I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.
If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.
The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".
Consumers are lazy and greedy.
The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.
That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.
I have a pair of Mountainsmith Lumbar packs, both either over or pushing 30 years old (I have two because I misplaced and replaced my first, but later found it).
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."[1]
I had high hopes for the tiled image formats, which began with Microsoft Seadragon, a project they took on and closed down, as is the way. Fortunately someone forked OpenSeadragon, which is such an under-appreciated tool. Good to see an implementation.
If anyone wants to do their own tiled images, creating the tiles is the hard part, and the image processing toolkit VIPS will do that bit for you.
The Franklin product I always wanted but never had was the REX. This was what PCMCIA slots were made for, a mini-organiser that was just cool in pre-iphone times, when any other organiser/PDA needed to be plugged in with some very slow cable.
Citizen made the REX and they sold it on to Xircom, so it wasn't as if Franklin did much apart from to add their peculiar style of marketing to it.
I think that a lot of people unconsciously quit Twitter/X due to friction/hassle.
By analogy, think of news websites that are generally paywalled, take ages to load and only offer 'USAID propaganda'. A lot of people just won't open a link to the New York Times and their ilk because of this friction. You might as well get the same story elsewhere.
Twitter/X has become similarly 'meh', perhaps even more so. A 'tweet' is measured in characters, originally SMS message length, now biglier, but still small. In theory you could get a feature length article on the NYT-style bloated news websites, so the friction could be worth the effort - in theory. But for a tweet? Why bother, particularly if it wants you to provide your age and other details that shouldn't be necessary, but marketing dictates otherwise.
As for Musk and his politics, I don't think Bezos is any better, as for Rupert Murdoch and the other press barons, they are equally odious. Yet, if the product is any good, I can overlook such awkward realities to a certain extent. If Amazon can get me that vital part I need tomorrow rather than 'in twenty eight days', then take my money!
I am a moderately heavy user of Telegram as I prefer to get curated news from there. If bad things are happening, I want to get my news from the natives, not from the 'Epstein' empire. Much is cross posted to X but much is not. All considered, nothing beats Telegram, particularly as far as friction is concerned, it makes X, WhatsApp, Instagram and much else seem to have a dated user interface.
IMHO, EFF need to embrace Telegram, not least because it reaches people in parts of the world where the EFF message resonates.
I have always dreamed of substituting a really expensive rack of servers with a couple of elderly laptops, with their built in UPS, handy screens, keyboards and trackpads. However, for pet projects, I now have a better way of being cheapskate.
Some ecommerce software stacks really need gargantuan amounts of RAM and CPU, which gets expensive on the cloud. However, it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement, therefore having the setup reasonably secure and cheap.
Downsides to this, having customer details in the basement rather than a secure facility, but how many developers have huge customer databases just casually lying around on USB sticks and whatnot? It happens.
Don't use "the cloud", rent a moderately-priced server. This "cloud" fetishism (that means AWS/Azure/GCP) has led to billions of dollars in unnecessary revenue for those companies and unnecessary expenses for the rest of the world.
> it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement
This is easy to say if you can write, but, what if you are trying to write in a second language?
As an English person, I can write reasonably well without having to know what any of the technical terms for writing mean. I don't need to know any formal rules for writing in different tenses, and even Oxford commas just happen automagically. I can break the rules too, not that I even know what the rules are.
Over the years I have worked with a lot of people from other parts of the world that have English as their second language. They can't write in English purely on instinct, 'writing as one might talk', they are stuck trying to remember the rules and the billions of exceptions to the rules that English has, just to make it hard for the second-language crew. Of course, in Britain, we can slip into Cockney Rhyming Slang, Glaswegian or West Country Speak (tm), for not even the Irish or the Americans to understand us.
Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is. They have absolutely no need to know. Whereas the German, speaking his most humourous English, gained from many years of study and watching TV, absolutely knows what a 'past participle' is, but they haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
Um, er, um, the, um, real problem with writing as one talks is, er, you know, sometimes, we, er, put in lots of ums and ers. That is the real danger of 'writing as one talks', but, when editing the ums out, we dabble and wreck that flow of words that sounded great but didn't look too great on the page.
> a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Yes, both Americans and Brits write overly verbose prose.
> Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is.
Plenty of true English speakers are educated enough to know what 'past participle' is. Like common. Just like plenty of native Germans can consciously analyze cases.
