No problem!

You can do all those things while also not supporting FAANG

Depends. If you can find another employer that’s more ethical (which is not guaranteed just because they’re smaller) and pays as much with as flexible a work schedule, yeah, you should probably do that. Otherwise it might indeed be necessary.

I don’t know, are we doing concequentialist ethics here, or deontological? I feel like we’ve reached the level of splitting hairs where we need to decide. For the purpose of actual advice people reading might follow, I’d say just try and be a good person, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

I mean, a lot of companies do stuff like that, and yet you still need money to live. Just working there doesn’t necessarily make it your fault; by that logic it would be a sin to work checkout at Walmart, because you’ll have the same blood on your hands as the Waltons.

I don’t really like talking about capitalism as if it’s a well defined concept, but, no ethical consumption under.

I’m not ignoring the other two things listed, I’m realistic.

I didn’t mean you, FYI. I mean someone who does work for a FAANG and is looking for more justification to do nothing for the common good.

Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.

I’m not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.

West Ed is still dope. I don’t know about submarines, but they have a 10/10 water park in there, and a bunch of other stuff.

Man, I wish that became more of a thing here. I’m good enough at being a weird shut-in without the architecture pushing me to do so.

Why not? Unlike Schindler you don’t have to worry about how many beatings are necessary to keep up appearances, and you might have a specific role that exposes you to very little evil at all. Meanwhile, you can donate some of that big wage to people like EFF, or volunteer using the flexible schedule.

I was kind of assuming that, since FAANG are American, but I’d guess they probably have foreign employees as well.

Canadians make pretty much the same as Europeans, I think. The Americans have a bunch of monopolies, and are characteristically weird and nationalist about who they share the spoils with. (I know, it’s not all of you guys, but it’s definitely some)

Alright then. Thanks for the info!

Yeah, I do worry someone will read the “work for a FAANG” part, and ignore the other two things listed. It’s absolutely not enough to go “welp, I’m just a little cog following orders”.

Maybe a one-man boycott is the wrong way to put it. Multi-person boycotts are obviously built from individual people. I guess my real point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; you actually have to look at the world, look at how you want it to be, and figure out how you can help make that happen from your place in it.

Agreed. Just working for somebody bad doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve given up, though. I mean, they made a movie about Schindler, and we all know who he worked for.

I like that! I’m going to steal it.

They are. You can get .debs through other sources quite often, though.

YEARS OF BACKPORTS yet NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND for staying more than ONE VERSION behind

I have a really old computer that still gets the job done, and just getting up to Bullseye broke it a bit.

I know, I know, it’s just a meme.

1 11 111 1111 11111 111111

That’s base 1. By convention, because it doesn’t really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.

But financially bussin’!

And also, it’s actually a complicated question. A one-man boycott doesn’t do anything. If you work at a FAANG, work for a better world when you’re off, and go whistleblower when they do something really evil, I find no fault in that at all.

Yeah, that’s pretty typical for a lot of computing these days. People are talking about exotic things like in-memory processing as a way forward because of that.

Is that the whole thing, or is there something more specific to VR? You can make a smartphone no problem, but portable goggles end up with an ungodly short battery life.

Yeah, I know, I’m not arguing against electric now, or even as a concept then. This was an alt-history exercise, remember?

Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.

It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.

Or, y’know, there’s a war on and you can’t stop to recharge, or you need to cross a desert, or you just want to do an express route with one vehicle…

Combustion is just a superior vehicle technology vs. lead-acid electric, assuming you don’t worry about emissions, and that will show up in plenty of contexts. Eventually, lead-acid would go the way of the other workable-but-not-as-nice technologies like crystal radios or black-and-white film.

“Thanks bro/comrade!” would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.