Tag: corpocracy

A lot of California companies are observably paying attention to Patreon’s legal shenanigans and are attempting to avoid being caught in a similar trap of their own device. Unfortunately, instead of taking an honest and legally valid approach, many of the scions of the Silicon Valley corpocracy are attempting to stack the deck even further in their Terms of Use, as can be seen in the example of Square’s newly announced terms that mandate arbitration, but only after attempting to force the claimant to divulge anything and everything that Square can use against him.

Pre-Filing Requirement to Attempt to Resolve Disputes. Before an arbitration is commenced, you or Square agree to attempt to avoid the costs of formal dispute resolution by giving each other a full and fair opportunity to address and resolve a Dispute informally. Both parties recognize that this is an important requirement, and that breach of this requirement would be a material breach of the Terms. To provide this opportunity, before commencing any arbitration or suit, each party agrees to send to the other party a written Notice (“Notice”). Any Notice to Square should be sent by mail to Square, Inc., Attn: Arbitration Provision, PO Box 427069, San Francisco, CA 94142. Any Notice sent to you will be sent to the address on file for your account. The Notice must: (i) include your name and account number; (ii) provide detailed information sufficient to evaluate the merits of the claiming party’s individualized claim and for the other party to determine if an amicable resolution is possible; and (iii) set forth the specific relief sought, including whatever amount of money is demanded and the means by which the demanding party calculated the claimed damages. Both parties agree that they will attempt to resolve a dispute through an informal negotiation within sixty (60) days from the date the Notice is sent. After that sixty (60) day period and not before, either party may commence arbitration. Each party agrees that state courts in the City and County of San Francisco, California, or federal court for the Northern District of California, referenced below, may enter injunctive relief to enforce the pre-filing requirements of this paragraph, including an injunction to stay an arbitration that has been commenced in violation of this paragraph.

The purpose of this is to attempt to build an “extortion” case out of nothing to provide an excuse for playing the victim and establishing a false narrative. The correct thing to do is to tell the company absolutely nothing and to make no settlement demands, because anything you say can and will be folded, spindled, mutilated, and then used against you in front of an arbitrator who is sympathetic to the corporation. Just file the arbitration and do the absolute minimum required by the contract. Notice in particular that Square actually gives themselves the right to go to court in order to stop you from going to mandated arbitration. I doubt this requirement holds up in court.

Scope of Arbitration. If we are not able to resolve the Dispute by informal negotiation or, as provided below, in a small claims court, all Disputes will be resolved finally and exclusively by binding individual arbitration with a single arbitrator (the “Arbitrator”) administered by the American Arbitration Association (https://www.adr.org) according to this Section and the Commercial Arbitration Rules for that forum, except you and Square will have the right to file early or summary dispositive motions and to request that the AAA’s Expedited Procedures apply regardless of the claim amount. Except as set forth above, the Arbitrator shall be responsible for determining all threshold arbitrability issues, including issues relating to whether the General Terms and/or Additional Terms (or any aspect thereof) are enforceable, unconscionable or illusory and any defense to arbitration, including waiver, delay, laches, or estoppel.

This is flat-out illegal and will not even hold up in arbitration, let alone court. Square is shamelessly attempting to force the consumer to agree to the Commercial rules, instead of the Consumer rules that provide the consumer with some level of protection in order to level the playing field. This is completely illegal, as it directly violates both black-letter and California case law, but the vast majority of consumers won’t know that.

Fortunately, the attempts of the corporations to work their way around the consumer protection laws won’t work at all. The California legislature is very much aware of their shenanigans, as it is already in the process of passing laws to tighten up the terminology and eliminate the ambiguities in the existing laws to which companies like Patreon and Square are appealing in order to attempt to avoid being held accountable to their own contracts.

It’s clear that some Silicon Valley executives are beginning to correctly perceive the legal positions of their organizations vis-a-vis their customers as an existential threat. But it is absolutely idiotic for them to turn to the very same inept lawyers who created the existential threat in the first place in the hopes of somehow escaping it.

 Except they don’t actually give the founder any money.

John Matze, the co-founder and former CEO of free speech platform Parler, is suing the company for wrongful termination and the alleged theft of his 40{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} ownership of the company. It must be tempting when a big gun comes in, and promises millions in funding, and access to their massive media promotion machine. But that is almost always the first step in taking over your operation, and muscling you out.

If the Mercers come knocking, the answer should always be “no, thank you.” Nine times out of ten, if someone is seeking to invest in something you’re doing, their interests are in no way aligned with your own. Be content with what you have and where you are. And remember that no one genuinely gets to the big leagues through hard work and genuine success.

