61–68 of 68 posts
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> just trading When Americans understand stockbuybacks should be illegal, that the entire stock market is a game played by monsters, then maybe, maybe you'll fix your shit
Stock buybacks are just a tax advantaged dividend. Why would anyone invest in a company if there isn't some way to turn that into a profit?
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I believe I've seen DDG's CEO or founder on here claiming that they do not proxy requests through Bing and that they do their own indexing. I think they had been using Bing at some point but I'm pretty sure current DDG results is all DDG indexing. Probably still falling for most of the same tricks which blogspammers use for Google SEO, though.
DDG is powered by Bing plus other APIs and their own crawler. https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources... > To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. > We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. > we have more traditional links a…
But what I’ve still yet to hear anyone share are good solutions?
The situation with Google’s search results is basically identical to the one with Amazon and cheap crappy products. In both cases people seem to have just given up.
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> this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so.. That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are extremely broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more narrowly than they were intended to be. > the failures tend to be th…
>In a functioning regulatory environment [...] you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market. Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised
There are many markets where this is the case. Which trucking company has significantly more than 15% market share? Which law firm? Which car insurance company? Which university? Which construction company?
Nearly all of the consolidated industries got there through some combination of mergers, vertical integration and regulatory barriers to entry. Even some of the "natural monopolies" like last mile telecommunications are only so because of regulatory choices -- the natural monopoly is actually the roads, which the government owns, and if they provided easy and affordable access to roadside cable trenches there would be much more competition for data service.
It’s one of the reasons why I started AskPandi as a side project. It’s an answer engine that gives answers without fluff. No link sifting, no ads, no popups, no cookie consents.
It’s making browsing the web fun again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just trading When Americans understand stockbuybacks should be illegal, that the entire stock market is a game played by monsters, then maybe, maybe you'll fix your shit
Stock buybacks are just a tax advantaged dividend. Why would anyone invest in a company if there isn't some way to turn that into a profit?
I feel like there is another big point being hinted at in these articles but not quite stated: Better Homes and Gardens is committing fraud and lying to website visitors.
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Google (and Walmart) established their dominant position through clever marketing based on lies. We bought it and only now are starting to realize what we fell for. Google's big lie was "don't be evil." They provided overwhelmingly valuable services for free. They did everything with minimal advertising and generally fantastic performance. Then they merged with an advertising company and pretty soon "don't be evil" w…
This a great, well researched response, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I think we should be careful not go give these companies too much credit. America has, understandably, been investing less in manufacturing over time at a roughly steady rate of decline: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu... manufacturing's share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) has dropped from 28.1…
One example: Place a massive order beyond the capability of the supplier to meet the demand but at a premium price to incentivize them to try anyway. Then cancel at the last minute when production is almost finished but doesn't quite meet the original quantity ordered. Finally come back a few weeks / months later and offer to buy the resulting overstock at a deeply discounted price.
Obviously the blame doesn't all belong to Walmart but when a company is struggling and desperate it only takes a couple of deals like that to put them on a fast track to liquidation of their assets until all that remains is a company dedicated to marketing imported products under a previously prestigious brand.
The company I have specific knowledge about, Rawlings Sporting Goods, shut down most of their US manufacturing at the end of the 1990s and moved everything to China. Walmart had a big hand in driving the nails in the coffin of that ~80 year old company.