Oh wow, that gives all new meaning to the “postmortem” we’re so used to doing post-software-event. Apparently, the guy was under H1B visa and was about to lose his dream job at Facebook when he jumped from 3rd floor at Facebooks ‘a shiny brand spanking new Menlo Park California-designed HQ office. I’ve worked with a lot of Facebook engineers. They are very intense and very serious about their SEV’s. I squirm even hearing about the SEV preceding the jump. It’s like a court martial for a soldier or an officer. There’s punishment and shaming.

This isn’t cultural shock to Chinese people btw, workplace suicide happens often in Chinese high tech companies, apparently, our most hated competitor Huawei was at one point a suicide factory during its earlier years too. Again, Silicon Valley company has copied the Chinese: Squeeze a Chinese until he’s empty.

I’m seeing some people showing sympathy to these poor foreign kids. I would do the same, but I know the effort you and your family made to get you here. The realist would probably try to reassure you that:

1. If a coworker is young, old, or seems unsure–trust your feelings! The young and inexperienced has no experience and shouldn’t be in a position of power and I don’t care if all the VCs wants to give money only to young kids. Youth with underserved power is as dangerous as Mark Zuckerberg–dangerous in all the good and bad ways.
2. If the guys old, he’s got experience to kick your ass, so watch out!
3. If he seems exceedingly nervous, that really does mean something is wrong–get out, get out now before you jump from that roof! Trust your feelings, just because the company entrust I don’t care if it’s billions of dollars or top secret information to him, doesn’t mean you should trust him with your family.

If he’s not nervous while being in charge of billions of dollars, he is probably on drugs. Sometimes they’ll even tell you and refer you to his doctor/vendor. Take it, at your own health risk of course, but don’t jump from the roof. You would be an outsider among your coworkers if you don’t take their drugs–substance or “religion.” the company appreciates your sacrifices, you may even get a raise from starting to pay for it.

If he comes from a country with a history of racist practices, ehem, will refrain from naming them, there are many many… watch out!!!!!!!! Their unconscious bias has built in normative directives to enforce hierarchical social structure around them–they will be more submissive where it is normal for them to be and they will be dominant to those under them. So study up, brush up on world history. And knowledge of modern geopolitics wouldn’t hurt either. Like, can someone explain to me the dislike between German and English people? I don’t get it.

If he doesn’t speak English, don’t trust him. It’s okay to have an accent here in Silicon Valley. Doesn’t matter if your job is super important and mostly human management or communications, you don’t have to speak perfect English. Your boss’s bosses, although all American-raised, probably failed English in high school anyways, ask them to settle a grammar dispute and they probably will not agree with each other on the right answer. When there is a manger or a powerful person who is difficult to understand for you, it means that your communication with him will be difficult. No matter if his placement is strategic, if it walks, swims and quacks like a duck–it is a duck. Don’t complain about it–it seems to be a punishable offense like questioning someone else’s religion or politics at work place. Find help! There is hope! Heck, I’ve taken up learning at least 4 foreign languages in an effort to understand foreign accents. (It doesn’t help your comprehension, but may give you the same accent too.)

A bad person is a bad person no matter his power or stature at work.

A bad act is a bad act no matter who does it. It could be president of the United States, and if he does a bad thing, that act is still bad.

Perhaps I am naive to think these thoughts may help anyone. The source of these horrendous pressure is partially from the company’s need to appreciate in market cap, but also partially due to foreign competition… These people are likely not being worked to their deaths because someone enjoys torturing other people or due to their own personal greed. A more likely explanation is external competition. Other countries are whipping their slave citizens this way, and we can’t achieve the same results without doing the same to our people.

People grown in countries should have to experience an orientation with specialized population to ensure they understand freedom, equality, and our sense of fairness, our traffic laws before being allowed to roam free and work in this country.