Big Tech discovers that India is where the Indians are:

Last year, allegations of caste bias got a public airing some 8,300 miles away from the IIT campuses. On behalf of the Indian Cisco Systems employee who alleged he’d been discriminated against based on his caste, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing brought a suit in San Jose against the company and two other Indian employees. All three were graduates of IIT Bombay.

American law protects workers from disparate treatment based on a handful of characteristics, including race, sex, religion, and disability status. This was the first time, though, that anyone had argued those protections should extend to Dalits. The complaint said that the unnamed employee had faced discrimination by two upper-caste managers since 2015 and that he’d reported one to human resources for outing him as a Dalit and informing colleagues he’d enrolled in the IIT through affirmative action. The employee said the discrimination had continued under the second manager.

Cisco denied the charges. “We have zero tolerance for discrimination and take all complaints of unfair treatment very seriously,” a spokesperson says. “In this case, we thoroughly and fully investigated the employee’s concerns and found that he was treated fairly, highly compensated, and afforded opportunities to work on coveted projects.” In its response to the suit, Cisco made an additional argument: Because caste isn’t a protected category under U.S. civil rights laws, the allegations are immaterial and should be stricken. The court recently denied Cisco’s petition to move the case to arbitration, and the company has filed an appeal.

Advocacy groups in the U.S. have weighed in on both sides. The Hindu American Foundation filed a declaration in support of Cisco, saying that though it vehemently opposes “all forms of prejudice and discrimination,” the state’s case “blatantly violates the rights of Hindu Americans.” Meanwhile, the Ambedkar International Center, a Dalit advocacy group, filed a brief in support of the state, encouraging the court to acknowledge caste discrimination and set a precedent prohibiting it. “American civil rights law has little experience with the Indian caste system, but it is very familiar with the idea of caste: the notion that some people are born to low stations in life in which they are forced to remain,” the motion reads.

The case inspired a flood of tech workers to tell their own stories. A U.S.-based Dalit advocacy group, Equality Labs, told the Washington Post in October that more than 250 tech workers had come forward in the wake of the Cisco suit to report incidents of caste-based harassment. Thirty Dalit engineers, all women, also shared a joint statement with the Post that said they’d experienced caste bias in the U.S. tech sector.

For years the industry has been criticized for doing too little to rectify a culture seen as hostile to women, Black people, and Latinos. In response, companies have held town halls, instituted anti-harassment training, and made very public promises to do better. On caste, though, executives have largely pleaded ignorance. Microsoft is a rare exception: The company, whose CEO, Satya Nadella, is Indian-American, says that it’s received a few complaints of caste bias and that it has more work to do. Google, for its part, says it will investigate any discrimination claims based on caste; it wouldn’t say whether it had received any, and Pichai didn’t respond to Businessweek’s requests for comment.

Another Indian-American executive, Shantanu Narayen, has been CEO at Adobe Inc. since 2007. The company employs hundreds of Indian expats, including more than 100 who graduated from an IIT. In an interview with Bloomberg TV last year, Narayen, a graduate of an engineering school (though not an IIT) in his native Hyderabad, rejected the idea that any of Adobe’s Indian workers might show bias based on caste. What the company “has always stood for and our founders instituted as the way of creating this company is equality for all,” he said. “We have not had any of those issues.”

It would be naive for U.S. companies to assume that Indian hires leave their prejudices on the subcontinent, says Sarit K. Das, a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras who until February was director of IIT Ropar. “Graduates carry this to Amazon or Google or wherever, and the feeling toward the other person is that you didn’t make it like me, you are inferior,” he says.

Ram Kumar, a Dalit alum of IIT Delhi, has worked in the tech industry for more than two decades, with stints at Cisco, Dell, and other companies. When he arrived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, he found “another mini-India arranged by clusters of Indian hierarchy,” he says. Whereas dominant-caste Indians might see expat communities as sources of professional networking and support, Kumar avoids them. “People will try to segregate you once they find out your caste,” he says. As a matter of self-preservation, “I’ve avoided good opportunities when I see that the CEO or CTO is Indian.”

My favorite is the way Cisco and The Hindu American Foundation have filed suit for the right to discriminate by caste. Just like our Founding Fathers!

 It will get worse before it gets better. And by better, I mean people will be legally permitted to burn “diversity trainers” at the stake. On the corporate premises. On company time. For a bonus.

Jennifer Spargifiore, 23, filed a civil complaint, alleging that Panda Express pressured her to strip to her underwear in front of colleagues during company training, NBC reports.

Panda Express and Alive Seminars, the self-improvement consulting outfit that led the exercise, are the defendants named in the suit.

The claims are bizarre and if true, which we don’t know yet, otherworldly creepy.

