411–420 of 438 posts
While unlikely, I personally believe that advertising revenue should be taxed at 50%. This would do a lot to align industry incentives. Advertising revenue would be looked at less as a free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere. In this case, maybe the app could be monetized directly instead of whatever the fuck is happening now.
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https://killedbygoogle.com/ vs https://killedbymozilla.com/ Yet Mozilla has the stigma here?
Mozilla launches fewer projects in general, so the denominator is smaller. But yes, Google is the worst at this, and they've built up a reputation which has really hurt them! For example, basically no one believed that Stadia would stick around long-term, which (I would argue) became a self-fulfilling prophesy.
And then there’s “launch whatever an SVP dreams up” followed by “kill that old SVP’s thing” at Google.
Perhaps slightly exaggerated. Google product reveals and sunsets have frequently followed executive movements in/around/out of the company. Two big examples that had widespread impact are in the later Google Wallet/Pay changes and some of the later insanity around multiple self-canabalizing IM/chat/conferencing services.
There seems to be no long term vision or strategy at Google, and Pichai is notoriously averse to making decisions of consequence. It’s not surprising that Google is rudderless.
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People are already spoofing location, and it hasn't been the end of the game so far. Or did I miss something?
It depends on how many people are doing it though, right? If you make it trivially easy by building the functionality into the operating system—and potentially even prompting people to lie when the app asks for their location—I feel like things would be very different.
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Revenue isn't taxed. Profit is. I suppose you could tax a proportion of your profit at a higher rate, according to the proportion of your revenue that came from advertising. But advertising isn't a "free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere". It's part of a business model that either is sustainable or isn't. If you taxed it that much higher, a lot of businesses would simply go out of business, because people…
I think in case of ad companies you could tax the revenue directly. They are strongly vertically integrated so there's really very little reason to track their profit rather than total sales. The only reason you tax profits rather than revenue is that you want to avoid killing businesses that do useful things why operating at low margins. Margins in advertising are huge and what those company do is pure detriment to…
They don't need apps to do this. I sat in a meeting with a data broker in 1998 where one of their managers was chuffed that they could determine menstrual cycles by analyzing purchasing records. And it wasn't hygiene products. Various foods and other spending patterns pop out after a 28-day correlation over groups of women that are artificially "synced" into cohort groups. This invasiveness will continue so long as t…
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This gets downvoted for being negative, but it was my immediate reaction when I saw "Mozilla": They're axing projects that don't align for strategic reasons that probably make sense, but is simultaneously very Googly. Association with Mozilla is a cause for concern when considering the longevity of a project.
Sure, Mozilla does this. So does Google. And Apple. And Microsoft. Everyone does. Pruning is a healthy and expected part of running a business. So what? All software is temporary, given a long enough timeline, even gmail. It's a user's fault for expecting otherwise.
Those are all companies you need to be wary with, because a strategic choice on their behalf may upend your life with a few days warning, or none at all.
And the sad part is that Mozilla joined their ranks, not qualifying as a truly “public service company”.
> All software is temporary, given a long enough timeline
Sure, we must all perish one day. But what you describe is how commercial SaaSS gets pruned because it’s good for business, and I have two objections with that:
1. That doesn’t make it good for users.
2. It’s a different timeline for software than for services.
I was contacted today by the customer of an old employer post bankruptcy. They want to know how to deal with self-hosting the service their hardware depends on; this never got delivered. All software is temporary, I told him, meanwhile his very expensive hardware wouldn’t initialize properly on boot.
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> Obviously nobody's being investigated for routine miscarriages. Sorry, how does a third party know the miscarriage was "routine?" What is a non-routine miscarriage? Why would it be criminal, it's still a miscarriage? What's the suspicion? The article you refer to, the investigation happened, not because there was a miscarriage, but because a body was seen being dumped... Maybe it was the mistake of the other poster…
>I do not understand your unwillingness to provide a response ... as to whether or not you think a miscarriage is a normal occurrence Why would I? It's such a rude question. We are discussing the nuances of suspicious "miscarriages" that appear to be home abortions constituting valid reason for investigation and possible prosecution, and you are hung up on ridiculous strawmen as if you're the only person who understa…
No. We weren't. We were talking about miscarriages being tracked through these kinds of apps. You selected one of over 20 examples provided by one poster.
> you are hung up on ridiculous strawmen as if you're the only person who understands the issue so everybody else who disagrees must be an uninformed sociopath
It was your strawman. You talked about "suspicious miscarriages" or whatever the exact term was. Something you made up on your own.
> Yes, I have the basic concepts of mammalian biology well understood
That's actually not clear at all as evidenced by the several other posters that took the same exact issue with your bizarre characterizations. But great job making yourself into some sort of victim here!
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https://killedbygoogle.com/ vs https://killedbymozilla.com/ Yet Mozilla has the stigma here?
Mozilla launches fewer projects in general, so the denominator is smaller. But yes, Google is the worst at this, and they've built up a reputation which has really hurt them! For example, basically no one believed that Stadia would stick around long-term, which (I would argue) became a self-fulfilling prophesy.
If Google had launched it and told everyone from the start that if they canceled it you'd get your money for games/hardware back I think people would've tried it.
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I’m not sure why this is downvoted, the strips are indeed a lot more accurate.
It's because people are reading the first few words and thinking "this is an male nerd asking stupid ignorant questions". It's that or there are people who actually think that counting days is a good way to enable unprotected sex without a risk of baby. Which is absolutely isn't - it changes the risk to 2-5% a shot. Compared to around ~2% year for condoms alone.
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Revenue isn't taxed. Profit is. I suppose you could tax a proportion of your profit at a higher rate, according to the proportion of your revenue that came from advertising. But advertising isn't a "free cash stream that can be bolted on everywhere". It's part of a business model that either is sustainable or isn't. If you taxed it that much higher, a lot of businesses would simply go out of business, because people…
If corporations are indeed people, why isn't their income taxed? They can have the mortgage interest deduction, just like me! I'm a people too! Also: >Is that really what you want? Kinda
And if individuals got to deduct everything they spend money on, then everyone would be incentivized to spend their entire paycheck every year and never save money for retirement or anything.
So the reasons we tax corporations on profit and individuals on income doesn't just make sense logically from a point of measuring economic value, but is also literally the only practical mechanism.
And just to check, you really want most of journalism to go out of business?