6 ms·

Today's google would be banned by 15 years ago's google. One rule they had was that the style of the ads on your website should not match the style of the websi

by GoToRO 4y ago

Today's google would be banned by 15 years ago's google. One rule they had was that the style of the ads on your website should not match the style of the website (clearly visible ads). Today most people do not realize that the first page on google.com is mostly ads.

obituary_latte 4y ago
Unfortunately, as is almost always the case, the almighty dollar skews ideals. Is it even technically possible for a public company to be "good" these days?
- fendy3002 4y ago
  Logically no, when the overly optimized and less secured options are rewarded. There's a story of a car company which calculate the cost needed to recall a defective model (safety-wise), versus the fines needed to pay times the possibility that the error may occur. There's cheaper on the later so they don't do the recall. And the recent train derailments, many people said that if the fines are lower than the reduced cost they get for lowering the safety, they'll keep doing it again.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Is it even technically possible for a public company to be "good" these days? Yes, there are many companies that do good things, and some that exist solely to do good things. The difference is that they focus on doing those good things, so they don't show up in headlines very often.
- samman 4y ago
  Perhaps: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/ https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/
- frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  There is this fixation on “the dollar” or even “capitalism”, but in reality both of those are essentially just abstractions for the underlying human behaviors, which is mostly greed and the lying and deception used to obfuscate greed. Neither the dollar as the object of transaction nor the system of accounting (accounting for resource allocation) called capitalism, have any real connection to the underlying drivers. The same problems existed in many other means of transacting (currency) and economic systems (communism notoriously being a sprint towards corruption). Unfortunately, people have forgotten or have intentionally been misled from realizing the tacit type of self-regulating controls of a system like actual capitalism (you lose money when making bad decisions, you aren’t rewarded by thieving friends in government) and even aristocracy, where you had to maintain a certain balance of relationships even with the peasants in order to prevent being made a foot shorter. Ironically, the rather tyrannical caste that has we emerged on Mt Davos is forgetting that sometimes the dumb and easily manipulated peasantry the technocrats see themselves as being benevolent demigod leaders of, don’t take so kindly to their shenanigans, with dire consequences for all. I mean what are you, a bigot, racist, sexism homophobe for questioning the beneficent and glorious, exhaled rule of the Ruling Gods over your life and limitations on what you can do, say, and think? You better. Don’t get any ideas or your gods on Mt Davos will strike you down with ban hammers.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    > Neither the dollar as the object of transaction nor the system of accounting (accounting for resource allocation) called capitalism, have any real connection to the underlying drivers. The same problems existed in many other means of transacting (currency) and economic systems (communism notoriously being a sprint towards corruption). Capitalism provides a moral justification for the actions of greed, it makes responding to those incentives seem inevitable and necessary and so not the responsibility of the person actually doing it. Neither of those is necessarily inherent to capitalism, I guess, but they are certainly part of the structure of the capitalism we live with so shouldn't be dismissed either.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Capitalism isn’t a form of accounting it’s a mode of production
    - frankfrankfrank 4y ago
      That is absolutely false and at the core of the rather schizophrenic mentality towards the world today. Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with the means of production beyond it being a method for accounting for resources and allocating then based on a value assigned, ideally in a kind of double blind manner, which is the part that has been broken by cheating through things like corruption and “money printing”, i.e., fraud. You may be referring to the favorite alternative method for accounting under the inherently fraudulent system that fraudulently calls itself communism, while hating and having nothing at all to do with community, which allocates resources, i.e., means of production, by central committee that sees itself as some kind of contemporary gods on earth. The means of production are a separate thing and are generally separate from gore they are accounted for and allocated for some purpose. To simplify, you having the skill, told, and wood to create a bookshelf are the means of production; your method and decision making that lands you on making a bookshelf instead of book ends or something else, is where you could use capitalist or “communist” practices to determine that, Party of which is accounting for the resources and drawing a conclusion as to what to do.
- bogwog 4y ago
