8 Comments
Sep 2, 2020Liked by Can Duruk

Ranjan & Can. Once again thank you for creating Margins. Your column surfaces another crucial point. Is this the way forward in our post-truth world? Deflect. Distract. Distort. It's clearly working for the Musk's, Zuckerberg's and the Trump's. How do we raise our kids? What do we tell them when they ask us what it takes to be successful? There is dissonance, in what we know are the right morals and what our society celebrates as success. Not unlike the wide chasm between what we are observing on Wall Street and our main streets.

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Sep 1, 2020Liked by Can Duruk

LOL at this line --> "I enjoyed the not-so-subtle "Let them eat stocks!" vibe from telling people who are unemployed and can't put food on the table that they should be happy $SHOP is doing well."

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I’m struggling to see why the world would be any worse off without SHOP AMZN or Stripe.

If Shopify didn’t exist, people would still be using a combination of Magento, Squarespace, etc to create online stores. If Amazon didn’t exist we would simply be buying more stuff from a variety of providers like Target, Walmart, and most likely a whole slew of smaller focused sellers who hadn’t been demolished by the Amazon juggernaut, for barely more money, with over a hundred billion of Bezos’s money distributed among more people instead of concentrated in his hands, and with less fake and counterfeit products. If Stripe didn’t exist, we would still have online purchasing like we did the several decades we did before Stripe? I mean, people have been buying stuff online for decades before Stripe was a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

And if it’s stock prices we’re worried about, fret not. All that loose capital being pumped into the capital markets would have found somewhere else to go. Maybe the gold bugs would be better off, or maybe it would force itself into the hands of actual innovators instead of the next breakthrough internet company which is nothing if the sort, and basically seeks to lose money until it can IPO and steal our wealth from our 401ks in the next crash.

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The only thing I really want from Facebook owner is to NOT VOTE trumputin! Same goes for Amazon owner! God, I keep trying to Live in in this Reality that YOU Planned!?! This place is NOT what You are Suppose to Be, Kind, Loving, want to create a community where we Build each other up! Please God tell me what you need from me. So I can do it die & we can continue this Conversation Face to Face!

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Small UX suggestion. The comment section allows user to write a comment but only directs user to log in when they decide to post. During the process of re-logging the comment disappears. You might want to looka that.

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In the Fascist Hell-State to come during Trump II (and beyond), I see Facebook becoming even more tightly entwined ("Department of Social Media?").

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It’s hard to take you seriously when you write this: “It's a company that hires people to build others' ideas, and, more often than not, it does that better and faster than them too. And when it can't do that, it just buys them outright. There is a lot of building, but the ideas are outsourced.“

Don’t know anyone worked at Facebook or who still works there that would agree with that. They have some of the best AI researchers and contribute more to the Open Source community than just about any company.

But sure, no innovation at all. Just PR and pure evil.

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