innino

1) Bitcoin has the potential to destroy the tools of monetary policy. 2) Bitcoin has the potential to hide taxable income from governments. 3) Governments with dwindling tax bases may react by printing traditional currency, hastening the flight to Bitcoin in a vicious cycle. 4) Traditional currencies may collapse as people rush to convert them into Bitcoin. 5) Unable to tax coercively, traditional governments may collapse.

What might replace them? Toll roads and kickstarter philanthropy in Randian democracies?

(Is this in the ballpark for Bitcoin's potential impact or not?)

Anyway the most common reaction may be to accept the judgement that you feel has been passed on you - that you are worthless - but at some point someone has to come along who refuses to accept that, and realises that the whole system is founded on narrow-minded bullshit. Then that person can build a challenger to the chaebol - one fueled by fresh thinking and real inspiration.

I mean look at LG and Samsung. Where's the passion and love in their products? Raw technical competence and business acumen might lead to limited success, but these companies seem completely soulless. At the end of the day, the world will never love a Samsung like they do an Apple. No matter how big they get, they'll never be able to make it to the next stage, where they actually inspire people and have devoted, passionate fans. So the space for alternative approaches within Korean culture seems (from an outside perspective) huge, even if the first steps are going to be very hard.

The iPad Air looks amazing for example, but compared to the OS-level features offered by tablet Windows 8.1, I think it's lacking.

Feels very disheartening.

Now you can trade a grind in one settled area for a slightly more profitable grind in another. With the tradeoff of losing contact with your whole social milieu and having to start a lot of things from scratch in the new place, while you're surrounded by people who have a lot more than you because they've been grinding in that place for years.

Not appealing, so it's no surprise that it's mainly the highly-educated who can a) seek high value economic opportunities and b) are guaranteed a welcoming social reception from university or work colleagues :)

People like us should be more generous about the incentives governing the lives of the new post-mobility local cultures.

>Macbook Pro on a flat desk - no mouse, no external keyboard, no keyboard tray, no eye-level monitor.

Stuff like this makes me think this guy is a jackass. Steve Jobs never "disrupted an established revenue stream" - in 1999 he started with nothing, and built everything from scratch. He died with the company in full throttle, and that's that. Never had the need or the chance to do what this author is suggesting.

Furthermore, how exactly can you fault Apple/Cook's performance post-2011? Their releases have all been solid improvements which have sold like hotcakes. Their products still command global consumer consciousness like no other brand. The iPhone and iPad stand as the centre of gravity of the mobile market, and the confusion and noise of the myriad products churned out by Apple's ertswhile competition only further cements their stature. Other than a few small exceptions (screen size in particular), they still control the focus of consumer desire - the average consumer only knows and cares about a particular feature once Apple has pointed to it. Watch what happens post-5s - if other phone manufacturers release a spree of devices with novel unlocking mechanisms, you can guess why.

Everything Apple has done has been profitable and popular. They're playing from a position of incredible strength, so why should they rush out and reinvent the wheel? They have time, their current position is stable, and it would only advantage competitors to reveal their next plans before Apple is ready or it is even necessary to do so.

I think the mistake people make here is in confusing what happened to Microsoft with what might hypothetically happen to Apple. But Apple isn't Microsoft. There's no indication whatsoever that Apple is taking their current strength for granted - moves like the new campus suggest a firm focus on and faith in a very long-term future. The only people who are dissatisfied with Apple's performance are impatient, ignorant tech commentators, who seem to depend for their sense of self-worth on a deluge of new gadgets to critique. It's a serious cognitive failure to imagine that just because Apple overturned incumbents, Apple must be equally vulnerable to being overturned, as if the marketplace just cycles through the same rough dynamic with little to no variation. Apple blew the competition out of the water because it was better, and in so doing it set a new bar for product and ecosystem execution that until now no other device manufacturer could equal - a bar which it has only maintained and even raised.

We're only now starting to see the market rebalance with Google and Amazon emerging as real competitors, with Microsoft a big question mark about when and if they will ever rise to the occasion. But the ball is thoroughly in the competition's court, so right now Apple can watch, analyse, and plot its next move. We don't have even close to enough data to evaluate Apple's "performance" yet because we haven't seen it.

It's not that I think they have any real chance of success with these tactics, but I do find this behaviour insulting. No good historian thinks such simplistic nonsense about the Galilean episode. Any good historian is well aware of the progressive simplification of the past. It's not that these specific points aren't all true, it's way they're used, the subtle insinuations, that I find slimy.