  That's why regulation is needed. Efficient corporations will (and must) do the most profitable and legal thing always. What would the economy look like if corporations behaved irrationally, by doing unprofitable things based on unpredictable/fickle human emotions? It might be a cynical way to look at it, but overall I don't think it's sustainable to place the responsibility of caring for society on corporations. Saying that Google or their employees are evil for doing the thing they're supposed to do is pointless. If they don't do <evil thing>, a competitor will do <evil thing>. The only way to save the world from <evil thing> is to make it illegal (and preferably with criminal penalties, not just small fines), so that corporations can avoid doing it without worrying about the competitive risks. (although Google and all of big tech are evil monopolists and they need to be broken up)
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Governmental regulatory agencies are largely captured by the likes of Google and Apple, and if not completely captured there's a very large influence that prevents regulators from taking any actions that would actually threaten profits of monopolistic corporations. There has been a little push back recently, in terms of preventing more mergers and a push towards breaking up conglomerates, but not without a lot of political resistance: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-lina-khan-derangement-syndrome https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-lina-khan-derangement-...
  - akaij 4y ago
    > It might be a cynical way to look at it, but overall I don't think it's sustainable to place the responsibility of caring for society on corporations. This line of thinking bothers me more than it probably should. How can corporations be thought of as separate entities from the people it consists of, in any context except legal? I wrote a lot more, but decided to distill it into one question: How can they be, in good conscience, allowed to get a pass?
    - bogwog 4y ago
      Because corporations aren’t people, they’re machines that happen to be powered by human labor. There’s some wiggle room for individuals to make a difference, but ultimately the market will win in the long run. Consider the CEO of Google growing a conscience (hypothetically ofc). If he decides to cut back on <evil things> for the good of society, then society will benefit, but Google shareholders will lose. The impact will be measurable in financial statements, and when the board meets to vote on a new CEO, they’ll replace him with someone who will do a better job of making those numbers go up (aka someone without that conscience). The system self-corrects in the long run! The CEO has a legal obligation to protect the interests of share holders (“fiduciary duty”). So from that perspective, a CEO acting in the interests of society rather than shareholders is breaking the law, and could be personally liable. The incentives in the system are not set up in such a way that corporations could be reasonably expected to “self police” in a way that benefits society at the expense of shareholders. Sure, in some cases it’s possible to have a win-win scenario, where everyone benefits, but those are extremely rare. IMO this is a good system because it leads to the primary producers to perform at peak efficiency, but it doesn’t work unless it’s balanced by government regulation, which is something that the government has been miserably failing at for the past two decades (at least)
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  This is the central problem with investment capitalism, as distinguished from what I'd call industrial capitalism. Once you put the shareholder associations in the driver's seat, and eliminate most input from the people who work for the corporation, you always find the company trending towards monopolistic behavior, eventually leading to poor-quality products with various safety issues, because that's a way of reducing costs once you have a captive market. With Google and Apple, ownership is somewhat diffuse but the top tiers are the usual suspects: Vanguard, Blackrock, FMR, State Street, Berkshire-Hathaway, etc. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders/ The only real solution is to give the employees of the corporation the degree of power when it comes to selecting the executive cohort as the shareholders of the corporation have - i.e. a 1 : 1 ratio. Germany does this to some extent. The other option is more radical - eliminate the shareholder system of devolved liability entirely, and only allow the people who work within a corporation to own shares in that corporation. (Note that the traditional communist-socialist approach would be to simply replace the shareholders with a governmental central committee while keeping the structure essentially the same.)
Razengan 4y ago
> Today most people do not realize that the first page on google.com is mostly ads. Ugh this. Trying to search for almost any generic phrase or term just floods the results with links to shops and "TOP 10 BEST thingYouSearched" Google Search feels almost useless now for anything other than shortcuts [in]to websites you already know about.
- raincole 4y ago
  Google feels like an index engine of Reddit (and sometimes HN) to me.
- jjav 4y ago
  > Google Search feels almost useless now for anything other than shortcuts [in]to websites you already know about. In my experience, not even that. I used to be lazy and use google search to get to websites I knew, but it can no longer find them even if I type it in exactly! So I've mostly had to revert to making sure I bookmark the sites and go in that way. (And of course I've switched to ddg for search.)
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Trying to search for almost any generic phrase or term just floods the results with links to shops and "TOP 10 BEST thingYouSearched" eBay is the worst for this. "Pancreatic cancer now on sale at eBay!" "The best Libertarian Morals now on sale at eBay!" "Buy discount Rings of Saturn now at eBay!"
  - Razengan 4y ago
    I would gladly pay for one of these.

