Boutique Pedal Manufacturers Are Feeling the Tariff Pinch
- Thread starter Chuck D. Bones
- Start date
Stickman393
Well-known member
I dunno man. Like I said before: Humans are instant gratification eat sleep fuck murder primates. I don't see that trend as anything more than commercial interests hacking our evolutionary imparatives for their benefit.
We like to think we're evolved. We aren't. We know some math and science, but our understanding of the world we live in is remarkably limited. Hell, we really don't have a firm understanding of how our bodies work. We are animals. Smart ones, but still partially governed by impulse and instinct.
We may have free will to a certain extent, but there are shortcuts in our psychology that can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors. This is basically the purpose of advertising: how do you get the monkey to buy the banana?
Propoganda is a natural evolution. How do you get the monkey to overthrow a democratically elected government to get access to cheaper bananas?
Day-o, Daylight come and me wan go home.
The issue with Google search isn't so much that it's a bummer that the first result is no longer the intended target and therefore we have to do more legwork to get there. The dream and promise of capitalism in the Adam Smith-ian sense is that we will all achieve a better world by simply allowing the invisible hand of the markets work their magic. That everything will be more efficient. That things will work themselves out into the best outcome because that's how good the system is.
It's not, though. Products are purposefully made *objectively* worse and the markets reward the companies that do so. AI is the latest evolution of this: It's good at certain things...but it's headed for a cliff. The amount of venture capital pumped into OpenAI, for instance, is massive. Like 50 million a quarter. Their current offerings don't make a profit at all, and are heavily resource intensive. And they really don't have a realistic path towards cutting the cost of compute, making the workload more efficient, or monetizing in such a way that the service provided is worth the cost to operate the service.
It's supposed to be the next hypergrowth market...like the smartphone, or the cloud, or whatever. Thing is...most of those markets may have been expensive to start, but there existed a reasonable route to reduce costs. No such route currently exists with generative AI. Its a cow, and when it tips it's gonna have a massive impact on our economy.
We've let companies like Amazon follow this model and completely destroy small businesses in their path. They were able to out compete just about everybody else...not because they did it all better, but because they *didn't have to make a profit*. They were filled to the gills with VC cash and could afford a burn rate that smaller companies couldn't sustain. And what was it that eventually made the company profitable? Certainly not their logistics or shopping platform. No...it was AWS. Web services. Something so far removed from their core mission that it kinda makes ya go "what?".
Not to mention how awful the shopping experience has gotten on Amazon in recent years.
My overall point is this: capitalism isn't inherently the sort of thing that generates mass prosperity. It's not inherently better than any other system. It's not the system that leads to the best possible outcomes. Hell, It's not even inherently *efficient*, which is what is supposed to be its primary selling point. It works because it uses our own short sighted-ness and greed and ignorance of its long term detrimental impacts on society to keep us pushing its bloated corpse down the road like we're on Weekend at Bernie's X, in space nobody can hear your body rot.
Capital alienates us from our work, from each other, from the consequences of our choices. Eventually...those chickens gonna come home to roost.
Sunshine. Lollipops. All is well and fine. Really. Murder. Kittens. Murder.
We like to think we're evolved. We aren't. We know some math and science, but our understanding of the world we live in is remarkably limited. Hell, we really don't have a firm understanding of how our bodies work. We are animals. Smart ones, but still partially governed by impulse and instinct.
We may have free will to a certain extent, but there are shortcuts in our psychology that can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors. This is basically the purpose of advertising: how do you get the monkey to buy the banana?
Propoganda is a natural evolution. How do you get the monkey to overthrow a democratically elected government to get access to cheaper bananas?
Day-o, Daylight come and me wan go home.
The issue with Google search isn't so much that it's a bummer that the first result is no longer the intended target and therefore we have to do more legwork to get there. The dream and promise of capitalism in the Adam Smith-ian sense is that we will all achieve a better world by simply allowing the invisible hand of the markets work their magic. That everything will be more efficient. That things will work themselves out into the best outcome because that's how good the system is.
It's not, though. Products are purposefully made *objectively* worse and the markets reward the companies that do so. AI is the latest evolution of this: It's good at certain things...but it's headed for a cliff. The amount of venture capital pumped into OpenAI, for instance, is massive. Like 50 million a quarter. Their current offerings don't make a profit at all, and are heavily resource intensive. And they really don't have a realistic path towards cutting the cost of compute, making the workload more efficient, or monetizing in such a way that the service provided is worth the cost to operate the service.