America is full of people that know what the 'past participle' is. Isn't it another country, like 'Africa' is a country, according to a worrying amount of Americans?
> Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
If he’s not, his writing indicates a native level of fluency.
There are absolutely native English speakers who write like this. Some of them even get degrees studying the language.
> haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
I’m a native English speaker and I have no idea what “take a butchers” means, so possibly not the best example. I assume this is a Britishism.
You're right. More specifically it's Cockney (east end of London) rhyming slang. Basic rule: find a phrase that rhymes with the word you mean, substitute the phrase, but leave out the rhyming word. So "butcher's" = "butcher's hook" = "look". So "take a butcher's" means "take a look".
I had a Cockney father-in-law, once upon a time, so a few phrases crept into my lexicon. I still use "don't chicken about it" = "chicken curry" = "worry", and a couple more.
You don't always leave out a word. Some of the more famous ones, that most English people have heard, are "trouble and strife" = "wife", and "apples and pears" = "stairs" - though I never heard anyone use those particular examples in regular speech, they're often given as examples / stereotypes / satires of the style.
As a non-native English speaker, it sometimes takes me some time to write things because I am trying to put my thoughts in a concise yet simple-to-understand form.
PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of.
First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in New York and ask them to post your 'hot potato of juiciness'. But, how to you exchange keys without the beloved five eyes seeing what you are up to?
This was in an era when very little was encrypted, so anything encrypted would theoretically get flagged for the three letter agencies to take a look at. Again, this would depend on the person you are trying to reach, if they were working at the equivalent of 'the Iranian embassy' then yeah, good luck with that, you are going to get caught.
The next problem was that PGP was doable for the three letter agencies using what amounts to WW2 Enigma tactics. In period it was possible for them to man-in-the-middle attack an email, to ask the PGP using sender to 'use the right key and resend'. The sender does as told, even with the same, as provided, public key. However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
PGP was originally treated as a 'munition' with export controls. People weren't using PGP for their Uber Eats and Amazon orders, as per the article, it was only anti-government people that needed PGP, that being Western 'five eyes' governments.
Hence, even though it is a tedious NYT article, the author is right about PGP, in period. And, don't ask how I know about how PGP was hacked, there was a certain fog of war that went on at the time.
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
It was never trivial for TLAs to man-in-the-middle anyone, because PGP users were very much aware of the problem and nothing about key exchange was automated, for good or ill. Key exchange parties, reading out key fingerprints in their own custom extended phonetic alphabet etc.
A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.
Clearly they have sales and other teams as the important people within the company, with customer services being down the pecking order.
They don't need AI to automate their customer service requests, they just need decent forms with a standard issue helpdesk system. It takes some work to get right, but anyone with experience of building customer support services will be able to do that, to put most of the customer service team out of work!!!
The problem is that the Law of The Instrument applies:
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
So we have some AI 'hammer' going on here, and it is the wrong tool.
At a guess, 80% of the customer service requests are going to be billing related, with some need to provide refunds or free credits. Get the form right so it shows the right boxes and these 'easy wins' can show up as a big list that a customer service person has to glance over before hitting the 'refund everyone' button. You need the human there to take responsibility, plus they can work on the 20% of other tickets, once they have spent ten minutes clearing down the refunds/extra credits requests.
Google don't sell much to end customers, therefore no support. If I search Google for how to remove fonts from my computer that are not latin, and their AI bot gives me an answer that zaps my whole computer, I can't complain and ask for a refund because I never paid anything in the first place. Google do not need to speak to a single customer.
Meanwhile, Arsthropic have a commercial product with billing. They prefer not to do customer service, but they are stupid. Every contact with customers and friendly customer service is an opportunity to sell more to customers or to not have them hate you. This is why companies should do customer service, however, they also need to put CS at the heart of the org chart and acknowledge that a well run CS department raises revenue and is not a cost.
Why do American keyboards have that horizontal enter key?
As a Brit, with plenty of notionally British keyboards to choose from (with £ signs for the price and the '3' key), too often there is this wrong-shaped horizontal enter key. What is the thinking behind that?
As for the article, mystery key pressing games might be incredibly clever in the parallel universe of the Apple cult, and even quite fun, particularly if you press the wrong keys deliberately, but I prefer the Ubuntu way, where you just have the keyboard for your locale selected, with the option to change it, if you really want to.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
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