When I first visited these United States back in 1982, one of the immediate things I noticed was the sheer size of the market.
I don’t think that people outside the U.S. can quite comprehend the scale of industry of all kinds that native-born Americans pretty much take for granted, if they think about it at all. After the Great Wetback Episode of ’86, I remember watching TV in Longtime Friend Trevor’s place, and snorting with laughter at some car dealer whose claim to fame was that he was “The Largest Chev-lay Truck Dealer in South-East Texas” or some such puffery, and wondering why the geographical area was so tightly defined. As it happened, the dealership was a little outside San Antonio, and one evening I and a few others drove south for an evening’s carousing and passed said Chev-lay dealer’s place.
It was the largest car dealership I’d ever seen. It seemed as though the lot contained well over a thousand cars and trucks, and I was completely gobsmacked. By chance, one of the group was involved in a car dealership — I think in advertising — back in Austin, so I asked her how many times this guy was likely to turn his stock over in a year, thinking that it might take at least a year or maybe even two to sell it all. When she said, “About four or five times a year”, I could not believe her. That would involve selling about 5,000 vehicles a year, or roughly 15 vehicles per day, every single business day of the year. And this was one dealer in a small town (as San Antonio was still back then) — and of course we passed dozens of dealers on our way into town.
Similar discoveries lay ahead — such as the fact that Jewel supermarkets in Chicago was larger in both size and sales than the national chain I’d just left in South Africa (OK Bazaars, for those with long memories) — and just about every week brought more and more.
I ran into a fellow consultant in Chicago, a Belgian who was making a very good living in South America by selling a piece of software he’d discovered in France, and whose franchise he’d purchased for the international (outside Europe) market, as the Frogs weren’t interested in selling outside their home territory. It was the only one of its kind in Europe, so after setting up the easy business in South America, he decided that it was time to try and crack open the U.S. market. He attended an industry conference in Miami, and found to his horror that not only did he have competition, but he had lots of competition from companies selling almost the identical product, and at several different points on the pricing scale withal. He stood absolutely no chance of success, so he slunk back to South America, tail between his legs.
This country is enormous. The scale of business and the size of the market simply boggles the mind, and it’s no surprise that when the Euros try to bully us into using metric, for instance, we can them them to piss off because outside the sciences and drug dealers, the U.S. market prefers to work with Imperial units, thank you very much, and the U.S. market is big enough for the rest of the world, in most cases, not to matter.
I told you all that so I could talk about this.
Via Insty, as usual, I read an interesting article entitled A Nation Divided, which bemoans the fact that not only are we facing a permanent political divide between Right and Left, but we run the risk losing our conservative voice by falling under a Big Tech monopoly as well:
Now, Apple, Amazon, and Google are teaming up to make life extra difficult for Parler, a right-leaning alternative to Twitter. Apple and Google are removing it from their app stores while Amazon, who has been hosting the site, is yanking their hosting.
Now, Parler will migrate over to someone else and be back up and running soon enough, but it’s still troubling. Especially with people being de-platformed and then some of the biggest in the tech industry doing everything they can to shut down the alternative.
I doubt that. Remember that when Roger Ailes came up with Fox News, his selling point to Murdoch was the simplest ever: “Half the market.”
At some point, the Left is going to run away with itself. That outlets like Gab and Parler even exist in the face of a near-monopoly like Twitter shows that half the market is still there to be had.
Okay, to put on my marketing wizard’s pointy hat for a moment: not quite half the market because conservatives have better things to do with their time — like holding down a real job — than to fuck around in a glorified chat room 24/7, but remember what I said above: even a third of the U.S. market is a huge number, and perfectly capable of supporting not only a competitor to Twitter, but to Facebook, GoDaddy and [gasp] even Amazon. Think I’m mistaken about the last? Remember when Kmart was the market leader in mass merchandisers? Not so popular now, are they, thanks to Walmart. Think Walmart is too big to fail? Say hello to Amazon.
And if there’s one thing anyone can bet the house on, it’s that at some point a competitor to Amazon will arise, and put them out of business. After all, General Motors was once the Big Cheese of automotive manufacturing, but as little as a decade ago, they required a government bailout to keep their doors open and since then they haven’t exactly gone back to their position of market eminence.
