Technology

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Mary Barra’s Rolling Cineplexes

The culture at General Motors under Mary Barra’s more than 12 years of leadership has been to always be smarter by half. The company’s privacy scandal, which garnered a formal rebuke from the FTC and a $12.75 million civil penalty in California and sparked dozens of class-action lawsuits, is but…

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The Offshoring of Big Blue: How IBM Became India’s IBM

IBM once represented the pinnacle of American engineering and managerial excellence. Today, it employs more people in India than in the United States and ranks among the S&P 500’s “Low-Wage 100.”
Its CEO, Arvind Krishna, still gives the company a distinctively American influence, hauling in the largest compensation package in the Low-Wage 100 at $38.0 million, or 765 times the company’s median pay of $49,630.

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August 21, 2019 San Francisco / CA / USA - UBER headquarters in SOMA district; Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation network company

Disrupting Uber: A Blueprint for Democratic Socialists

Silicon Valley sold Uber as a technology revolution.
A recent Government Accountability Office report documents it has become the new poster corporation for taxpayer subsidized low-wage labor.
Some thoughts on how Democratic Socialists could disrupt the company that best embodies the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

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The ChatGPT Consumer Protection Agency

The focus on AI is overwhelmingly how artificial intelligence will change work. Virtually no attention has been paid to the technology’s potential to become the most powerful consumer protection tool ever created.
Thank you ChatGPT for sparing me a $720 subscription headache.

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The traditional Chinese game Dou Shu Qi is a Chess Jungle

SAIC, China’s Humiliation of GM & Capitalist Greed

Ignorance is bliss. Otherwise, more Americans might be alarmed to learn how General Motors became dependent on the state-controlled Chinese automaker it once taught to build world-class vehicles.

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Crushed Small Car Damaged in Traffic Accident

Class Privilege and America’s Auto Safety Divide 

For decades, federal regulators and elected officials have known that vehicle weight and crash incompatibility can determine who lives and who dies. Yet they have allowed the automotive arms race to escalate, permitting manufacturers to sell increasingly massive vehicles without adequately accounting for the danger those vehicles impose on everyone else.

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Ken Griffin and the AI Greater Fool Theory

Today’s “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” Wall Street Journal story: The guy who openly called AI-generated market analysis “garbage” just stepped in to buy the leveraged stock portfolio of Silicon Valley’s favorite AI oracle after margin calls forced a sale.

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The CEO Marshmallow Test

Nearly 60 years ago, Stanford researchers asked children to choose between one marshmallow now or two later.
Indications are that most CEOs of American companies would have grabbed the first marshmallow.
Tesla’s Elon Musk, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy are among the rare U.S. business leaders managing their companies with long-term horizons.

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Fishers - October 6, 2024: Cadillac dealership. Cadillac offers the Escalade, CT5, LYRIQ, XT4, XT5 and XT6.

An Unsung Engineer and the Cadillac Vistiq Recall

Not all heroes wear capes.
Many remain unknown.

Some thoughts on the unidentified GM engineer who forced the recall and stop-sale of every Cadillac Vistiq GM ever manufactured—and what the episode reveals about the automaker’s engineering, software validation, and supply chain.

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