Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says

Re:Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dom... by pessimizer on Friday September 09, 2022 @04:36PM (#32784608)

I can't parse this comment. Who's the princess, what's the bread, and what's the cake? And what are they supposed to read in the room? As far as I can tell, "read the room" is something that people have been saying a lot on twitter over the past few months in order to silence people when they are correct, therefore difficult to argue with.

> Yeah the poor could sustain themselves on cake,

This is the opposite of what the anecdote is meant to say, right? The joke is that the poor can't sustain themselves on cake because lacking bread also means lacking cake. Is $3 million the bread? Is the CEO the poor? Am I having a stroke?

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Re:Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dom... by tmpz22 on Saturday September 10, 2022 @02:14PM (#32793093)

"Let them eat cake" is a famous example of "not reading the room" because it was said while French peasants were starving and the royals feasted. Its an incredibly crass thing to say, like bragging about your wealth while your next door neighbor is being evicted.

By comparison here is a CEO announcing a noble "sacrifice" at 3 million/yr salary while people and projects were being axed at Mozilla - and in my view Mozilla continues to falter relative to what its trajectory could have been given the extreme amounts of capitol and talent they've had access to.

A real sacrifice would've been to take $0 (presumably this individual is already enormously wealthy).

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Re:Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dom... by googlryas on Sunday September 11, 2022 @12:16AM (#32796772)

The people getting axed...how much money did they make per year? Are they now in the poor house?

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Re:Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dom... by tmpz22 on Sunday September 11, 2022 @10:02AM (#32799698)

Is it not standard for lower paid product and sales roles to be axed first in these circumstances?

You do realize in these organizations not everyone is making 150k+.

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Re:Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dom... by xdavidliu on Friday September 09, 2022 @10:48PM (#32787248)

I'm not parent and I agree that it was not a carefully thought-out comment, but I'll give it a shot.

comment 1: How dare she say 3 million is a sacrifice? That's more money than many of us will see in an entire decade, if not more! None of us can get imagine getting 3 million!

comment 2: Well she could make 10 million, so 3 million to her is chump change.

My guess is as follows: The "us" in comment 1 is the poor, the failure to "read the room" is comment 2 mentioning the 10 million when the vast majority of people identify with comment 1 and thus think mentioning 10 million when even 3 million is unattainable is tone deaf.

Thus, loosely speaking, 10 million is cake, 3 million is bread.

But I agree with you that the analogy is not perfect.

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