Kagi sure does keep me on my toes. I love it. I won't be using this at all, but I appreciate it exists. If you opened one on the East Coast I could see myself visiting.
To all those calling this bizarre - I agree, BUT I also think Kagi is in the perfect position to do weird stuff like this. Their products are high impact but, to be blunt, easy to ditch. If the company gets too weird for me I can just effortlessly use a different search engine / browser. So, I encourage them to try weird stuff while they are small and have a small footprint. I love the idea that a company is doing stuff like this.
> If the company gets too weird for me I can just effortlessly use a different search engine / browser. So, I encourage them to try weird stuff while they are small and have a small footprint.
I actually don’t think there’s a search engine or browser to switch to with the same values. That’s why I and others get dismayed when the best, the only, option for paid search wastes its time and talent on boondoggles.
I have a personal theory that this technology is inevitable, and will become widely used. As the technology gets better, and these cameras get more discrete, anyone not wearing these glasses is at a disadvantage.
I would love to record everything I see (assuming perfect solutions around video security and storage, another topic), not because I’m a creep and want to watch the videos, but because it acts as a personal dash cam.
Right? Actually having access to what you saw and heard beyond your memories sounds like a great thing.
But I would prefer not to get it via Google or Facebook.
Even the humble recorder app that came with my phone, which I used to record interviews for genealogy - turns out, I am locked out from my own audio file. It's saved on the device, but I need root to access it. If I get that, my bank punishes me for my irresponsibility by disabling the apps I need to e.g. log in to government websites. I can only get my audio file if I upload it to Google first.
So that another topic is quite relevant.
I'm not so sure it will be inevitable and widely used. I'm sure it will be used by our secret police. I also think they prefer we didn't get it, or at least that our use of it was heavily mediated by a government-partnered organization like Facebook or Google.
perma-video + llms to scrape through it ("where did i leave my keys?" - "you absent-mindedly left them in the kitchen") plus a million other use cases we haven't even thought of will be way too useful to give up.
"wow you send Every Single Frame of your life to zuck?" - i will have no retort than to hang my head in shame.
i just wonder what google will come up with. they can't let zuck have the entire cake, especially when they had The Vision 10 years ahead of him.
Interesting idea of offloading yet another mind function to technology... We already take pictures of scenery instead of absorbing it with our eyes and mind (what about concert-goers who press record and get busy watching the video to make sure the framing is right, instead of actually enjoying the concert).
Even critical thinking is now being offloaded to ChatGPT.
A friend of mine loads up a YouTube video of how to tie a necktie every morning...
not really a convincing comparison... if i no longer had to poo, that would be pretty cool. yeah its a bodily function but it also kind of sucks and is disgusting and requires a ton of infrastructure to "take care of".
being able to seek-scroll throughout your day like a non-stop livestream is objectively a power-up. some people will get oneshotted by it - but a lot of people have been oneshotted by a lot of different things over the decades.
short-form video fried lots of brains, but it also built out the infra for all the other stuff. it is what it is.
Walk around in Lycra and clompy shoes, wearing a cycle helmet and helmet cam and people will assume you’re a YouTuber. You don’t even need a bike.
Incidentally if y’all aren’t following this space there are bike rear lights which have cameras and radars in them and they hook up to a cycle computer, warn of cars coming up behind and how far away they are, and can be used as a ‘dash’ cam for near misses / bad driving / accidents.
My wife and I recently decided to do IVF. The doctor specifically told us that we needed to order the medicine (menopur, Gonal F, etc) from an American pharmacy. That alone made me suspicious, so I looked at foreign options. Altogether, the medication required would have cost us about $5000 from American pharmacies. We found out that we can just buy the exact same stuff from a German pharmacy for about $1000. So yes, Americans get wrecked by drug prices.
When my wife needed a rabies post-exposure shot course, it would have been around $25000 range for the shots without coverage. Our (expensive high end) insurance brought it down to "only" $2500 out of pocket for us. The alternative is to take the gamble of a possible horrible death.
For whom? I can't imagine this in particular would not be free at the point of use like almost everything else. That said, the UK has famously been free of (classical) rabies since the 1920s, so it's unclear if it would be easily available if there aren't other uses.
Was talking about from a private clinic [1]. Obviously it's free via NHS. It's a good example of a system in which the government in incentivized to not tolerate drug price gouging.
