kristianc

Kind of sucks when you have stock…

It goes deeper than that in the UK. There's a large (and electorally powerful, as they're often older) proportion of the population who want, no expect, the government to step in and regulate social harms, and has a genuine belief that the good outweighs the harms.

Scammy marketing can sometimes be effective in the short term, but the problem with it it’s inherently self-limiting.

Deceptive brands burn their audiences, lose customer trust, and either get regulated out of existence or collapse under their own churn rates. Meanwhile, companies that invest in clear, honest positioning, strong customer relationships, and long-term brand value consistently outperform in the long run. Apple, Patagonia, and Tesla aren’t winning because they spam pop-ups.

If marketing were purely a race to the bottom, all successful brands would look like clickbait farms. They don’t.

Effective marketing (not just comms, but real positioning and messaging) is why people can find the right products and services, why small businesses can compete, and why entire industries grow. It's unequivocally a good.

If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.

> marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes

It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks.

But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.

On the other hand, people losing the ability to think critically, being concerned at power being concentrated amongst the few and thinking the next generation is more ignorant are perennial concerns since forever.

This — two sides marketplaces are probably the hardest type of business to grow and scale, you'd be much better at focusing on a specific locale and directing traffic there (even with social/PPC) than going with an empty search box.

In most states it's public. The Republicans would also have access to their own proprietary voter lists or databases, as well as publicly available voter registration records.

A good thing the parties don't have registered party affiliation lists they can x-verify the information against then. Of registered voters in the US, 47% have declared a party affiliation.

Good luck with that.

> It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.

With seemingly similar rent-seeking behaviour when Automattic decide they’ve had enough and want to put a toll on that road…

Let me rephrase — in the UK we have a generous and expanding safety net, for the elderly, voted for by the elderly, and paid for at great expense by the working population.

Can't help but OP might have been better engaging with PG's Wokeness article itself (it's full of holes, and probably one of the weakest he's written), than talking about what they think the article said made them feel.

Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.

Hmm — I wonder which non-EU country relatively on Spain's doorstep could be the issue here?

I think that needs to be qualified heavily — salaries in the UK are much lower both in nominal and PPP terms, so there's much less opportunity to build one's own safety net, and the NHS is overwhelmingly focused on providing care for the elderly. To a young(ish) startup founder, the presence of the NHS and UC makes little to no difference.

Twitter wasn't ever really a new protocol in the same way as the others, as it was owned entirely by a private company.

Protocols are open standards that anyone can implement and use without needing permission from or reliance on a single entity. Twitter, by contrast, has always been a proprietary platform, entirely controlled by a private company, which fundamentally undermines the comparison.

Most of the challenges Twitter has comes from not actually being a protocol. If Twitter had been designed or evolved as a decentralized protocol, it would have avoided many of the issues it faces today.

"Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success"

Now there's a gem of a line...

> People drift apart over time sometimes.

It's admittedly a little easier to drift apart though when you deliberately delete your access to the place where they post all the shit that's happening in their lives...

Newton and the Counterfeiter

https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...

Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.

The bad faith “NNN - just expressing an opinion” is a cancer on CNs too.

> From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US.

Zuck has probably done exactly that cost-benefit calculation — FB has put enormous resources into fact checking, and to most people it hasn't moved the needle on public perception in the slightest. Facebook is still seen through the lens of Cambridge Analytica, and as a hive of disinformation. The resources devoted to these efforts haven’t delivered a meaningful return, either in public trust or regulatory goodwill.

The AI appeared to be absolutely right, however. There wasn’t a single round where Fury landed more punches.

It weighs half a ton. Getting it to even 10% of the speed of light would take more energy than is produced by the world in a year.

> People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.

That’s because American cities do their best to make themselves as car-dependent and unpleasant in downtown areas as possible. Of course American college kids want to move out to the suburbs, because American downtowns are not nice places to live. Offer people the choice to live in nice central walkable neighbourhoods like in Europe and they tend to take it.

That’s a pretty broad sweep (mis)characterization of Rousseau’s work. He was neither a radical egalitarian or hated the democratization of publishing.

He argues for a society where people are both free and equal, but he recognized that some forms of inequality could coexist with freedom, provided they were rooted in merit or necessity, rather than arbitrary privilege. Also, when he talked about the Rights of Man, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourishes, he did mean man.

It’s a mischaracterization too to say he hated the democratization of publishing. His own ideas gained traction precisely because publishing allowed them to reach broader audiences. His critiques of printing and arts weren’t aimed at access itself but at the unintended consequences that came with it.

The problem is that it’s unclear consumers actually ever wanted Dropbox to become any more than a sync and share company, or to deal with the resultant complexity that that will bring to what has been a beautifully simple product. But they had to do that to justify Sky-high valuations.

Winer in particular often writes in a style that approaches technology with the attitude that even the most obvious ideas weren't truly finished until he's had a hand in them.

WordPress code is all GPL

> Imagine the effect of a TV spot touting a new OS feature on the new iPhone. Do I need the new phone to get that feature? As soon as you've asked the question, you're at the doorstep of "I wasn't thinking about it, but I will need to replace the battery soon ($$) and it's been getting slower …"

I’d say this works exactly once - Apple will get a one time hit out of customers upgrading to an AI enabled phone, which will have a SOC capable of running AI (customers don’t need to know what a SOC is).

For anything beyond that, the media will likely pick up that it’s not strictly necessary and you’ll already have pocketed a lot of the benefit from having your first AI integrated phone.

Here’s the rub though: convincing customers to pay for something they used to think they got as part of the hardware package isn’t going to be easy.

People love the seamless integration of hardware, software, and services that Apple provides, but introducing a mandatory yearly fee would erode that goodwill pretty much instantly.

It would be more or less impossible to pull off.