Comment by eru
3 days ago
Compare: Google's founders can buy all the yachts they could possibly eat, yet Google Searches are offered for free.
If we could get healthcare to that level, it would be great.
For a less extreme example: Wal-Mart and Amazon have made plenty of people very rich, and they charge customers for their goods; but their entrance into the markets have arguable brought down prices.
> Google's founders can buy all the yachts they could possibly eat, yet Google Searches are offered for free.
Google searches cost many billions of dollars: your confusion is because the customer isn’t the person searching but the advertisers paying to influence them. Healthcare can’t work like that not just because the real costs are both much higher and resistant to economies of scale but, critically, there aren’t people with deep pockets lining up to pay for you to be healthy. That’s why every other developed country sees better results for less money: keeping people healthy is a social good, and political forces work for that better than raw economic incentives.
Wal-Mart and Amazon have reduced wages for employees and the quality of purchased goods more than they have improved prices for consumers.
How do we know that?
And why do customers come back to shop there?
We know that from observing evidence such as how much the government pays out in welfare to Wal-Mart employees.
Customers continue shopping there because human beings are typically incapable of accepting a short-term loss (higher price) for a long-term gain (product lasts more than three uses).
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And Google search, a service on the level of a public utility, has been degrading noticeably for years in the face of shareholders demanding more and more returns.
How is Google Search a public utility?
Comparing something to a public utility is not me saying it's literally a public utility. Google runs a monopolistic service that is essential to a lot of our public life, in a segment that has high cost of entry and infrastructure cost. They make the service worse to make more money. It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized. The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
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