They’ve rug pulled on users who got wise. Now on B2B.
Sundar is a sus CEO. Ballmer of the decade, knows how “Google works”, but was riding high on money printer going brr. He does not seem to have a clear vision forward with the cheap cash tap turned off.
At least here on the outside of Googleplexes, the feeling of a directionless Google/Alphabet is becoming very palpable.
I can't tell anymore what they're trying to do, earlier Google was exciting with new products and features for us techies. GMail launch was awe-inducing at the time, now we know such excitement came with the cost of a steady march of dead products and leaving a dissatisfied mass of users/consumers in its wake. The last big move playing out I remember from Google was YouTube's purchase.
I don't know what Google wants to do or be, it's has slowly became a big ball of mud around the cash cow from DoubleClick's acquisition...
Almost all of these billionaires' net worth is in stocks; that is, in their (part) ownership of companies. Redistributing their wealth is the same as taking ownership of their companies away from them. In that direction lies the Soviet Union.
So we could let them keep their stocks and not trade them for dollars; they own 100% of their company and the public is no longer obliged to acknowledge outsiders have ephemeral value beyond their direct contribution to society.
Demanding we believe in ephemeral property is spoken tradition not an immutable truth of reality. I am not saying we have to redistribute their wealth; I’m saying we stop idolizing wealth. Especially when tax policy and direct cash infusions from government is keeping these guys afloat. It’s not free market trade. Look at their tune change as soon as free money is shut off with interest rate changes; it’s not them it’s political policy. They’re not actually rich.
Because they’ve created immense value, jobs, and progress from which other human beings have benefited and will continue to benefit for years to come. Not sure why this is so hard to understand.
These people have delivered immense value on multiple levels. Removing the incentive for doing so would be discourage others. I would like to see more Teslas, more founders, and more progress - not less.
If their output does not improve the lives of others and society around them, then it’s certainly an issue. Otherwise I’m not concerned with their wealth and would be happy to see it grow as a biproduct of their continue effort.
Basically, fu Main Street, got mine. I wonder if they believe the meta-awareness the internet has provided will just go away if they crash tech/social media? That’s where all the progressive undesirables work, after all.
Past pols convinced people “trickle down” was sincere economics, not a bawdy joke. That Reaganomic funneling of wealth to the top was for their own good, and the public now blames modern progressives. A pols dedication to double speak is commendable.
Supply side economics has taken more people out of poverty than any kind of ISI or other internally focused development programmes. (I’ll also note I’m a far left person who believes there are many flaws with the global economic system but the raw facts don’t lie. Also, I’ve been poor and destitute unlike the majority of HN posters and understand how desultory and ineffective the majority of social programmes truly are - and this isn’t just an American perspective, as I’ve lived in nearly a dozen countries.)
What’s this have to do with being ruled by rent seekers? They don’t have an absolute plan, but Powell has been projecting his goals for months; stop the rise of wages. Deflate asset prices. That sure sounds like a plan. A vague one, but a plan. Opioid addiction was an intentional plan given the evidence at various trials.
The economy and where possible, the outcomes, are intentional. Cushion “the right people” with free money so they can ride the long hard dip. Gamble with everyone else. It’s all part of the spoken traditions so we readily accept it. The lords of finance demand sacrifice!
Generally I agree that liberal-ish do-goodery interventions are basically hokum, but in the good old days when there was a real socialist project in the form of the Soviet Union, left economics also pulled huge numbers of people out of poverty. The Bolshevik program of "socialism in one country" turned the leftovers of the Tsarist empire, mainly a mass of peasants who had in living memory been serfs, into an industrialized powerhouse with a quite high standard of living.
I'm not a tankie or Stalin apologist but it shows what is possible within a planned economy.
Not sure I agree when we now know the majority of their economic statistics were hokum and the average second world worker earned basically 10%-25% of what a Western European or American worker did. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/soviet-economy-1917-1991-its-...
Sure, (most) Russians made less than (most) Americans but they also importantly made more than workers in other parts of the world (the "third world") and even more importantly much much more than Russians were making in 1917. There is also probably a stability dividend at play here -- Soviet jobs were much more stable and so much more desirable even at the same level of pay.
