Crime went down becausr wr locked up all the Urban Youth scum. Now theres chatter of letting em out and going soft on crime. If that happens, crime will back up.
Having recently finished The Rise and Fall of American Growth myself, I reached the opposite conclusion.
Yes, the decrease from 12+ -> 8 hour workdays helped health and thus productivity and growth as the author persuasively states. But in the final few chapters which look forward rather than back in time, it was my interpretation that the author sees trends in declining hours & labor force participation as headwinds to TFP growth.
It is naturally more inefficient to have more shifts and thus more people commuting, etc. The diminishing health returns from 8 - > 6 hour work days not being enough to make up for this loss in efficiency.
Do you really think the audio jack was removed because of thinness?
Have you seen the inside of a smartphone? Its not just about thinness. There is very little space for anything besides the battery.
Also, removable batteries and the audio jack get in the way of dust/water proofing.
You may think shrinkage is pointless, but that's clearly not what the market or the top designers think. Why do you want a giant, useless, 100+ year old analog port on your 2017 device? I don't. Its ugly.
> Why do you want a giant, useless, 100+ year old analog port on your 2017 device? I don't. Its ugly.
Arguing about aesthetics is futile, but I want the port because I find it useful, and don't measure utility by invention-age. Seems similar to judging a beer by the bartender's height.
>Also, removable batteries and the audio jack get in the way of dust/water proofing.
My Samsung Galaxy S5 proves you wrong on this.
>Why do you want a giant, useless, 100+ year old analog port on your 2017 device?
3.5mm jacks aren't 100 years old. 1/4" ones are. And I want one because my $350 Sennheiser headphones use a 3.5mm jack, and Bluetooth headphones sound like crap and Beats headphones are utter garbage.
While i agree that the port is useful and i want a phone with one, your comment about Bluetooth headphones sounding crap is ridiculous.
The Bower and Wilkins ones are decent, the BW P7 Wireless is the best portable headphone i ever heard, the integrated bluetooth DAC is actually better than the DAC integrated in my iphone 5s and huawei p9 phones.
I had the sennheiser momentum 2 headphones before them, also different AKG Headphones and the BW7 Wireless beat them on all aspects when it comes to the sound, in Bluetooth mode (they also have an optional cable included - they sound better with the bluetooth dac tho!)
Maybe that's true, but my experience from the other end of the price scale is that cheap bluetooth headphones are absolutely awful compared to cheap wired headphones. I'd love to be proven wrong on that, as I don't like the wires, but even when I've had bluetooth headphones that sounded tolerable, switching back to even the cheapest wired headphones felt like a revelation.
Personally, I care just enough about the audio quality that this matters, but that I'm not willing to pay for an expensive pair like the BW P7 (more like 1/10th of that price...), and in my price range.
Bluetooth won't be a good replacement until they can compete on quality across that whole price range.
And the water faucets! And the drains! And the toilets! And the windows! And doorknobs! And doors! Heck who needs doors - we can just crawl in the windows.
Sometimes things invented 100 years ago (or 1000) are all we need. People don't evolve that fast.
> Do you really think the audio jack was removed because of thinness?
That and to shill overpriced, easy-to-lose Bluetooth earbuds, yeah.
> You may think shrinkage is pointless, but that's clearly not what the market or the top designers think. Why do you want a giant, useless, 100+ year old analog port on your 2017 device? I don't. Its ugly.
How on earth is a tiny, inconspicuous round hole uglier than a big dangly headphone adapter?
That aside, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. The "top designers" have decided that phones are fashion accessories first and working tools second. I like good design as much as the next guy, but good design is functional. A pretty tool that doesn't work properly is useless.
That's fine, but that has nothing to do with whether or not the presence of a 3.5mm jack makes wires mandatory. Whether or not the quality of the bluetooth stack improves with the removal of the 3.5mm jack is highly debatable.
There is very little space for anything because of the insistence on making the phone thin. Without the thinness fetish there'd be plenty of space without sacrificing the jack. Add even 1mm, and e.g. the area covered by a battery with the same capacity is drastically reduced. Just look at some older (thicker) phone batteries for comparison to the pancake batteries in newer phones.
> Also, removable batteries and the audio jack get in the way of dust/water proofing.
The same method used to dust-proof/water proof the USB apply exactly as much to the jack. And they also apply just as well for the battery compartment - nobody cares about making the battery compartment dust proof, after all.
I can say water proofing is never something I've looked for in any phone beyond being able to handle the occasional splash. Even then, if you look at the inside of devices with removable batteries vs. devices where the batteries are not intended to be, the main difference is that in the former there is usually an inner shell covering the rest of the components - overall the internals of the phone tends to be better protected. If you want to water-proof that inner compartment, then worst case you get shorts. Again, this is about thinness and some extent cost-custting - dust proofing and water proofing is a total canard since you still have wires crossing the boundary, and two more sets is not going to make a major difference.
> You may think shrinkage is pointless, but that's clearly not what the market or the top designers think.
We don't know what the market thinks, because there are no high end devices that sacrifice thinness for e.g. battery capacity as none of the big brands dare to even try to be different.
