Andrew Strong

@UpdatingOnRome But if you could explain to those who can’t bother…

If you think about it

@stevesi Yes … but if it looks stupid maybe it simply is I totally get they want to generate growth and they probably chose this design to keep it distinct from their traditional market … but who would pay that kind of money for this? And they had the obvious option of SUV..

The uproar from loyalists and enthusiasts (L/TE) over this car is both incredible and entirely expected. It shows the power of a brand and the way individuals form a community that feels they are the stewards of the brand. The challenge is this doesn't account for the company behind the brand doing what it feels it needs to do to preserve the brand. The L/TE view is always that the company messed up and failed to honor the brand definition. It can feel powerless as the company and more often than not a company goes down with the ship, so to speak. They are afraid to "cross" this audience. On the other hand if they choose to then the obvious next step is the countdown clock that the L/TE community creates to "right the wrong." Again the company feels the pressure. Very quickly this becomes a "new coke" moment (I haven't looked enough but suspect this analogy is already in play. The solutions proposed are always (in this order): 1) Cancel the product and don't release it. 2) Send it back to redesign it and come back with an "classic" design. 3) LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS The challenges remain: 1) The company is ultimately responsible to steward the brand and business 2) In almost all cases, this becomes a drawn out process precisely because the business / product challenges that got the company to this point remain. 3) The company always knew this would happen. The presumption that there would be no controversy or that the company failed to consider the "customer reaction" is nonsense. Someone was always worried. The bigger the company the more there are people who worried. 4) In a commodity or price/volume product, there are many customers/segments each with different views. A controversial new product might be wrong for one set of customers but what is needed for another. When Apple switched to Intel processors and made an ultra thin laptop, the core Mac base kind of freaked out on both of those choices. Same with iPad. And importantly the iPhone. 5) In a luxury good market, there's a very good chance the vast majority of voices about the product (NOT ALL) are people who would never purchase the product in the first place but are primarily enthusiasts. The uproar over the Porsche or Mercedes SUVs when introduced are good examples of this. Both companies THRIVED with those controversial introductions. 6) Most products do not have easy fixes to "get back on the proper trail." The nature of disruption is that the technology is a discontinuity. It doesn't mean the old technology goes away but it means it is a smaller market. Digital cameras from Nikon/Canon were viewed as toys and inappropriate for the professionals and prosumers. The "easy fix" products were adding screens to film cameras which ultimately proved to be the demarcation between film and digital and not a growth market. The next-gen DSLRs were full steam ahead and Nikon ultimately became #2 because they were slow and Canon seized the chance to be a new leader. Mirrorless repeated this dynamic (with Sony being the aggressive player as they had no installed base to nurture). At every step T/LE worked to hold back the existing companies and new customers paved the way and led the makers to growth markets in a new way. This product might fail. It also might be the start of something generational. The capabilities developed in making it will most clearly inform the future. That's a good lesson from pro-photography (where most T/LE were also not customers.) In all cases, the world of $1M gas powered race cars driven hundreds of miles a year doesn't seem like a growth market no matter how they constrain supply and keep doing what they did for the past 50 years. At some point even getting gas won't be easy. Even F1 will be EV, probably sooner than later, even if it baby steps with hybrids. And we haven't even talked about autonomy and what that might imply.

Guys we need to remember what profit is: the difference between how much a buyer is willing to pay for a thing versus what it cost to create it. Profit happens only when the outputs are worth more than the inputs. Profit is literally value creation. Profit is good.

@krishnanrohit I salute a fellow Douglas Adams enjoyer

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the [US visa rules] are for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Jeff, this is another terrible idea that won't die, like UBI. The problem with it is that it creates the wrong political incentives. The higher the "no-taxes" floor goes (and we already have a pretty high one due to the net effect of government transfer payments) the larger the constituency constantly clamoring for more gibs is, and the more difficult it gets to build a political bloc against taxes going even higher on an ever narrower segment of the population. It's a very slippery slope, and the logical outcome is visible in places like California where states are absurdly dependent on tax revenue from a handful of very high earners. Who then respond to incentives and bail out. Goodbye revenue base, hello debt death spiral. This is why a flat tax - no income brackets at all - is the best policy and in the long term they only stable one.

I'm losing lots and lots more followers today because I am glad Thomas "Look at ME!" Massie lost. So I might as well go all in and purge all the freaks from my follower base. There are hundreds of nations and thousands of interest groups that constantly seek to influence American public policy. If the only nation doing that which you are bothered by is Israel, and if the only PAC doing that which you are bothered by is AIPAC, and if you drone on incessantly, endlessly and vigorously about Israel/AIPAC and no OTHER NATION OR PAC, rational, intelligent people know why that is. It's because you are an antisemite. And if you want to say "Oh you are so wrong, I'm bothered by ALL nations and PACs attempting to influence US policy," but literally the only time you ever mention it in your X feed is in the context of Israel, you are an antisemite. Don't like that? Want to unfollow me because I said that? Good. Beat it.

