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Silicon Valley Warms to Trump After a Chilly Start
Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election, executives at Google consoled their employees in an all-staff meeting broadcast around the world.
"There is a lot of fear within Google," said Sundar Pichai, the company's chief executive, according to a video of the meeting viewed by The New York Times. When asked by an employee if there was any silver lining to Mr. Trump's election, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, "Boy, that's a really tough one right now." Ruth Porat, the finance chief, said Mr. Trump's victory felt "like a ton of bricks dropped on my chest." Then she instructed members of the audience to hug the person next to them.
Sixteen months later, Google's parent company, Alphabet, has most likely saved billions of dollars in taxes on its overseas cash under a new tax law signed by Mr. Trump. Alphabet also stands to benefit from the Trump administration's looser regulations for self-driving cars and delivery drones, as well as from proposed changes to the trade pact with Mexico and Canada that would limit Google's liability for user content on its sites.
Once one of Mr. Trump's most vocal opponents, Silicon Valley's technology industry has increasingly found common ground with the White House. When Mr. Trump was elected, tech executives were largely up in arms over a leader who espoused policies on immigration and other issues that were antithetical to their companies' values. Now, many of the industry's executives are growing more comfortable with the president and how his economic agenda furthers their business interests, even as many of their employees continue to disagree with Mr. Trump on social issues.
💔 💰💰💰 💕👌
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @11:41PM (13 children)
If you were a Google employee, could you wear a MAGA hat? No. No, you could not.
Could you at least not enthusiastically oppose Trump? No. You would be suspected of wrongthink, and mere suspicion is enough to get you in trouble.
Google employee opinions on politics are about as trustworthy as North Korean opinions on politics. There are consequences for failure to demonstrate loyalty to the cause.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 30 2018, @11:47PM (10 children)
External politics do not belong in the American workplace. Period.
The leadership of Google, as is the leadership of all that other overvalued "pie in the sky" bullshit, were and are fools for "encouraging [external, political] discussion." This is why good employers allow their employees to go home at reasonable hours, so that those employees can get all of that out of their system before coming back to work to code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @12:22AM (9 children)
Conservatives tend to feel it is inappropriate to bring politics into the workplace. This is a losing strategy. This makes large corporations liberal.
You hire/promote/fire fairly, choosing for competence. Some portion of the competent people will be liberal and will get into positions where they can hire/promote/fire, but they will not return the favor. They will prefer like-minded people. As the overall bias tilts more in their favor, it becomes unacceptable to be conservative and then unacceptable to not be enthusiastically liberal.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 31 2018, @12:34AM (2 children)
Your first sentence is wrong, mostly. Both sides are guilty. But since we are on the internet, the internet is governed by Silicon Valley. Huntsville, AL contains one of the highest concentrations of Ph.Ds, if not the highest, in the US. Gays run the space industry now. If they're quiet about being gay and loud about launching [youtube.com] rockets into space, then you should be quiet about discussing gayness up the anus and let those anointed homos do their jobs.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
If they manage their diversity quotas the GNAA may have been prophets?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 31 2018, @01:59AM
The GNAA were Gods, rather than prophets.
We fear that it may have been too late for the rest to understand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @12:37AM
They're not liberals, Milton Friedman was a liberal, these people are illiberal collectivists and communists.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday March 31 2018, @02:00AM (4 children)
People who want to get shit done feel it is inappropriate to bring politics into the workplace. Please incorporate that correction into your thinking.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 31 2018, @02:22AM (1 child)
Amongst all the noise, a dollop of pure truth. I will thus spend a mod point. :)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 31 2018, @04:23AM
Now that I swallowed the dollop of pure truth, may I be excused for a moment?
I need to go to the toilet, to get that shit done...
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @02:34AM (1 child)
Yes, conservatives want to get shit done. This is the reason they do not discriminate against liberals; a small portion of liberals can get shit done or at least seem able to do so.
In the short term, that works great. In the long term, it fails. The strategy fails to defend itself from people with hostile values. In the end, conservatives are discriminated against, even if that means nobody is left to get shit done.
So it is a losing strategy. The kind fairness is not reciprocated.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 31 2018, @03:03AM
You mean like companies paying out because they're discriminating against conservatives or shrink/go bankrupt because they lose focus on the business? I think the strategy has more going for it that you suppose above.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 31 2018, @02:03AM
I was once a client of a publicly-funded mental health care clinic.
Quite likely Trump will cut that clinic's funding. Even so I never asked any of its employees about Trump.
And why? Because I didn't want them to have to deal with the possibility that their political persuation wasn't cool with their employer's.
(I now pay for marketplace insurance. That insurance doesn't cover the treatment I was getting at that clinic.)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @04:55AM
This is the company where management condones messages of "fuck you" being sent via official tools, including from managers, to peons who commit wrongthink.