Emmit's Corner - My Octopus Lover

If I were You, Pay to Play, Reset the Police, My Octopus Lover, Precious Bodily Fluids, Deliberations, The Trial of a God, 

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Swamp Castle - Gatekeeper

Hastur had a tough job to do, working for the Interdimensional Immigration Service determining whether witches, gnomes and enchanted teapots get into the USA (Unicorns get in automatically).  Then he is given an ominous warning and must solve it using the main skill he has; beuracracy.

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 2, Scene 4

 [Images of Garage and Happy Google]

VO: Once upon a time, two friends started a little company in a garage, but they wisely learned the lessons of technology companies in the past and made a simple motto, “Don’t Be Evil.”  They had a simple idea, figure out how to rank web results by when people made hyperlinks.  And it worked.  Before, the internet was basically a card catalog (like Yahoo) and they made the worlds first search engine.  And the company had a simple way to make money; just charge for ads based on the results.  For a long time, the company grew and grew and they had tons of cool ideas and offered lots of free things like email, and documents, and phone calls, and chat bots and on and on and on; so much so that people loved it and used it.  Sure, google took tat data and used it to improve their search engines, but they were the good guys, so it was OK.  And google grew more, and more and more and offered more cool ideas like balloons that let people talk to each other, and super intelligent AI to help make their search engines work and self driving cars.  Google called these crazy projects moonshots, and it was built right into the company charter that they could do that, and eventually the two friends got bored, got another CEO and walked away to live happily ever after doing cool things like building flying cars.

[Images of Sundar Pichai]

VO: But the company was still around.  And it was making a lot of money.  Someone had to run it.  Along comes Sundar Pichai, who has a slightly different vision; call him crazy, but he decided that a company designed to make money organizing the world’s data, was going to make a lot of money.  And oh GOD, did they make a lot of money.  First, Google made the android phone which became much more popular than Apple, and they gave it away for free.  Of course, to use it, you had pay google for services that were more and more mandatory and eventually if you wanted to do ANYTHING on the opensource apple phone, you had to pay Google.  

[Images of the EU and android, Dont be Evil covered with a little slime]

VO: So there were some lawsuits from the EU which doesnt have anti trust that is quite as pathetic as the US.  And then Google had someone steal a lot of their self driving code, but they made a nice side deal with Uber to get that back and kept working on it slowly but surely.  They might have used their lawyers a little aggressively to get ahead, but hey, they were still the cool company right?

[Images of Apple Company Store, Don’t be evil has a bit more slime]

VO: They thought apple had a good thing going on and so they charged the developers some money as well, for thirty percent, there’s a lawsuit about that.

[Images of Sex Managers and other things with Dont Be eventually blotted out with slime]

VO: Then there were some complaints about sexual harassment and the company made that go away.   And then they were involved in anti union activities and illegal collusion with other companies to fuck over their pay rate.   And then they entered into a duopoly with the most evil company in the world on Advertising where they had a symbiotic relationship.  And in 2020 they were accused also of being involved with the Xinjiang region but Google assures you that is a nice liberal company even though in 2018 they formally removed that pesky ‘Dont be Evil’.  

[Images of Sex Robots]

VO: Google is among the most intelligent companies in the world at AI research.  Recently, they fired a researcher who spoke up about unethical google behavior, so of course the company fired her.  There were protests from the employees, but gone were the days of the open collaboration between employees and management.  Old habits die hard and Google is now looking at doing business with China and the US military.  Now that Alphabet doesnt have to worry about its brand due to its monopoly power and thorough bribery on congress, they can do what they want, which is acquire as much data as possible with as little accountability as possible.  But hey, remember when they used to be cool? Remember all that free stuff they gave you? Trust them.

Google.

[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 2, Scene 3 - Continued

 [Image of 19th Century Coal Companies]

VO: In the late 19th century, Robber Barons got this nifty little idea to put all their employees in a village where they owned the houses, the stores and the means of production; so while technically the employees weren’t slaves they paid the employees in company monopoly money which meant that not only did their employees work for effectively nothing but slowly took on debt.  The song ‘16 Tons’ was made popular because it highlighted what an extremely gross abuse of power this was.

