Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn’t compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn’t sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at… putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn’t have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that’s what they did.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
the fucked up thing about every corporation’s executives being like “we are going to use AI and other new technologies to replace you it’s inevitable sorry” is that
1) usually experts in AI and these new technologies will tell you that it CANT replace every worker and has its own challenges and requires new and different kinds of workers to make it functional and
2) it is not the fucking technology putting people out of work or ruining how the system functions. it is PEOPLE (executives) making CHOICES to make it that way, and blaming the TECHNOLOGY. moving to adopt new technology in sustainable and realistic ways requires, money, time, and long term investment, which executives just trying to show exponential growth to wall street at the next shareholder meeting for a few years before they take a nice severance package and hop to the next company or retire, don’t give a shit enough to do. they see a new toy, a new bauble, that some silicon valley idiot tells them will reduce costs and increase output, they sell the lie to their shareholders, they rinse and repeat. it is CHOICES. BY PEOPLE. NOT THE TECHNOLOGY. it never has been in the history of human innovation.
At first Netflix said, come write for us. We’ll save your cancelled shows and write about whatever niche story you want. Our algorithm says people will watch it!
Then a few years later they said, regardless of our promises or contract obligations we are cancelling shows after two seasons without telling anyone. Turns out no matter how loved a show is, we get less subscriptions after the second season.
How many subscriptions did we bring you? Netflix won’t say.
So writers started writing two season shows. Just give us two seasons, Netflix. Like you promised.
Then Netflix said, oops sorry! Turns out your show didn’t premiere at #1 and the views in the first day weren’t what we wanted so we’re cancelling your second season.
What were the numbers? How many people watched our show? Netflix doesn’t say.
Then, they did something extra special. They started taking shows and splitting their first season into two halves. Inside Job was not two seasons. It was one season split in half.
Oops! Sorry! The second half of your first season didn’t do as well as the first half, so now your show is cancelled!
Why? How many people? How much money? These companies are making cash hand over fist and they refuse to tell people the truth: people loved your show. Loved it. But some corpo exec wanted an infinite money making machine. Do you know how long shows are in production for before you watch them? Years. Like, 5+, even 10+ years. And Netflix gives it less than a week before they decide whether you’re getting cancelled.
when a mutual posts a poll you know nothing about, but they say “orangutan johnson my beloved, orangutan johnson sweep!!!!” you vote for orangutan johhnson. it’s called loyalty.
You can do everything right and still become disabled. Disability isn’t a character flaw or a personal failure which can get blamed on the people who aquire one. It can happen to literally all of us at any time. There’s no fairness involved
you know what. i’ve always been hesitant to describe my anaphylactic food allergies as a disability because “it’s just allergies” but if you look at the numerous ways this has affected my life as an adult (because everybody only talks about kids having anaphylactic allergies):
no restaurants or fast food
no store-bought food from small companies (less accountability/resources to prevent cross-contamination)
no candy or desserts (unless they are 100% homemade, which takes a lot of time and energy if you have other disabilities like i do)
no hand-washing dishes (every place i live in has to have a well-functioning dishwasher)
no kissing people on the mouth/lower half of the face
other people cannot kiss me/put their mouth on me
no allergens in the house (really difficult to enforce with non- immediate family members!!)
always having to cook my own meals/bake my own treats/desserts
no sharing drinks/food with other people
no food cooked in other people’s houses/kitchens
always having to bring my own “lunchbox” to family events, work or school, all-day events, or any other situation in which i could THEORETICALLY need to eat or drink something other than bottled water
calling food manufacturers to verify label information on new/changed foods
and none of this is counting the avoidance behaviors i developed with obsessive-compulsive disorder around age 13 in response to the panic attacks i’d have remembering about the anaphylactic shock i experienced at age 10.
i was taught to read labels at age 5. i was taught how to use my own epi-pen at age 6. my parents and i have always been careful and responsible about my allergies. it’s not “i just don’t like this food”, it’s “if i eat this my throat will swell up and block my trachea AND i’ll go into shock from low blood pressure.” as inconvenient as it might be for YOU, you can learn these things too and save a life. happy disability pride month; stop being a dickhead
i don’t usually talk about my allergies because it gives me a LOT of anxiety but i felt this was important to share, because most people have no idea what being an adult with allergies is like. life went from “everyone at the birthday party gets a cupcake but me and i’m sad” to to “if i want to kiss someone i like, i have to make sure she hasn’t eaten anything i’m allergic to in the past few days” (which is like. hugely awkward to ask of someone holy shit) or “i have to turn down the meal from my friend’s mom even though she has the best of intentions and now she thinks i’m an asshole”
To clarify, Elon musk has had years where his net worth increased by around $121B (such as 2020 and 2021, a time when a lot of people were suffering) but he did not pay income on this increase because an overwhelming majority of it was not reported as income.
If Elon Musk were paying regular income tax on this increase in net worth, he would be in the top bracket paying 37%, which would be about $44.4 billion. Instead, he’s paying about ¼th that. Why? Because he’s able to benefit from loopholes and legal tax avoidance schemes, such as borrowing at a very low rate against unrealized capital gains, that most taxpayers are not able to benefit from.
A large part of why there is such a massive disparity in wealth between the rich and poor in our society is that we allow people who already have a ton of wealth to concentrate wealth very easily while avoiding tax, like this. Closing these loopholes is important to ensuring equality of opportunity and also avoiding the extreme concentration of power in the hands of a tiny number of people.
And we see the negative effect on the world of allowing Elon Musk to have such wealth and thus power.
Please, support closing these tax loopholes. At a bare minimum I want him to pay some sort of base level of tax on the increase in his net worth. But I also would prefer that the top tax bracket was much higher. 37% is much lower than it was historically. Not that long ago it was even as high as 90%. Having it that high is a strong disincentive or deterrent to people getting the sort of compensation that leads to people becoming super wealthy. But it’s probably more important to fix the loopholes because if you just raise the rate but still allow legal tax avoidance, people will just avoid paying tax.
Unless I’m mistaken it was Eisenhower in the 50s who raised the top bracket to 90%; that’s why we have interstates. Idk about you, but I think they’re a nice piece of infrastructure. Imagine what we could do with that kind of money today…public transit, high speed rail, etc.
