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Welcome to Weekly Wisdom, your weekly dose of highlights, quotes and notes from my notebook. Join me every week, as I share ideas that interest me, intrigue me, and sometimes infuriates me.
I had one of the longest flights of my life this past week. Not in the length of the flight. The flight was long(16 hours), but that wasn’t my first go round for that. It was everything else. The long lines on the airport, the immigration computer failing, etc. It was awful, but I was safe throughout.
This week I’d like to share:
- Search is Dead: Google’s monopoly has destroyed their core product. In this post, I illustrate how, as a matter of complacency or in the interest of commercial goals, Search is useless for the end users.
Petty Business
Rarely do you find something insightful in the comments. Even if there is anything insightful in the comments section, it is buried under an ocean of inflammatory drivel.
Well I found this rare gem last week. This is a comment on a post about how Apple’s anti-tracking measures are hurting Facebook. Maybe the reason for Silicon Valley’s disdain for Facebook is that they are more productive than the rest of Big Tech.
I’m no fan of Facebook, but when I noticed big tech companies piling on Facebook, it made me think that there’s more to this. So, I made a quick financial comparison; always follow the money. Based on SEC filings, Apple averages a net income of $390,551 per employee, while Facebook averages a whopping $497,338 net income per employee. Facebook’s net income per employee is better than Apple, Microsoft, or Google. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, who recently eviscerated Facebook, has an abysmal net income per employee of ($30,836.73). We need to remember that company PR is always grounded in perception and profits. It’s not morality that drives a company with 2.5x the number of employees trying to damage the sales of a company that is 1.3x more efficient in generating profit.
—Gary Moore, Comment on “Completely Running Blind.”
Insularity
Next month New York City elects its new mayor. Barring a miracle, it will be Democrat candidate Eric Adams. Eric Adams was a come-from-behind candidate in the Democratic primaries. His policy proposals are very much Center-Left. Which drew a lot of flack on twitter. But as Mr. Adams point out in this profile in Vanity Fair, twitter means nothing. It is too insular to be effective.
They can tweet all they want; that’s a whole universe that lives among itself. [But] there’s a real-world that is not on Twitter. And so I could care less what they write, what they say.
—Eric Adams, Eric Adams on Weed, Beyoncé, and the Housing-Sleuth Haters
The New Nobility
This essay is about the Danish TV show Borgen. But it is really about the liberal elites obsession with status and court intrigue. They see all politics as fodder for inter-personal drama. All achievements as status symbols. This passage is especially illuminating.
Admission to Oxbridge or the Ivy League serves largely the same role that Mill assigned to the competitive examination: alma maters take the place of noble titles, and the frantic preparation (and sometimes even subterfuge) in which many middle-class parents engage to secure their children’s admission recall the desperate maneuvering of Victorian families to wed their daughters to peers.
—Samuel Biagetti, Into the Fairy Castle: The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism
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Mudassir Chapra