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Stanford grads walk out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai speech (twitter.com)
74 points by sosomoxie 1 hour ago
7 comments

Seems this has more to do with Palestine and Google's involvement with Israel to provide cloud computing.
Which is kinda sad that Stanford students are so out of touch with the reality.

Both sides are bad and evil. They both want to annihilate each other. Yet Stanford students only criticize one side.

Stanford students are criticizing Google for enabling Israel. If Google was providing support for Hamas they could protest that too.
I've never seen any protest by students that protested against Palestine.

In fact, at University of Washington, a protest was organized to support Palestine after the Oct 7 massacre on Oct 8; they chose to show support Palestine after Palestine did a massacre. And there was a very little criticism on that kind of actions.

> I've never seen any protest by students that protested against Palestine.

you should think long and hard why that is but answer is as always quite simple

We all know why, and the reason doesn't fit what you want to believe. That's why you pretend to be obscure about it. Otherwise, you would have just said so out loud already.
We both know they wouldn't, though.
Both governments may be but there isn’t a power balance between the two in any appreciable way nor in a civilian casualty balance, especially concerning children casualties.
I think Stanford students are not out of touch. Google has enough revenue to sustain itself but yet they decided to become an arms dealer. CEOs only care about the shareholder.
yes, the kid trying to fight back is equal to the adult punching down.

This is the time of moral fortitude of a 12 year old.

Let's not victim blame here. Would you have called the Indians evil for wanting to have liberty from the british occupiers? What about the many other european colonies in Asia and Africa, were the locals "evil" for wanting to resist and get liberty?
lol you clearly think the Palestine side are worse, stop being disingenuous and say it with your chest.

Only one side is being armed and funded by our tax dollars, and that’s good enough reason to protest.

Indeed: hamas is funded, directly and indirectly, through foreign aid. Foreign aid is paid from taxes, including US taxes.. Why? They hold the Gazan population hostage, also for taxes, and make it so any aid for Palestinians funds hamas.

This means EVERYONE in the west is funding hamas. US/EU. You pay taxes? You're funding hamas. You heat or drive a car with fossil fuels in the EU? You're funding hamas.

> Only one side is being armed and funded by our tax dollars

I mean, yeah, I would heavily prefer for one of the sides in this conflict to be much better funded and armed than the other. Specifically, the side that I consider to be fundamentally in the right in the conflict.

Whichever side I am talking about is not relevant to the point. What's relevant to the actual point I am trying to make, is that I don't think that one side being better armed and funded serves as a reasonable indicator of which side is right/wrong in a given conflict.

your current employer funds the Israelis
...hence the protesting?
> you clearly think the Palestine side are worse

You only think that in order to fit your narrative... even I already stated the contrary.

> that’s good enough reason to protest.

Clearly, this protest isn't about that. The protest is about criticizing Israel's actions.

It's you who should stop being disingenuous

If only there weren't so many reasons.
I wonder what percentage of total graduates walked out? The video shows maybe around 50 people at all. The title makes it seem like everyone graduating walked out.
Speech itself was kind of fun: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s...

Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine.

> But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.

Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI.

The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.

I went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.
Tech leaders from this era will not be remembered well.
What was the speech on?
It was a commencement speech. Here's a transcript: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s...
No mention of AI at all.
Good kids - proud of them.