@eurofounder Could you elaborate on those sex parties maybe? Asking for a friend

The European female founder journey: 1. Have a groundbreaking idea for a period tracking app 2. Recruit four other female co-founders 3. Spend 6 months designing the logo 4. Get rejected by Y Combinator, blame it on "tech bro culture" 5. Raise €25k from a Berlin Female Founders Fund instead 6. Pay Forbes €10k for an article titled "Building A Company Without Toxic Masculinity" 7. Speak at six panels about being a woman in tech 8. Launch MVP with 12 users 9. Win "European Female Innovator of the Year" award 10. Meet a 62 year old divorced French VC at a sex party 11. Marry him, shut down company, become a trad wife

@StealthQE4 We believe NYT now? ;)

Now the truth comes out. We aren’t close to a deal. Irans military capabilities are just improving. I swear to god if we go in there with boots on the ground we will regret it.

@avidseries Parking in movies is the greatest lie ever told … there is always a parking spot right next to where they are going

Things that regularly happen in movies that rarely happen in real life: (1) Ordering food or drinks at a restaurant or bar and then not eating the food or drinking the drink, and leaving without paying. (2) People ending phone conversations without saying goodbye. (3) Female protagonists beating up muscular and much larger male bad guys. (4) Statistically improbable mixed-race romantic pairings (e.g. East Asian man and black woman). (5) Characters driving vehicles and not looking at the road while engaged in conversation with a passenger. (6) Having sex under the sheets. (7) Important business meetings in a conference room lasting about a minute or two. (8) Middle-income characters living in expensive homes or apartments that they couldn't possibly afford. (9)Ordinary people casually dropping f-bombs every sentence or two. (10) Women waking up in the morning with make-up on and perfectly arranged hair.

@CNLiberalism Reminds me during ww2 Japan thought they would beat US navy at night because their eyes were better adapted to darkness or some such… while US was developing radars

The Chinese will look at you with a straight face and say “we think in centuries” as they plunge into a demographic crisis caused by one-child policy

@canedeeman T-34 :)

In your opinion what technology won WWII (or 11 if you're Somali) for the US? I'm going with the proximity fuse.

@Kurt_Steiner Thats … really not accurate at all

This is one of the more insightful things I've read this week: "By the late 1930s [the Germans] had developed the weapons that would in the main be used to fight the Second World War.....When the war came they tried to speed the process of development up, to win the war with the weapons of the 1950s. The result was a technical disaster: shortages of resources, constant political interference, the inherent difficulty of accelerating research work at the forefront of science, all meant that German forces got little in terms of performance from the new weapons to match the great expense of producing them. The Allies...stuck with the weapons of the late 1930s, and pushed them successfully to their limits, in most cases overtaking the performance of Germany's most conventional weaponry. When after the war they came to develop missiles, jets, advanced submarine technology, and a host of other vanguard equipment, they simply took German scientists and blueprints." Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, 243.

@KnotSeaworthy Isn’t that kind of the point? Jedis grew fat and lazy and stupid .. Dooku basically says that much and he is not wrong … say what you will about prequels but the worldbuilding was brilliant

This arena battle was the most horrendous military operation ever conceived. Hundreds of Jedi killed in mere minutes, barely any survivors, and not a single Separatist leader captured. Easy to see why the overconfident Jedi were so easily hoodwinked by Palpatine. Total buffoonery

@runaway_vol Literally 1933

Germany suffers from suicidal levels of woke right now, but when you know Germans, you know they will overshoot on the correction so hard it will make MAGA look like a liberal kindergarten.

@EvangelicalDW @seanmdav They are go cancel lion king now right? Or have Nolan do a remake

Watching The Lion King with my kids and it's amazing how the first act of Scar's tyranny is to import a bunch of low IQ foreigners who ruin the Kingdom in a matter of years.

@IVANM31 @peterrhague Nope, like most everything else about Soviet Union and WW2 it’s Cold War era mythology and propaganda I know it’s fun story but like 99% of stories that are too unreal to believe… well it is unreal

@AndrewBeeStrong @peterrhague It's 100% true. Stalin completely botched the early mobilization and allowed Soviet Army to be caught with its pants down and, basically, destroyed. USSR then needed to all but create a second army.

Remember when the Nazis invaded the USSR, Stalin basically went catatonic and couldn’t respond to the disaster, but his underlings were too scared to remove him? Thinking about that today. No reason…

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

@airkatakana Why not both

you see a guy with a 6-pack and mistakenly think he's a chad no, that is an autistic man and his autistic special interest is being hot one wrong turn and that 6-pack would have been a binder of magic the gathering cards