Boeing employees mocked FAA and clowns who designed 737 Max

“This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” one Boeing employee wrote, before the 737 Max accidents JT610 and ET302 killed 346 people. “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” regrets another. Natalie Kitroeff reports on what Boeing employees were really thinking about the 737 Max.

nytimes.com

You are the product

“What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does—‘connect’, ‘build communities’—and the commercial reality. Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them. Since there is so much content posted on the site, the algorithms used to filter and direct that content are the thing that determines what you see: people think their news feed is largely to do with their friends and interests, and it sort of is, with the crucial proviso that it is their friends and interests as mediated by the commercial interests of Facebook. Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.” John Lanchester does not know what will happen should this $450 billion penny ever drop.

www.lrb.co.uk

The psychology of evil


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“Paradoxically, it was God who created Hell as a place to store evil. He didn’t do a good job of keeping it there, though.”

Philip Zimbardo

Ryanair deserves a new name

“The culture is created at the top and reflects all the way down. Michael O’Leary is a twat. Can I say that, Mrs Lawyer? He is. There’s no getting round it. And Ryanair, the airline he has built in his image, is a twattish airline that treats both its staff and its customers with contempt.” Comment by Carole Cadwalladr.

www.theguardian.com

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