As for Feyeraband, well, again he's a favourite of the religious pundits - doesn't matter that none of his critiques of science really had an impact - again the suggestion is that hey, knowledge is limited, so all these scientists who like to think they're purveying ultimate truth are so silly, and maybe hey this religious stuff isn't all bad? Again it's insulting - any good scientist is highly aware of the limits of reliable knowledge - and anyway, just because there are some limits on the reliability of knowledge, doesn't mean we can't at least try and distinguish between more and less reliable knowledge. The religious pundits don't want us to do so, of course, they would rather that we get shocked over the hubris of prideful scientists, and walk around "knowing" that everything is relative, nothing is really knowable... Helps them out.

This is all textbook religious propaganda to me, the more so because it's so benignly packaged.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all that smoke alarms are irrelevant or not relevant enough or whatever it is you seem to be trying to say here. I don't spend my life working on them but I've installed them for student tenants, thinking I was doing a great thing and maybe preventing them from killing themselves with an unattended cooking fire, and you know what, two months later when I went around every single one, every single flat I manage, had knocked their alarms down. Every single one. I wanted to slap the stupid fucks, but then I realised that hey, most people really are kinda lazy and stupid and you will get nowhere getting angry over that fact, you have to accept that and adapt as best you can.

At the time I imagined something very similar to Nest - an alarm over your oven which turns it off if it detects sudden heat. An alarm which sends me, the property manager, a text if it goes off. An alarm that can distinguish too between "a little smoke" and "a shitload of smoke and heat." I imagined that, and I talked to the local fire service, and they laughed and shrugged and said it'd be great but who's gunna do that.

And now guess what, here's a company that's actually made and prepping to sell something even better than what I thought about. It's a beautiful looking object, for starters. It talks to you in intelligent language - "there's carbon monoxide in the living room". It distinguishes between potentially dangerous and critically dangerous situations. It can send push notifications to your phone when something goes wrong or when batteries are about to go out. It can be silenced with an elegant hand gesture. And it gets better: it lights up a room when it sees you walking through it at night. It can turn off your furnace if CO levels rise, if its connected to Nest's Thermostat. And it will help your Thermostat get smarter about power usage by detecting your activity.

And this is just a version one product. Keep in mind - the name is "Protect", not "Smoke Detector." What's to stop them making v2 smarter, and maybe it can sense when people in a house become panicked and call emergency services? Maybe it detects unusual activity when burglars enter? Whatever - use your imagination - the possibilities are huge. And don't forget, this is only the second product that Nest has produced. And already with two they've made them better together. This is the Internet of Things man. It's happening, and it's going to be massive.

If you're not seeing the breakthrough yet, then I just don't know what to say to you. What, are you angry because they made such a good product? Because they're selling it for a fraction of what it's worth? Because they're smarter than any of the unimaginative companies making crappy smoke alarms we had to put up with up until today? Are you angry because it's "not enough"? Because the whole world's not going to run out and buy this one product tomorrow, and so therefore for some weird reasons we shouldn't bothered being excited about it, because obviously it's gunna go nowhere?

Get over yourself man. The world is about to explode with companies like Nest - and new products and opportunities will emerge to improve every single facet of our life. And people like you are going to look like the worst kind of assholes when the transformation becomes obvious. If the false binary choice you seem to offer is between a chorus of blind praise and your brand of negative bullshit, thanks but no thanks, I'd rather take the former.

I wasn't, for the record, advocate that life should be easy in the sense that you seem to be thinking I mean it. Maybe we should distinguish between hard as in unnecessarily complicated and poorly designed, and hard as in challenging. I'm teaching myself how computers work at the moment, I really enjoy it. That's challenging, and I like challenging things. Current smoke alarm design, on the other hand, is not challenging in an enjoyable way. They're poorly designed and annoying, and that's a type of hard that I think anyone really likes.

Instead my criticism was, boiled down, that I like a lot of what Microsoft is doing but I don't think they've addressed certain basic problems with their communication style and general corporate culture. I feel especially frustrated because I like so much of what Microsoft is doing and want them to succeed, I think the world will be a better place if they are genuinely competitive against Google, Apple and Amazon. I didn't hesitate to express that frustration but in my opinion frustration is far from narrow-minded dismissiveness.

I see my comments on that article as constructive. If I let my frustration override my sense of balance then I apologise.