matrix87

Usually it's a management problem (like favoritism or something), so going to management is just going to put a target on your back.

Usually they've made a couple enemies. Just gang up with their enemies. If it's a group effort, there's only so much management can do at that point (depending on how much leverage they have). It's all dependent on the specific political situation.

This whole image of them being "well-liked" and socially invincible is just a play. Usually this type of person has made a shit ton of enemies. It may or may not be worthwhile depending on how shitty of a situation you're in, how bad the company's stack ranking and layoff quota is, how attached they are to you, etc

> they are holding the whip hand now as it were

They aren't holding the whip unless you give them the whip. Biologically you are the one with leverage. Probably economically too. You're the one doing this to yourself. Either stop doing it to yourself, or stop complaining about it

But if the abuser can be obligated to pay legal fees, there could be incentives for lawyers to seek these kinds of cases out

Corporations could just do the same thing. Henry Ford historically had doubled people's salary to get them to have families. This was contingent on a bunch of paternalistic rules and inspections (like participants weren't allowed to drink for example).

From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.

So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector

brute force scales a lot better than nuance

> I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.

I'm pretty sure in this specific case, they get an instant green card if abuse happens. So the incentives point in the opposite direction (pro-divorce)

The shared tools that people actually need like git or ms word already exist (because they're things we actually need). Maybe claude code / codex / opencode is the rare exception of a new thing which will survive long term (the coding agent idea in general, maybe not these three products in particular).

This kind of internal tooling always creates a window for empire building. The few things I've done that actually mattered at the jobs I've been at have mostly been in excel, and I'm a swe to boot. People don't want another internal tool, they want signal that helps them make business decisions.

Decent tooling is nice, but really over the top tooling can indicate organizational problems like misallocation of resources

I wonder if all the cargo cult frontend JS people pivoted to doing this agentic stuff and that's why it's so much of a clusterfuck

Because empire building, why else. They had two other internal tools and now they have three

Apparently they used facebook to incite backlash against the Indian government to bully them into allowing their Internet.org initiative to continue there (essentially a stripped down, anti-net-neutrality version of the internet which only allows people to use facebook and a couple other sites).

This was mentioned in Careless People. It seems like they wanted to use facebook as an electoral tool pretty early on because it gives them leverage over politicians. They might not have been deliberately involved in CA, but this is probably exactly what they wanted

> but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem.

In Careless People, they mentioned that this was a strategy they wanted to employ:

They wanted facebook to become a tool for winning elections so that they would have more leverage over the politicians in power.

For example, they were trying to fight the Indian government over internet.org initiative (essentially shipping out a stripped down version of the internet to impoverished areas where they could only use facebook and a couple other apps, subsidized by telecoms). They used facebook features to incite backlash against the Indian government.

If I cut my leg off with a chainsaw, am I addicted to the chainsaw? I think what matters is the intent of the design. E.g. if they design the product to make you need more of it (while it has an actively detrimental effect)

But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive

> It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general?

Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.