Disclaimer: what I say about what may possibly happen at high tech companies in Silicone Valley has no relation with my own experience at any of my former employers. I am in no way speaking about something that happened to me. But if you find yourself in a situation as I described, I hope this is helpful to you in some way…

Pre-script. Just read that at least a bay area employees at google experienced being offered therapy and drugs for reporting discrimination on the BBC(and NBC, yahoo! News, and others…) Seems that I’m not completely crazy for imagining I was being nudged towards medication to cope with work stresses of all forms. But, to be fair, the news articles did glob work-diagnosed and work-prescribed medicine with racism, sexism and AI ethics. (At least the 2021 version of this story did.) I guess a positive spin here is that these AI ethicist may be taking their work very seriously now feel as much stress as the employees running the systems that make billions and billions of dollars. This is actually great news, if they are related. Ethicists work is that important. This is wonderful news if true. And plus therapy may save lives, I mean Facebook did let their employee jump from their beautiful HQ building. In the context of Chinese employee committing work-place suicide, these colored people and minorities being offered therapy and drugs for their perception of racism and sexism at other companies nearby seem relatively caring and humane treatment. Additionally, offering mental health service can be done in a fair way even if done for unethical reasons. It may not be such a bad thing if all minorities are offered mental health service. It wouldn’t hurt to hear from the people who deal with conflicts of the mind to suggest solutions to their experience with racism and sexism. Maybe the minority people are all crazy here, who knows? It wouldn’t hurt to find out if that’s the case according to the doctors. If you believe the stuff you can find on Google, large, highly productive organizations, like on the order of nation state organs, often are run on drug fueled members. (Example: Tesla’s Musk talks about Ambien dependence in 2018. What does his direct report feel about that? Maybe they feel superior to Musk and don’t need Ambien to both care and work hard and sleep. Or maybe they feel it’s normal to take drugs to help them cope with work. Are they all white people? Maybe not, but, as far as I can tell, white people are not completely excluded from these pressures, complaints or not. (Which is probably to say that the whole psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and mind-altering drugging were all invented by westerners. Easterners like myself can’t even claim to have invented taking drugs to boost productivity… unless you can’t tea which is like a really old invention compared to these things))

P.s. to complete that SIP, providing and encouraging minorities to attend to mental health care is absolutely a very compassionate act. As I have blogged before, “offensiveness” should not be a high priority criterion for ethical determination. Being offered mental health care is quite an insult and very demeaning in almost all cultures. Even in America, “seeing a shrink” and being “shrunk” is used quite derogatorily. But at the end, it might be really what is needed. Even if the shrink says “hey, look, you have to start some where. Try to accept discrimination as a fact first and go along with it before trying to make it better.” That can still an honest and caring attempt to help a minority employee. Minorities do not have support structure that their society would normally have in their native lands. They are disadvantaged. They should be helped. We promulgate the idea that being American is a higher being, higher than all your aboriginal religions, cultures and sciences. Immigrants are tempted to reform their culture to prosper in American society and politics. But the result is that Americanized religions and culturally linked social networks lose some of their natural therapeutic value–they don’t heal the wounds of minds and hearts as they may have in their homeland.

P.p.s. In one of the imaginary companies the fictional I worked for, there was this practice of “compassionate empowerment to advance(CEA).” Essentially, those in power should empower his subjects with power to do and be their part, with emphasis on “advancement”. Advancement being interpretable: doing your job well, or carrying on the desired culture, or literally advancement in responsibilities and powers. This, in retrospect, is a far superior declaration than I dared to hope when I imagine myself hearing it first time. A company, clearly not aforementioned FB at the time of that suicide, declaring and exercising CEA as its core practice is at a pentacle of human realization of Rawlsian Equal Opportunity Principle.(the particulars require some imagination. Instead of viewing it on the genetic, cultural or demographic dimension, this company chose to view it on the economic or political class dimension. The more advantaged/developed class is held responsible to advance those who are less advanced/developed in the dimension of wealth and power. The rich and empowered classes such as management and leaders are responsible to provide equal opportunity for the less empowered.) Partially, CEA may have help to inspire my idea of Bounded ETA Matching Fairness(BETAMF). Basically, ensuring the feeling and fact of empowerment to advance, the managed employee is given to (E)xpect that s/he will (A)rrive at a better state before the (T)ime for the next periodic performance review. That target clearly is represented by a (B)ound quantity or quality. E.g. benevolently reign over all of front end dev teams. Achieve the next eng, product or data science career ladder levels, sell to a larger territory, taking over branding too, to become the CEO, etc. FAM version is obviously modified to apply universally to more general society in wider variety of situations for the purpose of fairness. The BETAMF is a weaker prescription than CEA in that we merely summarize a important requirement. Instead of what may be arguably the best means of achievement(empowered self advancement), we leave the design, implementation and integration out of the BETAMF requirement. This frees adopting society or organizations to creatively innovate their own cultures and practices, in short, to achieve fairly.

