>But I (an American) pay for some European services in Euros, meaning those got 10% more expensive.

European services would be the least of issues. The main issue would be the tons of foreign imported food, cars, products, clothes, gadgets, and so on - including tons of component parts for "american" products (not to mention materials and tooling to make even the increasingly rarer "100% made in US" products).

>They are not worth less in dollar terms. The same number of dollars will still settle next months mortgage bill, or tax bill regardless of what it may or may not exchange into Euros.

If only our living expenses were just taxes and mortgages, amiright?

This take reminds me of the old joke:

“I don’t get why people complain about gas prices going up. I used to put in 40 bucks, and I still put in 40 bucks.”

>you'll be very lucky if your Casio can last as long

The Casio would last even longer - and would be closer to the right time even without touching it in between.

Good luck finding a compatible battery for it after 200 years.

I'll just ask the ruling AI to summon one into existence from the required atoms?

>For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing.

I think that's a self-dellusion many tech enthusiasts have, that they're somehow trend-setters.

And then the same enthusiasts say for the original iPod "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", and see the masses jump to buy it, and themselves only catch up later.

Or they see the masses never caring for their e.g. desktop Linux, whose mass dominance (not mere "works for me" or "have set it up for my elderly parents and they don't even know it's not Windows") would come "any day now" for the last 30 years...

Trend-setters exist, but they're a different group than the "tiny minority" of enthusiasts. More like some musician paid to spot Beats headphones, or some cool dude sporting some gadget early on.

>For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

A hell of a lot of people had a real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, if they could have the chance. And even more admired Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches because of their design and elegance (and price, people aspire to luxury goods, even when they can't afford them), not because some sport-car afficionados said so.

It's the same in other areas: the popular books, or comics, or movies, or music, etc. are rarely if ever what the "inner" crowd of each niche admires. Most people buy Reacher and such, not Finnegan's Wake.

>So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants.

More likely, if you want to keep and continue increasing your margins, and your stock price, you'll incrementally continue to shit all over your product trying to squeeze ever more money.

Neither the "enthusiasts"/tech-savvy users NOR the "median user" wants Netflix to be the shit it has become, or Google search to be so fucked up, or ads and nags on Windows UI, and so on.

They're just given those, and they accept them having no recourse. The moment there's a better recourse, they jump to it (like IE -> Firefox -> Chrome, or BS early search engines -> Altavista -> Google).

Haven't digged deep into Erlang, but from what I read, I never thought Erlang's big idea is "lightweight processes and message passing".

Always thought the key differentiator is having a kind of "orchestrator/supervisor" for those processes.

(Which "lightweight processes and message passing" facilitates, sure, but it's more than those)

>Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial.

Especially when post-tarrifs consumption is going to take a huge nosedive

>We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.

You say as if they weren't right about those things, and they aren't the toxic to society crap they're today.

>"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."

So, exactly like the real world case with all modern tech advancements?

>we are clearly beyond the point where any goods are going to flow between the US and China

Not even close to being near that point, much less "beyond".

It simply can't happen (the flow to stop in any significant way) for the foreseeable future of 5-10 years. Trade will continue.

If all such trade was to stop not even now, but even a year from now, It would be Mad Max.

You're out of your mind if you think people will pay more in the long-term when there are or will be cheaper alternatives. Many countries in Africa are the next logical neocolonial maquiladora targets for cheap goods to feed the Global North.

Key words: "when there are or will be".

"Many countries in Africa" don't have the infrastructure, manpower, expertise, supply chain, and other factors - and they wont have for the foreseeable future.

If you're talking about sweatshops making clothes and stuff, sure. If you're talking about anything more advanced, that requires factories, technology, complex production lines, etc, nope.

For the foreseeable future, things will just get expensive and/or be consumed less.

You'd be lucky if you get "only modestly quite more expensive" alternatives.