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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • If you think so, you should explain where exactly the 1.624 trillions $ value of Google is, given that its net assets are about 267 billions $ and they had about 118 billions $ in cash (or cash equivalent)

    You can sell a cow for $1000 on the meat market. Or you can keep that cow, so that it produces milk for many years and earns you a total of $5000. This is the difference between net asset value and valuation. If you were to buy a cow, and producing a cow was next to impossible (cows are one of a kind, like unicorns), then the price of the cow would be closer to the valuation than its net asset value. And once you have that cow, as a responsible farmer you will milk it to the last drop, to get the most out of your money.

    Now I’m sorry for the cow, but a business isn’t a living creature so exploiting it is ok.

    The company isn’t necessarily expected to grow. Companies are expected to be milked. Sometimes companies don’t grow and that’s ok, they’re still being milked. The only requirement is that the owners of the cow, at any age of the cow, will believe that there’s milk in there somewhere some day.

    It’s not a loan, it’s actual ownership. And the expectation is that people get something out of it.

    YouTube would exist almost as a hobbyist site that has issues scaling its users and monetizing its activity. At some point it would have failed because people would find it frustrating to face the lags, and the owners (who by the way are still owners, who still invested in it, so actually very little changes in this mechanic) would introduce subscription fees or something in order to use the platform. Would it have become a ubiquitous platform as it exists today? Would you have it on your tablet, tv, phone? Probably not, but any of its competitors would have gone on a very similar journey and you’d be complaining about a different company, because you need investments in order to grow, become better, more attractive, and become both the way that people choose to upload content, and the way that people choose to consume content. And it would have been YouTube who couldn’t have afforded to keep the lights on at this moment.

    A loan without the need to repay it.

    I’m sorry, but that statement is as false as “developers get paid to much simply to press buttons. Anyone can do that”.

    At the heart of this statement sits a conviction that you understand the topic, while you are missing some fundamental facts about it.

    Why don’t you play a few thought experiments? Put yourself in other people’s shoes. If you were someone who had money, why would you put it in a loan that doesn’t have a need to be repaid? If you’re suggesting that the entire stock market rests on the “greater fool” principle, then maybe you don’t know about the end goal? Did you consider the “return on investment”? This literally is the very thing that powers the farmer who buys a baby cow, and what makes trillion dollar companies. Literally, the same instruments and calculations that financiers and CEOs of huge companies use day to day, my acquaintances who literally run their own pig farm, use every year - from options on feed, to futures on meat before even buying the piglets. The only thing they don’t do of this equation is stocks, since it’s a small farm and it’s owned fully by the family, and they don’t need to scale.






  • It’s not fair to pay money for services to a company involved in unrelated lawsuits? Does the antitrust investigation negate the expenses associated with running the operation of serving you content?

    Are all competitors dead? You can switch to watching TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, for random user generated content. You can go to nebula if you want YouTube style documentaries. You can go to any movie platform if you want to watch random stuff. They are all either in the red, backed by VC, waiting to do the same thing, or serving aggressive ads, or selling your data, or costing money.

    How much people are willing to pay is irrelevant in the context of fairness. Fairness is about a company breaking even. Customer readiness is however relevant to business, and in this case I’m afraid that the evidence is against you - after countless similar complaints in the past, people haven’t left the platform, and people have signed up to pay.

    Paying for services is normal. It’s unrealistic not to. It’s unproductive to pretend otherwise.





  • It didn’t take a lot for me. I clicked on the link, took a look at the first post and there you go! Advocating for terrorism and defending genocide, and every comment is full of hate, using mostly language that is particular to dark corners of the internet where incels and fascists thrive.

    The comments weren’t responses to comments they didn’t agree with so it’s not like they got provoked or anything. The hate is inherent. Imagine what it looks like when someone tries to contradict them.

    For me, I’d like to be as far away from such resources as possible. They give too many negative vibes, and I’d rather spend my time and energy in places that have a possibility of a constructive discourse.


  • Convenience and performance.

    I’m a dual user of Firefox and Brave on different computers. In order to separate work and personal stuff and shopping, I use different profiles. Easy on brave, needs extension with separate app on Firefox, that doesn’t work on librewolf. And too often I have to stop my browsing because this Firefox setup is less stable and crashes once in a while causing annoyance.

    Plus Chromecast. I like the ability to search for a video on the laptop and cast it to the TV.

    It’s always a balance of convenience and privacy plus ethics, can’t have both.






  • Well it’s good that you care. It’s the multitude of opinions and open discussion, what makes a democracy work.

    Unfortunately we have siloes of opinions, so you’re pretty much either trying to yell in an echo chamber or at best, argue with a moderate like me. The moment you’re faced with the people leaning right, some of the rhetoric might be scary for them, and they might retract further into their own silo, where more and more extremist views are tolerated.

    The key to a functioning society, is moderation in enforcement of law (so that the state continues to be the only one who is able to, and expected to exert force), and understanding of each other so that it remains an open dialog.

    I’m originally from a country where society has degraded into 2 irreconcilable camps, and it got to the point where I can’t even stand my own parents because their echo chambers had lead them to extreme extremes. And I’m not the only one.

    Right now what is paramount is a government that optimizes social well-being (think Finland), and the enforcement of those laws, because everyone from Putin (and the general club of autocrats) to fundamentalist fascists everywhere else, want to destabilize that right now. A prosperous democracy is a threat to all of them. Whether you like it or not, we are in the middle of an ideological war.



  • Keep in mind that privacy is really a recent concept. Human societies never had privacy before the industrial revolution. Everybody knew everybody else and what they were doing. I do want my privacy, but modern technology makes it too easy to create and grow any organization that can rival the state in power. While we do have the power to influence and control the state, we have no power over competing organizations that act like authoritarian states.

    There needs to be a balance, an amount of power that the state can exercise, that’s just right for keeping it as a monopoly on violence. Absolute privacy, where the state has transparency, is taking away all the power and advantages from the state and gives them to whoever wants to challenge that state.

    In other words, nuance.



  • Read the article. Title is clickbait. It’s only with approval from a judge. You know, alternatively they could just arrest and imprison the person, which is what every country is doing. Not saying it’s without worrying, but there’s important nuance that most are missing.

    P.S.

    Absolute extremist attitudes like “nobody should be able” and so on, have absolutely no place in modern society. There’s always nuance. Libertarianism doesn’t work, and laws must be enforced. It sucks, but when there are forces that want to hurt people and destabilize societies, you can’t go by the rule that everyone is a saint. The world will punish this attitude.

    Yes, the world isn’t perfect, but for ducks sake, quit sensationalizing anecdotes and representing them as “this always happens”. That’s dishonest.