Thanks for the link. I'm not sure where in the article I said inflation is worse than deflation. I don't feel I know enough about economics to express an opinion about this.
What I'm trying to say is that if people have a choice, they'll keep their wealth in a currency that destroys their wealth the least slowly. This, I suspect, will have a runaway effect. We probably wouldn't be able to stop it if we tried, which sounds a lot like the AI singularity.
My concern is that you ignore the effects of deflation in your argument altogether, which you simply cannot do.
You are also effectively demoting the US dollar to the current inferior currency of the two to support your little adage, which I find a bit strange.
I believe your intention was just to write a little thought experiment, which is cool. I'm just a little baffled the way some people follow along for the ride without question.
Perhaps obvious, but I hold no cryptocurrency. I'm not saying I never would, but the sheer amount of dreamy speculation like this is exactly what keeps me away from the market.
By "effects of deflation", are you referring to the claimed ill-effects of deflation, that will grind the economy to a halt? If so, mind helping me understand why I can't disregard that?
I appreciate your replies - not sure if I mentioned it earlier to you, but I posted it here in HN because there is no shortage of smart people willing to express their thoughts.
It's a concern I have about deflationary currencies in general. It's not very common in the world right now so you could argue I'm speculating too, really.
You are talking about the singularity being the point that we switch to crypto currency. I suppose my argument is that the singularity may not come because of deflation counteracting and convincing people to continue holding.
All in all I'm glad it's been such a diplomatic discussion. I would engage people the same way if I were you and appreciate that you seek new information.
I understand - I'm not aware of an asset class like bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, so I have to go with opinion and extrapolation for a lot of the thinking. :)
It sounds like what you said is that the singularity may not happen because cryptocurrency deflation will make cryptocurrencies more attractive to hold compared to inflationary fiat. I'm fairly certain I understood it wrong.
Won't people move more of the money into deflationary currencies if they are accessible and exchange friction between the inflationary one and deflationary one is acceptable?
OMG Kai Ryssdal is insufferable. I can't decide which I loathe more: his nails-on-chalkboard exaggeratedly-saccharine voice or his habit of filling in between stories with stupid rhetorical questions the "answers" to which are based entirely on his own banal idiosyncratic bourgeois politics.
Kai Ryssdal is horrible. Fluff piece after fluff piece and he prefaces all stories containing data with an extremely patronizing "dumb this down for you" speech.
Not being allowed to run your own engine actually has deep ramifications. For example Firefox on iOS cannot support plugins, whereas on Android it does since the beginning. It also means that Firefox cannot compete in supported web standards or performance or whatever you can think of. And once upon a time these alternative browsers weren't even allowed to run the same JS engine as Safari, which meant they were forced to be slower. This changed fairly recently, somewhere around iOS 9.
Also other browsers on iOS are more restricted than Safari. For example those Safari content blockers don't work in Firefox. So given Firefox's inability to provide plugins, this means that in Firefox you are forced to load and see annoying ads, whereas in Safari you don't have to.
On Android, Firefox is actually a good alternative to Chrome, albeit less well integrated, but then I can't imagine using a mobile browser without uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. But on iOS the alternative browsers like Firefox are nothing more than dumb shells around restricted functionality.
I'm using Firefox on all of my desktops (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu), I'm using Firefox on my Android device. Guess which browser I'm using on my iPhone? ;-)
> I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space."
Since it uses Apple's engine underneath, you can't work around their ban on free codecs in the browser for example. Same goes for support for multiple HTML5 features (how about MSE for starters?). So it is clearly anti-competitive.
I had to replace an interior door handle on a '99 Miata (interior is far easier than an exterior; exterior means pulling the door skin off for access and having to deal with paint matching), and a Miata is real straightforward repair job. But I still took a photo of each and every little piece I pulled off not knowing when one would break or be deformed before or after this process. (And having to locate a dealership to order the part shipped while showing him a handful of broken parts and a complete photo of "this doohickey".)
$1000 would be steep price to pay for a Corrolla but not outlandish. I would bet the cost of replacing one on a BMW 3 series would be more.
The fact that RSS appears to be dying is the best proof I have ever seen that demonstrates a secret cabal of lizard-people who control the world. How did it go from being so pervasive and useful to dying in so short a time? It can't all be laid at the feet of Google Reader and Facebook news.
Because content providers want to lock users into their own proprietary content platforms, and providing an RSS feed is completely counter-productive towards that goal.
RSS was way too open and user-friendly to survive contact with corporate greed.
