501–510 of 839 posts
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Knowing how people live moment to moment is how you can know how to extract money from them
Ok, keep going. Clearly draw the line from “X has access to vacuum cleaner cameras” to “X is extracting money from them.”
X now gets monthly checks from Y. Done.
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Our household (and I suspect many with us) bought a Roomba specifically to not give the Chinese government a roving camera in our home. Ouch!
This! I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced. Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I guess Rodney Br…
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
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So the govt implements rules and a panopticon for penalties. this works for the FDA, why wouldn't it for the FCC
Because regulation is bad, according to the current executive? Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
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No. Enforcing anti-trust law is critical for healthy markets. Healthy markets support technological progress through competition.
How is Chinese market consolidation a healthier market outcome here?
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Our household (and I suspect many with us) bought a Roomba specifically to not give the Chinese government a roving camera in our home. Ouch!
Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government. The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders (e.g. Meng Wanzhou, Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, etc.).
Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
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I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.
So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.
Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.
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The concern - for you, maybe nothing. However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us" (trying to capture private conversations of politicians. Or it could do the same for vacuums located new military bases or corporate headquarters. With transcription software and AI, it could simply record and transcribe every conversation it hears and look for import…
> However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us" The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.
I'm not making moral comparisons; I'm just saying that the motivations of the PRRC and Coca-Cola are different.
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In a scenario, where the US and China go to an actual shooting war, moving a couple million high-energy-density devices near the most flammable object in a houshold and purposefully setting the device on fire would be an interesting new variety of shock and awe. Not too new actually, thinking about the mossad pager attack.
Maybe it would be a bad idea to get into a shooting war, then. Seems like these little Roombas might act as deterrence and help to preserve peace!
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> How would you feel if Roomba devices were controlled by North Korea, for example? Depends on where you live. If you are living in North Korea and somehow you got to own a Roomba, it would be surely a bad thing. But living in a western country, I would hands down prefer giving all my secrets to the North Korean government instead of my own one.
Yeah, this is the funny thing about it. As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one. The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data. Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, the…