Google Selling โ€˜Democracyโ€™ โ€” Oh, and Advertising - Bullet Points:

For everybody โ€“ and I get the feeling the numbers are dwindling โ€“ who fancies Google as a new-age white knight jousting with the venomous capitalist serpent that is Microsoft, I offer yet another disheartening bit of evidence: corporate spin...


It's no surprise that Google has become corporate, and perhaps the biggest surprise is how long it's taken -- and how there's still a space for programmers to do The Right Thing wrt backwards compatibility, as I've commented on before. Still, it's a shame to see the company popularly believed to be in business to "do no evil," is, at best, redefining evil as it marches along.

In The Dosadi Experiment, Herbert includes this bit at the beginning of a chapter (pg 290 in my paperback version):

Communal/managed economies have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is what Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is self-regulating.

--The Dosadi Analysis/BuSab Text



Very Ayn Randian, ain't it?

Such a line is becoming/has become popular in academia again, which bothers me, though I do wonder if there isn't something to the statement's accuracy. The problem seems to rise not by believing in its possible accuracy, but when one uses such a capitalistically fatalist argument as an excuse to cede the hearts and motivations of institutions at least historically built on non-capitalistic frames. It is one thing to believe in a possibly goodness in greed, quite another to act on that belief.