Example 1 - Rainier Beer.
Something that was good and part of the cultural identify of the Pacific Northwest, and now exists as a fake reproduction of itself today.
Example 2 - Microsoft Outlook.
Back when I worked there, the Exchange Server team used to refer to it as 'look out'. You can see why.
These are not examples of 'corporate greed'. They aren't 'bugs' or even 'features'. They are the basic functions of the system. This is how capitalism operates.
I seriously can't make this shit up.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-seven-richest-billionaires-are-all-media-barons/290572/
It's like a gallery of evil villains - Joker, Lex Luthor, Green Goblin, Skeletor, etc.
Or Software Developers for Genocide!
https://www.mintpressnews.com/microsoft-israel-surveillance-azure-idf-gaza-genocide/290534/
Pretty fucked up
In the months following October 7, the IDF’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service surged more than 200-fold. The amount of data from surveillance cameras, drones, checkpoints, biometric scanners, phone calls, and intercepted Palestinian personal data stored by the IDF on Microsoft servers doubled in the next nine months, reaching 13.6 petabytes by July 2024 – equivalent to 23,000 years of audio, or seven trillion pages of text.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created. In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
Sariel argued that big data was the solution to Israel’s problems, envisaging a future where Israel intercepted and stored “a million calls an hour” from Palestine, and used A.I. to search for keywords and identify threats.
There was no way, however, that Israel could do this alone, as it did not possess the expertise or anything like the storage capacity needed for such a project. To this end, Sariel travelled to Seattle in 2021 to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to pitch him on the surveillance partnership whereby Microsoft would build Unit 8200 a customized and segregated area within its Azure platform.
The Israeli military uses Microsoft Azure to transcribe, translate, and otherwise process intelligence garnered via mass surveillance, which is then linked to Israel’s A.I.-based weapons systems.
https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/microsoft-sign-protest-2048x1367.jpg
Why?
The actions came as tensions over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza spread into the corporate world. At Microsoft’s annual Build developers conference in May, an employee interrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote address, accusing the company of enabling Israeli war crimes through its Azure cloud services. The worker, Joe Lopez, was later dismissed, according to CNBC.
https://blackagendareport.com/us-media-barely-touches-epstein-links-israeli-intelligence
I mean it's pretty obvious considering who is accomplice - Ghislaine Maxwell - is ...
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Epstein had connections to the [Israeli intelligence community],” Brown said in a July 2021 interview with The Times of Israel to promote her book, Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story. “Robert Maxwell certainly had those kinds of connections, and Epstein had a close relationship with Robert Maxwell.”
Unlikely story
Maxwell is the British media mogul who had secretly worked for Mossad before drowning under mysterious circumstances in 1991. A 2022 BBC documentary series, House of Maxwell, revealed how Epstein helped Maxwell hide millions of his assets in offshore accounts after the newspaper tycoon was accused of plundering his employees’ pension funds.
Ultimately, more than a billion dollars was found missing from the Maxwell firms.
Epstein and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, the youngest of Robert Maxwell’s nine children and reportedly his favorite, recruited and trafficked underage girls who were sexually abused by Epstein and, it is contended, at least by some of the many powerful individuals he made a point of meeting and catering to.
Amazing how the metoo movement is pretty silent on all things Epstein.
Yes I know there's been a lot of hoopla around it.
Clearly it's a game-changing technology (and perhaps moment) for not only countries (US, China), but various US tech oligarchies who have a stranglehold on AI, as well as people in general.
I've used it a couple of times while knowing nothing about it or how it works.
So far, it's results have proven interesting and promising.
https://waynemroseberry.github.io/2023/12/06/Is-testing-bouncing.html
Bouncing - yes.
But to where - that remains to be seen.
Part of the reason (I saw at least) for the transition of software testers from '2nd-class employees' to 'consultants' and 'contractors' was this mindset.
