Franklin Roosevelt did not allow anyone to make recordings or take minutes in White House meetings. Historians find this very frustrating, but all you need for a rationale for that is what happened to Nixon.
To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
231–240 of 319 posts
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#232Earlier 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 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…
Capitalism is property rights and economic freedom. There's nothing inherent to it that requires monopoly. Natural monopolies can occur but are perpetually unstable provided there are no artificial barriers to entry. Of course, those barriers exist (one form is regulatory capture), but they are not capitalistic. Absent those artificial barriers, even natural monopolies must behave over the long term as though competitors exist, or they will be created.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#233I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…
Yep. This is hardly new. I have been at Google since the mid 2000s and this stuff has been around at least since then. There was also a similar training when I was at Microsoft. Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. Our goal shouldn't be to "dominate the competition/market." The goal should be creating compelling experiences and pr…
> it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words.
People are always trying to control the thoughts of others by banning certain words. Is there any evidence it works? I've seen plenty of evidence it does not, as the new word simply takes on the meaning of the old one. Then that new word gets banned as well.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an interesting quirk of markets that can explain the broken-up companies being worth more. Prices in a market are set on the margins: the price of Bitcoin or Tesla stock is set by those who are actively buying and selling. If you think those assets are complete scams, you aren't going to go near them, which means your opinion doesn't matter for the purpose of setting the price . When a company is broken up in…
> If you think those assets are complete scams, you aren't going to go near them, which means your opinion doesn't matter for the purpose of setting the price. Doesn't that reduce demand though, which lowers price? > They all get their own teams of cheerleaders, who value the spinoffs at close to the value of the original because they think their preferred spinoff will take most of the market of the parent company. P…
> Doesn't that reduce demand though, which lowers price?
Yes, but "Seems fine, but I'm not interested." and "LOL. I've researched this extensively and am confident that this is a scam" both send the same 0 demand signal.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#235"Certainly don't change your behavior! By all means, continue to lie, cheat, and steal. Just make sure you come up with code words for it."
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
RFCs don't get changed, they get replaced by new ones. Until we find something that is 'good enough'. SMTP and IMAP are now older than quite a few of HN's readers. They could be replaced by something better, all someone would have to do is design it and put out a new RFC. What is true though is that once a protocol is 'good enough and it gains mass adoption that change is hard but this is more to be blamed on human n…
Unless your plan is to change human nature, where the “blame” goes is pretty academic. The inertia is still an issue when going the RFC route, and less of an issue when standards are developed first to fill a specific need for an interested party.
The inertia is a good measure for how successful a particular protocol version is. See for instance IPV4 and how hard it is to get rid of it. And that inertia is good, you don't want to rip up your standards every two years.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#237Google (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…
If a Google employee uses these taboo words in an HN comment, will YC get a subpoena?
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our goal shouldn't be to "dominate the competition/market." The goal should be creating compelling experiences and products for our customers. Googler also. I believe that the phrase used to capture the desired mindset is "respect the opportunity".
Ugh. I detest that phrase. :( It sounds so corporate.
Doesn't sound corporate to me at all. Corporate to me is things like "increase synergy". Respecting the opportunities available to you by showing respect for your competitors who are just like you at the end of the day seems like a pretty real and relatable recommendation.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced, though there are, obviously, advantages to RFCs and IETF. The primary disadvantage is speed. A private corporation innovating on its full stack can come up with a faster and more secure HTTP alternative for their use case in the time it takes the RFC process to get up in the morning and find its shoes. Google has a streamed cloud gaming service running in its web browser right now; how long would i…
There is another downside to IETF/RFC/public standard: it's hard to move forward. My favorite example: e-mail. SMTP and IMAP are old and have so many issues. On the SMTP side it is hard to identify authorized senders, which is a reason for spam, IMAP doesn't really work nice with mobile devices. On the other hand there are messengers like WhatsApp which solves many of those issues and allows adding features (for good…
Inability to move forward has less to do with IETF/RFC/public standards than it does with email and SMTP, to use your example, being heavily entrenched. Anyone can come up with a new way of doing something, but it's a walled-garden until it's interoperable with other tooling that other people, everyone else, are using.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company Gentle reminder that thisbis partly because Google isn't fairly compensating the people actually producing the value it accrues to itself: the users. They could start by having accessible customer service.
That doesn't affect the balance of the equation much. The same analysis applies even if customer service cost more.
If profit were lower because Google were forced to address cost centers they neglect (to the dismay of a limited but utterly devastated portion of their clientele), then it would effect what they saw as "profitable."