ux to keep you engaged with the app well past any healthy duration, and shows you content designed to enrage or arouse you to keep you in a mental state that will increase engagement and possibly lead to you engaging in shopping therapy.
Advertising is releasing psychofauna into the world of YouTube kids to get your children obsessed with brand characters that they absolutely must have physical representations of. Or it gets even darker than that, look up Elsagate.
Maybe advertising wasn't evil when it was a sweet potato hawker shouting their wares into the market. Now it's an entirely different beast and it is anti human and evil.
In the interest of not getting bogged down in semantics, let's just always assume that when people say "advertising" in this era, they mean "targeted advertising". Then we can avoid yet another tired attempt at excusing Meta's behavior.
I don’t think we have crossed the threshold to make them synonymous, feel free to provide data to back that claim globally not in some hip Silicon Valley I don’t own a tv market. My quick search shows targeted isn’t there
That you can get paid and have fun doing it, doesn't make the product better.
I am sure it made developing and standardizing the algorithm easier, but what makes it such a good (performant) algorithm is the design of the original creator.
Problem is systemic.
Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.
> it only went down after you know who passed away.
I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc.
So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.
> But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company?
So I suppose not really, no.
Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.
Interesting exemple because the biggest investors in renewable by far are big oil companies.
So what should people do? Go or not go? Sadly, the world is never black and white.
You could take a job designing landmines and you'd have a real hard time causing as much actual harm, as there just aren't enough wars going on to reach the same scale
What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them?
Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient?
Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?
If you can get a well paying job at meta, you have other options.
dont shit talk my goat like that