I absorbed the ethics and had to work out my own approach to where they’re supposed to come from. I’ve ended up a fairly doctrinaire C.S. Lewis-style supernaturalist.

Just astonishing.
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Wendy,

I was going to respond to your first comments but it became a rambling mess. I hate to beat up on businesses and investors for making an honest buck. But venture capital and tech companies are a little different.

Venture firms often are a concentrated vehicle for the primary ownership, unlike just being a public company, and they don’t have a personal life and reputation investment like the founders do. Secondly, there is so much about these tech companies that is entirely opaque to outsiders and extreme powerful in possibly insidious ways.
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They skip the part where they have to come up with a coherent system for deciding what’s actually good. — Wendy L.

I was having a long conversation with a friend some years ago and the topic meandered from his points about there being no objective truth, only “my truth,” on to various issues of moral relativism. Then I recollect that he went to some genuinely dark places.

Days later, thinking about it, I had this epiphany. (Which may have been nothing of the sort.) I had a religious upbringing and was taught the catechism. I’m not a religious person now, but without taking a second to think, I know what people generally consider to be moral or immoral because it was instilled in my childhood vocabulary (for lack of a better word). (There are issues with that previous sentence that a person of the left would point out.)

But my friend, if he were to think back on his childhood about what is moral or immoral, I don’t think he’d find much. They just don’t have a very developed foundation or reference points for such things.

Well, it’s not like he did something really heinous like take selfies under the Rotunda or sit at Nancy Botox desk.

Yes, and literally childish in the sense that many people who do bad things start with resentment against the power their parents held in their lives and, as soon as they get a taste of money and power, decide that Rule Number One is “Don’t do anything that wouldn’t grieve your parents and show them a thing or two.”

They skip the part where they have to come up with a coherent system for deciding what’s actually good. Most don’t get beyond pretending not to be interested in money–even if their disdain largely takes the form of resenting how other people spend their money on their own priorities instead of catering to Me Me Me, the eternal infant.

No idea how it worked, but it was literally spectacular — not a single alternative search engine even comes close.

I don’t recall a single case where I put in search terms and exactly what I was looking for was NOT on the first or second page.

*sigh* Eventually, it went under with all the other search engines that failed to get the right financial backing. I still miss it, 20y later, every @#$%#$^# time I have to slog through multiple pages of irrelevant and totally useless links, and try and refine the terms to tease out what I am actually seeking — and then give up because they are so ineptly designed that they are not even getting close to what I’m looking for, no matter what terms I put in.

Near as I can tell, none of them pay much attention to the ordering of words, to give preference to what is first, few pay any attention to quotes (i.e., to aggregate words into a phrase), and almost none of them allow forcing terms any longer, which means to exclude entries which don’t contain a given term.

The result is about a 30-60% effectiveness rate, unless you have some very very exacting and unique words available for the target/subject sought.

And even there, it’s subject these days to political manipulation.

For example, Google excludes, explicitly, any results from certain conservative sites like “Red State”. So you can search for an exact headline from a Red State article and Google will refuse to provide it.

Search Google for “Jake Tapper Fact Checks Jake Tapper” on google.
Now do it on Duck Duck Go.

Google won’t even show the article in at least the first 2 pages, if at all.
DDG, it’s like the first or second entry, because it’s the freaking headline FFS.

You should also read the piece — even if you don’t want to trust Red State because “bias”, it’s just stating self-evident facts with external verification:

Jake Tapper has openly lied about facts he knew the truth about. Openly. Indisputably.

There are other examples of this available for other organizations, where they’ve deliberately told lies and twisted verifiable truths to push an agenda which is at unquestionable odds with those truths.

I suggest remembering this because you use it to deal with assholes who deny that the merdia lies to you, and does so openly. You’re unlikely to convince them, but you will convince lurkers, and that’s what is actually important. That people see you in any argument/discussion as concerned with The Truth and as someone who seeks it out.

And getting people to recognize they cannot trust in the Merdia is a significant factor in opening their eyes.

It wasn’t until about 2012 you began to hear about cooperation between tech companies and the Obama campaign.

Oh it was definitely before that. Seeing Barry at Google in I think 2007 get asked a question about sorting and giving an answer that included bubble sort. I know it was supposed to make regular people think “Oh, Barry is smart” but all I could think was this was so fake. They must have planned ahead to ask that question and they told him what to say. (I mean what’s the chance he took CS102 so he’d know the answer and could remember it that fast and turn it into a bit of a joke? Basically 0.)

The tech firms’ often obvious hostility to conservatives – Gmail is even alleged to flag Republican fundraising appeals [carpet bombing] as spam – has unsurprisingly made them many enemies in the GOP, a party which once worshipped the capitalist elite.

Ha. Maybe I’ll switch to gmail. The GOP establishment is difficult to tolerate, let alone like. Anybody here politically donate through WinRed online? Boy that is awful. Be sure to reject all the tricks.