As I've pointed out before, RSS feeds are still widely available for hard news. Reuters, AP, and VOA have them. Even Al Jazeera [1] and China Daily[2] have RSS feeds. The New York Times has an RSS feed.[3] The Hill has RSS feeds with details of what's happening in Congress. The European Union has many RSS feeds.[4] The Hollywood Reporter has RSS feeds.[5] The Times of London has RSS feeds.[6] The South China Morning Post has RSS feeds.[7] The NASDAQ has an RSS feed for every ticker symbol.[8] Platts has RSS feeds for oil industry news.[9]
Those who need to know what's going on choose RSS.
Not saying this is wrong, but I think a less cynical rephrasing which explains a superset of the problem is that RSS failed to win adoption from a critical mass of content producers.
You can go to pretty much any website and assume there will be an index.html equivalent which spits more or less anything the site wants at your browser.
You definitely cannot assume that any website you want to receive updates from has an RSS feed. You could never do this, even at its height commercial content producers regarded it with deep skepticism for totally valid commercial reasons. They would publish excerpts but not full articles, headlines but not excerpts, etc.
Now had the RSS community offered more incentive to the content producers to get on board, it might have seen more adoption. The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem--someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Boom there goes your support from anyone whose writing is ad-supported. Why would they embrace RSS when it will de-monetize their audience?
While I loved RSS and the ncurses readers it powered for me, the ad thing was real and many publishers just put a blurb or a headline on their feeds (basically worthless), content scraping requires effort and varies by site, whereas RSS / Atom would be standardized and stupid easy for any old talentless profiteering hack to install as a source for new WordPress articles to feed their content farm.
Having the "barrier" of writing a content scraper for each site you want to scrape and figuring out a way to get that onto your crappy WP link farm blog is a high enough bar that many marketers just can't be bothered, so it "solves" the scraping problem for the majority case at the expense of the users.
Now we have things like Feedly which AFAIK maintain their own scrapers and I can still basically read most articles without looking at ads for this one new trick to get rid of tonsillitis complete with a nasty gif.
> The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem
I'm not sure what you mean by advertising problem, it's not inadequacy of RSS/Atom but the feature that the web is open, you don't wan't your articles to being copied you simply put it behind the login screen. You could even provide the feed for authenticated users only or implement personalized feed(s).
It wasn't user-friendly for non-tech folks. It was confusing. There were no readers that appealed to regular folks. The open-source world dropped the ball here. This is why it died.
The free software world created Liferea, which looks good,[1] works very well, is easy to use, and was created 13 years ago. People just don't know about it, because they look for web services that they don't control instead of applications running on their own computers.
RSS is not dead, it is still supported by everything on the web except the large social networks that have corporate interests in not supporting it. This is in large part because all the content management systems support it.
He's talking about there not being any applications that appeal to normal non-tech users and your example is a linux desktop app that looks like a windows 95 application. I don't think you two agree on what "non-tech" and "appealing" mean.
That being said I'm sure it is very usable in a utilitarian sense.
Liferea is quite buggy on many systems, if you use GNOME and/or it's stable on your system then good for you. QuiteRSS is good, the only problem is that it comes with built in browser and I'm not sure if the browser code is updated properly.
I don't disagree. I didn't mean RSS was user-friendly in the UX sense, although the poor UX of RSS readers in general was also indirectly a result the lack of interest from profit-driven companies, but rather in the sense that it offered users freedom from lock-in and the ability to aggregate content they're interested in and decouple it from the often ad-ridden platforms it was served on.
I know a few relatives that used RSS integration in Firefox even though they do know nothing about tech. You just had to click the orange icon to subscribe and you would get the list of news on a dropdown in the bookmarks bar.
That is one of the awesome features in Firefox, its too simple for power users but for the regular user its great. I only wish there was some better interface around it, even if something html based or what not, like Bamboo Feed Reader maybe.
VLC Media Player. It's not pretty, but it has a play button and a scrollbar. Its 3629394 power user features are nicely stashed away where they belong: in a menu that most people never even bother to check out.
But the core feature for a video player is that it plays the damn video. That's core UX, and most other players of the last 15 years have dropped plenty balls there. You can have so many skins and library features and preview screenshots but if the movie doesn't play without your nerd cousin first breaking your OS with sleazy half-broken codec packs, the UX is shit.
The most difficult part for non-tech people using VLC is understanding Finder or Explorer to double-click the movie they just torrented.
A lot of the audience went away because of Google Reader - Reader drove out newsfeed competitors, then when it shut down people went to non-RSS alternatives that they were already using like Facebook. Basically Reader killed all momentum for RSS and Atom.