Most dispensed _items_ are free of charge (as in, the prescription charge is not paid - only around ~11% of items are paid). There isn't enough data to know how that breaks down to people though.
Well, for one ... it's illegal to import drugs that aren't FDA approved. You can import a few months personal supply of a prescribed drug that is FDA-approved but doesn't just mean that the active-ingredient is FDA-approved. It has to be the same exact product, manufactured in the same FDA-approved facility with the same packaging/labeling/etc to be considered "FDA-approved". The most expensive FDA-approved drugs are sold at US prices globally, so there's no geographic arbitration. Then other non-FDA approved brands are sold at lower prices - importing these is a smuggling offense, though enforcement was pretty low (but now with CBP's upcoming budget increases, who knows if this will continue to be practical or ultra-risky).
More practically - HMG is a very difficult drug to assay for purity. It's too complex to interpret with qNMR, HPLC testing is also very hard to interpret. The testing that exists evidently either has a very high margin of error or involves lots of rats and dissections.
Even testing for hCG, while it can be done reliably with HPLC, results between different labs are not comparable because the primary assay is also to test bioactivity on rodents, so they're not normalized to the same standard.
The lack of any independent testing for HMG means that some of the more accessible international manufacturers don't actually test their own product. Combined with its high price, that all makes it a very common target for counterfeit.
Yes, the American pharmaceutical system absolutely has quality-control issues. 80% of our generic pharmaceuticals come from overseas production. The pentagon wanted to independently test the drugs it was purchasing for the VA, so it worked with a company named Valisure who determined that about 10% of the drugs had issues with contamination or a lack of the active ingredient[0]. The FDA responded by shutting down Valisure's third-party testing.
But even with the problems we have here in the USA, HMG is the one drug I would particularly not trust from gray-market supply chains. It's conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if the doctor said that because other patients had tried it and had poor results.
Not only the drug has to be approved but the production process and laboratory.
There is a lot of bureaucracy and audits. It is but as if a European laboratory is allowed to sell a generic drug without at huge costs for certifications ( and viceversa)
I am not saying that buying your medicines to questionable online web is a good idea. Just that other countries have their own controls depending on their policies
Yes. There are a lot of good non-FDA drugs that have been available for online purchase by US citizens. It's illegal to get them shipped to you, but enforcement has historically been nearly non-existent and given that 75 million Americans are under-insured ... it probably has been the rational option for many. India, China, and Turkey are perfectly capable of making high quality pharmaceuticals when the business owner actually cares about quality.
Also, compounding pharmacies in the USA sometimes get their raw active ingredients from even the shadiest suppliers in China and India. It's not always perfectly legal, things aren't always QA/QC'd at any point in the process the way they should be, but it happens. So again, "buying American" isn't exactly a golden ticket.
European HMG from reputable pharmacies is probably great quality - but it's still rather expensive compared to Chinese HMG and there's really no way to trust anyone selling it online, you'd basically have to fly to Europe yourself. And taking it back on the airplane would still be illegal, and you'd be rather more likely to be caught by customs than a mailed package.
I'd assume it was their telling them specifically not to get it from a foreign country that was the odd part, as opposed to simply prescribing it from a US pharmacy since ofc that is what a US doctor will do. Maybe enough patients tried this, to save costs, that it resulted in some kind of issue for the doctor and that is why they brought it up.
You need to understand that the system is deliberately so opaque that doctors don't even know what your costs would be. Sure there's a sticker price, but for most medications that's so high as to be absurd. From there, it's entirely dependent on your insurance, coinsurance, pharma benefits, etc, etc.
They try, but they're not in a position to do anything about it.
> They try, but they're not in a position to do anything about it.
Well, somebody's got to be, and the doctors seem like the ones with the most leverage to get those people to do something about it, right? Customer/patient pressure obviously isn't working.
> the system is deliberately so opaque that doctors don't even know what your costs would be.
You're telling me professionals who make $300k after 20 years of education have 0 clue about what their patients might pay, or have never had patients who expressed concern over costs? Or don't have friends or relatives who expressed dissatisfaction with a high-deductible plan? Or aren't complicit in getting kickbacks for prescribing opioids?
We gotta stop absolving people of accountability. And that includes EVERYONE in the chain who benefits. Yes, this includes doctors.
Btw, I have had doctors who do try, and many more now will accept reasonable cash prices for their services. That should be encouraged and commended.
