It's not just millions. Shanahan received over a billion dollars when divorcing Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan

Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money.

It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)

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maest 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible

If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.

The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.

So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.

An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.

Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.

	▲	yourapostasy 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder whether we're trending towards a high-sensor variation of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" / Vannevar Bush's Memex that ingests the details of a user's daily life (the smart glasses being a primitive first example products of such) and identifies salient information in their lives can help us perform mass customization of instructions into direct prescriptives, with backing evidentiary data for SME's. Instead of "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", the interaction becomes "do this, anticipate that outcome" to the user, and if an SME (a doctor in your example) asks about it, the system recalls and presents all the factors that went into deciding upon the specific prescriptive.

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ngcazz 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

While Brin comes back to Google to advocate for 60h workweeks as it lays off thousands of employees.

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neilv 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment.

I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.

I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.

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MagicMoonlight 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why would I want to be paid the same amount as any moron that gets in? What motivation is there for me to work hard?

	▲	neilv 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		* You like the mission. * You like the craft. * You want to be there for your team. * You like that your financial needs are taken care of, so that you don't have to think about that. * You like that everyone else's financial needs are taken care of, because you want everyone to be happy. * You like that there's alignment by everyone on this. (Even though there will be disagreements on, say, how best to accomplish the mission.) If someone gets in and doesn't actually have or find motivations like that, or doesn't rise to the occasion despite help, I guess they'd be managed out. That cultural mismatch wouldn't be good for anyone involved.
	▲	aleph_minus_one 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Why would I want to be paid the same amount as any moron that gets in? You answered your question by yourself: the company has to prevent these morons from getting in.
	▲	TeMPOraL 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's what's beautiful about this scheme: people with attitude you presented would self-select out of it. That solves half of the problem of typical work dynamics already; the second half, preventing unqualified morons from getting in and setting themselves up for life by being paid good money for doing nothing, would need to be solved in some other way.

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Balinares 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honestly, though, screw even that.

There are so many things worth doing in so many areas that pinning your whole weekly life on a single one is just an immense waste.

Cap the time that a company gets to have from you, and achieve so much more.

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ngcazz 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay? I'm not making a point about how long individuals should want to spend working (although this being 2026 I believe it should be less not more)

Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company

His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable

This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few

	▲	neilv 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I fully agree about the labor rights concerns. (In my head at 2am, I was (wrongly) taking that as a given, understood by everyone, and then remarking on a tangent from there. About the implications of 60hr/wk at Google specifically. And then going from there, about how maybe it didn't have to be like that. Moot for Google in reality, but it makes a good example for what-if thinking or daydreaming about how we'd like the next good tech employer to be.)