Google has Search and Ads, which generate vastly more money than they need to operate. Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history, so I think the money is well deserved.
But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.
Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.
Google could give it to schools with no heat or AC and outdated textbooks. Or help solve homelessness. Or fund fixing the country's bridges. "Sorry we really don't have the funds for more heads or ridiculous raises we're busy not being evil."
Google is a public company. The money either goes to shareholders or to employing people. There is no conceivable world in which this money would have gone to any of those causes.
Well there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.
Google has a large charitable arm called google.org, but your point is mostly correct, although the money they pay to employees (and to the government in the form of payroll taxes) isn't being destroyed. It's just cycling around the economy, and many employees donate decent amounts of their paychecks to charity (Google does 1:1 matching and encourages this)
For-profit companies do philanthropy all the time. There is no requirement to divert money to shareholders (further, Google's not payingany dividends right now)
Google does stock buybacks instead. The last yearly buyback authorisation was for $70b, so the "yield" is around 4-5%. It's very much in the blue-chip, return-cash-to-investors phase of its corporate life.
I know that you probably meant to express that Google is the opposite to a public (= governmental) entity, but "private company" is not the term to express that. Google is a public company (= listed on the stock market for anyone to buy and sell), so the opposite of a private(ly owned) company.
That's not true. Google makes money for stockholders, and they do whatever they want with that money. Some of them also certainly give money to charity, etc.
I don't know if we prefer a world in which Google itself made these kinds of contributions and not the people who own Google.
There's a conceivable world where we restructure incentives around our current form of capitalism and tax codes to encourage extra money going into humanitarian causes, instead of being spent on arbitrary capital maneuvers like stock buybacks.
Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.
It’s very simple, that’s what the government should fund. That’s what our tax should pay for. If you really want to manifesto, then just read about land value taxes, don’t tax anything except what we want to disincentivize and land, which doesn’t distort the market. But this is entirely off-topic for this thread.
There are 500k homeless people in the US alone [0]. Let's compare that to Google's net income (money gained after all expenses including taxes, etc.) for a quarter (quarter is 3 months with $70m on a good quarter and $30m on a bad one [1]). If we were to give every cent of Google's earnings to each homeless person in the USA then each homeless person could get a $46 pay check ((net_income_per_quarter / homeless_population) / 3 [2]) per month from Google on a good quarter and a $20 paycheck per month on a bad quarter [3]. But, you have to ask yourself what this sort of wild and crazy idea would cost to Google's bottom line. I'm no expert on that, but I assume it would not be good. This is just some simple back of the napkin math, but it shows how simply infeasible solving homelessness or poverty is even for a company as big as Google. This is why I usually believe solving homelessness can not be achieved by money alone, and just the scale of the problem makes it so intractable.
That is true it says all numbers in thousands also I noticed I accidentally was on years and not quarters. So 11k a month for example is the new number for a good year [1] and 5k a month is the example for a bad year [2]. So yes now it seems more tractable than it was before, but my argument was just supposed to show one reason why it was intractable there could be many other reasons, though my argument fell flat for that one reason there are still many other reasons it could be intractable.
So the question still remains is it tractable? The answer given my above argument is still up in the air, because the honest truth is there are many underlying assumptions in my argument so again it doesn’t really say much about it being tractable. It was only trying to say it was intractable which again it fell short of doing. For example in the per month. After Google dumps all or even some of their profit into that for even one month it is somehow going to still reach the same profit margins the next month the proof for that is up to someone trying to prove it’s tractable. There are too many other variables like this that exist and it really needs a much bigger burden to show that something like that is tractable.
Homelessness is mainly caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people.
The good way to change that is to add more housing (let's ignore the option of removing people).
Giving homeless people money doesn't end the physical reality at all. It can make some homeless people able to afford housing, but an equal number of housed people will replace them as homeless.
I might be misunderstanding what you are saying, but if there are less than 600k homeless people in America and over 15 million vacant homes, it doesn't seem to be "caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people".
Okay I was wrong about that I was also wrong about the quarterly part the numbers were not per quarter but per year. Again back of the napkin and I’m glad to have people point out the flaws in my argument.
Calling Google Search one of history's great inventions is beyond delusional starting from the fact that Google didn't invent website indexing and searching if anything it had better algos and was less disrupted by the various waves of SEO spammers that killed the likes of Yahoo or Lycos or Altavista, etc.
We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know.
Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.
> We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know.
I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there were always databases online to look up books. Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank, and after Pagerank was gamed was only better than the alternatives because the alternatives had shut down their crawlers.
I miss Altavista. It would be nice to be able to grep the web for things that I want to find, rather than to beg search engines to suggest something for me that they claim their research shows that I might like, but is probably just profitable for them.
Compared to the invention of the Internet and/or the WWW, I'm of the opinion that calling Google (the search engine) or PageRank (the algorithm) one of the Great Inventions in Human History (and capitalizing it) is too far-fetched. The first is an indexer for the former, and the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walks.
I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)
"the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walk" - I think the parent's point was the impact not that the algorithm itself is unprecedented. You could argue in the same way that the wheel is just a solid symmetric disk connected to a hub in the center that helps vehicles move around on a sufficiently even surface. Note that I don't imply that PageRank is as significant an invention as the wheel.
That hasn’t changed one bit. Google made it possible to find what you’re looking for. That was literally and figuratively revolutionary. This hasn’t changed either.
Altavista was around for quite a while, and I liked its engine better than Google’s for a long time. Also, Yahoo’s directory-style thing was pretty decent if you knew your way around a catalogued library.
Compared to the alternatives at the time (and really now) it absolutely is. Without decent search the web is a mess, it's just mountains of information with no logic or organisation and the best content and information is nothing if you can't locate it.
These days their search is starting to turn. Too many sponsored results, no way to avoid the AI takeover or copycat sites. In short the search doesn't actually find you the best results. But still it's hard to avoid it. There's no better way to find what you are looking for wherever it is on the web.
I feel about the same amount of uninformed as I was pre- Google, maybe more so being that there are now whole categories of information that I know are pointless trying to memorise.
What's really changed for me is that now we don't have conversations that peter out because nobody has access to basic facts, i.e. whose population is greater, France or Germany. Now we just look it up, end the argument and move on.
Of course this was possible with other search engines. Google's utility comes conflated with the rise of the smart phone and mobile internet, all of which happened around the same time. Everybody having access to the answer to every question in their pocket is the real game changer.
Creating value feels more like the purpose of the business. Google is creating value, and I dont see the problem with them creating a bunch of easy jobs for people as a means of distributing that value
It's worse for everyone else (plus it's mentally terrible for the soulless drones taking paychecks). If Google didn't waste money they could offer more value to society.
It's like the government redistributing your money to bullshit initiatives
Are you saying Google is currently trying to offer more value to society and they can't find the funds?
My core stance probably comes down to: I don't see how putting money into payroll can be considered a waste to society. It's distributing money directly into the bank accounts of the working class.
They are in a position to provide value to society. They have as large a team of vetted professionals as they can. A bit cliche, but the horse has been lead to water
the opportunity cost of these people's entire working lives? How is that not a waste to society? Its not like Google is stashing its funds under a matress unless it doles out extra payroll
But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.
Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.