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Comment by smrtinsert | Hacker News Reader

It's pathetic on many levels but I cant shake the most obvious one to me, the nerds are being forced to worship the school bully and his girl

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Forced means something else when you’re among the most rich and powerful people on earth - they chose to do this. It’s far more demeaning and should haunt them to their graves.

Bezos can afford anything on Earth, but he can't afford to alienate Trump. Tariffs could end Amazon overnight.

Same is true for Musk, whose fortune hinges on government largesse and regulatory collegiality.

But Apple? Screw those asshats, they have no such excuses.

They absolutely can afford to be a-political. It may not maximize their wealth, but they can afford a little less maximizing.

Donald Trump is an extreme narcissist and you are either with him or against him. There is no “a-political”.

Any one of these so-called titans of industry could have stood against Trump, and then parlayed the inevitable tantrum into the launch of their own Presidential campaign. But weak men create hard times.

I’m sure that’s what Bezos tells himself. Which is both wrong and absolutely ignominious.

And if Elon’s X feed contains his real thoughts, his brain has turned to pudding and he earnestly believes a bunch of really vile racist garbage, so I guess it makes sense he’s hanging out with the rest of the deplorables in this administration.

End Amazon overnight and see what the response is from the people. What I don’t get about these guys is that they have their OWN power base - their customers. Just look at the leverage TikTok had because of their users

> What I don’t get about these guys is that they have their OWN power base - their customers

What do you not get about these guys? It's very simple. The likes of Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos are the exact same as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The last two are just louder about it. They have their own power base, but relying on it doesn't maximize their wealth. In a best case scenario, they could achieve maybe 50% of the wealth by relying on their own power base, compared to kowtowing to The Party. They don't want 50%, they want 100%, and there's absolutely nothing that they won't do for it.

Each round of Chinese tariffs had an exception for smartphones.

That wasn't by chance. iPhones going up in price 50% would kill Apple very quickly.

All phones would be subject to the same - it’s not like Pixel devices are made in West Virginia or something.

Apple relies on people churning their phones every year or two far more than Google or any other Android manufacturer.

> Tariffs could end Amazon overnight.

Is this really true? Tariffs can be applied only if products go inside/outside the US. They could still operate from othe locations.

> being forced to

Choosing to.

I'm honestly pretty tired of the 80s-movie-derived cultural memeplex of nerds getting oppressed by jocks with girlfriends in a high school context. This never accurately characterized any social environment I've been in, and I'm definitely a nerd by disposition. I'm not sure this ever really existed outside the imaginations of hollywood screenwriters. The Breakfast Club is mid, Weird Science is an actively terrible movie, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off is entertaining enough but looms way too large in the American pop culture imagination.

Tim Cook was the salutatorian of his Alabama public high school, majored in industrial engineering in college, and later got an MBA. He sold IBM computers for years and joined Apple in its late 90s doldrums because he was won over by Steve Jobs' charisma within several minutes of his first interview with Jobs. He's an openly-gay fitness nut - meaning he's had a lot of opportunity to have sex in his life (and being famously private, he's not talking about it one way or the other, as is his right).

I frankly don't think Tim Cook is much of a nerd. He's a smart, driven, ambitious business guy who's done a good job at making the gigantic electronics company he's the CEO of sell more products and navigate the political environment it operates in. He's not some underdog hero, and people who actually care about technology for its own sake or who care about computational sovereignty shouldn't attach their sense of identity to anything Apple does.

Wow. That’s a breakdown I will remember for a long time.

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