281–290 of 352 posts
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But Alexa extracting a 5-10% (or even 30%) fee on all pizza places through that access definitely hurts all pizza businesses, anywhere. And those that opt out will miss that business.
How can adding the Alexa business harm the pizza place, and opting out also harm them?
Edit: Yes, that's a bit exaggerated. Just noting that a dominant outside force can change your fortunes whether you choose to play or not.
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Even if it happens within a platform it's still a very concerning problem. If a company decided to put cameras in people's homes to improve "customer service" that business would be out of business the next day. And yet companies are able to get much more information about us by having access to what we do on the internet and everyone is fine about it. I understand that this is a result of people not wanting to pay f…
>Even if it happens within a platform it's still a very concerning problem. I don't necessarily disagree, but "Xcorp is presenting personal data that you've released publically in a misleading way" very different than "Xcorp is giving personal data that you assumed was private away to third parties". I think the second is a lot more serious than the first. >If a company decided to put cameras in people's homes to imp…
And I think that's the main difference between our viewpoints. Personally, I'm not ok with a company having so much information about me just for the sake of convenience. I'd rather have to write my own scripts to scrape through news feeds or just continually check blogs that I like rather than a company having all that data about me.
We are living at a time, imo, when data is the most important asset. And companies like Google are one of the biggest purveyors of it. It's dangerous when a company could have enough information about you and have the tools to know exactly what makes you "tick". They could provide services to make "specially crafted" advertisements that would manipulate you at a scale even more than they do now. "You like tall blondes? Here's a computer generated tall blonde that talks about the new eau d'toilette and how it seduces her! Buy it!"
It's bad enough that companies are using methods to addict their users to make their apps more profitable now, imagine what a world it'll be when they'll have the technology and ability to do it to the point that no one could possibly refuse their advertising.
Now I realise that this is taking it to the extreme, but my point here is precisely that we need to consider these possibilities in case they don't catch us unaware and when it's already too late to do anything.
I am ultimately skeptical of companies that get all of their revenue from advertising and who fail to make money from sales of products. The value of online advertising is massively inflated. Of the tech giants, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft seem to be in the best shape at the moment. They make their money from selling real products and services to real end users. Amazon is strong but not unbeatable. Walmart in partic…
> Microsoft's wins are hard fought and fair Was giving Internet Explorer away for free along with Windows and bankrupting Netscape fair ?
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Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services, that's a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate. Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies, by allowing them grow even further everything would just turn in a way that would allow such companies to make even more money, whilst increasing the gap between the rich and the poor…
> Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn't even the most popular search engine. Want me to show you how google is not a monopoly? A company with monopoly power would be able to raise the price of its service to the price the market can bear . If google put search behind a pay wall, Bing…
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If you look at China, they have because of their protectionist policies practically thriving clones of many big US tech company. It seems likely that the same would happened in other regions if some of Google services were blocked.
Yeah, USSR also had clones of European and US cars produced. Ask anyone who lived there whether they would prefer Lada to a Mercedes.
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>What is up with all this egalitarian nonsense? Just the wish to have a society that is able to evolve, to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few. >There is an obsession with equality that I just don't get. That's called being a bit of a sociopath, but it gets better. >This is an affront on capitalism which has served to lift so many out of poverty. Good! Capital…
Well at least we can get that out of the way; it is an affront then. These 4 companies (and more) have done more good than all the goodness of your heart will ever do. We have to be pragmatic and not just be bleeding hearts because it is endearing and it will make us popular. >to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few. This is the problem you and others that thin…
These big corporations only exist and thrive because laws and regulations are designed in this way. To suggest that these corporations grow organically and that they should be allowed to follow their natural course is wrong. They are as unnatural as it gets.
The laws need to be tweaked to change the economic environment so that it favors smaller companies like it used to.
Corporations are extremely inefficient.
Maybe not communism, but socialism is working very well in countries like Sweden.
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How is it definitely ? It may hurt or may not. Credit card systems also charge a commission and yet every pizza place prefers to pay it rather than accept only cash, because of the benefits credit cards provide.
Justeat is an online pizza ordering service from Denmark which also requires pizza shops to sign up for it and pay a fairly large fee. This started out very well, but when it gained massive traction they ramped up the fees and pizza joints started complaining that it was killing them. Of course it was too late to opt out since all the consumers had gotten used to going to the website. The fee started out at 10% and w…
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I view it like a private school. If you don't like the school then one option is to leave. No one is forced to use facebook. Leaving though is hard. And I'm assuming you'd rather use it but have some sort of do not track. I don't see that happening because their main source of revenue is you the user. So if you want to change the world by limiting Facebook's reach then leave the service. And convince others to do so…
I think you completely missed the point of my last post. I don't use Facebook, but that doesn't exempt me from their surveillance efforts, or the societal effects of their massive reach. If it was as easy to avoid as you seem to believe, I wouldn't have as much of an issue with it.
I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…
Disclaimer: I work at Google > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. [citation needed] A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it's a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, y…
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Disclaimer: I work at Google > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. [citation needed] A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it's a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, y…
Suppose there was an organization, "Creation", that did mass surveillance on everyone on the planet. They don't disclose what they do with this data. Let's say as a result of Creation's sharing of this data with local governments, crime is nonexistent. Based on only what we've said is that a good or bad deal? Also, all of your examples were either purchased or have alternatives, so, yeah.
Your scenario is way too terse to yield some actual insights and honestly seems aimed for a particular outcome. Questions that remail open, e.g.: What kind of crime? How can the governments get rid of crime using data alone? What side-effects does the data-sharing have? Are those side-effects less or more severe than the crime used to be? Can you know all potential side-effects for the future? there other approaches to solve the crime problem?