[Images of Walled Gardens and Alice and Wonderland]

VO: Apple has continued its love of walled Gardens by charging a third of all the income an app developer makes in order to work on their platform.  Google does the same things and other companies including Microsoft and Sony are starting to take notice, but Apple claims it needs to take this money in order to offer proper safeguards for their environment.  Then again, given that apple has made over 700 billion dollars in profits in the last 10 years, maybe they can afford to be a little less greedy.  

[Images of Epic Games and Fortnight]

VO: Epic Games, the creators of the rando themed shootem up game Fortnight finally lost it with Apple and took them to court where all kinds of interesting details came up in discovery.  Apple’s response to Epic setting up a payment method outside of Apple? They removed Epic from their appstore.  At Apple, you buy from the company store, or you buy a new phone.

[Images of Locked Warehouses and Fires]

VO: Apple is also notorious for using locked contracts with their vendors but they are more notorious for working conditions in China where the iPhone is made.  FoxConn had several employees on suicide watch just to keep them from killing themselves.  They had an ACTUAL company store scenario with employees having to spend half their paychecks just to work in the lovely Apple sweatshop environments.  In 2007, Apple, realizing that this was not a good look for the company, started a monitoring program.  Of course, three years later, workers were dying due to a cleaner used on the screens in a similar manner to the Radium girls who painted watches in the 1930’s.  Four years later, the BBC did an expose wherein Apple still hadnt fixed the problem.  Apple, obviously, denied these allegations as it also denies allegations that it is using slave labor in the federally sanctioned region of the Ughyrs which lobbiests from Apple tried to weaken as much as possible.

Project Nimby Tour Continues

 Here we go

Wattpadd - Cactus Bob and Ted

Penana - Kat and Mause 

Cactus Bob and Ted

Micronation - Chapter 18 - Memememememe

Amberlove is rescued by a flood of tiny little cars that also take her on a (larger) car chase.

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 2, Scene 3 - Apple

 Scene 3 - Apple - The Company Store

[Images of Ihappiness and Apple]

VO: Ah apple, the darling of the tech world.  When you think of slick, when you think of cool and how it intersects with tech, you think of Apple.  iPhones, iPods, Macs, iPads; Apple makes it smaller, smoother faster better.  It is no accident that it does this.  Apple is something called a Walled Garden.  What does that mean?

[Image of Steve Jobs, Hedge Mazes and Gardens]

VO: Back in the day, the founder of the company, Steve Jobs, had a vision that you can see in the movie of the same name.  He wanted a seamless customer experience where Apple controlled the user experience and the quality thereof; Apple made the hardware and apple made the software.  Back in the day, Apple did both and Microsoft made the hardware and operating system but allowed others to make hardware and software that were compatible.  The phrase PC Compatible was how Microsoft won the first round of the tech wars since at one point Apple and Microsoft were giant rivals, but this open system allowed Microsoft an edge.

[Image of Year by Year PC vs Apple size share]

VO: But year on year, Microsoft kept getting bigger and bigger and Apple was left in the dust. Oh, Apple had some die hard customers; artists, creatives, musicians and it had a highly effective in with schools in an attempt to get kids to be loyal to apple products in the next generation.  While it didn’t work with personal computers, it did pay off in the long run.

[Image of the Ipod]

VO: Steve Jobs was foolishly expelled from the Apple board where he did all kinds of things on the side including help found a little company you might have heard of called Pixar.  And when he came back, he remade the walkman as a slick sexy project called the Ipod.  But that wasn’t enough, he had changed the world once with the Mac, so he decided to do it again with the Smart Phone.  The iphone changed how we interacted with our phones and the internet in general.  It was a genius move and earned Steve Jobs a well deserved reputation as a creative visionary genius.

Only there were problems.