I think most people are simply ignorant of the sheer volume of transactions of counterfeit goods on Amazon and similar platforms. The platforms benefit from each transaction regardless, so the platforms often evolve to encourage volume, nothing else.
Amazon has benefited tremendously from counterfeiting, and has done little to combat it until recently, mostly because the pressure to act has increased and the benefits of stalling have decreased.
The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.
Are you really sure that is the distinction. A lot of conservative policies results in even the conservative voters being worse off as a result. And there IS a direct profit motive by those who fund conservative politicians (a.k.a. scammers)
Absolutely, I'm 100% sure. I'm not talking about indirect
"cui bono" desire to use politics to one's own advantage. Whether or not voters are worse off is subjective and debatable. Policy discussions are a form political participation. Selling a product isn't. There's a very clear distinction here. In my view, it's much less reasonable to make content distinctions based on "correct" political beliefs, vs. venders selling a product.
Duckduckgo claims to use 400 sources [0], so you’re probably not totally spot on.
Edit: However, that includes their Instant Answers feature, and the numbers are outdated, it’s 1600 sources, most of which are catering to an specific and tiny niche (like angular.js docs, or a dictionary of accounting terms). Main sources are Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha and their own crawler (according to Wikipedia).
