arder

I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit their crimes were pretty egregious and they actually never faced any consequences, the law suit they lost eventaully got turned over on appeal and by the time it was all resolved the market looked markedly different.

Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.

I'm a shareholder. The company does something I don't like. I file a lawsuit. The lawsuit costs the company time and money and possibly forces them to change their policy. Is this good for my immediate financial interest in the company? Probably not, but does it fulfil other purposes I may have? Sure!

If you want to send a message to companies that they better not fuck about with this DEI stuff for example, this might send that message.

You can absolutely turn up to the interview and claim a bunch of protected characteristics you don't have. I would wager it is not going to increase your chances of being hired.

There are a few good reasons to sue as a share holder. The first is that you just have different interests. For example, the board and CEO decide to do something that benefits themselves and their other financial interests. In that case you can sue and stop them doing whatever it was. So it's a mechanism of control - and you don't need a shareholder vote or a majority of support, what you can force can be unpopular but in your interests. That was the pretext for Tesla getting sued for Elon Musks' compensation package - the shareholder won and Musk had to hand back billions in compensation, that's strictly a financial gain for the shareholders.

But secondly, there's the meta game. If you're a good lawyer and you spot some company doing something egregious you can go shopping. Go and find a shareholder and say "Hey, we can sue that company, I'll take care of all of it, I just need your name because you're a shareholder". You can then conduct a massive expensive lawsuit against the company and if you win? They have to pay your exorbitant costs. Going back to the Musk example, the shareholder who sued to reverse the compensation package had a derisory number of shares, but the lawyers who took on that case are now asking for something like $5Bn in costs. That's a pretty nice payday, and in some ways it works like a bounty against companies with poor governance.

It's especially not how people shop at Amazon. You could feasibly imagine a shop where there is basically 1 version of each thing. Like the low cost supermarkets in the UK, they're efficient because they have very small product inventories. In that scenario you say "I'll buy some ketckup" and they only have 1 ketchup so you don't need to see it. You know the shop, you know what you're getting. Amazon is the polar opposite, for any given product it'll have 100,000 options and you have to fight Amazon every step of the way to find what you want, not just what will give Amazon the fattest margin.

That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods, the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order tide pods via the Alexa and before you know it Amazon is still doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods but they've got a $2Bn cost centre of overpaid enginers designing hardware that lets you order tide pods.

I wonder which way this splits for Amazon though, on the one hand lots of people already have Alexas and so you've got great brand recognition when you want to sell your Gen AI doodad. On the other hand, your Alexa brand is trash, everyone knows its basically only good for timers so maybe no one will take them seriously when the Gen AI version comes out.

Isn't this an integral problem to the reddit model though, that you can point to half a million communities and say "Look, so many people doing so much good" while what many will point to is "look, you've made thousands of dollars from celebrity leaks" and "You've got huge communities of people sharing images of underage girls.

I guess my commentary would be that there's a lot of places for people to be pleasant to each other and to discuss their shared interests - be it enthusiasts forums or facebook. The risk is being the place people go to be abusive and share their degradation of other people, and it's difficult to just take the rough with the smooth in that respect, when other communities are held to account for that sort of behaviour.