No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.
I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy it’d be more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isn’t great for you, but it’s not cocaine.
But the fact that a company can manufacture consumer(ish) routers in Latvia means it's very practical that another company could manufacture consumer routers in the US.
Usually the argument is that X can't be made in the US because China's so good at it that the US could never compete, so we shouldn't even try. But if a company with 367 employees in a country with the population of a medium-size metro area can do it, it proves that argument is bunk.
> But the fact that a company can manufacture consumer(ish) routers in Latvia means it's very practical that another company could manufacture consumer routers in the US.
Assembling them in Latvia, or the US, from internationally sourced components isn't a solution to anything.
> Usually the argument is that X can't be made in the US because China's so good at it that the US could never compete, so we shouldn't even try. But if a company with 367 employees in a country with the population of a medium-size metro area can do it, it proves that argument is bunk.
Unless Latvia is a much better environment for this kind of industry than the US is.
> Assembling them in Latvia, or the US, from internationally sourced components isn't a solution to anything.
I disagree. It's the first step. I mean, how did China do it? They started with assembly and low-value manufacturing and worked their way up the value chain. The US still had fabs. Once you get assembly reshored, start pushing to to reshore components (which are mostly chips, and pretty soon the equipment is mostly domestic.
> Unless Latvia is a much better environment for this kind of industry than the US is.
In what way?
Even if the US is utterly terrible for this kind of industry, we're talking about a small-medium sized tech company. It seems extremely doable.
Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.
>It is not so much about whether the USA could do this and expect to win, of course they can. Nobody has any doubt about that.
Um, lots of us have doubts about that. The USA couldn't win against Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; why do you think it could win against Greenland? Greenlanders actually have a lot of guns; and likely most of Europe and Canada would also go to war against the USA.
>"and likely most of Europe and Canada would also go to war against the USA."
Canada and the US share border and almost all meaningful infra of Canada is located in that thin border area. The US can obliterate much of Canada with artillery, various types of missiles, bombs etc. etc. Canada has nothing to counter it with. So no, I doubt Canada is that suicidal (I am Canadian btw).
I'm Danish. There are 56k people in Greenland and almost half of them live in Nuuk. The USA could frankly "take" greenland simply by putting a warship there and saying it was theirs. Not really sure why it was ever on the table though. The USA has basically free reign to expand it's military bases there, aside from the ban on nuclear weapons. Sure it would need approval by both Greenland and Denmark, but up until recently we were frankly more allied with the USA than the EU, and I doubt we've ever really said no before. We even bought the damn f35's despite them being so much more expensive than the alternatives, primarily because our history with the F16's. Which would probably have been a possiblity considering we're now debating whether or not to have french nuclear weapon carrying planes stationed on Danish soil in the fallout of the USA no longer being a trusty NATO ally.
If it was because of resources, then American companies are frankly free to extract them as long as they reach deals with Greenland about it. If the USA had waited a few years for Greenland to gain more independence then it would have been even easier.
Not the parent poster but, while I acknowledge your point on Canada and Europe entering the conflict (and I'd add that the highly motivated Dutch punch well above their weight in intelligence and economic spheres and this whole scenario of US invasion is a Putin dream), when you ask "why do you think it could win...", the 50k population of Greenland is smaller than Granada (100k) and three orders of magnitude smaller than Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (~40m). So I find its insurgency potential hard to compare to those examples you give.
I never understood this with cable TV either. You could use an antenna and watch TV over the air (with ads) or you could pay for cable and still watch ads!
Before streaming, if you didn't live in a large metro area, cable got you a good clear picture and more than one or two channels. That was the selling point for it when I was a kid. With OTA reception we would have had two channels with a clear picture and maybe two or three more with a lot of static/snow.
Cable just carried regular broadcast channels back then. The value you paid for was more channels and better picture, not avoiding ads. HBO was the first premium add-on, and it didn't have ads.
Some people set up a big dish antenna in their yard so they could get content directly off the satellite backhaul. This might not have had ads but it was a fairly big investment and you had to be sort of an AV geek to use it.
Cable at least made sense on paper (if not obvious to the consumer). The channels were independent companies, they pay for the rights to content and get paid by ads. But they had the problem of how to actually get their feed into your home (over the air broadcast was the only D2C option).
The cable provider was just a delivery mechanism. So you pay them to deliver the feeds. But they didn’t get any revenue from the content providers (or their ads).
In other words, two different companies, two different services (content vs delivery), and two different revenue models.
No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.
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