Find everyone in my life who has money issues and give them each a million.

Eh, if you define it that way then almost anything is innovation.

But innovation, even at the low bar you define it at, for its own sake is useless. It has to do something substantive, or else it’s just more noise.

Zuckerberg wasn’t early though, in many ways he was late. Virtual worlds have been tried many times, with varying degrees of success. Second Life is still hanging on. His fault was trying to make it, somehow, a business think, when it should obviously be a gaming thing. Zuckerberg has never been an innovator. He was a geek who got lucky, had a round of mythologizing about him, and got a sweetheart deal in Facebook’s IPO that he could never be ousted no matter what stupid decisions he made, otherwise he’d be long gone over his Metaverse fiasco.

Companies who’s founders still own a majority have limits to how much they will tarnish their creation. Each founder is different, but on the whole, they usually are more constrained than a CEO brought in by non-founders.

Well that can go either way. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, wasted billions on his cockamamie Metaverse idea, and even named the company after it.

Heck, ever read your employment contract

Can’t, as I am fully self-employed, much to my dismay when it comes time to file taxes in the US.

Mine basically says they reserve the right to change the rules unilaterally such that I am in breach of contract. And thats standard apparently (I asked a lawyer). That shouldn’t even be a legal contract.

Ideally that wouldn’t hold up in court, although of course the burden is on you to prove it if it goes that far, yay.

And last, most of them do pay tribute to trump if he takes notice of them. Others just try to stay out of his sight. But how many immediately cancelled all dei training and such as soon as he took office. Without even specifically being asked.

Oh yes, I know. We must remember everyone who did that, they should not be allowed to live it down, ever.

Please consider: it at executive’s job is only to make money, then why would any executive do anything but chase the single most source of maximum profit, which right now is obviously scamming people and courting Trump’s favor to get out of consequences? Who would care about building anything real? How could they? Just chase hollow bets and game the system as far as you can?

You can complain about capitalism, and indeed there are many problems with it, but I think you should realize that today’s hyper rapacious version of it is not historical, it’s a fairly recent interpretation of the law. A company is more, MUST be more than a single minded profit making engine. If it always had been, our civilization would have collapsed long before now.

It varies.

I often give the example of HP Lovecraft. I’m a big fan of his stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. But it remains that he was a huge racist. How do I reconcile the two?

First, an author’s works are separate from the author themselves. Second, in Lovecraft’s case, he was a product of his time and upbringing. And third, and importantly in his case: he’s dead. He has no ability to change beyond his passing in the 1930s. People can and do change all the time. If Lovecraft were around today he might have become to most left-leaning person in the world, but he never had that chance. There were indications, late in life, that he might well have changed.

But, he didn’t. It remains that he was a racist in life, that will never change, and because of it there will always be people uncomfortable with his work. That is understandable, and I won’t try to convince anyone that they should ignore it.

It’s because those shareholders are captive to that same narrative. These practices do carry a real cost, but executives have made themselves blind to it. There are people who’s job it is to judge the value of customer satisfaction and loyalty and to measure it against the cost of providing good service, and they think the former is less valuable than the latter. My premise is these people are not doing their job well.

This view of the purpose of a company, to ruthlessly extract every cent of value from a company or else face the wrath of shareholders, it’s a fairly recent view. Shareholders selling doesn’t cause a company to go out of business, failing at that business does. Stock price falling is a different issue, it matters because company success has come to mean the success of its shares more than the amount of customer goodwill. But that matters.

I sense though that we really aren’t on different sides. I wouldn’t say you’re absolutely wrong, nor that I’m absolutely right. We both have profound dissatisfaction with this world that all these rapacious companies have build around us. The next generation of business people, if we’re privileged to even have one, will have to figure out some things for themselves all over again.

Companies very well can change. Nothing forces them to enshittify their customer service for what amounts to virtual pennies per user. It’s entirely a case of narrative capture among business people, the conventional wisdom that they have to do this stupid thing. That’s it.

Do we really want to go into this? Can’t you do your own research? Okay.

Brave has been known to rewrite ad links so they get the revenue from them. In addition to its AI features (which Firefox is also doing right now and is a point against them too) It has a built-in cryptocurrency wallet. Its dashboard has its own ads; sure they can be turned off, but you can also change Firefox’s search engine away from Google. Or here, how about, instead of just reiterating easily discovered facts, I could just link you to this article on the crappiness of Brave: ZDNet And, of course, there’s the issues with Brendan Eich.

Firefox definitely has problems, like those AI features and putting sponsored links in among the items on its home screen, but it never rewrote links to its own benefit, and it doesn’t support cryptocurrency.

This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.

Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.

I use Vivaldi as a secondary browser, it’s not been too bad. Firefox is my primary, but I might go to a fork soon.

I’m sorry, it’s funny to me that you stopped using Firefox because it “went down a dark path,” which is in some ways true, but went to Brave, which is like strolling through the deep wood at midnight.

It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.

Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.