The 'Black Mirror' of dating apps takes California colleges by storm (sfgate.com)

As an aside, does anyone make employment decisions on policies like promised sabbaticals after $x years of service? Everywhere I've seen them, the policies usually have something like a 5yoe cliff, and also are usually revoked in less than 5 years, so it's only really some existing employees close to the cliff that ever get to benefit. Which makes me wonder why they offer this policy in general.

(Even before the post-covid attempt for employers to reassert control, this was a commonly rug-pulled policy)

kelseyfrog · 10h ago

I thought neurotypical people were supposed to understand Theory of Mind[1] and comprehend how people perceive them.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

monetus · 11h ago

This comes across as naivety to the point of trolling their own employees. It might be worth following where those particular executives go, and to maybe avoid being involved with those companies with services and the like if you have options.

neworbit · 9h ago

Nikki Krishnamurthy - the center of this scandal - came there from Washington Mutual, one of the most famous implosions from the 2008 Big Crash along with Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers. How she's employable at all is beyond me.

quacker · 6h ago

She’s in HR not finance, and wasn’t an executive at the time. It’s extremely unlikely she had anything to do with the failure of Washington Mutual.

plasticsoprano · 12h ago

From the recently hired Senior VP that was giving an award to a regular VP and had the following exchange,

"Charlie, I hear you like Audis. How many do you have?" "I have 2" "Just 2? I have 4"

To the Senior VP who was running that week's all hands and asked "anyone else going to the regatta at X yacht club this weekend?"

And the exec suite getting steaks and salmon delivered on china on the regular while the rest of us got sodexo crap on the daily. These hypocrisies and tone deaf statements are the norm, COVID and RTO just better exposed them.

Jtsummers · 12h ago

Our c-suite did a tour a year or two back visiting all our offices around the country. We hadn't quite hit the full RTO order yet, but many of us were already in the office 90+% of the time because we work in labs. One of the execs was talking about how great remote work was for about 10 minutes, completely oblivious to the fact that all of us were in the office 4 or 5 days a week.

It was funny in a pathetic kind of way. The stupidity of people at the top.

GuinansEyebrows · 8h ago

Don't attribute to stupidity what may be easily attributed to malice.

taurath · 13h ago

During our RTO mandates, and after a huge layoff, we had an executive who was broadcasting in front of her glass wine cellar. The head of technology would address entire rooms full of people from his $5m mansion’s custom engraved kitchen and tell us we weren’t going to have performance based bonuses that year (he was paid double).

I’m fucking sorry, but Elon saying “excess empathy is a societal problem” is one of the most evil things I’ve heard from someone with significant power this century.

This is Sesame Street, preschool, kindergarten level values and morals that people somehow still safe to flaunt. They all walk this path at their own peril.

TheJoeMan · 12h ago

During covid, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson gave a virtual meeting from his house, and the camera was perfectly framed on a bookshelf behind him that I presume was expertly curated/arranged specifically for the purpose.

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pfannkuchen · 9h ago

Wasn’t Elon referring to westerners feeling obligated to help everyone in the world with respect to refugees and immigration?

I don’t think he was referring to local empathy towards humans you are physically with or your countrymen? Though if taken out of context I can see how someone could reach that conclusion.

LiquidSky · 9h ago

That's what he and his defenders claim he was saying, yes.

pfannkuchen · 9h ago

What do you mean claim? Like, that is an extremely unpopular, borderline heretical opinion already in the west. If what he actually meant was “empathy in general is bad and you should be self centered” or whatever, then laundering it to “excessive empathy for foreigners is bad” is not the spot you’d want to launder it to, if it were indeed laundering and not what he actually meant.

em-bee · 8h ago

right. how does that make anything better? the opposite is true. only if we develop empathy for the whole world, we will get a better life.

LiquidSky · 6h ago

>Like, that is an extremely unpopular, borderline heretical opinion already in the west.

Not these days, or at least not in the US. With all the federal cuts has come more public acceptance of openly deploring empathy for people not in your immediate circle. Witness, e.g., Vice President's Vance's widely-discussed comments on the "ordo amoris". Tribalism of this kind is somewhat in vogue. And, more generally, in the rightwing media ecosystem the idea that kindness or empathy is a kind of weakness to be disdained has been bubbling for a long time.

All that is to say, Musk seems like someone who genuinely believes empathy is a problem in general. The way he runs his companies, treats his worker, his own children (the ones he bothers to even be around, anyway), nothing comes across as the behavior of a man who sees any value in empathy for others.

So, to conclude, I think even he knows how distasteful his true views are to most people and so is couching them in terms that are as far as the current climate will let him go in public.

pfannkuchen · 1h ago

Okay what percent of people in America do you think aren’t offended by the statement “empathy towards foreigners is bad”?

I try hard to understand the perspective of everyone along the entire political spectrum, all the way out to the farest of the far right. People who actually want to roll back the immigration and refugee policies to say the 1950s are like less than 5% of the population at most. Most people on the right are still offended by that statement.

LiquidSky · 9h ago

Reminds me of a friend who was an attorney at a boutique Manhattan firm during the lockdown. Their managing partner was very old and traditional and as soon as legally able demanded every associate return to the office. He, of course, continued to work remotely from his Long Island home.

dmitrygr · 12h ago

We all knew that RTO is a layoff. More confirmation is nice, though