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Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’
(www.hindustantimes.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they'll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.
If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals' stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.
And, in the end, they'll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated "we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button" basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.
Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don't actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.
Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.
We can always hope for another Enron.
As a Houston native that gives me IBS just to think about.
one is plenty enough already i'd say
Which is annoying as people will say yeah but capitalism will bring competition. If Google isn’t doing well someone else will step up.
But no. They don’t. Google will be to big to fail and we will support them like you said.
Because we're all trapped in the Primitive Accumulationist mindset long after the frontier has closed. Now there's no more worlds to be conquered. The only question is who has the cheapest lines of credit.
The reason why Tik Tok is getting banned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
Foreign governments and businesses have always been allowed to lobby US officials, under the condition that they register as agents of another government.
Banning TikTok doesn't prevent business agents from Singapore or China from lobbying in the US. It doesn't even prevent ByteDance specifically from lobbying in the US.
Ok? They still banned tik Tok because it was a threat to alphabet
The Senate dropped the original TikTok Ban Bill as a stand alone. The House stapled the TikTok ban to its Ukraine relief bill, which Schumer considered a Must-Pass. There's no shortage of Silicon Valley shills in the Dem Majority US Senate, but that's not why the amendment ultimately succeeded.
This is because Steven Mnuchin is trying to force a buyout for personal gain and lobbying Congressional Republicans to do his dirty work. Its got far less to do with Sundar Pichai fearing that TikTok might eclipse YouTube.
That's nice. Doesn't change what I said but whatever.
If you track the history of the failed independent TikTok bill in the Senate, you'll understand the situation better.
If you go to opensecrets.org and look at how much money alphabet and meta have spent on lobbying, you'll understand the situation better.
I would recommend checking your own link. OpenSecrets has been dead for a while now. Nothing in there after 2014.