> much much more than Russians were making in 1917
Which is true almost anywhere in the world. Obviously Russia was several decades behind western Europe in 1917. But I’d be very surprised in if the gap between Western Europe and Russia in this regard was considerably higher in 1915 than it was in 1985.
> Soviet jobs were much more stable and so much more desirable even at the same level of pay.
What is this even supposed to mean? It was illegal to not have a job and most people couldn’t freely choose their workplace. Obviously certain positions which provided access to state resources were highly coveted despite only a moderate increase in pay (I don’t think I need to explain why). How is that in anyway
something positive, though?
Right, slave labor can be incredibly efficient in certain circumstances. Plantation owners in the southern states and the Caribbean had already proven that a hundred or more years before Stalin.
It’s not particularly surprising that if you literally work a few million to death and distribute the surplus they created amongst the rest of the population (the one innovation I’ll grant USSR) you can have some impressive growth figures. In fact the more people starve to death or die in the gulags the more per capita productivity increases.
> who had in living memory been serfs, into an industrialized powerhouse with a quite high standard of living.
Right. You can probably say the same about many states in Germany. Russia was just 40 or so years late. It not unreasonable to believe that it’s industrial output would had reached similar levels without the revolution in comparable timeframe (probably with considerably higher inequality but with a magnitude or two less murder, however higher inequality would probably meant that more people would have died from preventable diseases which would potentially offset a million or two who were executed).
Look up "holodomor", "dekulakization", "law of spikelets", and other lovely things. It's possible to get a lot done in a worker's paradise when you can put a bullet in a head.
Yeah in the US we’d never curtail industrial food profit to overhaul the state of store shelves being full of easily consumed crap packaged in plastic waste of enormous energy and material cost.
The health side effects are not the only outcome of concern with our eating habits.
I am a “personal cognitive freedom across contexts should be protected, full stop.” For example, that means opt-in social healthcare should be a thing that resources are provided for. A minority in charge saying “no” to the public “opting in” spending agency on providing free healthcare is living under a police state mindset; forcing poor who have no real choice into illness, empowering death is freedom! It’s a twisted joke to not care as a society and say we individually chose this; individually we’re beholden to the group think, how neighborly of you all. That we should be expected to spend our time only on profitable (a form of political correctness serving official economic policy ) application of agency is authoritarian, and conveniently coupled to maintenance of financiers past investments.
Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference.
Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone?
There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces.
Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.
The opinion this is cheap talk might be a shitty one?
Gas line works fine for years, suddenly during regional conflict it goes tits up?
A dying country whose leadership seems intent on putting it out of its misery sending its potential fathers to a meat grinder, a history of stupid big picture choices, angry at the world for not letting it conquer it might partake in environmental sabotage.
It’s a lot less on the nose than nukes; if we can’t have imperialist nation state, no one can!
The holocaust is proof of human indifference to each other’s existence. What do a bunch of old turds care about intentional environmental destruction?
Gas line works for years, then 6 months after removal of western technical experts and ending of cooperation with technicians running west end of pipeline (which article stressed were critical to clearing plugs like these safely) it goes tits up.
Putin is not going to blow up his biggest leverage over Europe during a cold winter, its his only chance at getting them to reduce support for Ukraine.
I know there have been gamers like this for years but in this case 2 of the 4 years were during a mandatory isolate at home public health crisis. It’s possible this was actually a positive escape to help cope.
Personally I’m not attached to digital ephemera. I’ve already lost more save games and files of one type of content over another to be used to it. I’d call the clingy-ness the real issue. Others have to put in a bunch of work to manage this persons figurative video game identity?
This is certainly true. Though public health analysis only shows correlations, not causations, between video game playing and decreased alcohol and drug use. And in my life, whenever I knew men whose girlfriends would relentlessly harp on their video game playing, it gets substituted by alcohol.
In medicine it is called video game fixation. I’m concerned though that it is not open as a possibility that what they are calling a disease is closer to a medicine than certainly alcohol, tobacco or drug use are. Closer to how coffee is used for tiredness, maybe, for a depressed 15-25yo male, than to any of those things. That said this guy is spending 33% of his life, and video game fixation can also look like 90%, which is certainly pathological.
