village-idiot's comments

There’s a theory that dogs are just wolves with the canine equivalent of Williams Syndrome.

I’d say Apple is doing just fine when it comes to convincing people to pay.

The bigger the monitor (or the more of them you want), the further you have to sit away from them. The further you sit away from them the less you can resolve all the details, making the extra resolution pointless.

If I were going to have multiple monitors, I would skip the Apple monitor and get a bunch of 4K panels.

I don’t think that the resolution was an attempt to justify the price. If that was the case, why go down in resolution from what’s available? Maybe if they were selling a 9k I would buy it.

Based off some back of the envelope math I did a while ago, I think Apple decided that 6k is the maximum usable resolution for a desktop monitor. At reasonable viewing distances you should be able to tell the difference between a 4K and 8k monitor, but you won’t be able to resolve every single detail of the 8k, hence 6k.

I don’t think that GP was implying that they would. Even a structure built by machines can fail catastrophically if poorly designed or operated. The ocean floor is littered with ships that weren’t “built with their bare hands”.

> Since Clojure is pervasively built on laziness

Only some of Clonure’s data structures are built on laziness, everything else in the language is strict. If you want something actually built on laziness, you need Haskell.

Given the outrage about data theft and sales, I believe the consumer has an expectation of privacy on Facebook.

Statins are very notorious in this regard. While they do indeed affect cholesterol, for most members of the population it does nothing to change all cause mortality.

Circular dependencies are never considered a good thing.

So bitcoin is more valuable than its hard forks because there’s more hashing power.

Ok, that makes sense. So why is there more hashing power on bitcoin than the hard forks? Oh, because bitcoin is more valuable and so the mining reward is higher once converted to fiat? Well, that seems like a problem.

I can come up with myriad examples of verifiably limited items that are valueless, I don’t think there’s any point in litigating that issue.

And bitcoin is easy to move internationally, but that’s just begging the question. Why would anyone want to move bitcoin? Presumably because it’s valuable, but now we have a circular dependency; bitcoin is valuable because you can move it internationally, and people want to move it internationally because it’s valuable and can be converted into currencies in which people can actually buy goods and services.

Gold’s special place in the western canon is really just a cultural artifact. Not only are there a variety of metals that could take its place as an investment vehicle (silver, platinum, and rhodium among others), but historically a variety of metals were used for currencies and transactions. Bronze, brass, lead, and salt were all once used as currency, but have long since just become “base” metals.

On the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got South American cultures that loved Gold for purely decorative purposes, but basically never considered it money. These cultures largely traded using barter or using a specific agricultural product as the unit of account, such as cacao beans.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s just focus on bitcoin as an investment vehicle.

Rarity does not confer value. My toenail clippings are limited in quantity, but valueless. There has to be some sort of underlying demand before rarity gets to play a factor in the pricing equation.

So for bitcoin, what has been the underlying value proposition to justify purchasing? A large part of it was that bitcoin is the future of money, and that once “mass adoption” began, the price would go up.

Of course, bitcoin is a miserable failure of a currency. It doesn’t have properties that most consumers and vendors want. So this leaves us with “bitcoin has no inflation”, which is as I’ve mentioned above, not a good reason for anything to be valuable.

I’m not sure why anyone in their right minds thought bitcoin was going to be used by random civilians for their everyday transactions. Customers want the protections that banks and credit cards provide, and vendors don’t want to expose themselves to exchange rate risk when selling goods and services.

Oh, and 4 transactions a second is far too low a limit for any currency.

Having side loaded apps personally, I'm not really sure why you're so pissed off.

That's a lot of words that take literally no stance on the issue. You've slowly shifted back to an incredibly vague definition of a market and an incredibly vague definition of what an abusive monopoly is. At this point it's literally impossible to discuss the issue with you, because the definitions have become uselessly broad.

Because anything else is silly. Am I allowed to release a Ford car because allowing Ford to have a monopoly on Ford cars is unjust?

Apple has about 45% of the US smart phone market with their next competitor being Samsung at about 29%, with both of those companies on track to lose share to Huawei. Globally Apple is about 11% of the market, with Samsung selling well over double of what Apple sells.

Those numbers, combined with the fact that a new competitor is arising to take market share away from Apple strongly implies that Apple is not currently behaving in an anticompetitive fashion.

So? You can still side load. Developers do it all the time. The approval process is only for distributing your private app to hundreds of people using Apple’s servers and hardware.

So your point is that there are no high priced smart phones other than Apple, therefore it’s a monopoly?

Aside from being extremely silly, under this formulation Rolls Royce might be a monopoly, it lacks factual backing. There are plenty of android offerings that overlap Apple offerings in price, including the Pixel 3 and most of the Galaxy S10 series. If your point is that someone willing to spend $1k on a smart phone has no other choice other than to buy Apple, the $1k+ Galaxy S10+ would like to have a word with you.

If your point instead is that any brand that builds up a “pocket market” via good products and marketing is an abusive monopoly that just be stopped, then you’re signing up basically every top company in the every market segment for stringent antitrust enforcement, which is so broad a definition as to be useless. You can’t sue Nike as a monopoly because they’ve built up their own fan base and “pocket market”.