yes, there are clearly unfair trade practices here. EU has been making money for Google and Amazon, but the US are not using our services. I hear the best solution to this are tariffs: EU users have to pay to use gmail until enough US users start using EU email providers and we rebalance the services trade!
the “logic” is pretty much as you described it. Only, after charging yourself with the extra tax on Walmart purchases, you obviously can’t afford Walmart any longer, so you learn to make your own soap with ash and the fats of animals that you have started breeding in your own flat.
but Putin’s invasion wouldn’t have looked like an invasion at all, if it had gone according to his plan. He infiltrates territories, creates areas heavily inhabited by Russians, assumes more and more direct control of them through puppets and only then eventually moves in with the army to “liberate them”.
And then we all collectively pretend to look the other way and resume doing business with him as soon as possible. That’s how it mainly worked with Crimea, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, so not a new thing. This time NATO didn’t play ball (and Trump is trying to go back to the usual routine).
When the “move in with the army” phase happened with Ukraine, the way I remember that last part, it was pretty abrupt as far as invasions go; “drills” was a brief excuse when they couldn’t hide all the troops that were amassing near the border, not a continuous flexing of military muscle.
Not saying that “Putin did it better” here; in fact I hope he’s going to get the right comeuppance for what he’s doing to millions of people (Ukrainians and his own). Just saying that whatever China is doing with Taiwan looks different to just-a-schmuck-on-the-internet me…
That’s probably true… Still looks a bit ridiculous though. It’s like somebody is planning to steal your wallet but instead of jumping you in a dark alley, they start showing up in front of your house every day, do 100 push ups on the sidewalk, then glare at you and leave.
Maybe Putin didn’t do enough drills before trying to invade Ukraine and that’s why he’s not done great, I don’t know. My expertise invading countries (or mugging people for that matter) is pretty low, so don’t mind me.
You make a great point. But just to stay on the example of cars: besides the innovation on EVs, there’s this horrible tendency to consider cars as tablets on wheels, both in the sense that you can forget about repairing them by yourself and in the sense that they are now increasingly becoming low-margin hardware to run higher margin subscription services. If anything warrants high valuation for a car company it would arguably be the innovation on EVs, rather than the SaaS model.
I hope the idea of Car Software As a Service dies before becoming too widespread. But if it doesn’t, maybe car companies wouldn’t become “Tech” companies, just more shitty subscription vendors. And their stock should be valued as such, not for the largely unwanted “Tech innovation”.
what is the point where having continued drills becomes just ridiculous? What is it that they are actually testing at this point?
By that measure shouldn’t Disney be considered a Tech company too? Or I guess banks and insurance companies.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but maybe the article (at least the small part I can read with no paywall) is on to something, Companies that sell access to technology or rely on technology to sell something else (he does give the example of e-commerce) should not be “Tech” companies.
The part I didn’t get to is where the author draws the line to tell what companies ARE Tech. I guess OpenAI or Google would qualify. They sell services but they are services they invented and made, with considerable researxh and investment. But what about Amazon or Netflix?
I misread as left the country and was disappointed on second read…
Agree. The MO is totally different: funding for bis research would be cut, he would be fired and then deported very publically.
“Hey we said ‘rapidly’, nobody said anything about it still working when we’re done”
Two comments:
If you and Elon Musk are playing bad-cop-good-cop, how shitty of a person do you have to be for Musk to play the good cop?
This sound a lot like Russia saying they want peace. You know the argument that"if Ukraine just gave up their territory, government and freedom there would be no war, it’s their fault!". Same here, if Europe removed all their social security and pesky regulations so that US companies could do everything they wanted there would be no tariffs!