by GoToRO 4y ago

obituary_latte 4y ago

Unfortunately, as is almost always the case, the almighty dollar skews ideals. Is it even technically possible for a public company to be "good" these days?

fendy3002 4y ago
Logically no, when the overly optimized and less secured options are rewarded. There's a story of a car company which calculate the cost needed to recall a defective model (safety-wise), versus the fines needed to pay times the possibility that the error may occur. There's cheaper on the later so they don't do the recall. And the recent train derailments, many people said that if the fines are lower than the reduced cost they get for lowering the safety, they'll keep doing it again.
reaperducer 4y ago
Is it even technically possible for a public company to be "good" these days? Yes, there are many companies that do good things, and some that exist solely to do good things. The difference is that they focus on doing those good things, so they don't show up in headlines very often.
samman 4y ago
Perhaps: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/ https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/
frankfrankfrank 4y ago
There is this fixation on “the dollar” or even “capitalism”, but in reality both of those are essentially just abstractions for the underlying human behaviors, which is mostly greed and the lying and deception used to obfuscate greed. Neither the dollar as the object of transaction nor the system of accounting (accounting for resource allocation) called capitalism, have any real connection to the underlying drivers. The same problems existed in many other means of transacting (currency) and economic systems (communism notoriously being a sprint towards corruption). Unfortunately, people have forgotten or have intentionally been misled from realizing the tacit type of self-regulating controls of a system like actual capitalism (you lose money when making bad decisions, you aren’t rewarded by thieving friends in government) and even aristocracy, where you had to maintain a certain balance of relationships even with the peasants in order to prevent being made a foot shorter. Ironically, the rather tyrannical caste that has we emerged on Mt Davos is forgetting that sometimes the dumb and easily manipulated peasantry the technocrats see themselves as being benevolent demigod leaders of, don’t take so kindly to their shenanigans, with dire consequences for all. I mean what are you, a bigot, racist, sexism homophobe for questioning the beneficent and glorious, exhaled rule of the Ruling Gods over your life and limitations on what you can do, say, and think? You better. Don’t get any ideas or your gods on Mt Davos will strike you down with ban hammers.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  > Neither the dollar as the object of transaction nor the system of accounting (accounting for resource allocation) called capitalism, have any real connection to the underlying drivers. The same problems existed in many other means of transacting (currency) and economic systems (communism notoriously being a sprint towards corruption). Capitalism provides a moral justification for the actions of greed, it makes responding to those incentives seem inevitable and necessary and so not the responsibility of the person actually doing it. Neither of those is necessarily inherent to capitalism, I guess, but they are certainly part of the structure of the capitalism we live with so shouldn't be dismissed either.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Capitalism isn’t a form of accounting it’s a mode of production
  - frankfrankfrank 4y ago
    That is absolutely false and at the core of the rather schizophrenic mentality towards the world today. Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with the means of production beyond it being a method for accounting for resources and allocating then based on a value assigned, ideally in a kind of double blind manner, which is the part that has been broken by cheating through things like corruption and “money printing”, i.e., fraud. You may be referring to the favorite alternative method for accounting under the inherently fraudulent system that fraudulently calls itself communism, while hating and having nothing at all to do with community, which allocates resources, i.e., means of production, by central committee that sees itself as some kind of contemporary gods on earth. The means of production are a separate thing and are generally separate from gore they are accounted for and allocated for some purpose. To simplify, you having the skill, told, and wood to create a bookshelf are the means of production; your method and decision making that lands you on making a bookshelf instead of book ends or something else, is where you could use capitalist or “communist” practices to determine that, Party of which is accounting for the resources and drawing a conclusion as to what to do.
bogwog 4y ago
That's why regulation is needed. Efficient corporations will (and must) do the most profitable and legal thing always. What would the economy look like if corporations behaved irrationally, by doing unprofitable things based on unpredictable/fickle human emotions? It might be a cynical way to look at it, but overall I don't think it's sustainable to place the responsibility of caring for society on corporations. Saying that Google or their employees are evil for doing the thing they're supposed to do is pointless. If they don't do <evil thing>, a competitor will do <evil thing>. The only way to save the world from <evil thing> is to make it illegal (and preferably with criminal penalties, not just small fines), so that corporations can avoid doing it without worrying about the competitive risks. (although Google and all of big tech are evil monopolists and they need to be broken up)
