Die NATO ist doch schon längst tot

Falls jemand tatsächlich noch glaubt, Trump würde uns im Ernstfall helfen, für den hätte ich ein paar gebrauchte, hocheffiziente Verbrenner im Angebot.

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/trump-merz-iran-krieg-nato-100.html

Die Trumpschen USA wollen keine Verbündete sondern subserviente Vasallen.

Baut was Neues ohne die USA.

Economic cargo cults

One thing that never ceases to fascinate me:

Small, thoroughly unremarkable companies try to emulate wildly successful ones by copying some tertiary, sometimes even actively annoying property.

Take Apple and its near-religious obsession with packaging. Their boxes are sturdy, elegant, and engineered with the kind of care normally reserved for spacecraft or Swiss watches.

So naturally, companies selling $9.99 gadgets have concluded that this is the secret sauce. Not the product. Not the ecosystem. Not the brand. No, clearly it’s the box.

What they fail to realize is that I keep an iPhone box because the device inside retains resale value. The packaging is essentially a reusable shipping container with aspirations.

The cheap gadget, on the other hand, has the resale value of an expired, half-eaten sandwich. Its box is therefore not a feature but a long-term storage problem. A nearly indestructible one. I suspect some of these packages will outlive civilization and be excavated by future archaeologists, who will conclude that we worshipped mediocre Bluetooth speakers.

Another favorite is the imitation of Google’s customer interaction model, or rather, the strategic absence of it.

Companies observe that Google doesn’t talk to its customers and infer that this must be part of the winning formula. What they miss is that Google succeeds despite this, not because of it. When you control half the internet, you can afford to be aloof. When you sell niche SaaS to 50 customers in a easily offended corner of Germany, less so.

Yet here we are, with companies proudly offering the full “Google experience”: no support, no accountability, and a contact form that disappears into a small, silent void, presumably to be studied later by theoretical physicists.

It’s a bit like copying the table manners of a king while lacking both the kingdom and the food.

I suppose this is the corporate equivalent of a cargo cult: build the runway, light the torches, and hope that success will land.

Do you see those as well?

I had a great chat with Meredith Glaser, from the Urban Cycling Institute & Ghent University, to talk about "study tours" and how she gets international policymakers on-board to build better cycling infrastructure in their cities.

This was one of my better podcast conversations, so definitely check it out!

(Also available on all podcast platforms)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jtcuc4RUjA

Liebs wie gerade in eigentlich allen Ländern des Westens alle Regierungen am Herumkrebsen sind, weil GOTTVERDAMMT NIEMAND DEN MUT HAT die Reichen und Superreichen anzutasten sondern bei allen Steuerprogrammen und Reformen immer so getan wird als würden die nicht existieren und man müsste alles ohne deren Geld hinkriegen.

Fucking hell Leute, da steht ein gigantischer goldener Elefant im Raum, der alles Geld einsaugt und Rechtslibertarismus scheißt.

Hört auf euch und uns selbst zu betrügen.