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.

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.

Nothing, because the Webb is goiing to be almost out of Earth orbit.

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 article is nonsense. Whatever Sapiens' faults, it isn't merely repeating general knowledge. Harari is greatly overestimating the average person's understanding of human history. The article also says that Darwin didn't discover evolution, but only wrote a book about what Wallace found out, but the consensus today is the same as it was then, that Darwin and Wallace both had all the key ideas figured out independently.

You're right. Because he's such a coward they only had to shoot and beat his supporters in order to get him to leave.

I'm pointing out that you're wrong. The Republicans are worse than that.

It's bad logic to to conclude that we can't know thinking is a process because we don't know everything about how thinking works. We don't know everything about how digestion works, but there's no hope of finding a supernatural explanation for any of the remaining mysteries.

When are you going to realize that if you vote for someone who won't recognize elections then you're voting to give up your own vote?

The biggest difference between Biden and Donnie is that Biden will leave when he loses. That has to be a baseline quality for a US politician or we'll fail as a country. The people who are too dim to see that really owe Biden and the Democrats big for saving their butts.

Which is so stupid since they won't have to face them for another two years.

It's been well understood that presidents can be impeached after leaving office. We don't have to take this argument any more seriously than Bill Barr's confusion about whether it was legal for people to vote twice, after Donnie recommended that they do so.

In any case, Republicans previously voted to acquit because they wanted to let voters decide, but Donnie still refuses to acknowledge the voter's decision, so in this case it's particularly appropriate to continue with the impeachment.