little_hills

> George Bataille had a theory that excess and pointless expenditure...

Have you got a link or reference for this that I can explore? I'd be interested in reading what he had to say here.

> the modeling systems on which they are based do not include smoke

Can anybody help with providing some links to content that would expand on this? It doesn’t have to be region/country specific, just looking to dig a bit deeper in a lore general sense about current models and future improvements.

I can take a guess and say that it wasn’t accounted for in current models as it might have been too niche a statistic to try and monitor, but either it’s becoming more of a factor now that’s having a prolonged (significant) effect on models or maybe there has just been a push to expand into those niches to make the models more adaptable in the future.

> It's unfathomable to me how something that has such a monopoly on the domain can have such terrible performance.

You’ve answered your own question there, the keyword being ‘monopoly’.

If there is no competition pushing them to improve performance or site design, it’ll inevitably fall by the wayside until they get around to it or more accurately until somebody can convince a manager/business that they should spend time working on it, which, without using ‘look how much better the competition is’ that’s gonna be a hard sell.

I’m looking at this with broad strokes though, but as a best guess I’d say that’s pretty close.