• ChexMax@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    CEO of Ben &Jerry’s. They are not just posting the black square on their insta and then moving on, like half their posts are about fighting inequity, encouraging people to vote for actual human rights, openly pro abortion, pro immigrant rights, pro black rights, pro women’s right, about fighting climate change etc. they are walking the walk, conservative dollars be damned

  • Ænima@lemm.ee
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    18 days ago

    This CEO, Gabe Newell, and (if he was still alive) the founder of Little Caesars, who, if I recall correctly, secretly paid for Rosa Parks apartment until her death.

    • greenhorn@lemm.ee
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      18 days ago

      The founder of Little Caesars was a typical magnate developer who bought up much of downtown Detroit and let it rot until he received tax incentives to build, and kicked out many low income residents from apartments he let sit until they got city money. His family continues this tradition. The Rosa Parks thing is the only good thing I’ve ever heard of that man and his family do.

    • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Add Steve Wozniak to the list of the ones to be protected. The Woz has done more to pull people up and we should all aspire to that level if we ever have the means.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Woz isn’t a CEO and was stabbed in the back so many times he makes the Ten of Swords look like a sign for future friendships

          • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            in terms of being betreayed? sure.

            In terms of being the salvation and the light? Nah, that’s Linus

            • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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              17 days ago

              Linus is the drunken uncle of the tech backbone, let’s be real here. Woz is the supportive one after being in abusive relationship after abusive relationship.

              After every instance of getting relatively screwed over (he still made bank, just not as much) he still founded and ran groups that focussed on pushing the envelope of tech or improving less advantaged youth into stem fields

              • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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                17 days ago

                Linus is the drunken uncle of the tech backbone, let’s be real here. Woz is the supportive one after being in abusive relationship after abusive relationship.

                Woz is Bill Dautrive, Linus is Rusty Shackleford :P

        • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          He’s been on multiple board of directors and founded several orgs. While not a CEO, he’s certainly in the same sphere and must be protected.

    • tino@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Gabe Newell owns fleets of yachts and private jets. The man is using your sweet gaming money to burn the planet.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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        17 days ago

        maybe he’s just buying up all the yachts and private jets so no one else can have them.

      • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
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        17 days ago

        Yeah we need a source.

        Also, as far as CEO’s go, speaking from an outside perspective obviously, the man is wonderful. Valve makes solid business decisions in favor of long term growth instead of short term profits. They do this buy making sure that their platform is easy, safe, reliable, and not abusive for their consumers. They institute their own consumer protections into the platform that make them less money, just to make sure they remain a place we WANT to shop, when everyone else tries to make themselves the only place to shop, and then fucking over their consumers at every opportunity. Valve is a fucking case study on how companies should be ran, and a perfect display of how modern american capitalism is ruining everything, by being the antithesis of it.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Nah people need to stop jerking off Gabe and valve I general.

      They started predatory lootboxes, ridiculously expensive cosmetics, early access, owning a licence instead of the actual game, had to be sued just to get refund policy and the vast vast majority of his wealth has come from just skimming a bit off from people who actually make games he distributes.

      If you look at valve without the “omg steams sale XXXDDD”" mentality, then they are no better than ea or Activision.

      • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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        18 days ago

        He also normalized hosting kid’s content and adult/gambling content on the same platform. Anyone who tried to open up a game store that also sold adult material would get crucified nowadays.

        The reason Steam is praised so much is because unlike EA and Activision, regardless of what they try to push that they shouldn’t, they do put in the effort of going back and looking at issues from gamer’s eyes. Those cosmetics? They came about at a time when P2W was much more of a concern, and paying for something merely visual was considered much more acceptable. Early access? It came about from trying to open up development to more indies instead of just the big devs and publishers. Licensing instead of owning? The alternative were much more costly physical copies that also degraded with time and which you had to maintain a backup of yourself. If your local game store didn’t have it, you were screwed, and there could be no discounts. Porn on the platform? Don’t care, not a child and I’m responsible.

        Even then, I still damn Valve on both normalizing licenses on a subscription service that were it not for its market dominance could easily be teetering right now along with most people’s game library’s, and for not bothering to make an adult/gambling only version of a game store. GOG needs a competitor (remember Devotion and now Nine Sols), and it has none. It is possible to make money and be a digital distribution service without being a subscription service. There should be far more distance between adult and predatory content and normal gaming content, not all parents are responsible and it more easily creates communities predators can target from overlapping interests.

        • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Making the claim that adult content = predators preying on children has a couple issues:

          1. Predators are incredibly rare, and it has been repeatedly shown that these claims of predators-behind-every-account are blown out of proportion for political scare reasons (see Satanic Panic, all of human history for more examples).
          2. Even if the above weren’t true, why on earth would those people be spending their time on adult content instead of, say, roblox or minecraft? You know, games for children, that children play?

          The debate over steam hosting adult content is some really regressive stuff. An alternative take, the one I hold, is “It’s really heartening to see a major content platform not giving in to the conservative moralists that view anime tiddies as somehow damaging to the fabric of society. Making sexuality a less shameful topic for discussion also, conveniently, reduces ‘shame’ as an effective lever for preying on children, and makes them more likely to come forward and tell people when they’re actually in danger”.

          • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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            18 days ago

            All it takes is another client, a lot of argument for not wanting to take one iota of minimal responsibility. Predators are not rare, they literally fuel television series regarding them. They don’t have to be many to be a threat, either, all it takes is a small number of very active ones. They do target children’s game, having adult content facilities introducing children to it as “lol lemme gift u / giv u dis CD key its so sik”. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/us/video-games-child-sex-abuse.html - What alternate reality do you live in?

            • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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              18 days ago

              The first sentence of that article lists Minecraft and Fortnite.
              Neither of those games are available on Steam.

              So, and stop me if this is too wild a conclusion, it maybe just might possibly be the case that having separate storefronts doesn’t actually have any impact on sexual predation of minors in videogames.

              (Edit: actually, none of the games listed in that article are available on steam. Did… did you even read it?)

              • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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                17 days ago

                You were the completely utter moron who said predators “are incredibly rare”, I was just disproving it. Now you are just moving the goalpost. Yeah, time to disconnect from pervs who are asking to handhold them through basic logic they don’t want to see when all they will do is try to troll on whatever minutiae they think they can focus on to move the goalpost again.

                • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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                  17 days ago

                  That’s not moving the goalpost, that’s keeping the goalpost on the original topic. “Is steam making online predation worse by not having two separate storefronts” - Answer: Clearly, no, since there are multiple storefronts and that has nothing to do with how children are exploited online.

                  But if you want to talk about the rarity of predators (I’m taking the numbers in the article here): 1500 reported cases / year of sextortion in the US and nation partners is pretty damn rare. Even assuming non-reporting rates are 500x the value given in that article, that’s still 750,000 victims among ~1,000,000,000 people, or a 0.00075% victim rate. You’re only twice as likely to have been victimized per year as you are to have been struck by lightning. I don’t… like, I don’t know what else to call that but rare.

                  (The above numbers are just about sextortion, a very broad category of crime and that which is the crime in question here. Broadly, “pressuring kids online to send naked photos of themselves”. This number doesn’t include physical abuse crimes, I did confirm that in their sources.)

        • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          Fine, kick the kids off. It’s better that way. Heaven forbid there be a place with both kinds of content. Imagine what would happen if bookstores or streaming services or years ago video rental places would do if they had all kinds of content. Oh and imagine that Steam had a filter to hide all that adult content wouldn’t that just be absolutely crazy?

          Not everything has to be safe for kids. Kick them the fuck out if it’s an issue. Don’t dumb down the adults experience.

            • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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              17 days ago

              Oh we will survive. Somehow! Thank you for your concern young knave but do not waste your fretting on us! Chin up!

    • Starbuncle@lemmy.ca
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      18 days ago

      That’s a feature of Market Socialism, but we can’t call it that because sOcIalIsM sCaRy, so let’s go with Democracy in the Workplace.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        18 days ago

        Socialism is of course democratic. When people say “socialism is bad” what they mean is Socialism is good, and they’re thinking about Communism, which is actually also good but has never really been implemented properly.

      • Filthmontane@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        I mean, that’s literally the conclusion that Richard Wolff came to. Call it whatever, just as long as we do it.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Pirates had some of the purest forms of democracy. Their captains were democratically elected in many cases as well. Not sure why they came to mind when you said this… But if your going to rip people off, and democratically pick your leader, pirates formed your company right

    • bluewing@lemm.ee
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      17 days ago

      At the start of the Russian Revolution, the Soviets tried that. Even they quickly discovered that pure democracy didn’t work well when choosing “the boss.” They even went so far as to remove ranks from the military. Which failed even faster.