Indeed. At the end of the day, the entity underwriting the insurance plan decides the price. This is often the individual's employer. Your doctor does not know what your HR team decided to ask for when designing their health plan.
Pricing in healthcare is very tightly regulated and there isn't a simple one line answer for why certain prices are they way they are. Its easy to scapegoat bigpharma for being greedy, but they're just as greedy as any other US corporation.
I only brought up YouTube because when a company is free to set their price, you will still end up with a pricing model where the pricing is different based on region.
The problem with this argument is that pharmaceutical companies are private businesses trying to make a profit, not charities. If it were truly unprofitable to sell drugs in, say, Canada or France, pharmaceutical companies would just not sell their drugs in those countries. It is _less_ profitable to sell drugs in those countries than America but still profitable, which is why they still try to capture those markets. If America fixed this imbalance by forcing a lowering of drug prices in the American market, there's no reason to believe that this would cause raising of prices elsewhere. The only way this would be possible is if it were truly unprofitable to sell the drugs elsewhere, which can't be the case since these are corporations not charities. The real impact would be to slow down new drug development, since existing drugs are already profitable to sell everywhere in the world even in countries with more regulation, but if America fixed its market by lowering drug prices for Americans, the total profitability of pharmaceuticals would decrease, decreasing the incentive to create new pharmaceuticals. That's a totally different and very plausible impact. Rising drug prices for existing drugs in other countries is not a plausible impact.
> If it were truly unprofitable to sell drugs in, say, Canada or France, pharmaceutical companies would just not sell their drugs in those countries
You’re confusing capital and operating costs. Once you’ve developed the drug, selling everywhere you can makes sense. When considering whether to develop a drug or invest in something else, America’s biotech market absolutely turns keys. (But not as uniquely as we think. Europe has a thriving R&D market, it’s just directly subsidised.)
So basically if this true, you prove my point. If Americans weren’t paying these high costs then R&D would slow down and the whole world wouldn’t get these drugs.
America subsidizes these drugs for the rest of the world, which does not pay its fair share into R&D costs. If we’re to fix our healthcare system, this kind of thing can’t continue.
I think they are not saying it's unprofitable, but rather that the current government should shape the market so the environment levels more over US vs the rest. (of course please in a laissez-faire change the market style not the bad socialist stuff)
You think pharma companies won't bill the rest of countries whatever the market can bear? I can't think of why they possibly would lower their prices even if the American government stops subsidizing their businesses via using their monopoly on violence to enforce our perverted IP regimes.
Europe is highly regulated. Other countries with nationalist governments if pushed too far will make their own generic versions. So no, increasing prices in other countries to offset the loses in the American market is not that simple.
What's the problem with talking points? Talking is the purpose of an open forum like this one. Let's argue against the points and not against the commenters.
Fair point, I’ve corrected "talking point" to "propaganda" above. Not only does it not make any logical sense, but there is zero evidence that Big Pharma isn't pricing drugs to maximize profitability in every market in which they operate. Drug companies aren’t charities.
Besides, it also invites the immediate and rather fatal rejoinder of, "OK? So how about we... don't do that?"
Any negative response to that must suppose that everyone else would just give up on trying to advance drug R&D if the US stopped unilaterally self-sacrificing to subsidize it for the entire world... and when you lay it out like that, it seems like that must not actually be what's going on in the first place, because why the hell would we be do that, for that reason? So, very probably, we aren't, and further, if we are we should definitely stop.
>If America prohibited such gouging, would the rest of the world accept price increases on their drugs? If the current administration is so interested in inflicting harm on the rest of the world, maybe they should be convinced to lower drug prices.
I doubt governments elsewhere are itching to increase their healthcare spending even more. Realistically speaking the actual result will be cost cutting from pharma companies, mostly in the form of lower R&D spending for new drugs.
The sad reality is that if Americans stopped paying inflated prices the 40% of drugs discovered here would shrink to about 10% and world wide drug discovery would be massively reduced.
You literally have to get fucked or the world get fucked harder and drags you down with them. Same reason why NATO and the farm bill are good for America.
The greatest trick from the wealthy is to not just exploit you to get it, but to destroy any possibility of resistance to them. Even trying to resist does nothing but harms the under class even more than if you simply accept it.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.“ - George Orwell, a communist/socialist
Edit: To the guy who claimed Orwell wasn't a communist, the POUM who he fought for in the Spanish Civil war was communist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM) and according to the soviet union was specifically trotskyist. If you fight for them you are a communist, even if and especially if you claim you weren't later in life.