All of this before, many technology companies (like Microsoft) chose to eliminate the role altogether.
Testing was (no really, is still) seen as a cost or necessary evil - one that many companies felt they can either do away with, or have someone else do, or 'automate'.
... I can certainly say one thing with certainty.
I'm glad I left Microsoft years ago, and never looked back.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/20/tech-industry-layoffs-2023/
Announced July 10 that the company is eliminating additional jobs a week after the start of its 2023 fiscal year. These layoffs are in addition to the 10,000 layoffs announced in January.
Shocking, but hardly surprising. That's capitalism.
Not good for Sting.
Not good for Microsoft.
Not good for crapitalism.
Curious though that this is on MSN.
I mean, isn't that what we can call the corporations now, especially after this?
Never forget that slavery in the United States was officially abolished in 1865, except in one key area -
Thirteenth Amendment
Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Can one guess why?
Answer - it's a function of capitalism - the need to exploit a cheap labor source for profit.
Think that's hyperbole? See if your employer shows up here.
Sadly mine does. So does several ex-employers.
Honestly I think it'd be easier to create a database of corporations who don't use prison labor.
This time, it's in the social media space.
Some feeds in LinkedIn are being overrun by a number of spam messages. Often times they come from what appear to be different people, but they all have the same idiotic message, ending with a number to contact through another social media app.
Despite it's claims of not being an MLM, not being a CHAIN BUSINESS, that's exactly what it comes off as.
Yes, it's a spam scam.
The other clear sign of it is this gem:
I am in highly reputed organization and help people make money online..
Yeah, that's a red flag.
Anyways, I contacted LinkedIn to report it as such, as I've seen close to 100 of these overunning a number of their feeds.
I got back this -
A member of our Trust & Safety Team reviewed the post and found it does not go against our Professional Community Policies.We understand this is not the outcome you expected and want to share some additional options that can help ensure a safer experience on LinkedIn.
No. I'll just remove myself from these otherwise once useful feeds because LinkedIn failed to recognize these for the scams that they are. A part of me wonders if that too is part of the scam, to have me constantly muting people, instead of the feed itself.
But then again, I doubt that LinkedIn or any other social media company gives a shit.
Poor customer experience LinkedIn. You should know by know that you should never waste a customers' time.
Why?
Gates, who amassed his fortune by building a monopoly and zealously guarding his intellectual property, bears significant blame for the failure of the coronavirus vaccine rollout across the world. Quite aside from the COVAX fiasco, he pressured Oxford University not to make its publicly-funded vaccine open-source and available to all for free, but instead to partner with private corporation AstraZeneca, a decision that meant that those who could not pay were blocked from using it. That Gates has made over 100 donations to the university, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, likely played some role in the decision. To this day, fewer than 5% of people in low-income countries have received even one dose of COVID vaccine. The death toll from this is immense.
Unfortunately, many of these real criticisms of Gates and his network are obscured by wild and untrue conspiracy theories about such things as inserting microchips in vaccines to control the population. This has meant that genuine critiques of the Microsoft co-founder are often demonetized and algorithmically suppressed, meaning that outlets are strongly dissuaded from covering the topic, knowing they will likely lose money if they do so. The paucity of scrutiny of the world’s second-richest individual, in turn, feeds into outlandish suspicions.
Gates certainly deserves it. Quite apart from his deep and potentially decades-long ties to the infamous Jeffrey Epstein, his attempts to radically change African society, and his investment in controversial chemical giant Monsanto, he is perhaps the key driver behind the American charter school movement — an attempt to essentially privatize the U.S. education system. Charter schools are deeply unpopular with teachers’ unions, which see the movement as an attempt to lessen their autonomy and reduce public oversight into how and what children are taught.
Surprise surprise - it turns out it's the same group as always in this crapitalist system: the rich and the powerful:
https://blackagendareport.com/against-big-techs-algorithmic-cancel-culture
Read it end to end. And do your own research.
