Google fired James Damore yesterday for writing about diversity and the Mountain View campus’s “ideological echo chamber” on a private, internal message board intended for critiques of the company’s policies. The memo’s full text is worth the read. His swift termination reminds me of how dictators welcome dissent with open arms, but only as a tool to sniff out and exterminate any detractors.

With over 70,000 employees, it’s not surprising Google found him disposable. Damore was the sacrificial lamb that allows us to continue to sweep our differences of opinion under the rug.

In a 10-minute video, Raymond Schillinger, reporting for Bloomberg, chronicles the golden era of helicopter commuting in New York City and finds signs of a modern-day industry revival.

The EFF writes critically about GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare’s decision to drop the Daily Stormer as a customer:

Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t.

What has gone largely without mention during this debate is that GoDaddy, Google, Squarespace, Cloudflare, OkCupid (really), and others are getting credit for making the easy, popular choice. They don’t own claim to the moral high ground by succumbing to public pressure to censor their networks. Cloudflare’s CEO himself wrote that his decision was “arbitrary” and “dangerous”.

Maciej Cegłowski talks about the future of AI, the hypothetical dangers, and the too-real zaniness of its biggest proponents. The transcription is a longer read (his motto is “brevity is for the weak”), but it is deeply amusing and thought-provoking.