Looks like federal law enforcement is doing their job to keep us safe from domestic terrorists:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/christopher-hasson-coast-guard.html

.

I gotta say, though, anyone dumb enough to get caught planning something like this is probably mentally ill enough to be completely incompetent.

I never suggested your personal experience and motivations align with my theory, but your explanations and observations certainly do. Don't mistake your failure to understand (and my indifference about teaching you) with being right.

The retailers that are all succeeding now don't have any secret sauce, they're all just finding market fit and making intelligent tradeoffs along the cartesian product of "has money" and "has time". Amazon is targeting people with no time. Walmart is targeting people with no money. Ikea is targeting people with lots of time and no money. Luxury retailers target people with lots of time and money; people willing to spend the time with a sales rep to pick out what they want, and drop the cash to justify the selection. Meanwhile, the middle lanes are where retail has been hollowed out. Who tee eff was Toys-R-Us targeting? People with enough time to take their kids toy shopping instead of ordering online, but not enough time to make a special trip to an independent toy store. People with enough money to buy Lego, but not enough to shop at Marbles. Does this sound like a growing segment to you? Does this remind you of anybody else? Sears, maybe? How are they doing lately?

These aren't deep ****ing insights here. Knock off the Silicon Valley tech wankery and it's obvious that all of this isn't about ****ing e-commerce outcompeting other companies, it's just toddler mode marketing ****. Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods and raised prices. Why? Because the people who shop there have money. Video game publishers are sweating their balls off trying to stuff every game with microtransactions and loot boxes. Why? Because of the astonishing, absolutely ****ing astonishing amount of money you can make selling rich people their own free time.

The market is becoming atrociously bifurcated between the rich and poor, the overworked and the slothful. If a ****ing swedish particle board maker can figure this out so can you.

Um, if you want to kill everyone on earth it's really easy, dumbass. Just create a system of incentives that rewards indifference toward human suffering, and then invent a useful product that gradually degrades the ability of the planet to support life as a byproduct. Should only take 150 years or so.

Porter, M. E. "What Is Strategy?" Harvard Business Review 74, no. 6 (November–December 1996): 61–78.

I know nobody's gonna read that article, but they should. It pretty much perfectly defines by contradiction "Trumpism" as an economic agenda, if it can be described even that cohesively. Y'all obsessed about competing on operational efficiency like you're a buncha pretty little snowflakes, and then getting absolutely ****ing obliterated by companies and even countries that compete on strategy.

What exactly is Ford's or GM's ****ing strategy? Please, oh please, do tell. If you said "make the most boring car possible, as cheaply as possible", thats efficiency and it ain't a ****in strategy dude. Take your time. I'll just be over here sitting in one of my Toyotas that I bought because they're a little more expensive but last forever.

Every single thing in that article really shouldn't have had to been said. It's all very obvious. Annoyingly, I think the problem has actually become worse since it was written. I think there's this desire to run a company on numbers, and ignore everything that can't be given a number. This inherently pushes companies to an over-focus on operational efficiency. It also doesn't help that everyone is so damn obsessed with short term growth.

Of course, the start up world is all about strategy, and that's a mess too. I think it boils down to no one being interested in companies that simply do a good job. It's gotta be mega growth or bust. The thing is, if you execute properly and consistently, growth will eventually come as your competitors screw things up.

I’d argue the startup world is really venture capital’s operational efficiency masquerading as founders’ strategy. SV makes a lot more sense if you view them as competing on margin to create saleable equity.

Porter is one of those big names in business schools that everyone quotes but never listens to, even though he’s an economist and I don’t think he’s ever said anything relevant to business that wasn’t painfully obvious to everyone else. (I did call this stuff ‘toddler mode’.) He’s obviously right, at least if your interest is to run a sustainably profitable company.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean **** all as long as the principal agent problem is unsolved. Good luck convincing a career manager to stick his neck out to make strategy (= meaningful trade offs (= pissing off a ton of potential customers to delight a smaller segment)), even if the company as a whole is already failing trying to appease everyone. Nah, that’d be the kind of artsy fartsy **** Steve Jobs would have done.

