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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#161

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #116
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always come up with a sinister motivation for a good act. The question is whether there's evidence to support that surmise. I guess that's why sometimes it's best to look at the effects of the system rather than the intention behind it. Do the training actually have the effects that one would desire from them, if one had good intentions? At least in my case, the answer is yes. I have never thought about my wo…

> You can always come up with a sinister motivation for a good act. You can also come up with a beneficial motivation for a sinister (or at least, not morally positive) act. (This is the one Google employs.) Google is a corporation, and it exists to extract money effectively from others to make it's shareholders rich. If a corporation says it is doing something for the good of the public, it's because looking good ha…

[Google/corporations] exist to extract money effectively from others to make it's shareholders rich . . .

. . . by giving people something they want more than the money they're exchanging with the corporation. It's a positive sum game, at least in my estimation. But, yes, Google is not a charity, and I don't mean to pretend that it is more noble than it is. I'm not a charity either. I wouldn't do my work for free.

But I don't blame anyone for being suspicious of Google or any other corporation's behavior. It's important to verify that corporations are behaving, because there have been plenty of instances of corporate malfeasance in the past.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#162

Post by bravo22 »

benlivengood wrote: post #142
bravo22 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to d…

> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly. Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; pro…

You're on the money.

Self-interest is an inherent human nature. Competition is the mechanism to keep self-interest in check. Everyone wants a monopoly. Our institutions and power structure have to be built to be anti-monopoly of all forms.

Rise of corporatism in America is highly correlated with concentration of power in the state. Corporations could not have achieved their scale and power w/o the state putting its foot on the scale to tilt it in favour of one particular outcome or the other. When you have a giant who can throw its weight around, all you need is a bit of smarts to use that your advantage.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#163

Post by 29083011397778 »

mmm_grayons wrote: post #156
nitrogen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they can have that space and we are going to differentiate ourselves by leading in this other space Be careful with this one. It can be illegal to agree not to compete (INAL).

Could you elaborate on this? How would it be illegal to target a different market?

If Google colludes with Microsoft to decide each can have one market, free of competition, that would be illegal.

For example, Google trades the sub-thousand dollar laptop market (ceasing development of Chromebooks) for a monopoly in search.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

bravo22 wrote: post #160
dragonwriter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically No, it's built around centralization and rent-extracting monopoly power moving from the feudal aristocracy to the mercantile (now “capitalist") class, motivationally and historically. The risible competitive and anti-monopoly argument that bears no resemblance to the facts (anti-monopoly controls were one of the major elements of reactions ag…

You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism. In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power"? Is it in the free market? Is it in the competition? Is in the decentrlization?

> You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism.

No, I'm not.

> In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power"

Capitalist “philosophy” is a post hoc rationalization for what was already going on that didn't even start happening until several centuries into the mercantile class using their growing clout to pull rent-extracting monopoly power away from the hands of the feudal aristocracy and into their own, and didn't kick into really high gear until needed as a defense after major critiques of the concrete reality of capitalism started appearing.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#165

Post by [deleted] »

benlivengood wrote: post #142
bravo22 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to d…

> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly. Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; pro…

[deleted]

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#166

Post by bravo22 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #164
bravo22 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism. In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power"? Is it in the free market? Is it in the competition? Is in the decentrlization?

> You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism. No, I'm not. > In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power" Capitalist “philosophy” is a post hoc rationalization for what was already going on that didn't even start happening until several centuries into the mercantile class using their growing clout to pull rent-extracting monopoly power away from the hands of the feud…

You are avoiding the actual question.

Furthermore what you keep repeating is not true. You're retconning history and economics based on your own knowledge and absolutely ignoring books and written history.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#167

Post by class4behavior »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #116
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always come up with a sinister motivation for a good act. The question is whether there's evidence to support that surmise. I guess that's why sometimes it's best to look at the effects of the system rather than the intention behind it. Do the training actually have the effects that one would desire from them, if one had good intentions? At least in my case, the answer is yes. I have never thought about my wo…

> You can always come up with a sinister motivation for a good act. You can also come up with a beneficial motivation for a sinister (or at least, not morally positive) act. (This is the one Google employs.) Google is a corporation, and it exists to extract money effectively from others to make it's shareholders rich. If a corporation says it is doing something for the good of the public, it's because looking good ha…

> there is also value in convincing employees that they are benefiting society as welll: They work harder and above requirements without you having to pay them more, and they'll defend and advocate for their employer on social media for free. ;)

Convincing one's employees of a particular perspective or belief has been a basic tactic of large corporations for decades. Tech culture disrupted this for a little bit, though.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#168

Post by d1zzy »

Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

The engineering effort required to split up a mammoth code base where everything has been written based on those assumptions about the rest of the codebase is making such a split extremely unlikely to succeed. We're not talking about a few millions lines of code, we're talking about billions[1] of lines of code. It would take more than a decade of having thousands of engineers work only on this and not do anything else (like, you know, actually develop features to keep being competitive). I don't see how it would work.

What I could see working tho would be to focus on exporting some of the very core internal libraries[2] and then go on a project by project basis and do the work required to be made to work externally. The latter would be a never ending effort but the end result would be a number of averagely successful projects that spin off Google.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand... 2 billion lines of code in 2015, I'd imagine there are at least 3 by now, considering the increase in employee count.

[2] https://opensource.google/projects/abseil

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#169

Post by one2know »

ta20200710 wrote: post #25

At Amazon, all employees are trained not to use the words: "marketplace", "platform", and a few others.

Amazon's products are identified by a key made of marketplace and ASIN, so that's strange. Amazons "focus on the customer" principle turned out to be sham as they are acutely focused on their competitors, whether Quidsi, Walmart, or Amazon sellers.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#170

Post by andrewla »

heavyset_go wrote: post #119
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

> Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully It's worse than that, Google releases products for free killing competitors in the markets they enter, and once those competitors are gone, Google pulls their products.

Yes -- I think this is far more important. If anything, Google kills off low-to-medium _adoption_ products, regardless of profitability.
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