Perhaps they can disguise the LIDAR beacon inside an IR-transparent Thule roof box.

> People are confused about what I said.

Because you're saying very confusing things. What does National Lampoon have to do with anything?

ok Zorg https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/quotes/?item=qt0544361&...

“…by creating a little destruction, I am in fact creating [value.]”

Indeed, the capitalist’s creed!

This is absolutely doomed but how funny would it be if 50 years from now people share trivia like "Hey did you know that Allbirds started as a shoe company?" the way people talk about Nintendo starting as a playing card company

That makes me wonder, are there any major examples of this kind of abrupt pivot actually succeeding?

Nintendo was a much more gradual product shift that makes sense in retrospect: playing cards -> tabletop games and toys -> video games.

Or another gradual example was Tandy Corporation, which went from making leather crafts -> general crafting/DIY to electronics crafting -> Radio Shack and Tandy computers. That one's funny because the original leather business was spun out and still exists.

But abruptly going from shoes to AI datacenters, or iced tea to blockchain, etc I really wonder if there's any non-scam precedent of that abrupt shift actually working for a major known brand?

The one that springs to mind is Tiny Speck launching an MMORPG, failing, and then polishing up the in-game chat tool and releasing it as Slack.

Oh, there was a certain pair of Ohio bike shop owners who pivoted to powered flight some time back.

Shopify is a pivot from selling snowboards online in Canada

Yeah these are definitely some good examples of startups doing major abrupt pivots after a few years. But I was hoping to figure out if there were any successful examples of established, well-known brands doing it. (For comparison to the original topic, Allbirds was founded 11 years ago and is post-IPO.)

All Stewart tries to do is make game companies, and all Stewart actually ends up doing is starting big non-game-related tech companies.

Nokia was a pulp mill, a rubber boot manufacturer, and a tire maker. But it's also old enough (1865!) to have changed with industrialization itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia

Yeah, doesn't this reek of the Dotcom era where non-digital companies would just slap (.com) at the end of their name for the stock boost?

Samsung started as a trading company for dried fish, noodles and groceries. Now it does many things as a conglomerate but it’s mostly known as an electronics company.

Toyota started as a company to produce looms. It’s now mostly known as an automotive company.

Nintendo moving from playing cards (although they still make them) to computer gaming makes much more sense to me than this.

Nokia?

More Money = Better Than

uh I would argue that at the beginning of The Expanse things are middling to bad and at the end things are pretty fucking bad. The epilogue of the final book is the only thing that's unabashedly optimistic.

The main series takes place over about 30 years during which several billion people die system-wide as a result of various wars and terrorist attacks, and uncountably many die in the immediate aftermath of the finale. I love it but it's not really a feel-good story!

it's just the client app, so you could make a clone but you'd still have to pay to use their servers.

I generally agree, but this time his VP isn't going to defect and he's been building ICE into a republican guard loyal only to him, so I think you can't just completely say "well it failed last time so it'll fail again"

Yep, might not have liked a lot of what Mike Pence stood for but he was at least willing to operate with humility. He always took the honest route ecen if you disagreed with his views.

Vance however, I dont see much of that in action. But time will tell. Folks like to think it is a quiet conspiracy but every time you get a glimpse inside workings of government, if feels like they hate each other more than the next guy, regardless of who is in power.

> he was at least willing to operate with humility. He always took the honest route ecen if you disagreed with his views.

eh I'm not really going to agree with you on this. He flinched 1 millimeter away from committing a full coup. That's not really a positive vote, it's just not as negative as it could be.

I'm actually less concerned about the continued non-existence of a bunch of windmills, vs the billion-dollar payout to ensure that they continue to not exist.

I've spent my entire life not building any windmills and nobody's paid me a billion dollars for it yet.

It’s a refund for buying the lease, not a payout.

They thought they were going to get a payday at the end. That tells you how d much they actually cared about their privacy/the privacy of their families, they were willing to sell it for a couple hundred thousand dollars.