If everyone employed by Google vanished tomorrow the world would be immeasurably better off
@sir yes, we must all understand this fundamental truth. In snake oil industry, it's not the oil sellers or the oil buyers, it the bottle makers who are at fault. When Doodle company's snake oil has best bottles how can our actual medicine(tm) ever compete??
@namark in this analogy google employees are making the oil, not the bottles. Which I feel is pretty obvious
@namark if anyone's making the bottles it'd be, like, supermicro
@sir snake oil is nothing sold as something. It takes no effort to make it, it only takes effort to sell it. Are you saying everyone working at google is a salesperson?
@namark now you're over-extending the analogy. You're suggesting that what Googlers are making is "nothing". What the real comparison with snake oil is not selling "nothing" as "something", but selling something harmful under the guise of being beneficial.
@sir I simply meant to express my opinion, so I'm not sure why are you arguing the meaning of an analogy that isn't even yours in this context. Nevertheless a quick search reveals, that snake oil originally indeed was an actual snake oil, made out of snake. Ineffective but not harmful, so nothing. The ability to sell this nothing as something, is what allows you to then replace the nothing with another cheaper nothing that might also be harmful. It being harmful does not matter and is not a necessity for such industry. It being nothing is. The cheapest nothing just so happens to be harmful. Nobody advertises snake oil as "this will cure all your diseases by killing you".
