It's going to come out that Amazon calls the manufacturers for their basics goods, sends them the leading competing item and has them make it with slightly less expensive components to undercut the cost of the competitor.
It's so blatantly obvious if you've ever done a side by side in things like lamps, backpacks etc and other super simple designs.
Truth, the primary impact was the ability to arbitrarily inflate the cost of soft goods dramatically inside the terminal.
It's such a good racket Hudson News...a little news stand company inside a few dozen terminals was able to go public on the NYSE...
The public perception that security is "doing it's job" is non-existent since everyone knows it's at best a jobs program and in practice another group of people measurably stealing travellers things.
Social media removed the corrective elements of previous mechanisms. There's no longer a "trusted party" who helps you when you're in the wrong, there are "enemies" who "dunk on you."
The purpose of broadcasting isn't the same as conversation. People want the result of a positive interaction, but they do that by chasing hundreds of negative ones.
The negative interactions are actually better for the platform as they are (in some studies) almost 10x as effective at driving engagement. So the companies looking for "the most engaging" communities, drive more negative interactions.
The people looking for the most clicks, chase the "dunking" and "counter dunking" interactions, and it becomes at best 90% of the platform, at in reality like 99% of what you see while you're doom scrolling.
Social media is awful, and draws out our worst impulses as a business model.
So it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting sick of them.
So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model for an adversarial public.
My old Windows 98SE box on a 200Mhz MMX processor was perfect responsiveness.
We say that today, and remember the best part of the experience... but we do forget, it was all at the mercy of your (maybe if you're lucky) UltraATA/33mhz bus.
I gave bard your text, asked it to make it appear as though a AI didn't write it, and then gave it back to chatgpt... Neither one can definitely identify if it's written by AI anymore