      Turns out, “the boss” often can’t afford to be popular or buddies with everyone when making decisions.

      • bunchberry@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Che Guevara wrote about in his book Critical Notes on Political Economy about how workers who are given full autonomy in their enterprises actually can become antagonistic towards society because they benefit solely from their own enterprise succeeding at the expense of all others, and thus they acquire similar motivations to the capitalist class, i.e. they want deregulations, dismantling of the public sector, more power to their individual enterprise, etc.

        The solution is not to abandon workplace democracy but to balance it out also with public democracy. You have enterprises with a board that is both a mixture of direct appointments from the workers at that company with their direct input, as well as appointments by the public sector / central government. The public appointments are necessary to make sure the company is keeping inline with the will of everybody and not merely the people at that specific enterprise, because the actions of that enterprise can and does affect the rest of society.

        Workplaces need to be democratic, but also not autonomous from the democratic will of the rest of society.

        • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          “on a long enough timeline, the primary purpose of every organization becomes its own continued existence”

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Yeah… no.

      Reality is sometimes the boss has to be bossy. Quadrupling salaries and cutting 4 days a week from the schedule sounds great for employees until the business fails.

      What should be implemented is a maximum ratio of executive/worker pay (including contractors so they don’t just outsource cheap labor to cheat the system) based on 5-year averages.

      Without the 5-year rule, and new CEO can come in, give everyone massive raises, and burn the company down for a quick buck.

      • Filthmontane@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        The boss can still be bossy if elected. Your 5 year rule is silly and does not address the overlying problem, which is that the CEO works for the shareholders and they only care about making record quarterly profit gains at any cost.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      18 days ago

      You could in fact create a company that operates like that if you wanted. The problem is that you can’t force every company to organize according to your preferences.

  • GambaKufu@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Couple of British examples of what should be the standard for modern business:

    Julian Richer, founder of Richer Sounds (hifi store in the UK), seems like one of the better capitalists around. He signed over majority control of the company to an employee trust when he turned 60, donates 15% of their profit to charity, runs a nonprofit dedicated to exposing corporate tax avoidance, campaigns against zero hours contracts, and devotes company resources to promoting unsigned bands: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Richer

    James Timpson recently stepped down as CEO of Timpson, another UK retailer that specialises in things like key cutting, shoe repairs, passport photos etc. He made it company policy to hire people who had been to prison and help them get back on their feet, and his campaign for prison reform saw him step down from the company to become Minister for Prisons in the current government. The company has a “Director of Happiness” who is paid to keep the front line staff happy, resulting in policies like getting the day off work on your kid’s first day of school, compassionate leave for the death of a pet, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timpson_(retailer)

  • kreskin@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Craig Jelinek the (CEO of costco until recently) was always considered a good guy for putting his employees first and concentrating on keeping a high bar for product quality.

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Privately owned at least means they aren’t slaves to their quarterly reports. Every time a company goes public, they’re subject to the delusion of infinite growth in a finite system.

        • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Really depends on the ownership structure. Backbiting private boards composed of kids and grandkids of founders that are just trying to claw as much out of their inheritance as possible are just as toxic. Coops are about the only thing I can respect.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        18 days ago

        In fairness SpaceX isn’t run by Musk, which is why it’s actually doing constructive things and not getting into culture war arguments every 15 minutes.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Same with their frozen pizzas? I had never bought one before, then saw they were on sale the other day and figured I’d try them. Think it was 4.99 a piece. (Bogo 9.99) The pepperoni and ricotta one wasnt bad. The sourdough wasn’t very decipherable, but better than many cheaper pizzas. The 5 cheese I can’t speak for… As I overcooked it. The timer went off and I checked it, said to myself the cheese could melt a bit more and closed the oven. Saw the bottle of strawberry wine I was making didn’t look like it was bleeding air properly next to the sink and decided I should slowly turn the cap to drain the pressure and let the fermentation continue. (Have gallons of strawberries I froze left over still from spring that I grew). Turned the lid a bit and it of course exploded so much worse than I expected. Ceiling, floor, cabinets and everything within 10 feet got hit. I went to the bathroom and took my shirt off washed myself, started cleaning up the mess and cleaning the ceiling, cabinets and finally the floor when I remembered, oh shit the pizza… Yeah. The cheese was melted by then… just a bit darker than intended

    • inkrifle@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Seconding this, Paul Newman was probably the best person to ever come out of the state of Ohio.