And apart from crappy financial management, the one thing that causes all big enterprises to fail eventually is losing touch with their market, whether in spirit or by the market changing to a different model.
I showed just the tiniest bit of this a couple of days ago when I talked about disentangling myself from Big Tech, Big Retail and Amazon. Sure, I’m just one guy. But let’s just think about what would happen if the 75 million Trump voters like me did exactly what I was doing — individuals and conservative-minded businesses alike. I would also venture to suggest that when it comes to the conservative market, 75 million is a massive underestimation.
As to who would actually fund all this… I would suggest that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire in town — hell, a bunch of old boys at the Houston Cattleman’s Annual Ball in Houston could probably buy the New York Times with the change rattling around in their pockets, if they wanted to. (FYI, if Mexico’s Carlos Slim wanted continued access just to the Texas market, he’d probably sell his share of the NYT in a NY minute.)
Size matters. There is sufficient size in this country, whether geography, population or commerce, to support two competing visions of America. Would it be easy? Nobody said it would be, but if there’s one thing I have faith in, it’s in that restless American spirit which once said, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…” and I think you know the rest.
Let me also offer the words of John Adams, who when he realized the immensity of the task ahead and the purpose and intellectual powers required, cried: “We have not men sufficient for the times!” Whereupon Jefferson, Madison, Hancock, Washington and several others said, “Hold my beer.”
We also have men sufficient for our time. They just haven’t been motivated enough, yet. But they will be.
Unlike the earlier men, though, the only impediment we face is not external (George III, Russia!!), but internal. That would be when the Left attempts to prevent such a severing, or suppressing competition by passing a series of laws forbidding such.
Allow me then to quote, or rather paraphrase the words of George Washington when he was asked why he was preparing a number of boats to cross the Delaware at midnight on Christmas Eve:
“We are going to murder our enemies in their sleep.”
That was probably the best thing I’ll read all day, maybe the next whole week. Well done.
Amen.
Your points above give me hope that we can get thru this without bloodshed, that it’s at least a possibility to avoid Civil War AND keep America.
Bravo.. while I’ve never used Google for email your earlier post inspired me to migrate away from them for my calendar and contacts.
I was just discussing this issue this morning with a coworker. Big Tech is not only kicking their user base to the curb, they are attempting to shut down the alternatives and hoping that the demand will just go away. You know just like how attacking the supply chain was so successful in the war on drugs. (eye roll)
I would also point to Microsoft as a company that was once THE Big Tech powerhouse but is today a shadow of its former self. A company that once dominated during the dot com boom is non-existent in the mobile market (other than apps).
Monopolies are inherently unstable business entities.
I’m with John Adams. There is a microscopic minority of men with balls, and they amount to a grain of sand on Miami Beach. The GOP is a fucking joke. The Mitch McConnells of the world have never spent a nanosecond in the private sector, and are just as wealthy as the Bidens & the Clintons for all the same reasons. Too many cockroaches with all the power, and there’s no one they won’t destroy to keep it that way.
I suspect that most of us at Kim’s crib are boomers. We’re willing to go down swinging, but our replacements believe Bruce Jenner=COURAGE! We & our priorities are being overrun by the hordes of rancid pussies eager for the free douches administered by the gender nuetral non binary mother/father/brotherfuckers they’ve chosen to run their lives.
Color me pessifuckingmistic.
Speak for yourself Boomer.. I’m Gen X and proud of it.
Oh you kids!
Mitch McConnell is as suborned by the Chinese as Beijing Biden is.
The idiot Leftists (but I repeat myself) were so afraid their handlers would lose their phony baloney jobs in government that they REALLY have a Manchurian Candidate who got elected. And it will not go as well for the Leftists who don’t have G-jobs where the Marshall can come out and take the last shopping cart full of filthy cardboard and the little stash of aluminum cans from them.
