I feel like practicing any skill would be way more fun if I could have a lil level increase thing that pops up in front of me every time I do good like in Skyrim
“Push ups increased to level 5”
“Writing dialogue increased to level 37”
“Coping mechanisms (healthy) increased to level 18”
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn’t compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn’t sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at… putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn’t have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that’s what they did.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
This is what I imagined the stain glass window to look like from the church of the doodler <3
Odyssey-san is pink, Glenn is blue, Ron is yellow, Henry is green, and Darryl is red. I have some meaning behind the colors but it’s very self explanatory.
sorry i took a break from requests to make this- im getting back to the requests now. Requests are open btw!!
You love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)
Okay, as someone with their doctorate in plant health (specifically trees and landscape plants), I’m frothing at the mouth livid.
Pollarding is a type of pruning done where you remove the upper branches of a tree with the intent of forcing it to grow more branches. Historically, it was used to produce fodder for livestock and wood for fencing, crafting, etc. but now is more of an aesthetic choice - it creates dense shade and reduces the risk of heavy branches becoming safety concerns later.
However, that pruning is something that occurs in January - March, when the tree is dormant. Not in the peak of summer, when there’s a heat wave expected. By doing it during dormancy, the tree has already stored all of the nutrients and sugars the leaves held in the roots and trunk, ready for use in spring.
By pruning these trees now, they’ve severely damaged them, if not outright sentenced them to death. Leaves provide a tremendous amount of shade to the trunk, actively cool the area through respiration (pulling water through the tree and into the air around it), and provide sugars and nutrients necessary for growth through photosynthesis. These trees now have to work overtime to compensate and re-grow and entire canopy of leaves with reduced resources.
These trees are in what are sometimes affectionately known as “hell strips” - there’s a concrete sidewalk on one side, asphalt on the other, and they get hot. Not just upwardly hot, but they heat the soil underneath them as well. The root zone of these trees don’t get a lot of water to begin with (concrete and asphalt don’t let water in well) and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of soil around the tree to begin with.
Trees in hell strips already have the heat and restricted root zones working against them - you can’t have healthy trees if you don’t have room for roots. Now these have to compensate and draw resources to push out new growth.
In addition, all of those pruning cuts are open wounds - places where infections and insects can enter into the tree. Usually mature trees can manage minor infections or infestations with no issue. But these trees are now extra susceptible because their immune response is weakened - all the extra energy available is going to new growth, not fighting off infections.
So there’s a bunch of factors here that have put these trees at a disadvantage: the removal of most photosynthetic plant material, an increase in surrounding temperature, a restricted root zone, the potential for increased infection, and a heat wave expected in the next week. These trees are going to struggle the rest of their lives because of the decision to prune these trees like this now - all over a desire to break a strike so the studios don’t have to pay their actors and writers and editors fairly.
I hope they get the book thrown at them with tree law. And then some.
I’m a hard pillow hard mattress man. I need reliability. I don’t want something to change into a completely different shape when I touch it, that’s lying and I don’t like liars.
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