RadioShack Gone

Folks in the US are so stupid.

Some of that 80 probably ends up in Pakistan.

Idiot. back then that was ALL that was DOABLE. It had nothing to do with affordability.

Goodyear Tire STAYED on a daily batch processed mainframe and 300 baud modems and daily updates were sent to that mainframe from EVERY Goodyear store running, up until just a few years ago. Seriously.

Even you sales ticket got phoned home on an accoustic modem. Literally.

This is actually a lie.

One "cheaper" way back then was to use a BBS, because they breached long distance rates and requisites by placing key BBS "servers" near crossover points between telephony zones. There were simply a few propagation delays to wait on, and of course zero security.

Otherwise, BBSes would never have taken off either.

Always wrong:

The 300 baud FSK was mostly acoustically coupled, to get around the prohibition against wiring directly into the Bell system. Carbon mikes were horrible, the main limit on baud rate.

I've never done that.

Compare that to a PDP11, or a Univac.

"leased lines"

Yeah... there were consumers everywhere using those.

You're an idiot.

So your argument that the service provided by our current broadband infrastructure is actually cheap is that 30 years ago you had to fly tapes around, and you can currently purchase a computer that is better than one designed ~50 to 70 years ago

It's ironic that you say that in a dynamic economy new companies kill old companies, since in Silicon Valley it seems the number 1 goal of every startup is to eventually be bought out by some member of an oligopoly...

So price gouging is OK as long as the market will bear it ? Let's take this a step further, the unemployed should get everything for free and millionaires should have to pay a thousand bucks for a loaf of bread.

Now there's a warped situation that would have about the same result as true socialism. Nobody would work. Why ?

The running joke around the lab here was everytime you bought a battery at Radio Shack, they would always ask you what you needed it for.

Seriously? For a "AA"? What, were they going to try to upsell us to a "AAA"?

Drugs often cost a small fraction of the USA price when sold in poor countries.

That makes sense for a product that has an enormous development cost but a tiny production cost. In each market, the drug is priced to maximize profit. If the USA price were the same as the African price, they'd never get the R&D costs back. Even in the US, some drug companies heavily discount drugs, or give them away free, to people who can't afford them.

Yup, with an adapter.

Actually I had a battery card. Anyone else remember those ?

Obviously. Most electronics keeps getting cheaper.

Wired DSL is cheap and getting cheaper; remember when 56K was fast? About three orders of magnitude improvement in not too many years. I can watch a HD movie on Netflix for a fraction of the cost of going to a theatre, or renting a VHS tape. And I can drink beer while I watch it.

I don't have to drive to a university library to look up technical stuff.

I have a terabyte USB hard drive right here that costs under $100.

A very good digital camera costs, in real dollars, a fraction of the cost of an optical SLR, and there's no film to buy and process.

My HP35 calculator cost a month's salary when I bought it.

I guess you can spend a bunch slurping 10s of gigabytes into your cell phone every month, but why does anybody need to do that?

Remember National Union? Transitron? RCA?

The biggest tech companies on the planet (Apple, Google) were nobodies

They probably want to know what's so special about your application that you'd buy their overpriced junk. The clerk probably hadn't seen anyone in a week and wanted to talk to someone.

So you don't think it costs more to do business in the first world?

No, unlike you, I'm not a communist.

Higher bandwidth, too.

Very illogical thinking. The part that matters is, "In each market, the XXXX is priced to maximize profit." Why does it matter how much it cost to develop or what the product is? They spent the money to develop it whether it was a nickle or a billion dollars. How about we crack open your designs and allow others to copy them? It's not like you spent a billion dollars to develop them.

All products are priced to maximize profits. How else should they do it?

People vote with their feet too, though they're more limited in what they can do than are companies.

Of course government has competition. In Latin America governments go out of business every decade or two. In other parts of the world it takes a few hundred years... like in this country where the King of England and Parliament were forcibly shut down and replaced with a new one. Same thing happened in France not too long after. As a result the English government more gradually changed to better match the competition.

I seem to recall a government in the southern part of the US replacing the Federal government only to be evicted and the USA reinstated.