I read your post on disentanglement with great interest as it is something I’ve been working on myself over the past month. But I’ve been thinking for several months that something more is called for. We need to hit these dot-com and media companies in the wallet – by taking away advertising and interaction. Every time you visit a web page or blog, or read a new article, or follow a link, they are making a small piece of money off your action. You may not use Twitter, but if you visit a webpage that has a Twitter button or a Twitter quote embedded in the page you just gave them something. We need to TAKE THIS AWAY. We need to make our absence felt where it hurts.
I use Chrome for work and the Brave browser for personal use. In Chrome you can download ad-blockers (I use “uBlock Origin”)* where I can import ad-blocking lists or create my own. I’m slowly adding sites and domains to that list that are contrary to my beliefs. If I visit a webpage with an embedded Twitter button or post I see nothing and I give back nothing. I’m not sending anything their way. Ditto with the NYT and some other media… I don’t want to read them, I don’t want to see them, and I don’t want to support them in any form.
If you have any technical ability, I highly recommend looking into the free Pi-hole adblock system (https://pi-hole.net/)** for your home network. I’ve got it deployed on my home network and it’s amazing how much of a change it makes to my web browsing. Again, I’m slowly adding domains to the list of things to block.
(Honestly, we need someone to compile a “Conservative Action List” with all of the domains and companies that we don’t want to support. Then we can just import the list and call it good. I simply don’t have the time or energy to do it.)
I’ve had a feeling since November that a lot of these companies are vulnerable to this pressure. A dip in their advertising and reader numbers will immediately impact their bottom line. I suspect a 10 or 15% drop in revenue for some of the media companies will start generating layoffs – which would be a sweet sound to my ears. We can and should be doing everything we can to limit our interaction with these companies in every way shape and form. To quote the movie “300” – “Give them NOTHING”.
By continuing to support them indirectly we assist in their continued operation. Google might be concerned if a few thousand people close their accounts, but they know they still get our interaction thru their advertising network every day. Reduce that interaction and they will notice.
Stop going to their websites, stop supporting their work in every way, shape, and fashion. If you are a conservative blogger stop linking to the opposition media source articles, simply quote the relative text and reference the site/article so we can read what is needed without giving them anything back. Take away every page count and interaction that you can.
I believe that if enough of us did this it would shock the other side and hurt them in a way they won’t see coming. Wouldn’t that be worth it alone? If you like this idea spread the word.
Notes:
*Be careful when selecting an ad block in Chrome or other browsers. There is a LOT of malware out there masquerading as ad-block extensions. Be very cautious. Brave provides a lot of the same ad-block capability built-in to the browser and I’m just starting to figure out what I can do in it.
**If you aren’t technical find a geek that can do this for you. You will need to buy a cheap Raspberry Pi computer/device (~$60), install the OS and software, and configure it for your network. It’s amazing and worth it. But it will need some administrative actions about once a quarter to get the latest update/versions for maximum protection and effectiveness. If all of this sounds too much for you find a geek that will do it for you and pay them (beer, food, ammo, whatever). You won’t regret it.
Where does Avast! fall in the spectrum of adblockers/malware blockers, et al. ?
I had them for a while but dropped them for being woke. Now I use Kaspersky. Concluded that the Russians were safer than Silicon Valley.
Size matters? Right on.
Speaking of which, I moved to the States in the mid-late ’90s from London. Why? Well, all kinds of reasons not least of which was standing in the bar of the Sears Tower in Chicago and watching the lights curve over the horizon. “This is big,” I thought, martini in hand, “You have to be here.” So I moved.
People from England mostly don’t get it, their horizon’s much smaller, but there’s an expanse and opportunity here. Not least in Texas, which has its own genius to boot.
Forgive the ramble.
I once worked for an English company and one of my colleagues there observed that one of the big differences between Americans and Brits is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while Brits think 100 miles is a long way. Most Brits really don’t understand how vast the US is at an emotional level, even when they get it at an intellectual level.
I was inspired to work on migration too. Been with Brave and DDG for some time now on the laptop but working to get them on the phone as well. Still trying to figure out how to import my bookmarks. Also set up a Proton mail account and trying to migrate there. I don’t really need encrypted email but it apparently disrupts Goolag’s advertising algorithms so worth doing for that alone.
Well said, of course, and stolen, and spread far.