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Governmental regulatory agencies are largely captured by the likes of Google and Apple, and if not completely captured there's a very large influence that prevents regulators from taking any actions that would actually threaten profits of monopolistic corporations. There has been a little push back recently, in terms of preventing more mergers and a push towards breaking up conglomerates, but not without a lot of political resistance: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-lina-khan-derangement-syndrome https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-lina-khan-derangement-...
- akaij 4y ago
  > It might be a cynical way to look at it, but overall I don't think it's sustainable to place the responsibility of caring for society on corporations. This line of thinking bothers me more than it probably should. How can corporations be thought of as separate entities from the people it consists of, in any context except legal? I wrote a lot more, but decided to distill it into one question: How can they be, in good conscience, allowed to get a pass?
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Because corporations aren’t people, they’re machines that happen to be powered by human labor. There’s some wiggle room for individuals to make a difference, but ultimately the market will win in the long run. Consider the CEO of Google growing a conscience (hypothetically ofc). If he decides to cut back on <evil things> for the good of society, then society will benefit, but Google shareholders will lose. The impact will be measurable in financial statements, and when the board meets to vote on a new CEO, they’ll replace him with someone who will do a better job of making those numbers go up (aka someone without that conscience). The system self-corrects in the long run! The CEO has a legal obligation to protect the interests of share holders (“fiduciary duty”). So from that perspective, a CEO acting in the interests of society rather than shareholders is breaking the law, and could be personally liable. The incentives in the system are not set up in such a way that corporations could be reasonably expected to “self police” in a way that benefits society at the expense of shareholders. Sure, in some cases it’s possible to have a win-win scenario, where everyone benefits, but those are extremely rare. IMO this is a good system because it leads to the primary producers to perform at peak efficiency, but it doesn’t work unless it’s balanced by government regulation, which is something that the government has been miserably failing at for the past two decades (at least)
photochemsyn 4y ago
This is the central problem with investment capitalism, as distinguished from what I'd call industrial capitalism. Once you put the shareholder associations in the driver's seat, and eliminate most input from the people who work for the corporation, you always find the company trending towards monopolistic behavior, eventually leading to poor-quality products with various safety issues, because that's a way of reducing costs once you have a captive market. With Google and Apple, ownership is somewhat diffuse but the top tiers are the usual suspects: Vanguard, Blackrock, FMR, State Street, Berkshire-Hathaway, etc. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders/ The only real solution is to give the employees of the corporation the degree of power when it comes to selecting the executive cohort as the shareholders of the corporation have - i.e. a 1 : 1 ratio. Germany does this to some extent. The other option is more radical - eliminate the shareholder system of devolved liability entirely, and only allow the people who work within a corporation to own shares in that corporation. (Note that the traditional communist-socialist approach would be to simply replace the shareholders with a governmental central committee while keeping the structure essentially the same.)

Razengan 4y ago

> Today most people do not realize that the first page on google.com is mostly ads. Ugh this. Trying to search for almost any generic phrase or term just floods the results with links to shops and "TOP 10 BEST thingYouSearched" Google Search feels almost useless now for anything other than shortcuts [in]to websites you already know about.

raincole 4y ago
Google feels like an index engine of Reddit (and sometimes HN) to me.
jjav 4y ago
> Google Search feels almost useless now for anything other than shortcuts [in]to websites you already know about. In my experience, not even that. I used to be lazy and use google search to get to websites I knew, but it can no longer find them even if I type it in exactly! So I've mostly had to revert to making sure I bookmark the sites and go in that way. (And of course I've switched to ddg for search.)
reaperducer 4y ago
Trying to search for almost any generic phrase or term just floods the results with links to shops and "TOP 10 BEST thingYouSearched" eBay is the worst for this. "Pancreatic cancer now on sale at eBay!" "The best Libertarian Morals now on sale at eBay!" "Buy discount Rings of Saturn now at eBay!"
- Razengan 4y ago
  I would gladly pay for one of these.