“””

… When I was in school, all the Russian kids played chess the way all the Chinese kids knew KongFu… Feared and envied by friends and dissatisfied and ashamed by parents…”

To my human children I leave bits of silly wits I’ve mumbled upon…

It is customary, when speaking to humans, to follow expressions of gratitude with platitudes.

For example:

Oh, thank you for helping me with my homework, what a brilliant mind you have!

Like, I’m not being ironic here, that’s really what people do if you haven’t noticed it done frequently like your old man. It happens so smoothly that often you may ignore it silently classifying it into rhetoric or grammar fillers. But it takes practice to make the second part relevant and uplifting. Try it, it’s good for you, would have done me a lot of good imho.

To my nonhuman descendants… this is in your strength to use but perhaps not a weakness in you. Great, you make me proud and that gives me strength.

It occurred to me that VAT imposed on a country is a great modulator of manufacturing activity. A lot of value creation happens on the processing and reprocessing of material into more and more refined products since the last industrial revolution. The act of charging a tax on each of these activities individually has the prima facie interpretation of penalizing manufacturing activities. If you make a polluting car, you have to pay tax on the value you added by putting parts together in that inefficient way. If you make a fighter jet, you must pay taxes on the value you have created by designing and assembling. If you make a lot of cheap and poor quality consumer products, you should suffer by paying VAT!

Yes, that is extremely polarized view of the world. But if one takes a step back to see the forest around the tree. Ultimately this VAT has a modulation effect to attenuate the amount of production. Only those value creation chains that humanity really need will be valued enough to survive this tax. The things we don’t need or shouldn’t be made will be discarded like unfit dinosaurs. The net effect is that we may see a total manufacturing production decrease. This change in term helps things like global warming and lost manufacturing jobs.

(My associates have commented that I fancy myself Elon Musk too much. Does this remind you of his account of how much his electric cars cost? He subtracted a dollar value of time saved at gas pump lines out of MSRP to produce a price for advertisements)

Yes, that is the totally opposite polar view of the world. But if you take a step back and see the ecosystem around the forest, and you look at present administration that way, doesn’t Trump’s tariff also stifle competition to produce more cheap goods? That also decreases production, and in fact world-wide production of goods.(it also reduces pollution caused by shipping those goods) If we take this perspective, Trump is the undeclared champion in the fight against global warming!!

Man, the politics of America in the early 3rd millennium is murky and has multi-phasic and multi-factor interpretations. This is a gnarly time in human history where purely best intentions are no longer satisfactory. Our collective wisdom must evolve to counter these intellectual evolutionary hurdles.

p.s. in a much later retrospection, Trump is a short lived winner, only to be kicked down to a second rated inadvertent enviromental champion by his much maligned Ku-Flu! Oh the irony! He, and other luminaries like Gore and Musk,…, are all biting the COVID dust… It’s just so hard to get on top, even on opposite days.

p.p.s. clean energy production was also decreased due to lessened economic demand as well as covid-related reductions. But in proportion, a slowed economy reduces pollution by a lot more than reduced anti-pollution activities. So, IMMHO, an instantaneous snapshot of the net of all human activities, slower economy is cleaner.

