Those jackets are 100% a flex, but they (and their competition like Arc'teryx, Moose Knuckles, etc.) aren't a flex in the typical middle-class way of overpaying for a middling product because it has a trendy design. They're a flex because you're telling the world that you're willing to drop $800-1200 on a coat so you can wear whatever you want underneath and don't have mess up your outfit with layers.
> This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market.
Amazon's model is to be better at ecommerce and logistics than everyone else, including Walmart, which itself gained market share through incredible skill at logistics. They reinvest what would be profits into getting better, and frequently succeed at it.
Most companies don't actually do that once they're mature.
There is no European tech company that's going to compete with Google. They could ban Google entirely and the result would be Baidu etc. coming in and doing the exact same things.
Not to say we have any real contenders, but it’s difficult to compete with Google when the French company pays 33% corporate tax while Google pays significantly less
To the best of my knowledge the corporate tax in question is a tax on income, rather than revenue.
Any would-be competitor to Google is going to want to plow most/all of their revenue back into growth for years, perhaps over a decade. VC funded companies normally lose money so they can grow faster.
Once you're making money, yeah that's kind of a big sucking hole you want to deal with. But that's a political issue that other EU members states have with Ireland (and Luxembourg, and the Netherlands).
Why? America has historically had very high corporate tax rates relative to the rest of the world, that's what trump's tax reforms fixed. This idea in Europe that Google lives in a low tax environment is really very wrong. Their effective rate had historically been somewhere in the upper 20 percent ranges, no?
Certainly, tax is not the reason there are no Google competitors from France.
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world.
Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.
I only have a single, global persona. It's why my username for various sites is either 'dana' (my first name) or 'diederich' (my last name), with very few exceptions.
I've been using the Internet almost daily since 1988, and for the first 8 or 9 years, I embraced being pseudo-anonymous. I really can't say why, it was just what everybody was doing. If all of the online activity of all of my different personas was mixed in public, it would have been no big deal.
Having said that, I understand and respect that, I presume, most people need to be able to maintain different personas.
> You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
While I certainly don't say exactly the same kinds of things to everyone, everywhere, I do generally act the same in every situation.
And I think that's kind of unusual.
Feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you like.
Humans evolved to be really good at long distance running and given proper training, time and discipline you can run an absurd distance compared to most mammals.
I wish more games look terrible in a 1995 kind of a way. Mostly for the sake of nostalgia, I loved playing crappy shareware games and terrible demos from floppy/CD magazines when I was a kid.
Nothing wrong with that, or enjoying a great jacket in the process. But it's clearly a signal of wealth.