Google Meet Outage

Don't trust them. It's as simple as that. Whether they are pretending to care about social justice issues, or flattering trump, it's all an act. They have clearly shown they will change their moral principles faster than you can change your socks.

taylodl · 2h ago

Don't trust a capitalist? You've been told that for nearly 200 years now. The good thing about what's happening now is the veil has been removed, and people can see the true nature of capitalism now that it has been laid bare. Previous administrations worked hard to make capitalism appear more humane. Well, with Trump that ship has sailed. The good news is that's the spark of realization that can lead to meaningful change.

FridayoLeary · 2h ago

That's where you're wrong. Corporations were forced to pick a side in a culture war they wanted nothing to do with. Now they are reverting to their normal position. Dei brings no economic benefit for a company so they dumped it. Nor does criticising the president.

Capitalism should be recognised for what it is: an amoral engine for economic growth, and the best one at that. Companies have no business preaching to the public the opinions of whichever political party is in charge.

AnimalMuppet · 2h ago

The veil is less removed now than it was in, say, the 1890s. People then decided that capitalism needed to be regulated, not eliminated. Don't hope for more now.

taylodl · 1h ago

I think people are going to discard it. It'll be interesting to see what people propose to replace it with considering all the alternatives have failed. Maybe you're right and we'll resume with a stricter regulation. At this point though we have bigger fish to fry: Americans have just learned they have no inalienable rights. All their rights are what the government allows them to have. Several people have come to that realization over the lifetime of the US, but now that realization is hitting everyone en masse. How that is dealt with my drive how capitalism is dealt with.

hunglee2 · 2h ago

Arguably capitalism isn't the problem either, because in its purest form the state would simply be a neutral platform, rather than an active participant, in the game of free market competition.

What Trump is doing is putting capital 'under the authority of the state' very similarly to what China did in bringing down in 2020 - cancelling Ant Finance IPO, bring down Jack Ma, breaking the edtech industry, setting salary limits for finance sector etc.

OP is right though - you can't blame Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg or any of the CEO's who are kowtowing to the King. Role of the CEO is to protect shareholder value, and maximally increase revenue and profit. Hard to see how refusing Donald Trump what he demands would support those objectives.

FridayoLeary · 2h ago

They ended their dei programs so quickly that i can only assume they were waiting for an excuse.

hunglee2 · 2h ago

yep, double quick time. Spoke with a marketing agency earlier this year talking about 'state of the market' fully expecting downbeat report, only to be told that 'business was going great in 2025'. Upon further probing, it turned out that all of this new business was auditing company digital assets and strip out DEI

taylodl · 2h ago

Lessons learned from Bud Light

AnimalMuppet · 2h ago

Maybe those programs only existed because they were kowtowing to the previous king.

FridayoLeary · 1h ago

Exactly my point. DEI is nothing more then soft racism imo and one of the most accepted forms of virtue signalling today. In that case the "king" was the slightly hysterical progressive ideology that's been around since covid.

Finnucane · 2h ago

But if customers say, fuck that noise, and stop buying the products, then it harms his company and violates his 'fiduciary duty.' See also: Elon Musk.

taylodl · 2h ago

Musk was a special member of the administration and with DOGE went waaaaaaaay beyond looking out for the interests of Tesla's and SpaceX's shareholders. Musk, through the smokescreen of DOGE, actively undermined federal regulatory agencies who were investigating Tesla and SpaceX. Musk attended political rallies and gestured the sig heil. Musk bankrolled the Trump campaign in a very significant way. This is not what the other tech CEOs are doing.

Musk has put himself in a position where it's very difficult for him to claim "it was just business." That's a large part of why Tesla sales are now tanking.

Finnucane · 2h ago

And now Cook, Zuck, and the rest of those guys are just riding his coattails. Gladly. They seem pretty happy about it. Customers will judge. We have no obligation to the shareholders.

Google Meet Outage

Ask HN: I can't remember the name of a AI CLI tool I saw a few weeks ago

Not caring enough about money?

Ask HN: How to take notes and learn from them?

Claude Code fails to fetch or create the GPL v3.0 license when asked

Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

Ask HN: Good resources for DIY-ish animatronic kits for Halloween?

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2025)

Ask HN: How much can we trust open-source projects or our hardware?

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)

Ask HN: How to avoid passive use of AI?

Ask HN: Can an amateur make contributions to pure math or theoretical physics?

Raku.org Chooses Htmx

Ask HN: Are api.nasa.gov, data.nasa.gov down or shutdown?

Why the Technological Singularity May Be a "Big Nothing"

Ask HN: Significant reduction in AI related submissions?

Automated Workday check in/check out and Microsoft Teams messages monitoring

Ask HN: Is Reddit going the way of Stack Overflow?

If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

Ask HN: Why does Google word privacy settings like you agree even when off?

Ask HN: Moving from Dev to PM

Ask HN: What do you think of the new Digg?

Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?

New Member Alert

Ask HN: How long did it take you to learn Git?

Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired

Ask HN: LLM struggles to center div too?

Ask HN: Useful AI applications in regular businesses?

Ask HN: Why do LLMs struggle with word count?

A16Z scouting ambitious Swiss founders for $1M accelerator

Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

ASIC: Proof-of-Concept Binary Optimizer Reduces Size, More to Come

Ask HN: When was the last time you visited Stack Overflow?

Ask HN: VSCode AI Autocomplete Woes

Tim Cook isn't the problem, capitalism is

Comments (14)