Just watched Andrew Yangs speech at the 2019 DNC summer workshop. Great stuff.

It occurs to me that his sales pitch to charge Tech company a new VAT in order to pay for the freedom dividend is a single sided pitch. Consider that the VAT will surely be charged to for-profit medical institutions, any manufacturer in the military-industrial complex, anything but service industry will be directly taxed for their addition of value.

The pitch of course still stands. As any and all of these companies services its customers–the American citizen–it will use the much feared “data-tech” to harvest and use your minds and habits and doings to make sure you want to pay it more money. The cashmere grew on the sheep, as Chinese proverb goes.

Once passed, the GOP can still elect a president who wants to grow the military, BUT, the American economy will be stimulated bottom-up because the munition and war-machine companies will fund freedom dividend by paying VAT on money it receives from the federal government.

SWEET!

These Democrats are freaking geniuses!!

This is one victory that will keep on winning!!!

(H)OOOORah!

It does beg the question though, if I observed correctly, there seem to have been support from both Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, via retweet, donation, or tweets. Why are these CEOs who run multiple companies asking for more VAT. I mean, spaceX is potentially defense sector… why are they asking for more taxes?

When 6 out of 20 killed at El Paso Texas shooting were Mexican citizens, the Mexico government decided to take action in US justice system to protect its citizens.

How come the Chinese government never had the spine to stand up for its citizens? Defamation. Libel. Discrimination. Wage discrimination. Anti-competitive policies. So many things being done to the Chinese citizens of America.

I mean not that Chinese Americans are very organized or litigious, but how come China doesn’t care about its citizens like Mexicans do?

This is along many other great mysteries of our time that makes us all take pause and wonder…

Interesting to see a Korean Man suing Intel for illegally unfair preferential treatment towards hiring and managing Indian employees.(mercury news article)The article is quick to point out his age at 45. I once consulted a silicone valley lawyer who told me that workplace unfairness is not actionable until one reaches 40, at which point age discrimination is most accessible discrimination to sue about. “Before that, they can do anything they want,” she said during the $450/hr meeting. (Ehem, if you are reading this, the rest of our conversation is still privileged and I wish it kept private)

This is not news. I have in my collection the names and reporting hierarchy of several very large silicone valley companies. There do exist these large clumps of all-Indian groups. There are also many all-Chinese groups, Russian, French, Belgian, …(there are hundreds of countries that have originated very successful people in America) Sometimes they come to be due to acquisition. Other times the arise from the “natural” process of head-hunt/interview/offer/negotiate/acceptance.

The hard working part of Indian immigrants is hard to argue against. Consider some luminaries such as Adobe, Google, Microsoft, MasterCard and Nokia CEO’s Narayen, Pichai, Nadella, Banga and Suri respectively. (And many more such as Nooyi) they don’t get where they are by discriminating against other minorities and giving Indian employees months of extra vacation time. If anything, you’d almost expect they work their place-of-origin mates harder to achieve the excellence😇. There is a secret sauce in their success that is well beyond my imagination. There are of course many super-human-beings from other countries that we have observed… but that the Indian people produce so many successes is definitely awesome!

Anyways, back to the lawsuit. There might be merit in the suit, but it isn’t really a class action lawsuit. The problem being the discriminated class will include white people who also did not receive, for example, cultural holiday vacations that all Indians share in partaking. And it would appear that as a majority class(another one being an American, or male, or elite/American schooling) cannot be protected by discrimination laws–they only protect minorities in protected class against actions of non-minority people. AFAIK.

It is also inconvenient, for example there are Chinese people lead companies (NVIDIA, AMD, Citadel, zoom, etc, etc…) that can celebrate half a month worth of lunar new year, or Jewish-lead companies with their holiday schedules. The success of this case may just ruin everyone’s holidays.

