This is the Syrian government we're talking about here. Recent history may indicate that one shouldn't trust them to be entirely truthful about their reasons for doing things
Except a smart scammer won't do it as a hard sell and look like they need you. They know as well as anyone that aggressive sales look suspicious. Madoff waited for people to come to him.
Consumption habits are sticky. It's more effective to get a young person to like your product and they'll buy it across their working life than to try and convert someone already loyal to another brand
I feel like amazon has gotten much less user friendly in the past few years. Although I can filter by "prime" that doesn't seem to actually tell me anything in particular about the delivery date. And I can't narrow it any further. They clearly have the data on what things are one day, two day etc but presumably it's not profitable to let people filter on it. You also can't search for exact terms anymore, the way literally every basic search engine lets you. So you have to read through a bunch of vaguely related items even if you know exactly what you want
Given how many stories there are of IOT devices being hijacked for bitcoin mining or hacked in other ways I am extremely grateful that my smoke alarms are dumb as bricks.
Interesting essay. Reminds me of some of the issues that come up in teaching. Even when you think you have explained something at the simplest possible level you are often missing background assumptions that seem to obvious to you that you can't even conceive of not knowing them