Orwell was an anti-Communist, though especially anti Stalinist. He fell into the POUM, he didn't choose them, "I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM. (I had only joined the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties."
He actually said "As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists." After the Stalinists illegalized the POUM, killed and tortured Orwell's friends and tried to kill him, forcing him flee Spain, his view on Communism grew ever more dim, and after that he grew more strongly anti-Communist than his earlier anti-Fascism.
Is anyone else fascinated more about the stories of the people that get into this kind of stuff? I mean, it seems like you must just be destined to be in this business if you are in it. Nobody goes on the Internet and researches how to get started sand trafficking.
I personally think getting into organised crime kind of mirrors the process where corps pick up fresh grads. Someone who fits the profile of being suitable for organised crime is someone without legal opportunities due to a lack of education, illegal immigration status, prior convictions, etc. In similar ways they are "headhunted" in a process that is more about convenience than key skills in a resume. If you're one of these people you'll end up floating around spaces where the "headhunting" happens.
I remember when I was young and unemployed being plucked from the street when I was looking at job cards in the window of a job centre by members of an MLM. They tried to rope me into their ugly embrace selling door to door on commission only deals that were dubious in nature.
What's kind of spooky to me is how thin those lines can be, it only takes one mistake, lapse in judgement in youth or rolling your birth into an unstable family to end up on the wrong side of that line. This is why I personally find it quite distasteful when people who travelled the happy path turn up their nose at people who fell off onto the darker one. In some cases some kids excel in their black market roles and would have applied the same gusto to a white market profession if they'd had that opportunity.
Once you’re in, it also gets progressively easier to get in deeper, and harder to get ‘out’.
All your contacts are ‘in’, you have a reputation and people trust you to do what they expect, etc. etc. If you get arrested, even more so, as now people ‘outside’ have a clear signal which side of the line you’re in.
People looking down on you is as much a defense mechanism for them as anything else too, of course, as it provides not only a us vs them mechanism, but also makes it easier to segregate themselves and avoid crossing the line.
The documentary the Act of Killing [1] follows a man who was a regime-sanctioned killer of "communists" in Indonesia. Watching interviews with the director, he talks about how after someone's killed a couple of people, refusing to do more means admitting that the previous kills he's done are something wrong/terrible.
The director helps reveal what's inside the killer's mind by suggesting to him to make a movie of his experiences. In one scene [2], we're at a lush waterfall, we see angels dancing and the victims of the killers thank him for freeing them from communistic godlessness and sending them to heaven, with the song "Born Free" playing in the background...
Having been close friends to some killers (legally sanctioned by the gov’t at the time), the other issue is killing is, frankly, really easy. Way easier than anyone in polite society is going to be comfortable with really knowing, frankly.
Emotional and social consequences from killing are not so easy though, usually, but the actual act itself is pretty straightforward, especially with a little training and some forethought/prep.
It tends to change one’s view of society and other people quite a bit. Which makes re-integrating with society and/or integrating childhood conditioning hard. Hence the flight to delusions or drugs for many.
But often the hardest part for many people to understand is how easy it can be for many to just shrug their shoulders and go ‘ok’ and continue on with their lives with not only no guilt, but feeling good about it. Because sometimes people needed killin’.
Aren’t soldiers just that? Governments sanctioned killers? The only “guideline” is that the victim must be the “enemy”. Just that the definition of “enemy” is vague and arbitrary, enough that it can mean anything needed at any time.
Being government sanctioned it makes sense that it would attract people who find it easier (even enjoyable for some) to kill and live with it afterwards, or at least it makes it easy by providing the moral cover that it was necessary and moral. They were enemies after all.
These people are far more likely to continue to find killing easy during and after the fact as ling as they’re given even the vaguest sense of moral cover.
If you believe [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ratio-of-combat-soldiers-t...], it varies from 7% to 14% of active military personnel that would be in ‘combat arms’, with everyone else being behind the lines in support roles. At least in the US. That lines up with my understanding anyway.
It’s actually a much lower percentage though. As most combat arms folks will be stuck guarding something and never see action, be in an indirect fire type role (artillery, sitting in a bomber or in a connex piloting a surveillance drone), or even if actually infantry have a super boring tour patrolling some pointless BS in the middle of nowwhere.
