I wonder how much of that is due to the abnormal social pressure situation where your buying is public and you don't want to be seen as cheap.
A similar dynamic might occur with a bunch of people shopping together, for clothes maybe? I'm a guy that doesn't shop with others so I don't have experience here.
One bar in an upmarket area in my own town had a house wine on the menu much cheaper (I think 7 when the cheapest labeled wine might have been 14 or so). Seemed smart to me.
Although there is also some internal pressure, to not feel cheap to yourself.
For gifts the dynamics change completely since the recipient might not know the price.
It depends on who their target audience is. VMware for example have strict hardware compatibility lists because their target audience is big enterprise. But Synology being a consumer NAS, this decision was perhaps not wise. They're sort of standing in two markets. They need to make a decision as to which products are enterprise and which are consumer.
I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.
Evidently profitability went down due to the change, so if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is coming from.)
"During bubbles, every experiment or idea gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real."
Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the needs of the society and the current technological reality.
If the investors aren't the gurus we make them to be, we might as well do with a planning committee. We could actually end up with more diversified research.
"Under socialism, a lot of experimental ideas get funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And the planning committee have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real."
Committees' investment tends to be not very diversified and often too risk-averse because of how blame placing works. E. g. most of soviet's cloning of chip (and many other products) wasn't due to lack of engineering skill - it's just less risk for the bureaucrats running the show. R&D for an original chip is risky and timing it to the next November the seventh is likely to not work. Cloning is a guaranteed success.
The whole point of capitalism is that one is entitled to the consequences of their own stupidity or the lack thereof. The investors are more willing to take the risks because their losses are bounded - they are risking only as much as they are willing, rather than their status in an organization. Of course once all investors ends up investing into the same bubble there is no real advantage over a committee.
> Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas?
Early stage investors generally fund a portfolio of multiple ideas, where each idea faces great uncertainty - some investments will do tremendously well, some won't. Invstors don't need every investment to do well due to the assymmetry of outcomes (a bad investment can at worst go down 100%, a good investment can go up 10,000%, paying off many bad investments).
> The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the needs of the society and the current technological reality.
This is not the premise of capitalism, it's the justification for it - it's generally believed that capitalism leads to better outcomes over time than communism, but that doesn't mean capitalism has 0 wasteage or results in 0 bad decisions.
There is a very important difference: real investors risk their own money, the money they saved over their entire life making decisions.
Under socialism bureaucrats risk someone else's money.
We are not in a pure capitalistic society, we also have States, central Banks with central planning expending over half the money in Europe and USA and more than half in Asia.
As a European myself that see the public money being wasted by incompetent people and filling the pockets of politicians, specially marxist ones. For example, the money Spain received after COVID filled so many socialist pockets and has not given information back to Europe as of how it was spent(it was spent on their own companies of friend and family).
Even then, the people the money came from voluntarily chose those institutions. If you don't like risky investments, there are lower risk institutions or products you can put your money in. It's still ultimately the will of the individual what they do with their money, and the consequences of bad choices are still mostly contained to the individuals who make them. But when it's done with tax money, everyone's dragged into it and has no personal choice in the matter. Even worse, when it's tax money without democracy, even if the majority of people don't like how it's used, they even collectively have no choice in the matter.
The funny thing is, I agree with you about the contradictions in recognizing borders for the state of Israel, depending on what they're arguing at any particular time.
The borders of a potential Palestinian state and the state of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan is one of the most difficult conundrums to consider. I can think of a few "resolutions", none of them really "solutions". I make a huge effort to understand the Israeli side, the greater Arab side, the general Muslim side, and the side of the Palestinians who actually live there. Very few people - from any of those categories - make any effort to understand anybody else's side.
From a quick read in TFA and the comments, it is interesting that nobody questions iPhone as the right device for seniors. It is pretty much unquestionably presented as the only device option, even though it is pretty obvious that a lot of seniors are just not interested into its features.
I'm not sure where this can be pinpointed. Monoculture? Mimicry? FOMO?
- install one of WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Signal
- install one of Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail
- protect/hide away settings and app store
- lock homescreen icons
Done.
It's a pretty foolproof setup. And I'm not sure why you would need a brand specialist to get help for such basic stuff. Walk with a Motorola into a Samsung store, I'm pretty sure they will be able to help you, especially if you are a polite senior.
Fall Detection requires a satellite connection, cellular connection,
or Wi-Fi Calling with an internet connection from your Apple Watch
or nearby iPhone. You can use cellular models of Apple Watch to make
an emergency call in many locations, provided that cellular service
is available.
If an iPhone is indeed required even if your Apple Watch has a cellular connection, then that's just a lock-in "feature".
Isn't that an acknowledgement that the UX is essentially worse than a PC?
On a PC, are you inclined to show your mom how the terminal works or to install Xcode? You don't because these components are not forced onto you, or may not even be installed. They are out of sight until you ask for them.
OTOH on the iPhone, instead of starting with barebones functionality and allowing you to enable the parts that are relevant to you, building your own UX, they try to make you fully buy into the Apple ecosystem. This is essentially the result of the "batteries included" design philosophy of the iPhone (which is good!) when combined with Apple aggressive marketing policies.
It took me a very long time to get my parents to understand the file browser, and they still just find folders by remembering the exact clicks to make rather than understanding where they are in relation to everything else
Sometimes the answer is your parents are just bad at this.
File browsers have been around for 50 years, and they haven't changed much at all. But even if you've never used one, fine - they're as intuitive at they can get.
They work just like actual real life files. I have folders, or maybe a cabinet (drive). Inside a folder I can have another folder or tab, or another inside that. And then I have files, with data of some kind on them.
Don't like that level of organization? Fine. Just don't then. You can throw all your papers in one drawer. Or, you can just dump all your files on the desktop.
Mind that this was early Windows XP era. The Windows "workstation" would probably have something like a RIVA TNT with 16MB of graphics memory. Meanwhile the Intellistation had way more powerful options (e.g. 128MB on a single card, or exotic 4 cards x 16MB configurations).
But even if you could beef your PC hardware to similar specs, the CAD software was probably just not there (yet). Not to mention that pre-SP2 Windows XP were pretty terrible on their own.
I don't think it's a folk theory at all. This trick is used a lot in restaurant menus/wine lists.
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