Skeletor, Gargamel, Cobra Commander or Wile E Coyote
Umair Haque’s “Is Your Business Useless?”
Business supervillains have something in common with the cartoon supervillains above: they rarely win. That’s because socially useless business is built on shoddy, poor economics — and like most things too good to be true, it rarely lasts for long.
The Titanic, yet again but different!
The New York Times‘s publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., quoted by New York Magazine‘s Jada Yuan in “Times Publisher Compares Print Media to the Titanic”
He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”
The Titanic fallacy is interesting, however, it's implication that airplanes made boats obsolete is inaccurate. As a main mode of transoceanic travel perhaps, but we still have major cruiselines, massive transoceanic shipping and plenty of other things.
The Titanic's sister ship Olympic served throughout WW1 as a troop transport and hospital ship, it is likely that had the Titanic (or the Britannic for that matter) survived their Trans-Atlantic trips, they would have served similar purposes.
The plane may have jeopardized the future of the boating industry for passenger transit, but it took quite a while before the passenger airline became an affordable reality.
The Titanic fallacy is interesting, however, it's implication that airplanes made boats obsolete is inaccurate. As a main mode of transoceanic travel perhaps, but we still have major cruiselines, massive transoceanic shipping and plenty of other things.
The Titanic's sister ship Olympic served throughout WW1 as a troop transport and hospital ship, it is likely that had the Titanic (or the Britannic for that matter) survived their Trans-Atlantic trips, they would have served similar purposes.
The plane may have jeopardized the future of the boating industry for passenger transit, but it took quite a while before the passenger airline became an affordable reality.