How many rides are there every day in developed countries?
Their internal business case probably has them targeting not 50 million rides per year, but per week… at an absolute minimum
Regardless; at some point specialised vehicles will be developed which are ultra small and lightweight - less than $1,000 to produce - to take care of short downtown rides, for example.
> Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group)
Old and convincing, to those who want to be persuaded by them.
I also disliked Dawkins’ book and found my path to atheism elsewhere.
However, the problem of evil has a persuasive answer only for those already within the system, to speak.
Christian apologetics is nearly exclusively a field of interest for those Christians who want to be more prepared to deal with conversations with non-believers.
The problem should be obvious already.
If you became a Christian before being exposed to the ‘rational’ arguments for being a Christian, then what exactly caused you to become a Christian?
Given the extraordinary amount of effort poured into the field of apologetics with very little outcome in terms of new converts, it seems to me that the primary purpose of Christian apologetics is to help those suffering a bout of cognitive dissonance to stuff it back down.
Your theories and methods do make some sense, but a business that spends a lot of money on advertising doesn’t need to be inadequate per se.
I’ve been Marketing Lead for 2 startups and have now started 3 companies.
4 of the 5 have grown through advertising.
In all 4 cases, the market wasn’t even aware that a solution like ours existed. (You can’t search for something you don’t know about.)
I doubt you would argue that advertising these products is some kind of systematic failure.
Second; let’s come back to the hair salon example. Let’s just say it’s brand new.
I doubt you’d argue that a brand new salon is making its product suffer by advertising. After all, it is suffering right now because it has zero customers.
And let’s take a third example - where word of mouth is unavailable. There are many products and services where word of mouth is simply not available as a marketing channel. This is common in B2B where the people picking a service just have no one in their networks who would be interested.
I doubt you’d begrudge them the need to advertise?
Yet a huge amount of marketing spend falls into these three buckets.
I should also add that your out of the way hair salon would never have been able to start without the assistance of advertising. You’d have to be insane to start a business in a low traffic area if you’re prohibited from promoting it.
At some point, we need to accept that HN is not the broader community. Most people don’t care about this problem; most don’t even see it as a problem. If they did, politicians would be talking about it all the time, and it would be a major issue, but it’s not. Sure, the privacy angle has gotten political traction and that’s fine. But it’s the privacy angle - not the overexposure to ads - that is connecting here. Just look at the penetration of ad blockers - it is not that high.
HN has a default assumption sometimes that people enjoy spending hours looking at specs and trying to figure things out. My experience is that human beings are weird, wonderful and different. Some people enjoy doing this. Most people do not.