It also depends on where you draw the line at ‘killing’ of course. Does being a loader in an artillery battery count? A forward observer? A pilot who fires a cruise missle? A dude pushing the button to fire a cruise missle on a ship? An officer ordering an air strike?
About the only folks who are ‘killers’ in the way most folks would recognize the term though are infantry (of various forms, including mech. inf.), and perhaps some pilots if they have really good optics.
Soldiers follow orders. If they’re good ones anyway. Most have been trained to be able to be killers, and are often armed as such, just in case some folks need killing (per the chain of command and appropriate ROE).
But it rarely comes up, and anyone going into most MOS’s in the military hoping to do that is likely to be sorely disappointed.
It seems to me that business springs up wherever there is arbitrage and this is especially true for "free" natural resources (timber, water, etc).
Organised crime can make it profitable because they already have manpower and equipment, but it isn't necessary.
The smuggling operations between Guatemala and Mexico go both ways, depending on market prices in both countries for some very unglamorous products like eggs and gasoline.
Makes sense. Being in organized crime must be fucking fascinating. One day, you’re haggling on the price of black market eggs. Next day, you’re arranging the smuggling of sand from Latin America to Australia.
I lost a best friend that few years prior to his jail conviction got his phd in economics. I always knew about his business and he told me many stories about why he was doing it. I even advised him. But I always stayed out of it. One thing got clear to me. The people in that world are similar to our 'normal' world. You have the same hierarchy as in normal society with smart and dumb, nice and not so nice people. His story took place in Europe. He started after meeting some people in his fighting gym. Got a first assignment and things rolled fasr from there. High reward and thrill was an important motivation for him. He occasionally had hundreds of thousands of euros in cash. which we mainly spend on parties, escorts and drugs. Sometimes huge chunks of the money got lost because a person in the chain got caught or stole the money. But on avarage he was making like 200k a month.
He got caught on the highway few years ago with several kilos of heroine and cocaine and has to sit for 22 years.
This is the way it is with everyone. Rarely does someone choose their industry and job. I was into computers as a child because I had access to them through my grandparents' bookeeping business and being taught by my grandfather.
I really wanted to build houses but could never find a confluence of opportunity. I was sucked in by the available opportunities. My family were all artists and skilled industrial laborers. A lot of whom picked up their trade in the military. My opportunity was tech and I consider myself very lucky.
My father was a failed artist turned retailer bootstrapped by his father's GE stock he was granted as a precision welder, and I worked as a retail clerk and manager in the retail business for a time when I wasn't working in tech.
Farmers kid becomes a farmer. Maybe another opportunity comes up and they take it.
I'm never impressed by anyone's professional title until I hear their story. 99% of the time it's a result of the circumstances they were born into. Usually the only people with an interesting story were born into very modest or limited opportunity and had to grind it out until a better opportunity presented itself.
Sand trafficking is a perfect example. It is the best opportunity they have.
your answer was like "tell me you don't live in a third-world country without telling me..."
I am from Argentina so I know: You go to buy sand and are offered the legit one at a price hard to afford, or the "black" one with some discount. This way you learn there is a black market. Maybe for one bag you will get the same price anyway, but when you need an important amount of it, there will be 2 prices.
If you are in a beach town, you hear the rumors about why there is less sand.
I've forgotten the name, but I once watched a documentary on illegal gold mining in Brazil. One of the most successful of them was a German (illegal immigrant?
not enforced in brazil anyway) , who was attracted by the wild west aspect.
There definitely does seem to be a breed of people like this, and Latin America or Africa can present some interesting opportunities (see alo cowboy capitalists by vice).
Wow, coolest thing I’ve seen while doom scrolling this week. I wonder how accurate that is. It must be an especially dense cross section, because it doesn’t leave much room for hallways or other non living space.
Also was hoping to see more of the structural elements… that drawing really makes it feel like the entire thing is made of cardboard, hopes and dreams.
> that drawing really makes it feel like the entire thing is made of cardboard, hopes and dreams.
In the same way that corrugation gives strength to cardboard, it's possible that the city could have been so dense that it may have been relatively resistant to collapsing.
Every time I hear news like this, I think “hmmm layoffs coming to XYZ soon”.