Ah, Blizzard.

Interesting how every business he pointed to as having a good strategy is still around. Very keen. CarMax outlived Circuit City..

You can see this principle reflected in game franchises. Ubisoft hit gold with Splinter Cell. I looked it up and within a few years they had sold ~6 million copies.

One of the sequels was pretty decent, but most turned out to be stinkers. Different dev teams worked around the clock making new titles which lacked parity from the old, there were issues with crappy ports, little innovation so sales tanked.

So they began shifting around the mechanics, but did so in a way which totally betrayed the fans of stealth games. Later games were stuffed with "crash through a window and blow everyone away" moments which weren't stealthy at all.

It betrayed the fans who want to, you know, sneak, and the CoD fans didn't like it because they don't play games to exert patience.

The last Splinter Cell game sold way below expectations. Around 2 million IIRC.

Compare that to Rockstar who know their target audience well and make games directly to appeal to them. GTAV is absurdly profitable. I believe it was an expensive production but is still raking in tons. RDR2 sold 15 million copies in two days..

Okay. Whatever. Over it. I am disappointed, however, that you didn't acknowledge the term I coined for the fake socialists. I thought that was pretty creative. Eh, I suppose somebody already beat me to it though.

Yeah, maybe in the macro sense, but on an individual business level, it's idiots sniffing each others farts, and pretending their dumb hyper trendy strategies are anything but a blind attempt to win the viral lottery.

Really, I think it's just a cultural problem. The people who want sustainability want to look at everything by numbers, and the people who are interested in strategy are coke addled idiots making insane promises to eachother. The idea that you'd have to engage your brain for a reasonable return on effort and investment just isn't something that people want to face. It's either an algorithm or gambling.

Steve Jobs wasn't a genius. He simply implemented technology that had been developed for the purpose, and didn't plaster his wanton greed all over the interface to the extent that it utterly sabotaged the user experience. All of their products had already been done before by companies who couldn't be bothered to make any real attempt to empathize with their users, and Apple was generally the first to use technology that anyone who knew about the industry had been wishing for for years. Job's real asset was that he developed such a massive cult of personality that no one could really sabotage his plan to do the blindingly obvious.

I’m not gonna say something idiotic like “people are too hard on Steve jobs” because he treated his employees like utter dog**** and nobody who abuses the people they have power over deserve any respect or dignity in death.

What I will say, though, is that people generally misunderstand what made him effective. That goes for both his fans and critics. Nothing about Apple under his direction had to do with technology, it was just a continuation of his strategy from the early 80s: that there’s a big segment of the public who simply dont give a **** about computers and are willing to pay a large premium to have everything related to that - both the problems, the advantages, and the decisions - all taken away from them.

Everybody’s been doing a lot of regression to the mean lately, so it’s sometimes hard to remember how far ahead Apple was over PCs (particularly in the laptop space). Back in 2001 their prosumer desktop replacement notebook came in one color (titanium) and shipped with ~FreeBSD. At the time, new laptops were still shipping with a Windows 98.

yOu cAnT KiLl eVeRyOnE On eArTh hUmAnS ArE ReSiLiEnT YoUr aNcEsToRs sUrViVeD ThE LaSt gLaCiAl mAxImUm

Richard Stallman didn't take too kindly to that:

[quote=Richard Matthew Stallman]
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.[/quote]

The local museum curator, etc.

Your hotel's concierge, etc.

~hiring someone to make a decision is a legitimate option, and it's usually a lot more expensive and turns out a lot worse than buying an apple product~

I'm sure the billionaires will survive in their climate bunkers/mars bases for at least a few weeks before they realize the grocery store stopped making deliveries.

Oh, I'm not necessarily endorsing Stallman's extremism here. Although I do find it somewhat funny. And maybe he can add a fifth Software Freedom to his list: the freedom to endlessly debug / troubleshoot the software on your computer.

lmao, the only true freedom is being obligated to do that

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/my-left-shoe-wont-even-reboot-faulty-app-bricks-nike-smart-sneakers/

Ahahahaha

Ted Kaczynski was right about technology, just wrong in his methods..

uh... what? Are you sure you didn't mean to say Joseph Tainter?

