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Google. They had a company motto: “Don’t be evil”. They no longer have. And it shows. They make a browser as well. Pretty much from the beginning you could set which page a browser should open with. Some people called it a ‘home page’. Whole companies got started around that concept of offering people what they might want to see.

Changing this ‘home page’ was easy enough. Once you grasped the concept of the URL you just could take that line of text and plug it into a form in the browsers configuration. Simple. Works. What could be wrong?

Well: you should go where Google wants you to go. Not where you like to go. So in 2020 you have to look for an extension to change the page that shows up when you open a new browser window. Doable. But you need to really want it to do it. With the result that there are no more ‘home page’ companies to speak of. Demand and supply.

If you are on the Internet you go where Google wants you to go.

That in itself is pretty evil.

Not that there would be an alternative. Just that stocks no longer look so great. They are about the future. And that one is – lets say – uncertain.

A couple of days ago (mid October 2020) I compared Market cap with product produced (things made or subscribers) and recent revenue and employee numbers.

Tesla had a market cap of one million dollar per car made. So the stock market thinks that Elon Musks car company will make a million dollars in profits in the future for every car they manage to make. The same number for other auto makers is between 3 and 8 thousand. Only Toyota (18K) Daimler (23K) and BMW (31K) are different. Still a 30 to 1 ratio between BMW and Tesla.

Apple is expected to generate around $9000US of profits for every iPhone they sold in 2019. So if you did buy an iPhone, and if we assume a simple and generous 50% profit margin, then you have to buy Apple stuff for $18,000 for this to make sense.

Oversimplifying things even more Amazon is expected to make $10633 from each prime subscriber they have. Which ignores AWS and non prime clients or other activities like Whole Foods. Still: Profit margin on amazon.com are in the low percentages. Thinking 2% would mean that prime people need to order stuff worth half a million with the online merchant. Even if you think that only 1/3 of profits from prime member everybody would need to get 2243 Instant Pots. Each. Good times.

But hey: “There is no alternative to stocks”

In a week there will be an election. The polls look favorable for Mr Biden. They always did. Which polls? All polls. Mr Cohen got thrown under the bus in the meantime. The disregard for facts is part of the Trump system. The GOP has no problem to not replace a supreme court justice when he dies in February with the reason that it is an election year when the President who picks the candidate is a Democrat, while 4 years later 4 weeks is ample time to get a new one installed if it will be a Republican.

So, what happens if there is no blue landslide? Trump will simply not concede. Much as he tries to turn the election with lies and schemes before it happened he will do anything to hang on to power. For him it will be ideal if there will be unrest: The police will be on his side, not on the side of democracy. At least that is what is his plan. When there is chaos he can thrive. If he stays in power it does not matter to him -or many of his supporters – that he is on the level of Lukashenko.

As before the world, and the Democrats, will be flabbergasted by total disregard for any decency. As it has happened before. In a rally yesterday he claimed that he prevented the Democrats from blowing up Mount Rushmore. And yet around 30% of the people follow him. Read his constant nonsense on Twitter and paper their skulls from the inside with his nonsense. They believe him. They will find that it is OK that he stays in power. And in a couple of weeks Corona will be so bad that you can not switch horses mid stream. And least that will be their argument.

Luckily I have been wrong before. Sadly not as often as I would wish right now.

We will see.

Worth your time. So well made. So nicely written. I was waiting for this kind of thing since there was DV tape. DV is around for 1/5th of the time that has passed since WW1. So there is that …

Jahrelang verkaufte Apple Laptops mit Tastaturen die schlicht und einfach nicht immer funktionierten. Nicht weil sie kaputt gingen, sondern weil sie einfach so gebaut worden waren. War kein Problem für die Firma.

Whoa. This song is awesome. All his work is (seems to be). I had no idea about him. But “Reflect” is awesome. Thank you spotify. AI does not have to suck. Bummer that the youtube AI still so bad. Netflix: I don’t even want to talk about your issues if it comes to recommendations.

Back to Max Cooper: his work makes me very happy. I really like it. And I would have never found it, would the Spotify AI not have guided me.