-------------------------------

I thought this was interesting, so I compared it against their count last quarter (instead of last year) and they are indeed down.

  - In Q4 2022 [1] they had 190,234 employees.
  - In Q1 2023 [2] they had 190,711 employees.
  - This quarter Q2, they have 181,798 employees.

[1] https://abc.xyz/assets/c4/d3/fb142c0f4a78a278d96ad5597ad9/20... [2] https://abc.xyz/assets/a7/5b/9e5ae0364b12b4c883f3cf748226/go...

He told me repeatedly that companies that lay off the moment a bad quarter appears - or if they lay off employees if they even think the market will slow down - are always terribly run companies.

He said it was a clear indicator of poor internal planning and forecasting, that any company who suddenly needed to shed 5,000 or 10,000 employees on one bad quarter was was one to avoid.

The key is that they wouldn't know either. It could be a slow 'death by a thousand cuts' and they wouldn't even know they were bleeding.

This is why companies, even massive companies, generally die eventually. There are very few that last even 50 years without eventually being acquired or bankrupt. And how does it start? Little mistakes, lack of focus, everywhere.

They could get 1000 things wrong by 1% and they're still 1% wrong. You can't really add them up.

I am no fan of comcast and pay a premium to avoid them since I disagree with bandwidth quotas. But both Google and Comcast have bad customer service and some terrible products yet both have respective and respectable monopolies. YouTube is terrible and amazing at the same time and more teens watch it than cable tv. Yet there is awful content and no good way to screen it from children besides denying access entirely.

Google also arguably missed ChatGPT and TikTok as macro product trends. Previously, Google failed to capitalize on social networking.

I am not sure how you forecast or predict those things in any way that guarantees success. And even when you see the future to pursue and build that core competency. I don't think large companies can move fast enough because by the time you notice the competition they've already established a network effect.

And network effects seem to be the main moat. It remains to be seen if Threads really kills Twitter. It's not even clear that Musk can kill it unintentionally, i.e. the business succeeds despite its management.

Idk what you define as "average" global inflation. I don't really agree that it's the correct term for what is largely an american company even if it does international business.

We are tracking growth from June 2022->June 2023. So what we care about is the inflation from June 2022->June 2023. Which is 3%.

They aren't.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...

... A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively ...

... Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores their tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. The Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak. ...