This article doesn't explain why a hudson valley grown honeycrisp would taste worse now than 10 years ago? Those are still coming from the boutique farms where you can pick them off the tree. It only explains why big apple in Washington is ruining the national honeycrisp market. Or did I miss something?
It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore. How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.
> Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition.
Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
> Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
You break Google Search out of Google and break Google Search up into two (or more) companies. Now, they have an incentive to compete against one another.
Before Google became a monopoly, SEO optimizations were somewhat restrained because something which was super-optimized for Google would generally hurt your search on Yahoo and vice versa. If the results got too shitty, people would start to switch.
The fact that switching doesn't happen anymore is prima facie evidence that Google is a monopoly.
Even if the majority prefer free or cheap, that doesn't mean there isn't a market for better and more expensive search. Those who don't want to pay can stick with Google and get what they pay for. Just like with any other product.
Being a more expensive premium product can even be more lucrative than being the cheaper majority product. Look at Apple, the only company to even try making a high quality laptop i the last 10-15 years. I'd say the same about smart phones, but the latest Samsung phones are actually high quality.
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
> Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.
I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion long before that).
> We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value.
We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.
I’m not sure how this applies to the conversation. The challenges being discussed here are centred around managing compliance and long-term sustainability within specific platform ecosystems. It’s about navigating policies, ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-term shareholder gains. The generational divide you’re mentioning doesn’t really seem relevant in this scenario.
Big companies have been owned by shareholders for hundreds of years. Most companies being plundered right now were created by selling shares to initial investors. These shareholders held a sense of responsibility towards customers, towards employees and towards their community, which made the companies long term successful.
Blaming shareholders has no relevance unless you look at what has changed about the shareholders. It's a new generation of elderly who never grew up and never learned to think long term.
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
That ranks as one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, and it was really not bad on a human or planetary scale. Carbon-based power plants kill far more on an annual basis.
The word temporary is only used to placate people who don't understand nuclear / nuclear waste (waste is a bad term) and who have been badly influenced by 70 years of misinformation from The Sierra Club and others.
None of this spent fuel is really that spent, has plenty of other use cases, and should be used. Also, storing it in concrete casks for 40 years is perfectly safe and has caused 0 harm.
The cost is largely due to regulatory hurdles that are slowly being eroded.
I don't know if this article is true but many assertions are untrue. The bowlero stock is pretty level and up from when it went public. It never made it past $17 from the $10 opening (SPAC probably?). So I have no idea what this author is talking about when he says it's been a wild ride.
It's Jacobin. Capitalism has shaky underpinnings and is only to the detriment of society at that publication.
Their mention of Bowlmor Lanes was casual and dismissive. In the early 90s when Shannon bought the place it was a completely dilapidated mess you wouldn't want to go into and he turned it into the most profitable/successful bowling center in the entire US. I lived through the transition and it was significant.
DNSSEC is a complicated kitchen sink that doesn't do the fundamentals (encrypt DNS traffic). It is also very black-box with the current tooling (not by design, but by implementation) which makes deployment perilous and confusing.
It's really a PKI infrastructure masquerading as a secure DNS system.
There's value in a PKI infrastructure for domain names, but it probably won't look exactly like DNSSEC. And there's value in encrypting DNS, but that is definitely not DNSSEC. I helped invent and deploy DNSCrypt which is strong encrypted DNS, but doesn't provide the PKI components. There are plenty of ways to do that part, however, that would be much lighter in weight than DNSSEC.
I'm not motivated to do it now with my current day job (American Dynamism) but someone out there could.
We're not one monolith of content. Folks post what they want and think is interesting. You can also imagine a lot of our portco CEOs don't love when we mention their competitors.
Some of us do it more than others, depending on the topic or point of the post. Market maps do it a lot more than position pieces, as you'd expect, for instance. Anyways, the feedback is good.
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