HotAtForty [he/him]

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • Yeah but they can lie?

    Or if manufacturer of X doesn’t want to take that risk, then middleman Y would be happy to take the risk in exchange for a markup.

    All the US has is a paper trail and if china doesn’t share that with the US then the US has nothing.

    It seems banks are a particular weak point because of the paper trail that is inherent to banking, which is why it seems odd that this weak point hasn’t been addressed. If there is a specific bank that does business with Russia and only Russia, then the middlemen can use that. The other banks stay clean and the manufacturers have plausible deniability.

    Like, Kyrgyzstan is importing an unusual amount of German machine tools right now for example.













  • A big part of the collapse of tech is how it used to be extremely engineer driven but now it’s suit driven.

    Like the idea of the engineer in his moms garage making billions was always mythologized but there was a kernel of truth to it in that during the 2000s innovation really was much more driven by engineers thinking “this tech is cool and I want to play with it” but over time it became driven by “the analytics say the users want the buy button to be bigger” or “revenue goes up by 0.35% if we make this font bigger.”

    Also the “continuous delivery” methodology is favored by suits because “always deliver value” sounds so good to a suit but this also means engineering decisions are short termist.

    And the role of enshittification as the core product offering gets betrayed in favor of driving “conversion”.

    Eventbrite was pretty cool when you could use it for free and the offering really was pretty simple. But they just had to juice it in a quest to extract value and in the process they ruined it.

    How much would it really cost to run an event booking website? Like the core product offering should be peanuts to run and you could probably deliver with a handful of engineering teams. And heck sure add some premium features on top for revenue because this system is still capitalist after all, basic shit like a promoted event or management tools that enhance rather than spoil the core product offering sure why not but drive investment into getting that core product offering of a database of events really fucking cheap to run and you would have a good thing going, a simple but useful service with low margins but massive user base, you could live the dream of coding from Bali sipping daquiris with that.

    But no they needed to enshittify, drive design and engineering based on revenue metrics, they discovered the best way to drive revenue was to kneecap their free offering and absolutely cripple the experience if you don’t pay (fucking geniuses, bet that person got a bonus), and whoa whoa whoa now it’s failing wtf how did that happen?

    Edit: Craigslist isn’t laying off staff








  • Also wars are not necessarily fought to be won.

    Like, it’s common for a large supermarket chain to open near their competitors.

    Very frequently the second competing store is in a worse location so it doesn’t “win the local market” and could even be operating at a loss. But that’s fine. Its purpose is to fuck with the competition and hurt their margins.

    The USA didn’t hope to win in Ukraine. The point was the reshape the landscape of Europe, not to win.

    A war with china wont have the intention of conquering china. It will be because the USA will be pushed out of the region anyway due to china’s inevitable rise so if they’re going to be forced out they will leave scars behind on their way out knowing they will lose that war but seeking to shape the future anyway.