CaputHumerus

That’s sort of an over-read of that statistic. It is not the case that 100% of things Trump is willing to sign are worth voting against: this has been a strangely productive Congress on a handful of bipartisan issues, and not everything a Republican votes for is a misguided, idiotic ACA repeal.

For context: about half of all Democrat senators “vote with” Republicans at least 30% of the time or more. And remember, Jones came to the Senate AFTER a lot of the craziest stuff he would have voted against had already been through the Senate. Much of the Dem caucus ran up their anti-Trump numbers in those opening months while Republicans were still victory-lapping and trying to ram through totally batshit legislation.

Hey Kara! One of my proudest Twitter moments was when you liked one of my tweets a million years ago, so I'm super happy to get to ask a question, especially since I'm such a devotee of Recode/Decode.

What do you make of Google's attempt to work with the Chinese government to develop a search engine? You (and many others) have reported that there are strong headwinds internally at Google--mostly from employees who loathe the idea of having to work on a search engine that is designed to censor democratic ideas.

You've been pretty darn on-point with your predictions regarding Google. So... what do you think is going to happen here? Think it'll get released? What kinds of stakeholders are actually influential over a decision to make a product like this? Is it just the C-suite, or are there internal voices we don't know about that are really influential on this issue? Do you think Google has sufficient manpower willing to work on it?

Yep. Sounds right. That column was actually the reason I asked the part of my question about other stakeholders. Normally in business, shareholder uproar is a common reason companies reverse course, but the biggest Silicon Valley companies are so mindbogglingly liquid that they can safely ignore their investors for the most part--but they DON'T when it comes to ethical stuff. There seems to be such a strong resistance to being seen as evil in the Valley (which I assume is because evil is incompatible with recruiting in a field of hopey-changey companies that pay about the same).

It'll be really interesting to see what happens when Google builds this thing should ethical investing firms respond by publicly exiting the company. Such a product would so clearly support an anti-democratic regime that it seems safe to assume it would happen. Google may not HAVE to bow to their pressure, but I sincerely doubt they'll be insulated from the blowback. Here's hoping it's enough, because, I totally agree: this isn't something Google should participate in.