I CANT REBOOT MY SHOES


ahahaha we live in the best timeline

okay so you know lithium ion batteries? yeah, the ones made out of tightly rolled microscopic sheets of folded plastic and metal. yeah, those ones, the ones that explode when they’re crushed or punctured.

I’m gonna strap a pair of them to my feet and go running on them

oh

and I’m gonna let the battery control the straps.

This is honestly the first time I’ve heard about these shoes, and all I can think is, wow, some nike manager is like REALLY confident about their binding arbitration clause.

0/10 stepped on a nail and had to get both feet amputated because the motors seized

I have a lot of questions about these shoes, and the answers are not immediately forthcoming.

There’s no manual override for tying them. The article said as much, without the phone app they are useless as shoes.

Is there a manual override for untying them??

Is the tightening controlled by software, or is there some kind of mechanical interlock? What prevents the shoe from being tightened too much when the normal mechanism is damaged or fails in some way? Is there anything stopping a malfunctioning shoe from applying so much force that it hurts your foot? Can it constrain your foot for a long enough duration that it affects circulation? Does it fail to an on state, or an off state?

What safety measures have been taken to protect the wearer from being incinerated if their battery gets damaged? Does this include damage due to heat, cold, chemical exposure? What measures have been taken to prevent battery degradation from walking on hot pavement, or undervolting from walking in sub zero? I’m gonna assume Nike knows feet flex, so they probably designed the batteries to stop them from being crushed during normal use.

What security measures have been taken to prevent muggers and rapists from unlacing your ****in shoes while you run away? Trick question, ****in nothing. Using an android app is generally a bad thing for Nike to have done. Why couldn’t it at least have been a button? I guess google and Nike just really need to mine that critical shoe tying data.

Edit: Can they run netbsd

fake Edit: CAN I MINE BITCOIN ON THEM

lawl

Somebody on some blog pointed out there could be one useful application of these shoes: people who are too disabled to tie their shoes (but still able enough to use a smartphone, I guess?)

Velcro? Loafers?

You know what’s great about a shoehorn? If a shoehorn starts on fire, you don’t need a special fire extinguisher to put it out.

I worked in a group home with someone who couldn't tie their own shoes. Loafers and velcro are indeed the answer!

He meant Chad Bundy

One of my insane friends had me read the Unibomber manifesto. One of the first things I noticed was that a huge chunk of it is a diatribe against "political correctness" and liberals.

I mean yeah, there is a lot of hypocrisy to be found in modern liberalism. But it doesn't take Ted ****ing Kaczynski to point that out.

Fixed.

Yeah... I'm pretty sure Kaczynski is only the more prominent critic of political correctness because he was a ****ING TERRORIST.

So... I guess that terrorism is popular? Hmm

insert torturous theory about how Kaczynski was really left-wing here

I'm more speaking to his anti-technology rants, and am only half-sincere. We live in an age of everyone jerking themselves over technology so it's nice hearing any kind of lucid criticism of it.

Well, if technologists like Bill Joy took it seriously enough to quote Industrial Society and Its Future, I can't really fault you for taking it seriously as well. Actually, I don't remember exactly how coherent the essay was, but if memory serves it came across as something you'd find on Usenet: clearly written by a brilliant mind and full of subtle points, mixed together with several axes to grind and other bizarre obsessions. And it's that kind of obsessiveness that becomes more disturbing given that he followed through with acts of violence.

Also: I wouldn't exactly say we're in an "age" of everyone "jerking themselves over technology". Really, far from it: it's not really accurate to call it an age, unless you want such an age to go back at least a couple centuries. Also, it's certainly not everyone--look at all the skepticism about technology, especially related to government and corporate surveillance.

On the other hand, we certainly haven't seen too much push back against rampant consumerism, which in my mind is sort of getting conflated here with technology. Steve Jobs came up in this thread already, and I'd say he ushered in the 21st century as another manifestation of this consumerism. Of course people could have chosen to listen to Fight Club instead of Apple, but then again why not spend the extra $400 on that new phone when it buys you all kind of social status?