It's because the RSS community never figured out standard, easy ways for users to:
1) Find new feeds
2) Subscribe to feeds
They got close on #2 with the addition of feed autodiscovery (http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm) as a built-in feature of browsers, but the UX never got polished enough to make it a single-click thing, and eventually the browser vendors decided it wasn't being used enough and phased it back out again. #1 is a nut that nobody ever even came close to cracking.
In retrospect, all the energy that went into the war that ended up splitting the community into RSS and Atom camps was energy that was diverted from solving existential problems at a critical moment. It'd be interesting to read a retrospective asking the various players in that war how they feel now about the decisions they made then.
Am I hallucinating because I could have sworn that I remember "RSS" buttons on web pages that automatically did the right thing with your RSS reader via your browser?
The two problems are solved very well by Mozilla Firefox. You only need to customize the browser to drag the feed button to the toolbar. Whenever it is not grayed out, you know there is a RSS feed available for the current website or page, and you can click on it to view the feed and click "Subscribe Now" to subscribe to it in your default feed reader.
It's a shame that they don't ship it by like that by default. Even if it's "easy" to customize it's still is frustrating trying to explain it to computer illiterate relatives.
It's a nitpick, I know. I view source. I always view source. There a lot of things that made the web a success (the REST principles underlying the architecture, the "a" tag, the non-draconian "error" handling, right-place-at-right-time), and one of them was "view source." And I always view source. And then I pick at nits.
This one advertises "[relying on] existing W3C standards", so I brought it up. I usually keep my mouth shout.
"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."
Palm CEO Ed Colligan in 2006:
"We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," he said. "[Apple is] not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in."
They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
A smartphone was solidly within Apple's expertise in 2007. It's a small consumer electronics device (iPod, Mac) with a graphical UI (Mac OS X). Apple had tons of experience building (or more accurately, outsourcing the building of) small electronics. What was tricky about the iPhone was the RF stuff, getting the carriers to cooperate, and cutting data usage to squeeze into the crappy data plans available. Except RF stuff is nearly off-the-shelf, and Apple cut the Gordian Knot for the other two items by partnering with an underdog carrier in exchange for unlimited data plans.
A car is far outside Apple's expertise. Are they going to outsource it to Foxconn like they do with the iPhone, and ship them across the Pacific? Doesn't seem feasible. Will they buy or build their own factory? Doable, but totally new for them. What about sales, service, and support? The iPhone was able to use Apple's extensive network of existing retail stores for that, but cars need garages and mechanics.
Obviously, it can be done. Tesla pulled it off with far less. But there's plenty of room for Apple to crash and burn, too. (Figuratively, one hopes.)
To answer your question I googled the Italian web and found more details than I knew. The story is a little different and I couldn't put together all the pieces of the puzzle.
According to the sources the cars are either designed in Italy and made in China or designed by a Chinese company with Italian designers (not only the style, but at least the navigation system and battery management).
I found some references to the Xin Da Yang Electric Vehicles and the Shandong Xindayang Electric Vehicle companies, which should be part of the same group anyway. The model is called ZD1 and it's a custom version of the iCar0 http://greengomoving.it/prodotti/
That car was sold in Italy at 13 k EUR but didn't sell enough. The business was relaunched as car sharing and it's doing well enough judging from the number of cars I see around. I plotted the invoice numbers against time and it's a line, which could be OK given it's limited to a few cities and they have competitors. They could already have saturated the market unless they open in other cities.
Awesome, thanks so much for all that information. Maybe I'm too pessimistic about the possibility of outsourced car manufacturing after all. Seeing a car on freakin' Alibaba sure gives me a different perspective on it. Apple would need a whole different kind of scale, of course, but that's something the Chinese do well.
Not necessarily. Apple could sell those cars or operate a car sharing service. In the latter case they need to build only a fraction of the cars. Ideally we'll get a self driving car that never stops, going from customer to customer like a cab. That would reduce the number of cars even further.
Whatever thwy'll be I wonder if we'll be able to operate those cars with an Android phone or they'll be iPhone only.
> Are they going to outsource it to Foxconn like they do with the iPhone, and ship them across the Pacific? Doesn't seem feasible.
I have no idea, but they seem to be pretty good at outsourcing manufacturing where it makes sense to do so. I don't see that as a significant blocker to an Apple automobile.
I visited the NeXT factory in Fremont, and it certainly seemed state of the art to me at the time.
NeXT Computer Inc. eventually became NeXT Software Inc. and ceased manufacturing hardware. That was 23 years ago. I'd be surprised if any significant presence from that manufacturing team remained in Cupertino today.
I was under the impression due to cost and poor sales, they actually had alternate arrangements to build the NeXT products after a while. It was a nice video and launch story though.
