Took biscuit and made it into a product

No creativity to it at all
basically a mash up of
- biscuit
- session buddy
- tab suspender
- history search / station

damn apple made $72B through its 30% tax!!!!
- Both companies retain as much as 30 percent of the money consumers pay both for apps and for the purchases they make within those apps. (Credit card networks typically charge around 3 percent in transaction fees.) Apple made $72 billion last year from app store fees alone, while Google Play earned Google $39 billion, according to a research company called Sensor Tower.

"The triopoly increased their share of the U.S. digital-ad market from 80% in 2019 to a range approaching 90% in 2020, GroupM estimates."

(200k to 500k new businesses start per month)

Fails to mention how they use a tremendous amount of 3rd party data to make their profiles & dopplegangers / custom audiences (credit card data, location, Oracle, etc etc):
- It fails to recognize Google and Facebook get majority of their data from other parties (when users aren't using their services). There's a reason they've fought privacy standards/laws so hard. Antitrust + privacy is their 3rd rail.

TV ads going to google:
- Oreos maker Mondelez International Inc. MDLZ 0.33% shifted money meant for TV commercials during March Madness basketball and the Summer Olympics into digital platforms. A hefty chunk went to Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG 0.34% Google, which offered data on what locked-down snack lovers were searching for.

Going to FB:
- Athleisure company Vuori Inc. more than tripled its spending on Facebook Inc., FB 4.12% spotting a chance to juice sales of its sweatpants to people stuck at home.

Going to amazon:
- Office-furniture maker Steelcase Inc. SCS -1.36% built an operation to sell directly to workers and advertised aggressively on Amazon.com Inc.

• "New-business applications in the U.S., which slowly climbed from 200,000 a month to 300,000 over a decade, shot up north of 500,000 in July and averaged more than 400,000 a month for the second half of 2020, according to the U.S. Census data. This proved a boon for the biggest tech platforms, which provide the kind of advertising that is often all a startup can afford. Facebook says it had more than 10 million active advertisers in the third quarter, up from 8 million in January.

• Meanwhile, many businesses of all sizes pivoted to e-commerce selling—and turned to digital ads to support that effort.

• Before the pandemic, a little more than 10% of retail purchases in the U.S.took place online. That jumped to 16% in last year’s second quarter when lockdowns peaked, according to Census data. Though the rate tapered a bit as the year wore on, the trend strongly benefits the tech behemoths.

• “The pandemic zapped us two years into the future on the e-commerce side,” said Nicole Perrin, principal analyst at research firm eMarketer."

"When Mondelez invests in digital advertising, it gets a 25% better return than with TV ads, the company says. It has found that its Google and Facebook ads do especially well, generating 40% higher returns than an average digital ad. The two now account for roughly 60% to 70% of Mondelez’s digital ad spending, up from less than 50% in 2017, the company says.

The tech giants share data that allows Mondelez to understand its customers better, said the snack maker’s chief marketing officer, Martin Renaud. Google data showed Mondelez, for instance, that people tend to search the internet for healthier snacks in the morning and for more-indulgent treats as the day wears on."

Facebook targeting:
"But for finding customers, he says, Facebook beats his instincts.

“We could identify the age, demo and behavior, but ultimately the algorithm is much more powerful in terms of identifying people who demonstrate certain shopping behaviors,"

• Suzy Batiz, founder of the toilet spray company Poo-Pourri, was focused mainly on building out the network of retail stores that carried what it calls a “before-you-go” spritz of essential oils.

Then Covid-19 hit, and one distributor refused to take a multimillion-dollar order already produced. “That was pretty painful,” Ms. Batiz said. “But as one of my mentors would say, crisis precedes transformation.” The company shifted focus from driving customers to stores to driving them to its e-commerce site and others’ shopping sites.

That meant cutting all marketing spending that wasn’t digital, such as payment for promotions at Bed Bath & Beyond stores or for events, while stores were closed. Ms. Batiz redirected the money to the web, especially Facebook. Sales on Poo-Pourri’s website surged 300% in the second quarter versus a year earlier and more than doubled for the year.

“This is our future,” Ms. Batiz said. “I don’t think we will ever go back.”

• Steelcase radically increased its ad budget last year and spent $5 million to $6 million on digital ads targeting people setting up home offices. About half of that went to Amazon search ads.

“Everyone focused on Amazon, whether you needed toilet paper, spices, a Cuisinart mixer or an office chair,” said Allan Smith, the furniture maker’s vice president of global marketing. “We decided to shift there as well, and it paid off.”

For every dollar Steelcase spent on Amazon ads during the holiday season, it made $30 in sales, the company says. Sales for its business aimed at consumers are up 500%.

Steelcase plans to double its Amazon spending this year. Its research indicates the pandemic has changed work life for good, predicting that about 72% of businesses are likely to take a hybrid approach of working from both home and office. “The hybrid future is here to stay,” Mr. Smith said.

Recommended by people as one of Tanner's best essays:

• This essay shall have three parts divided over two posts. The final section is a list of recommendations on how to establish and develop the study of the Chinese strategic tradition as an academic sub-field, as well as some thoughts on where individual Anglophone scholars might focus their research. The two earlier sections will review what has been published in English about the Chinese strategic tradition already.

my favorite essay by scholar stage.. chesterson's fence made into an essay:

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Thing (1929)