Spargifiore worked for Panda Express from Aug. 10, 2016 to July 15, 2019, primarily in L.A. County. She says “the Alive seminars were often a prerequisite to promotion,” adding that attendees were required to provide their work ID numbers so seminar fees “could be debited directly from their Panda Express employee accounts.”

Spargifiore goes on to say the seminars in question quickly devolved into psychological abuse. Notably in the lawsuit, Spargifiore named the date of July 13, 2019, two days before her departure, alleging that she was pressured into a “trust-building exercise” that required her to strip down to her underwear.

She did not add the reason they asked for such a thing, if they even gave one.

“She stripped almost naked in front of strangers and co-workers – was extremely uncomfortable but pressed on because she knew it was her only chance at a promotion,” the lawsuit said. “Meanwhile, Alive Seminars staff were openly ogling the women in their state of undress, smiling, and laughing.”

If that isn’t eye-opening enough, the lawsuit goes on to claim she was then forced to “hug it out” with a male participant, who was also in his underwear.

“The seminar more and more resembled a cult initiation ritual as time went on,” the lawsuit says. Furthermore, the suit says Spargifiore was constructively terminated” just days after leaving the seminar early.

I give it three years before white women are required to have sex with POX and white men are required to have sex with trannies as part of their “diversity training”. Because the important thing is to a) keep your corporate job and b) ensure that no one can call you racist.

Facebook has gone to war with Australia because it doesn’t want to pay for the content it steals:

Facebook has blocked Australians from accessing and sharing news in protest at a new law which would have forced the site to pay for the content it hosts.

Furious Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the move shows tech companies ‘think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them’ while others branded it ‘an assault on a sovereign nation’ and an ‘abuse of power’.

The backlash quickly went international, with one Democrat politician in the US saying it shows ‘Facebook is not compatible with democracy’ while the hashtag ‘Delete Facebook’ quickly began trending on rival site Twitter. 

Australians searching Facebook for news today were instead shown notifications saying ‘no posts’ were available. Attempting to share news links brought up a message saying ‘this post can’t be shared’.

But the shock move also stopped some government messages being shared, including from emergency services providing essential information on Covid, fires, and help for victims of domestic violence.

What part of “get off Facebook” do you not understand? It is literally a hostile globalist power that quite literally regards itself above every law. Whatever benefit you think you’re getting from it isn’t worth it.

 No. Just no. No sooner has Parler bitten the dust than yet another new “alternative” is being waggled out there as bait.

Emphasizing free speech and privacy, a tech entrepreneur who has been developing a search engine for the past decade plans to roll out a platform that will include the features of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Find.com, says Jeffrey Sisk, will begin with a messaging platform similar to Twitter then add the search, social networking and video features, putting them together in one app.

“It’s the convergence of an amazing brand name, innovative technology and a public that is desperate to find any new way to help win this war on truth,” he told WND.

Sisk said he is inviting the millions of Americans who are seeking an alternative to the Big Tech giants to join him in funding the venture.

He’s launched a GoFundMe page in which he explains his vision.

“We are committing to you now that we will forever support the core values enshrined in the Bill of Rights,” he says in the GoFundMe description of the project. “As a platform, yes, we will remove content that contains the obvious bad things, such as graphic violence or pornography. But we will always support constitutionally protected free speech and the First Amendment. That is our firm commitment to you, the American public.”

After the funding comes in, he said, he plans to launch Find.com’s public messaging platform in the first couple of months.

Free speech + funding = gatekeeper. How many times are conservative idiots going to fall for this line? From Emma Lazarus to the Tea Party and Jordan Peterson, it’s always the same rhetorical bait for the conservatives they want to keep away from a) Christianity and b) nationalism.

Christian Nationalism is the only genuine alternative to the globosatanism of the Prometheans. Any platform, program, person, or organization who doesn’t explicitly advocate Christian nationalism should not be trusted one iota. And those that do should be regarded with relentless skepticism and closely watched for signs of convergence.

It’s just a coincidence, of course, that all these Promethean organizations keep happening to select architectural designs that harken back to Mesopotamia:

Amazon has just unveiled the plans for its new corporate headquarters that will stand in Arlington, Virginia, directly across the Potomac River from Washington DC. The announcement inaccurately describes the design as a “double helix” but scholars of ancient history and the Bible will readily recognize the ancient model for the design: the Tower of Babel.

Construction on their second corporate headquarters is expected to begin next year and when completed in 2025 at a cost of $2.5 billion. It will include 2.8 million square feet of new office space distributed across three 22-story buildings. The location is less than four miles from the Capitol Building. John Schoettler,  head of Amazon’s global corporate real estate portfolio, announced the second half of the project designed by architecture firm NBBJ. 

