Trying to interview Larry Page

In place of advertisement, the portal could run their own messaging to fund various initiatives (raise x amount in order to bring on a tech reporter for x number of articles a year, etc, etc). Users could choose to fund specific reporters at x amount per month, or just donate directly to the portal for day-to-day operational expenses.

there's still demand for quality investigative journalism, it just has to be right-sized away from bloated megacorps.

But they are only a weekly magazine, and get almost all their readers through permanent subscriptions.

(And like most newspapers, they have a handful of people standing everywhere on university campuses, trying to sell people subscriptions)

Far be it from me to defend the United States Congress, but the two things--a low approval rating combined with a high reelection rate--are often presented as evidence for corruption.

Corrupt though they may be, it's a faulty measure--the approval rating is for all of Congress. Most Americans by default hate half of congress--the half in the opposing party--and disapprove of many of their own members.

Put another way, the approval rating has Bostonians evaluating congressmen from Houston, but most people end up reelecting their own congressman. "The problem isn't my congresswoman, it's the other idiots," etc.

There are other, unfortunate reasons for that, but that's a separate point.

People keep complaining about the "government monopoly on violence." What other group would you prefer to have a monopoly on violence? If the government doesn't enforce a monopoly, then invariably someone else will, in the process becoming the new government; or else two or more groups will actively dispute it, a condition commonly known as "war."

> I knew that it was Larry and Sergey’s company, and I acted that way. For example, I never did any press. Right before the IPO, Larry and Sergey did an interview with Playboy — no pictures. It turns out that the interview was at the wrong time in the quiet period, and it put the IPO in jeopardy. “Did we screw up?” The correct answer is Yes. But the even more correct answer is no problem, we’ll fix this. From that moment on, they’ve never given an interview. That was 12 years ago. When they wanted to do interviews, they did them. Once they didn’t want to do it anymore, I did them.

https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/cs18...

I assume he (Page) was just meant that using a phone a lot felt awkward and took your attention away from the rest of the world around you, but made a poor word choice while improvising in front of an audience. The tech press had a little tisk tisk field day about though, especially since this was well past the point where Glass was looking like a silly boondogle.

In most newspapers though, someone besides the author writes the headline for an article, so I'm assuming whoever wrote this one for the NYT thought they were being clever here in referencing that faux pas.

edit: Just checked it was actually Brin who said the emasculating thing, so who the fuck knows what the headline writer was thinking. Maybe they remembered wrong too.

Managing your public image is something I imagine can become pretty draining, so I'm not surprised he parcels out his comments to simple, controlled, one-way exchanges.

No. You do not create technology that serves real humans by refusing to study the humanities.

I don't have any strong opinions on Page as a person, but if you decide that someone saintly based purely on their stage presence, you are in serious danger of getting taken for a ride by any charismatic jerk who crosses your path.

You were making sense, until this last para. Have some compassion - you don't seem to care that a human (journo) is degraded into such a position (used emasculate to describe his position) by another (although no fault of the latter). Its good that humans are different, for various reasons -- its so obvious. Going by your logic, what Mr. Page does is fart compared to say a Roger Penrose writing 'The Road to Reality'.

All said, we all try our best, you know. Your project looks interesting. So is mine, or that journalist's or Larry Page's or Roger Penrose's. In the large scheme of things, who knows what really matters.

1. highest market cap of a major tech company that is a) an important part of masses of people's daily lives, b) working on experimental projects that will not realize their fruits in the short term, c) has intimated a progressive vision for society.

2. has the necessary funds, personnel resources, knowledge base, and lobbying power to accomplish ambitious goals.

3. category definer for the domain of internet search advertising, which is actually a bigger deal than you make it out to be. this corresponds to a very basic human need: finding what you're looking for, including things you're looking to buy.

4. philosophically speaking, seems to have an actual grasp on what it is they are doing beyond the simplistic definition "making money" or "increase shareholder value". their actions are (if you believe their own statements about it anyway) guided by a coherent vision to "organize the world's information".

5. has already changed the way people speak and think about using the internet, which is the civilizational mega-project of our time that will have irreversible impact on human culture from this point forward.

That said, while it makes it very important to an olive oil producer that they can be "found" it is less important to you and I that we find that exact olive oil producer in response to the question about where we could acquire olive oil. So Google is asymmetrically important.

He makes it right in the article:

"It is worth $500 billion" - which is a pretty small group of companies (two)

"Six Google products have more than one billion users" - again a pretty significant achievement. Facebook has 1 or 2. Apple has none - the iPhone has sold about 700M units across all models apparently.

"I use Google to research stories, I email my editors through Gmail, and I use Google Maps to go to meetings." - people in first world countries probably use a google product every day. Few companies have that level of global reach and touch so many people's everyday lives.

>I don't trust Google at all

I'm sure that you would prefer that a maker of phone trinkets to have the label as the most important company in the world, but Google is much more than just a "advertising company".