You're right they did get out of the hardware business totally in the later years. But still, they build an an incredible factory that was widely praised.
I'm not talking about getting out of the hardware business.
"The factory that Jobs had configured to produce 10,000 computers every month produced hundreds every month. Because of the low volume, human labor was cheaper than maintaining the automated equipment."
In the entire life of the company, that factory built about as many computers as Tesla built cars just last year. And Tesla is a tiny player. This experience hardly seems relevant. Modern Apple is built on NeXT's software, but I don't think there's much if anything of their manufacturing in there.
I know what you mean. I often feel like the state of things in the 90s (when I really started with computers in earnest) is "how things are" and all the changes since then are recent developments.
Looking more recently, Apple does have their own factory in the US to make the Mac Pro. I wonder if any of that was intended as a testbed for in-house manufacturing in general.
Your kind of arguments were also made about how Apple was going to disrupt the watch industry, the TV industry, and maybe a few more industries. Watches and TVs are closer to Apple's expertise than cars. Apple still hasn't been able to do anything meaningful in those industries.
I still think that, with cars, Apple will try to do what it did with the Apple TV. Just like they built something that works with existing TVs, they'll try to build something that works with existing cars (or a few car partners). I don't think they'll try to manufacture cars.
Precisely. I think it would be fair to describe the Apple Watch as a flop. Amongst my tech friends, and my watch-loving friends (and a noted intersection of the two), only one owns an Apple Watch. And they prefer their Pebble.
I never understand the point of these posted quotes. Every time someone posts a reasonable doubt about Apple's new ventures, there's always the classic "iPhone rebuttal." Yes, Apple did iPhone, and during that time, some of their competitors laughed at them. What does it prove now? Apple is going to solve every single problem on earth just because they have iPhone? Companies create amazing products, same companies also create horrible products. Just because they had created an amazing product does not mean every single product they will create subsequently will be amazing and vice-versa. Why is it so hard for some people to understand?
What does any discourse on a forum prove? We're debating stuff that we mostly have little clue or hard data about. Most of what we have are narratives, quotes, anecdotes, analogies, etc.
In the old days we called it "shooting the breeze".
I'm sure an auto industry exec or engineer might chime in with some insight, but even that doesn't prove anything, just might illuminate the challenge Apple has ahead of them.
Ballmer was only wrong about which Apple alternative ended up capturing a majority of the market.
It doesn't matter a lot to Apple as they have captured a large portion of the segment of the market that is willing and able to spend more, but Android has more of the total market.
Ballmer was right. He underestimated the amount of money they would make, and also underestimated the size of the various markets, and ALSO got it wrong about who would be the "other" OS but......his core point was correct.
They were both right at the time. It wasn't until a few years later that the iPhone was actually competitive. It was really Android (and apps) that changed mobile. None of the companies with great OS teams (Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, Ericsson etc.) could compete with free. All the companies that are successful today are close to the hardware supply chain.
Android only had that opportunity because Apple changed the basic design of smartphones. Until the iPhone, Android was more like the Blackberry of the time. Of course, it wasn't until a few years later that Android phones were decent as the initial ones had issues.
Hard to compare a 100 year old industry with dozens of entrenched companies (many intended for the luxury end of the market) and a medium that was just getting off the ground with the high point being a "decent phone"
Did Ballmer and Coligan really believe what they said? Or were they just trying to put up a brave face? I'm inclined to think it is the latter. Obviously they can't say "oh we know Apple will do very well and kick our butt", right?
Did Ballmer and Coligan really believe what they said?
I believe that Ballmer believed it. Because MSFT in response to this new iPhone was...to let WinMobile, which was already starting to look long in the tooth before iPhone, sit and languish for a few more years. It wasn't until iOS had well and truly kicked their ass that MSFT decided to freshen up WinMo. By then it was too late.
Palm? Eh, maybe Coligan believed it. Then again, Palm was well aware of the Newton because, well, Palm kicked Newton's ass. But Palm knew that Apple could make a mobile device (even if it were pricey). Could adding phone radios and a dialer be that much of a barrier to entry? I mean, Palm obviously figured out how to do it.
To be fair, $500 subsidized was way way way above market and Apple had to cut the price significantly. Without the pricecut, the iphone would have probably been more a premium product instead of the default phone in America. They would have still made a killing, but they would have opened the door for Android to mop up.
The original iPhone was, in fact, carrier subsidised. Apple got a cut of the special monthly contract required to use it. If I remember correctly, they had to offer an unlocked version in a few countries and it was several hundred dollars more.
rofl
If you want people to use currency more, you make it inflate faster. This guy does not understand macroeconomics.