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really don’t think that’s the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that I’m also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, you can’t just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
It also means they've done the arithmetic, and know that it's worth losing their top X% of people - the ones who'll have the easiest time finding a better job.
Obviously you've never worked for a big corporation before. Corporations don't want top employees. In a corporate environment, top employees are a nuisance much of the time. Most managers, if given the choice, would rather have an employee who shows up, does their work (but not too much), doesn't care about anything (and thus will do whatever they are told) and will accept whatever is given to them, and someone who is not at risk of leaving and can be laid off or fired easily/cheaply when the time comes.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
It would be really interesting to see if they take that into account when they make these decisions. I’d have to imagine that the top X percent are also the highest paid, so maybe that’s actually a benefit.
I would guess they looked at who is mostly likely to leave based on forced RTO and they liked the answer. Probably something like parents of young children, mostly women, people who are caring for an elder or disabled family member, so again mostly women, and people who have a disability themselves.
A smart employer is already paying their best employees more than they can get elsewhere.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
I don't think they really care, or feel that they have to care. The way that I've seen it work is they'll make rare exceptions for individuals they absolutely can't lose or wan't to hire but that's it and the exceptions truly are rare.
I absolutely agree that they dont' care on an emotional level, but they're going to find it difficult to run a business when 90% of the senior staff leave and take their institutional memory with them.
Yeah, anyone that assumes these people care if it hurts the company in the long run is just mad, all they want is to see the stock go up after the announcement.
Sadly I think you're right. As some say the cruelty is the point. I also think much of the AI boom is just an excuse to get rid of people and get them to accept worse conditions. At the local IBM office they cut half the staff with the reason given being that AI would replace them, then told the other half they would need to work unpaid overtime to cover the lost staff (what happened to the AI?).
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
So, you say as a return to office employee, if i boycott local services by bringing my own food, making my own coffee and not going out for lunch, i can render political pressure moot?
I doubt execs care at that point. They, much like most of us, only care about getting people off their back. "Hey, I got the employees back into the office like you wanted, it's your problem now."
I know that RTO is offensive to many, and not mildly so... but if they were trying to force people to quit of their own accord, wouldn't we also see an escalation of tactics beyond RTO? If it's a good strategy, why stop there?
They're not out of touch they know exactly what they're doing, following orders while these centibillionaires are jockeying for position on the Forbes 100.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I don't disagree with your statement per se, but neither "being more profitable than last quarter" or "the current CEO needs to be successful" imply "these companies need people to leave".
That is one of the possible ways of making "line go up".
But when I hear that a company __needs__ to make an X number of employees go, it gives me the impression they are in the red, and/or the organization will suffer great damage if they don't proceed with it. The organization doesn't even need to be a business per se.
Saying "those companies want to fire employees to increase profits" IMO is more accurate, even if a bit more verbose.
The number of establishments I have seen doing this has skyrocketed. The last 2, I edited my review afterwards to 1 star and saying “this place gives a discount for good reviews”.
Because I'm not going to leave a review, don't really leave many reviews. But I'm especially not going to leave a review before I've received service. But if I don't leave a review, I'd be concerned I would be getting deliberately poor service.
And if I'm going to get bad service, why should I subject myself to that?
If anything, I would leave then give a 1 star review saying they give discounts to people who give good reviews beforehand and the explanation I gave above.
And they delete your review. There needs to be a requirement to archive all reviews for seven-ten years. When it was posted, how long it was up, content and user. This is such a rabbit hole.
People cheer when government makes a rule like this but there is a huge costly enforcement mechanism that goes with this. That has to be implemented and maintained. Making the rule is step one, and there are hundreds more steps that have to happen any number of times, forever. Good luck. Making laws that cannot be enforced just increases the cost of government without having the intended effect. I can't think of anything that the prime offenders would like more than that.
It is truly difficult because you do have people who leave fake negative reviews as well. And fake reviews, whether good or bad, should be deleted. They are useless, they are only there to affect review scores.
It's a convoluted problem with no good answer so far.
To all those calling this bizarre - I agree, BUT I also think Kagi is in the perfect position to do weird stuff like this. Their products are high impact but, to be blunt, easy to ditch. If the company gets too weird for me I can just effortlessly use a different search engine / browser. So, I encourage them to try weird stuff while they are small and have a small footprint. I love the idea that a company is doing stuff like this.