sjjshzvuiajhz's comments

For those billions, Apple links to the Google search results page in Safari when you type a query in the iOS system search field. That page includes Google search ads. According to the 2017 annual report, Google made $77 billion in revenue from “Google properties revenues”, which is mainly search ads but also includes other sources such as YouTube. Ads served by Google elsewhere (such as AdMob or DoubleClick) aka “Google Network Members’ properties” are only $17 billion. Search intent is an extremely strong signal for ads even with no personal information, although the ads are probably personalized if the user is logged into Google in Safari.

$9 billion is the “traffic acquisition cost to distribution partners” in 2017, which includes payments to Apple as well as other entities that send people to Google properties. This cost comes out to only 11.6% of the associated revenue. It’s likely that the amount of money paid to Apple is contractually linked to the revenue Google gets from ad clicks that can be tracked back to a link from Apple.

So there’s really no need for theories about the abstract value of user data here, it’s a simple referral fee for the ad clicks that are Google’s main business.

What do you mean by dwindling supply, we are talking about investors buying properties and renting them out. That doesn’t decrease supply in the rental market.

How does that cash end up in somebody’s rent check? Presumably the people selling to the oligarchs are not renters?

If the cash was able to get to renters via some kind of trickle-down effect, we’d all be happy with the resulting economic prosperity and then the resulting rent increases would unfortunately capture some of those gains. Increases in rent caused by increases in income aren’t going to exceed the increases in income, that violates causality. It’s only a problem if rent goes up first and renter incomes don’t increase to make up for it.

See my response to child comment - this is a story about the landlords diversifying globally, not merging together.

I’m really skeptical of this - my mental model is that when a city is initially settled and developed, large tracts of land are owned by people who end up becoming the local “old money” families who may truly have been monopolists. Over time they sell off chunks to “foreign investors” (who might come from the next town over or across the globe) which diversifies ownership.

Are you saying the old landlords were just being nice, changing less than they could, and the new oligarchs are suddenly charging market rate?

> Rents are essentially always proportional to real estate prices, otherwise there would be an arbitrage opportunity one way or the other.

This is empirically false. There is an incredible range in the price-rent ratio across different real estate markets - from 50 in Hong Kong to 5 in Detroit.

>more people can no longer afford to buy but still need somewhere to live, causing the rent market to become more competitive

It seems like you are double counting here. If high prices result in units becoming investor-owned and rented out instead of owner-occcupied, that means the rental supply is larger, so the foiled-owner-occupiers shouldn’t be crowding out more renters.

To put it simply, we are fitting the same number of humans in the same number of buildings here, and just changing whether the person who lives there is the owner.

> and the rents go up because owners charge what the market can bare

Landlords always charge what the market can bear, how does the sale price of the unit move that number (other than the double counting argument above)?

I don’t understand how the behavior described in the post raises rents. Clearly demand from investors would raise sale prices, but why would renters pay more to rent in buildings owned by shady oligarchs? Seems like it would just push up the price-rent ratio, which we definitely can see in the data. If anything, that indicates renters are getting a better deal, paying a smaller portion of the capital cost of living in a scarce asset.

Ie. if big city real estate is a particularly good place for oligarchs to park cash illegally, they ought to be getting less real returns then they could get on normal investments like the stock market. If they are overpaying for these properties, they are transferring wealth (on net) to the domestic sellers and/or tenants.

It’s cheaper to use a gas-powered water heater, right? I assume that’s because it’s also more efficient?

It’s complicated. Keeping salaries secret no doubt makes it more tenable to pay people who sit next to one another vastly different amounts. In a knowledge worker job where some people are way more productive than others, plus the same person’s productivity is highly variable over time, it’s probably good to pay people very different amounts of money over time, and also to have a complicated system of stock/bonus/promotions to incentivize better performance.

But companies aren’t just trying to maximize performance, they are also trying to minimize pay. It’s a lot easier to give someone a 20% raise if the starting salary is 50% lower.

Some people are underpaid because they don’t know how much they are worth, especially people from backgrounds where nobody makes this much money. Some people are overpaid because they are friends with the boss.

If a company is capable of paying $200k on average, salary transparency may make it harder for them to recruit people who are worth $500k. I’m paid a lot more than any company with a salary transparency calculator I’ve seen pays someone with my job title and experience. So I’m not going to try to work for those companies. I get the impression they are underpaying their employees, but their salary transparency allows them to recruit people who used to be even more underpaid.

Are you sure this is a problem? It’s very common for retailers to offer multiple payment options. As long as they let you check a box to default to the same option in the future, I don’t think users mind.

I am not sure about this, but could imagine it being the case that Amazon has done some analysis and found some fake reviews for counterfeit or legal knock-off items to be in their interest.

If the average customer believes that a lot of positive reviews means the quality of the product is high, they are more likely to buy the product. As long as the product is a least decent, they will probably be happy with it. If they are unhappy, they can complain and Amazon will refund them to make them happy (this is probably rare so not a huge impact on profit). Amazon gets to keep lots of the margin on the lower quality knock-off items, instead of the original IP owners. If the item really sucks and they get a lot of returns, Amazon can then use that as a signal to bury it.

If Amazon produced millions of fake reviews themselves, it would be a huge scandal. But if thousands intrepid sellers invest in making thousands of fake reviews, it’s not as much of a scandal for them. Amazon makes a show of fighting the most obvious fake reviews, so people will continue trusting the platform. But are they really using their top talent to fight the fake reviews? I work on a ML / data analysis team and I feel like we could do a much better job at that task than Amazon seems to be doing, and they ought to have more resources than we do.

I’m not accusing Amazon of doing this strategy intentionally, but perhaps there is an understanding that the ROI of engineering talent spent fighting fake reviews and counterfeit items is low or negative.

What would you think of a candidate who job hops every year or two, but usually gets promoted after finshing a project before hopping to a bigger/better project?

It’s true that every employer is competing in a global marketplace. The wealth-maximizing outcome is for the most productive programmers to work at the companies with the biggest money faucets to optimize. It makes sense for those companies to pay gobs of money for programmers from all over the world. And if paying them even more to move to Mountain View makes them 5% more productive, it’s worth it. This is definitely true for programmers that are working on systems that generate billions of dollars and get bigger every year.

On the other hand, there are lots of less-productive companies out there that don’t generate billions of dollars through carefully-tuned funnels, but who still need to employ software engineers. They can’t afford to pay $300k+ to thousands of people like the top companies do. But if they can find some solid talent who happen to have attachments to a lower cost of living area, or maybe are worse at interviewing, etc. they can get away with paying a lot less.