ethbr1

The (search query) -> (targeted ad) isn't the part of Google's ad business most people have a problem with.

They take issue with Google grabbing and compiling every piece of data it can get on you into a profile, keeping that forever, and selling that targeting to advertisers.

Yes and... parent was making the aggregate conglomerate profitability growth case instead of the single-product one.

Wall Street generally cares about the former more, unless the single-product is only-product.

In this case, that's the fundamental question about Google: is it only an ad company (in which case those numbers are the only ones that matter) or more (in which case total corporate revenue is more important)?

Might be useful to scale yearly revenue percentage points relative to graph start year, so f.ex. 2023 percentages sum to (total revenue 2023) / (starting total revenue).

Would give a better sense of left-to-right momentum over time when the entire pie is growing.

I'd assume Google leadership weren't unintelligent, looked at the trends, and decided maximizing search revenue per user was more advantageous than search quality.

E.g. how Amazon knows they have a problem with counterfeits and low-quality copies that damages their brand, but chose volume over quality

Neither company will ever explicitly put it in those terms, but it seems obvious Google isn't looking at search as a growth engine anymore.

Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers sure thought so.

That's not a loophole: that's literally the way fractional deposit traditional banking works.

The only difference is regulations -- banks have them; things labelled crypto don't (in the US).

The former is inflation of the money supply, which causes price inflation when it exceeds economic growth.

The latter is volatility.

Apples and oranges.

Why would they? In addition to moral hazard (next time), this is binance's fuck-up.

Have bad security, get hacked.

If binance wanted to hedge against that risk, they could have bought a cyberinsurance policy (if they could get one for the amounts they'd need).

Counter counter point - we've constructed a society that provides excess rewards to people with cooked brains and antisocial behavior

> Like greedy Brin here has donated around $4B to charity that has gone to all manner of public good.

$4B out of $250B = +1.6% tax rate

And total over all years, not annual.

So no, charity fig leaf doesn't cover being a dick and fighting a meaningful wealth tax.

BLUF

>> I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

That's almost always been true though. See: newspaper era, radio era, tv era...

The closest most democratic societies have gotten for most of the time is a diversity of large press entities that counterbalance each other. Possibly with the addition of a publicly-funded alternative.

You're typically only going to have a few wide-distribution press entities, but what seems more important is that they're (a) independent (of each other and the government), (b) financially solvent, and (c) represent a diversity of opinion / constituents.

Though I'd say the US fails those three tests because of conglomerate ownership without true independence (e.g. Washington Post being beholden to Bezos' business interests), the cannibalization of ad revenue by Google / Meta (without either funding a replacement for news), and increasing corporate consolidation (e.g. Nexstar getting preferential treatment by the current FCC to further breach TV station ownership caps).

The problem is that HR's remit is minimizing legal liability.

Nothing about productivity or culture in there.

So invariably they spend far too much time and effort addressing the person who had an issue with handedness, without consideration of all the other people that's impacting.

You can't please everyone, but if you're HR, you try.

Or just make it criminal for any accredited (because sensitive information) news organization to be blocked from these things?

I'm not convinced the world wouldn't be a better place if we advantaged the free press over corporations, the least transparent component of our modern world.