I've just gotten a Umi phone that uses a 4000 mAh battery (vs. more typically 2400-2600 for most of the mid-range MTK based phones) and it's fantastic to have that extra battery capacity, but it's a Chinese phone with little presence in Europe/US.
Give it a few more years and we may see if any of the smaller brands manage to grow based on their larger battery capacity.
There are a few others - you can get a decent quality Android phone with 6000 mAh, and one with 10,000 mAh. The downside is that the latter was built with the assumption that anyone wanting that much care more about battery lifetime than anything else, and so it sacrifices the screen quality for a lower power one too, and makes various other sacrifices.
> Why do you want a giant, useless, 100+ year old analog port on your 2017 device? I don't. Its ugly.
I found this hysterical after your appeal to the authority of "the market or the top designers". Outside of Apple, pretty much only HTC have taken that leap. The vast majority of "the market or the top designers" so far still insist on keeping the headphone plug. Maybe that will change, but I note that on my commute now, pretty much everyone I see with a new iPhone also drag along ugly adapters so they can use their old headphones.
Even dual 1080 GTX cards can't max out settings on the VR games currently available for Oculus / HTC Vive.
As for traditional usecases, I have a 3x monitor setup ( 2K@144Hz/4K@60Hz/2K@144Hz) and my 1080 GTX can't max out everything smoothly while I stream/record high-end games.
I would love it if all this was just vanity, but its my job. This stuff is an expense I'd happily avoid if possible. I don't own any nonsensical RGB lighted cases or non-essential peripherals.
Any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to die.
In the past, this was because of disease caused by pre-sanitation density. Today, it is due to below-replacement fertility rates caused by impossible to afford living costs.
So if you consider extinction a form of human suffering, 'traditional walkable cities' fit the bill.
> Any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to die.
(I'm honestly not sure if this is a troll comment or not. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt though.)
Alternatively one could say any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to prosper and innovate.
Also, and more importantly, the majority of dense, walkable cities do not have high costs of living - e.g. Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, or even much of Chicago. Just because the most expensive major global cities are dense and walkable that does not mean that all dense and walkable cities are expensive.
If you look at the most expensive zip codes in the US [1] you'll see that eight out of ten are in low-density suburban or semi-rural areas. Does that mean that low-density suburban areas are all super expensive?
> Any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to die.
I don't know where you get that interpretation, but most historians will say that is exactly the opposite reason why cities were developed. Historically, people moved to cities so that they would NOT die.
Living in a city amongst other people provides one with a greater defense against roving bandits and others who want to kill you and take your property/food. That is how cities came into existence. There is also the benefits of trade. With trade came specialization so that not everyone had to be a farmer to sustain themselves. One could become an artisan, a priest, or a warrior.
Hah, there's a good point there. Though I'd think there's a balance to be had: places like Albi, France, which has ~50000 people, may not require the skyrocketing living costs that our modern global megacities demand.
They don't have their shit together because the stock has barely moved in a decade. If you think Wal-Mart has their shit together, you've either been living under a rock for the past 10 years or you're not very intelligent.
Here's a fun chart from Google Finance: 10-Year Wal-Mart vs Amazon stock performance:
Here's a chart showing WMT growing annual revenue by $400B from 1995 to 2015 (from $80B to $480B) while AMZN grew from $0 to $100B. Over the same time period WMT made $217B in net income over the 21 years while AMZN made $2.6B.
Amazon needs to grow 5x the size it is today to reach Wal-Mart scale. They can get there and they're growing more quickly which is why the market has AMZN worth $388B market cap vs. $205B for WMT.
Amazon has a long way to go, I believe they can become the first trillion dollar revenue company but it won't be without a fight from Wal-Mart, FedEx/UPS, regional groceriers, Alibaba (I expect to see them in the US market in 2017), etc.
For Amazon to reach WMT revenue, assume WMT stays flat now and AMZN continues to grow at 27% Y/Y it'd be 2022 before the pass WMT in scale. If they average half of their current growth rate over the full period to reach WMT's current scale it won't happen until 2026 -- basically another full decade.
I see going from an incredibly valuable brick-and-mortar retailer to exactly the same valuation over 5 years during the rise of mobile, streaming, Prime, etc. as quite a success relatively speaking.
They could have been better, sure, but that's hardly a disaster.
You assume I'm either uninformed or dumb because I disagree with your conclusions drawn from a facking stock price. That's amazingly narrow-minded. As you can see by the other responses to your comment, there are many valid points to disagree with you. I suggest you tone it down.
As someone who grew up in a neighborhood where Western Union/Money Gram were commonly used -- Only criminals use it. Full Stop.
Now, not all these criminals are violent or into drugs. Many were illegals sending money home. I get WHY they would use it, but it makes no sense for the US Government to even allow these services to exist.
That's like saying you don't understand why the government just sending Altay a $1billion check with the pre-condition that he spends it all gets a bad rap.
There's no reason to favor home ownership -- look at home ownership rates in Germany vs S. Europe. Then look at the health of their economies and living conditions.