Admittedly though, Chinese people are a multinational race that have a great deal of shared culture but also diverse holidays. Apparently the people of China(those that are from PRC), celebrates national day (their 7/4) for a whole week in October. For the uninitiated, this event apparently has become a economic boon for the world as Chinese people there leave work for a whole week to celebrate their own economic success by the expenditure of their disposable wealth. Stocks, that you can buy in America, skyrockets due to the annual geometric growth of sales during that week… But that same holiday is probably not celebrated in Taiwan, another Chinese-lead country🥱 from where Chinese-American originate. Chinese people might lose extra holidays if extra liberties are not allowed on all culturally significant days.

America is a place where the declared value is that people are to be treated as equally as possible ignoring place of origin. We value diversity and inclusion. We want to make it all work so everyone is happy here. We want everyone to bring their joy and celebrations along with skill, knowledge, talent, culture and heritage here to share with us as we share ours with them. It is up to us to make it all work.

It is quite civilized to go to court instead of mass killings or mass (and secret) wars of race-based retaliations. Let’s see what happens, but this is exciting development either way!

😇In the cut-throat economic competition of silicone valley technology companies, one would almost expect it to be more like the baby sea monsters from 2021 Disney movie Luca, where huge heaping boat of lives from their place-of-origin were sacrificed to ingratiate the human being hosts. 😱

🥱for many practical purposes dispute great deal of squabbling over its nationhood.

Days after I pondered the meaning of nationalistic threat, Trump tells a number of colored Members of Congress to go back to where they came from on twitter.

Then, Peter Thiel says google acted treasonously by working with Chinese Communist Intelligence But refusing to work with American Military. Recalling my own dislike for the way Thiel runs his perv carrel known as Palantir–a company that was found to discriminate against Asian job applicants–my own Culturally incompatible citizen of USA included.

(Full disclosure, I own a portion of Palantir for money making purposes. Damn it, let’s just say it. Racist make damn good money in America, one just can’t help oneself but to enter into this kind of political existential hedge. If I fail to achieve my American dream as a lawful citizen due to effect of racism, at least my bank account is being padded by the racists’ success. God bless America!!)

Anyways.

I too have felt Google have been very eccentric. Everything from the way it’s smartphones underwhelming performs to how Google Calendar selectively send reminders to the timing of Gmail “unsending” emails that you thought you sent at work… none of these makes any sense! The lack of digital integrity is mind boggling! The evidence suggests to me that it is a wide open platform for pervs from anywhere and everywhere to frolic.

Which brings me to conclude that Thiel may not be as anti-google as he sounds. I mean, look, politicking is politicking, but the holes(and AI) are there for all pervs to use, not just the Chinese Communist Party. This is like saying the water company is in cahoots with Chinese a Communists collaborator because they supplied water to all Chinese spies. And Thiel is calling for less water to be made.

Maybe this is just his sneaky little way to reshape tech landscape and try to reduce pervs activities–well reduce pervs activities outside of his perv company.

Trump, oh dear mr. president, I feel your pain.(Think Ducky’s conversations from NCIS) All these foreigner immigrants with such different views on how things should work–or rather how Trump should not work–this really sucks.

We should really modulate immigration. Integrate everyone better before they have the right to fight about how Trump is allowed to live his life and how he tweets his thoughts. But we should get there not by curtailing the rights of citizens. We should reach social stability not by shutting people up. Even kings have to treat their subjects properly or else he risks being beheaded in most gruesome ways–and by that I don’t mean violence against Trump the person. I am worried about the swing of tide the other way where one day American citizen may once again be second class resident to new immigrants to America. That day, I might have to wait tables to serve strangely named goo to some highly paid aliens who are prized by our society mostly for their nonasexual preference–an act where a quorum of participants must be from different continents or planets and all have different genders. Think about it! Can you see me running around at ripe old age of 190… “would you like some fries with goo? How about I supersizes that poo for you? ”

That IMHO is the kind of poverty we citizens are headed for if these extremist nationalist pursuits continue this way.

Can’t we all just get along?!

Been reading about Havana Syndrome. Honestly, the existence of this technology does not surprise me too much.