“The natural beauty of a double helix can be seen throughout our world, from the geometry of our own DNA to the elemental form of galaxies, weather patterns, pinecones, and seashells,” the company said. “The Helix at our Arlington headquarters will offer a variety of alternative work environments for Amazon employees amidst lush gardens and flourishing trees native to the region.”

Though it is true that DNA is arranged in a double-helix, the architectural design is not, in fact, a double helix that appears like a ladder that has been twisted into a corkscrew. The design of the building is, perhaps, a single helix with a spiral walkway ascending the exterior of the building. The architectural design of the Amazon building does, in fact, closely resemble that of a ziggurat, a type of massive structure built in ancient Mesopotamia.

Jeff Bezos isn’t exactly hiding it, is he. The EU parliamentary building in Strasbourg is also designed to recall the Tower of Babel, and intentionally so.

 But you have to actually use it to accomplish anything:

Amid a boycott in response to its politically motivated decision to drop Mike Lindell’s MyPillow products, shares of Bed Bath & Beyond plunged 36.4{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} at the close of trading Thursday. The retail chain suffered its biggest one-day loss since going public in June 1992.

The consumer organization Media Action Network launched the boycott of Bed, Bath & Beyond after the retail chain stopped selling Lindell’s products due to his support of President Trump’s claim that fraud affected the outcome of the 2020 election.

Americans could break enemies like the Devil Mouse within a month if they would simply stop justifying their continued support of those who hate them.

An insider explains why Robinhood is selling out its users:

I work for Robinhood. Don’t kill me.

Low-level, technical shit, comp sciences major, not finance side. Guess what we overhead today?

Vladimir, yes founder Vladimir, and the C-Suite, received calls from Sequoia Capital and the White House that pressured into closing trading on GME etc. I guarantee you the same took place at E-Trade and the others who closed trading.

File reports on the SEC page. If I wasn’t scared to be out of work in a pandemic I’d quit. I’m disgusted. We all need to rise up, this is as bad as it gets when we talk about how the rich get one set of rules, and the rest of us get screwed over, and over, and over again left to bail them out and pick up the tab for their trillion dollar tax breaks. We need to pile pressure on every government and financial institution involved in this travesty of justice.

I’m taking a massive career risk even posting here but fuck these motherfuckers.

So much for the “rule of law”. It’s not communistic in the slightest to observe that the corporations are now obviously a significant part of the problem.

The head of Outkick the Coverage hammers Amazon, Google, and the rest of the corpocratic tech elite:

Amazon, a company founded to sell books and promote the free exchange of ideas more efficiently, effectively enacted the largest modern-day book burning in world history by shutting down Parler. Amazon’s message was clear: if we don’t like your political perspective, you have no right to reach an audience on the Internet.

This should terrify every American.

And how about Google here? Google’s pledge upon its founding was to organize all the information in the world and to do no harm. That was literally written into their corporate charter. And now they are selectively removing information they don’t like from the marketplace of ideas, which makes the information they cite less reliable. It’s a total refutation of their founders’ aims.

Apple may be even worse. Apple has specifically censored its own content to avoid offending China. The company literally said it would produce no content that upsets China. Now, they are selectively eliminating political opinions from the public discourse that they don’t like .

Honest question: how do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichal, the three leaders of these companies, sleep at night? The same is true of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Are they aware of what their companies are doing, or are they just sleepwalking our country into a Chinese-like Internet state? Are they really this afraid of people saying bad things about them online? How is there no billionaire tech champion for free speech in the country?

It’s not courageous to do what everyone else does in times of tumult and tempest. It’s courageous to stand up for the marketplace of ideas when everyone is screaming for censorship. That’s true courage. Is there no one out there in Big Tech who will stand up and say, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?” Or are they all cowards?

As a result of monopolistic collusion on the part of Big Tech, Parler can no longer be downloaded, and it may soon be removed from the Internet entirely. Again, this is a modern-day technological book-burning lit afire by three of the biggest American tech companies in the world.

Instead of the government restricting speech, you have three “different” trillion dollar companies — Amazon, Google, and Apple — colluding to reach the same exact view at the same exact time. They are using their monopolistic market clout to effectively tell Parler it can’t exist. They are using their marketplace dominance not only to destroy the marketplace of ideas but to destroy the marketplace, period.

American Big Tech has become our own Frankenstein version of China.

Those who claim these deplatformings and bannings are not censorship “because private corporations” are being disingenuous. A corporation is not an actual person, it is a government entity that is deemed “a juristic person” by the government. Corporations are not people, they have no unalienable rights, and it is long past time for the people to begin reining them in.