Probably before my time... What I remeber from using AOL was that their browser and keyword structure was like an idiot-proof version of the Internet that was accessible for the entire family. I guess they thought that typing www.something.com was for techies... But that ultimately they were still providing you an internet connection and you could use other software to access the actual internet.

Here they tried to introduce 400ml beer cans, explaining that this is what people actually want. The anger quickly removed that crap from the shelves.

And now the ones in my area are shutting down because B&N somehow is able to open new branches.

Beer, too

I used to not understand why people liked coffee until I had a real espresso.

I got a nice local shop which was part of a chain but the manager bought out the location and has been doing pretty well.

I wouldn't call it de-shitified but it is getting better. I think also Anna's archive and syhub should not be underestimated in their effect. If students and researchers are not dependant on journals to do their work, they are more likely to publish open access.

it always amazes me how many people buy into the neocon garbage that Carter was a bad president. Dude was a nuclear submariner, helped cleanup a nuclear disaster, built houses with his hands, and his biggest crime to them? he cancelled the B-1 bomber when it became painfully obvious the stealth programs were going to eclipse it's usefulness.

Reagan got elected on treason with iran, and lies about the B-1.

4 years later he was talking about the amount of money the pentagon was spending on 'costumes' as he slid into dementia.

Carter didn't piss and moan, just went on building houses with his hands for 30+ more years.

And some of those were literally life-saving claims.

Luigi saved more lives than he (allegedly) ended.

Welp, gotta kill another then.

If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.

It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a "family computer" system, not a game console.

I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.

Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).

Hard disagree lol, the American OEM standard is a bar so far down you can see the sparks of hell. The improvement was just their initial attempt to catch up before they gave up.

They nuked the EPA regulations which is why everything in the US is an SUV now and they bypassed competition with Japenese OEMs by lobbying congress to make anti import laws (exactly like what they are doing right now for Chinese EVs) which is how we got all these hodpe podge 90s era hybrid deal brands like diamond star or mazda & ford.

By the time those brands finally entered the US market with local production in full, they had already learned the gg ez system from their American counterparts and began to follow the same crappy practices of reducing cost and quality on every possible corner.

I wouldn't buy a Ford vehicle of this decade even if it ends up being cheaper because the thing is made of ABS plastic and Chinese aluminum glued together with the freshly harvested tears of their yearly department layoffs.

I'd argue that the big ~~3~~ 2 never recovered. Car design peaked in the 1920s and never recovered when the larger corps lobbied/wrote safety and fuel standards to force the mass consolidation of companies down to 3. Innovation slowed down so much and it is why China is going to eat our lunch through the transition to BEVs.

Cronyism is the system we have

Newman's own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.

This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It's how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.

Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.

They then proceeded to not innovate at all for a couple decades and now they're serving cease and desists to any builders making guitars remotely similar to the Stratocaster with demands to recall and destroy sold guitars.

Fender is dogshit ass like Gibson. Both companies have behaved like entitled nepo-babies for decades. These companies deserve to die as punishment for their hubris.

Relevant link.

Ironically, they are now sending cease-and-desist letters to guitar manufacturers that build guitars with the s-style that their stratocasters have, and they are public enemy number one in the guitar community right now.

https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/electric-guitars/fender-cease-and-desist-lsl-instruments