> bought an Apple controller

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.

The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

As several commentators on Twitter have noted that plain old ChatGPT leans liberal, libertarian in values by a fair amount.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

This is a change in degree, not kind; every developed economy is somewhat social democratic. Even the USA has minimum wage, social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps etc. The debate is not whether these things are necessary, rather it is a question of how much to spend and how best to direct them.

The decades since 1980 have seen a broad swing to a neoliberal consensus in which these things are to be reduced in order to reduce government spending, which in turn allows for increased economic activity in making things, which is supposed to make everyone richer. However we are now seeing that the last bit doesn't work very well, leading to pressure to do something about it.

This political pressure currently shows up as support for populist candidates who promise to solve the problems caused by "them", for various values of "them" (e.g. the feckless poor, the liberal elite, the media, foreigners, Eurocrats, drug dealers, jews, blacks, whites, muslims, gays, the list is endless). However amongst all the competing targets the big persistent one is of huge multinational companies and their billionaire bosses who pay little or no tax quite legally while telling the rest of us to tighten our belts.

The big problem for such "tax and spend" policies is simply that taxing the very wealthy is currently not possible: if you put up your tax rates the profits and income you were going to tax somehow evaporate and emerge in another jurisdiction with lower tax rates.

Maybe I'm an optimist, but I see this leading to a new consensus in which tax havens everywhere (including the USA) come under increasing pressure to share information about beneficial ownership and money flows, allowing governments to effectively tax the very wealthy and spend the money on social safety nets, UBI and health care.

eh