My point wasn’t really about the price, but availability. You said you remembered Walkman as “way way later than the 70s” and I was just pointing out that, technically, they were kind of around the WHOLE 70s, just not priced or marketed in a way that they would have been very common, and hence why you remember them “way way later” (probably sometime around 82-84, right?)

The Walkman came out in 79 and was cheap enough for a present to a teen or young adult by 82, at the latest. Hell, if you wanted to raid your parents’ stuff, they may well have had a (mono) folio style cassette recorder or even a Sony TC-50 cassette recorder/player (which looks exactly* like a Walkman), made as early as 1968! They brought them to the Moon during the Apollo program. That’s right, cassettes technically came BEFORE 8-Tracks.

But they were too expensive until the late 70s, and by then most people already had an 8-track collection, so it took a few more years to mass adopt.

Source: I have mono demo tapes that my dad recorded from his poor Oklahoma farm town in 1970

I swear to God, the government has done a good job of making people forget about the Snowden leak.

Many governments, all over the world, but especially the U.S. and China, can and are installing physical hardware backdoors into essentially every consumer grade phone and computer in the market.

The only think I know Chick-Fil-A for is funding conversion therapy camps and fascist politicians. That’s enough for me to never step foot in one

Bezos explicitly undercut the competition for years to drive all of the competition out of business. Amazon took as much time from 1997-2016 to make as much profit as they did in 2017, which is also (not) coincidentally when they hit peak market saturation and were able to start raising their prices.

So what you’re talking about was real, but it wasn’t like, “back when Amazon was good”, they were just preparing for what they are now. Having a huge monopoly on just about everything has always been their win condition, and they’re no where near done winning.