It's supposed to be the next hypergrowth market...like the smartphone, or the cloud, or whatever. Thing is...most of those markets may have been expensive to start, but there existed a reasonable route to reduce costs. No such route currently exists with generative AI. Its a cow, and when it tips it's gonna have a massive impact on our economy.
We've let companies like Amazon follow this model and completely destroy small businesses in their path. They were able to out compete just about everybody else...not because they did it all better, but because they *didn't have to make a profit*. They were filled to the gills with VC cash and could afford a burn rate that smaller companies couldn't sustain. And what was it that eventually made the company profitable? Certainly not their logistics or shopping platform. No...it was AWS. Web services. Something so far removed from their core mission that it kinda makes ya go "what?".
Not to mention how awful the shopping experience has gotten on Amazon in recent years.
My overall point is this: capitalism isn't inherently the sort of thing that generates mass prosperity. It's not inherently better than any other system. It's not the system that leads to the best possible outcomes. Hell, It's not even inherently *efficient*, which is what is supposed to be its primary selling point. It works because it uses our own short sighted-ness and greed and ignorance of its long term detrimental impacts on society to keep us pushing its bloated corpse down the road like we're on Weekend at Bernie's X, in space nobody can hear your body rot.
Capital alienates us from our work, from each other, from the consequences of our choices. Eventually...those chickens gonna come home to roost.
Sunshine. Lollipops. All is well and fine. Really. Murder. Kittens. Murder.
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Im a designer and work in marketing …so words are important in marketing.
we had a recent graduate who really struggled with copywriting - like she was writing but there was a load of “huh why are you saying that? What are you thinking”
And she would get fairly defensive and never really was able to take on advice.
Turns out (despite company rules not to use it) about 95% of her work was ChatGPT!
pressed reply before finishing…
The really crazy thing with her was firstly being so defensive of your ‘work’ when a robot wrote it - but also seemingly not being able to do it herself.
Yould never get the short writing where the idea is killer but just needs a bit of polish - just walls of AI generated rubbish.
No ideas.
The really crazy thing with her was firstly being so defensive of your ‘work’ when a robot wrote it - but also seemingly not being able to do it herself.
Yould never get the short writing where the idea is killer but just needs a bit of polish - just walls of AI generated rubbish.
No ideas.
The irony: I was thinking, that this would make a great tshirt. You can purchase it at Amazon
Stickman393
Well-known member
Selling the revolution back to us. Tale as old as time.
pricklyrobot
Well-known member
A related Public-service Announcement:
I just ordered some weirdo Euro-bulbs from a German EBay seller, for this epic project http://jhaible.com/legacy/compact_clone/ that I’ll definitely finish in a timely fashion
He messaged today saying
“I just received a message from DHL stating that shipping to the US via DHL/Post will be temporarily suspended starting August 25th.”
He offered to ship them out today, to try and get them in under the wire, and give me a refund if they get returned to him.
Apparently, no-one (including major international shipping companies) has been able to get the details of what’s supposed to happen with all the soon-to-be-former De Minimus stuff. So they’re just suspending all service to the US.
On the plus side, it’s going to be pretty awesome when hardworking ‘Muricans can get jobs in factories manufacturing obsolete European incandescent lightbulbs right back here in the US of A!!
I just ordered some weirdo Euro-bulbs from a German EBay seller, for this epic project http://jhaible.com/legacy/compact_clone/ that I’ll definitely finish in a timely fashion
He messaged today saying
“I just received a message from DHL stating that shipping to the US via DHL/Post will be temporarily suspended starting August 25th.”
He offered to ship them out today, to try and get them in under the wire, and give me a refund if they get returned to him.
Apparently, no-one (including major international shipping companies) has been able to get the details of what’s supposed to happen with all the soon-to-be-former De Minimus stuff. So they’re just suspending all service to the US.
On the plus side, it’s going to be pretty awesome when hardworking ‘Muricans can get jobs in factories manufacturing obsolete European incandescent lightbulbs right back here in the US of A!!
thomasbe86
Well-known member
Same here, I suspended shipping to the U.S. on my website. Swiss Post, Deutsche Post and French La Poste just plainly won't accept any shipment to the U.S.
thomasbe86
Well-known member
I get the joke but it's not really about uncertainty, simply that carriers in Switzerland (outside of the EU) won't accept shipments to the U.S. starting today.. Swiss Post sent us this last night