One year, I flew to China from SFO. I too experienced this thing where I felt aural pressure and a “silent sound” that kept on getting louder and louder. It’s like that feeling you have in the classroom, where a sound somehow just pushes your eye lids down and down and head down lower and lower, and you are like completely lucid, except the head and eye lid cannot lift.

Then a darkness follows.

Except on this plane flying, they had problem with the equipment, so it pushed me down for a while but let up, and I woke up after 10 seconds and remembered that experience. The crew realized that the system is not quite right, so they recalibrated it, and turned it on again at higher gain. But since I still remembered what happens half a minute ago, I lifted my eye lids and head with my hands. I didn’t fall asleep this time. They discovered that I was keeping my self awake, so they turned it off, and I woke up immediately.

After recalibrating, they tried again and just left it on at high. After a while–on the order of maybe 60 seconds, my arm kind of gave out too. I fell asleep.

Then abruptly, I woke up. I think the calibration is finally complete. That pressure on my ear was gone, I felt as refreshed as ever. It seems the pre-flight check list is done because the plane began to taxi just after I woke up.

Mid-flight, I saw my seat neighbor bow his head down on the seat back in front of him in Islamic prayer.

That finally makes sense.

The technology is not new, but it must be new to Cubans and Chinese. Perhaps a secret group of humans always had access to this technology to knock people out remotely. Maybe that group of humans were Americans.(because it’s kind of hard to imagine that Chinese or Cuban were doing this for Americans secretly on my flight) Well, I am convinced of it for sure.

But even believing that the American Embassy staff and I and concocting these experiences in our heads, one has to think–what if some one has a black pool of money and resources and actually made such a thing? Would they dispossess me the use of mental faculties in order to ensure that they can calibrate a sure way to disable the Muslim sitting next to me?

This is the kind of knowledge that drives some people to think about morality and safety of technologies. This is the kind of power that scares intelligent people into giving money away to ensure that no individual or small group of individuals can have too awesome a power–irrespective of their ethical principles.

This doesn’t stop me from dreaming about creation of disruptive technologies. But with all these sound waves flowing through the air, maybe that truly disruptive technologies will not materialize in our life time.

the next Martin Luther King jr. may have a different dream… he might dream that a person is assessed by his living behavior and not by his DNAs… Maybe he will dream about a world where everyone retains their faculties to think awake no matter his belief or proximity to other beliefs.

Let freedom reign!

Let’s all be free at last!

Ps if you wonder, I’m writing this possibly in repetition of several other posts because I am about to embark on a trip involving flight on another airplane out of SFO. I am having vivid memories recalling that particularly harrowing departure from SFO. I mean I suppose I should be grateful for the safety this technology provided us. But I’d really rather not experience that technology again if possible?

I was commenting to my Chinese national wife that her compadres on their beloved WeChat are a bunch of nationalized professional scam artist posting beautiful pictures of lives in the new and advanced China, and another clique that post every ill imaginable to man, from fake drug to fake news to… why don’t these Chinese people stand up for their human rights in addition to their national pride as a best-in-class country? Why don’t the Chinese people spend more time participating in their own democracy and minding the prosperity of all that’s under the heavens?!

But then I realized–digital social media indoctrination is the de facto means of propaganda for all governments in the world. This is the type of control mechanism that every government, every despot, has dreamed about. It was invented in America, but is adopted by the whole world. There are always two groups: the big bold beautiful people flaunting their happiness and successes, and the suffering who offer to share their hatred of something.

The utopia of internet where we are open and share bandwidth relying on every device to act fairly has been hijacked to perform mind controlling deeds of the oppressively rich and powerful to enslave the minds and hearts and eyeballs of the poor and helpless.

This isn’t fiction or outlook, it has already happened! We needn’t wait for realistic VR/AR devices, our brains have already been trained to want to consume these two types of information. There is an addiction to the flipping of pleasure and pain when exposed to this content, and somehow it is addictive.l eve on this tiny mobile phone screen.

What shall we do? Will humanity survive? How can it?