      He co-founded Newman’s Own, a food company which donates all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of May 2021, these donations totaled over US$570 million. Newman continued to found charitable organizations such as the SeriousFun Children’s Network in 1988 and the Safe Water Network in 2006.

      (Pasted from his Wikipedia page)

    • phx@lemmy.ca
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      17 days ago

      And, sadly, no longer available in Canada for some reason :-(

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
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      18 days ago

      Exclusively open source? Otherwise, you’ll spare Zuckerberg too. Facebook has given us a bunch of really cool open source projects.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Facebook has given us a bunch of really cool open source projects.

        did you mean honeypots?

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
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          18 days ago

          I only know honeypots to be something used to bait out illegal activities, so I don’t know what you mean by that.

          • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            honeypot is an enticing … thing that you use to gain an advantage over someone. I’m implying the facebook open source stuff is bait and they harvest something from you, be it data, legitimacy or something else.

            • howrar@lemmy.ca
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              18 days ago

              Oh, they use it to gain goodwill, attract talent, and get free labour. It’s no secret. Zuckerberg openly talks about this.

              I wouldn’t call it bait though. They’re legitimately good projects, and you’re free to make use of them while giving nothing back.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              18 days ago

              Unless you have some evidence to say otherwise the open source projects don’t report back to Facebook servers so they don’t collect data on anyone.

              It’s hosted on GitHub so if anything it collects data for Microsoft, and knowing Microsoft they don’t do anything coherent with the data.

    • JayleneSlide@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      … and actually gets their company to support it. My previous employer would only use FOSS when possible (good). But they refused to financially contribute to those projects (BOO!).

  • GiantChickDicks@lemmy.ml
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    18 days ago

    Bill Penzey would be safe in my book. Penzey’s spices are a fantastic product, but he’s an activist who very vocally supports equality, respect, and human dignity.

    Shortly after the election I received a blanket from them with a very kind note. Apparently they had a promotion where you could submit the name and address of someone who is struggling and could use a hug. I have no idea who nominated me, but I’m so grateful. Penzey’s didn’t change any money for this, which is crazy to me.

    • psion1369@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      I just went to the website and was my attention was first on the link “About Republicans”. An essay on the current fall of the Republican party and why they don’t believe in them anymore. I think they deserve some of my money.

      • GiantChickDicks@lemmy.ml
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        18 days ago

        You will be well rewarded with a quality product, too! It’s so good, even my MAGA mother in law is on their mailing list. If you enjoy the essay About Republicans, you’ll likely also love their emails. They have great sales, too. The weekend before the election they offered half off almost everything in their stores if you mentioned the promotion, and I got a free coffee mug, sticker, and sample product. They offered me two mugs because my partner came with me, but I didn’t want to be greedy.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        18 days ago

        An essay on the current fall of the Republican party

        This has been going on since at least the 2000s and possibly earlier, that’s the point at which I started paying attention to US politics. It was even noted in the Newsroom which I think is circa 2012

    • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Their emails are amazing. And the spices are very very good. I need to get some more of their vanilla. It was on sale, I think it might still be for today.

      Also there’s sometimes pictures of pets in the emails.

    • MarcomachtKuchen@feddit.org
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      18 days ago

      Great games but sadly working conditions at fromsoftware were not the greatest. Sure this is another country we’re work life balance is different then in Central Europe but the pay was not good given how much work is was and how successful the studio got. But to give credit where it is due, AFAIK there have been significant wage increases.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Maybe all CEOs get a yearly review. If they are good, they continue working. If something doesn’t add up, they get to choose to quit or they get executed right on the spot by placing their head between two large metal plates. The top plate is then dropped from 3 stories high.

  • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    My company’s owner/CEO can stay, gives us all sizeable profit share bonuses. During covid people didn’t get layed off, even though there was no work. Sure hours were reduced, but work was found around the shop to keep people busy as much as possible.

    In other words, small business owners that care about employee and their clients.

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Who stay small because they don’t squeeze their employees and their clients to grow. They care about risks when opening a new location, even if those risks are primarily to the people they’d hire.

      What’s it called when something grows out of control without regard to the welfare of their peers or the sustainability of the system?