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The number of people contributing misleading information to the internet is estimated at approx 3.5 billion (source so at half a million dollars that's about 1.5 cents per hundred trolls.

I think what the poster was suggesting is that including 3rd party app crashes in this statistic in the same way as battery failure may be a bit misleading given the overall theme... For instance did they add weight to the fact that iOS has more apps for which to crash and that people use their iOS devices more than people use Android? This could be important so maybe a weighted per app MTBF would be a better approach. Or anything else as arbitrary as the original study. Now that I think about it, perhaps replacement should count as failure...

There are more Apps in Android's app store than in Apple's: 2.2M apps for Android, 2M apps for Apple.

http://www.statista.com/statis...

I couldn't find a source for "people use their iOS devices more than people use Android", can you cite that?

http://www.statista.com/statis...

Only 27% of gamers are below 18. Perhaps you should rethink your life, many people enjoy video games and derive pleasure out of beating the latest video game.

What I find more odd though is the >50 demographic. They didn't grow up with video games, but are a huge demographic.

Looks like Samsung about doubles Apple's smartphone sales.

Sorry, I take facts over your handwaving and rantings.

According to Statista's chart, in 2009 "others" were 82%+. iOS was 10-12% and Android was ~%6. iOS market-share looks like it hasn't changed much at all over the last 7 years.

Birth rates among various economic strata beg to differ.

http://www.statista.com/statis...

How do you offer a better product at better than free? People obviously want the artist's product; and a rational person wants that product for the lowest price.

Bottled water. For most people in the US, tap water is free. (Essentially) And bottled water is tap water most of the time. And it is a $6.6BILLION business! http://www.statista.com/topics...

And since many pirates are paying for VPN services and seed boxes, it ain't even competing with free!

Are you suggesting that the headcount at Facebook has been static? Facebook has grown from 4k to 12k employees in the past 3 years. In your example, if Facebook had hired 50% females in 2013 and 2014, and nobody ever left, it would have gone from 33% to 44% over those two years without putting a thumb on the scale at all. I'm not arguing that this is what Facebook should have done. I am arguing that your example, while perhaps applicable to other companies, absolutely does not apply to a company with the tremendous headcount growth that Facebook has had.

out of interest, how many restaurants did they open in 2008?

Asked then answered: during 2008 McD's opened somewhere in the region of 1100 restaurants: http://www.statista.com/statis...

So we're talking an average of 46 workers per restaurant.Going by the size of McD's in my area, I'd have to assume that these are all part time positions, even in the 24-hour venues.

The estimate seems to agree with this: http://www.statista.com/statis... which counts full time positions. Jobsharing schemes mean that three part timers fulfill one full time position.

Now, this costs the company exactly the same amount of money, but for those part timers, they have to take a second job because economics. In England, this means that the higher earning job is counted as fully taxable - which sucks, particularly given that both wage packets count towards the tax return. Also the in-work benefits are different, like company pensions, sick pay, and for those on zero hours contracts, not even a guarantee of work. You're precisely one paycheck away from being homeless.

out of interest, how many restaurants did they open in 2008?

Asked then answered: during 2008 McD's opened somewhere in the region of 1100 restaurants: http://www.statista.com/statis...

So we're talking an average of 46 workers per restaurant.Going by the size of McD's in my area, I'd have to assume that these are all part time positions, even in the 24-hour venues.

The estimate seems to agree with this: http://www.statista.com/statis... which counts full time positions. Jobsharing schemes mean that three part timers fulfill one full time position.

Now, this costs the company exactly the same amount of money, but for those part timers, they have to take a second job because economics. In England, this means that the higher earning job is counted as fully taxable - which sucks, particularly given that both wage packets count towards the tax return. Also the in-work benefits are different, like company pensions, sick pay, and for those on zero hours contracts, not even a guarantee of work. You're precisely one paycheck away from being homeless.

Any computer without moving parts shouldn't wear out.

The might not "wear" out but they do fail. Moving parts are just one failure mode among many.

Hell, most PC's with some moving parts don't fail for the first 20 years or so.

Since very few PCs remain in service for 20 years I'm not really sure where you are getting this data. Yes there are some out there but the average age of a PC is supposedly around 5 years. Laptops tend to wear out sooner than desktops. Even if the machine could remain alive for 20 years the software in most cases would be obsolete and unsupported long before you reached 20 years of service. A Windows PC from 20 years ago would have been running Windows 95 or NT. Tell me how many of those you've run into in the last 5 years.

Your comment says a lot about your age. Fact is most people are not on Facebook.

If we're talking about the United States and Canada... you're wrong. The population of the United States and Canada is 357 million people. According to this site, 222 million people in the United States and Canada use Facebook. Even subtracting for some people having two or more accounts-- apparently, most people in the US and Canada are on Facebook.

http://www.statista.com/statis...

First, let's not hysterically confuse momentary tragedy with durable long term trends.
Violence and violent crimes in the US have gone DOWN significantly, more or less consistently, for DECADES, and continue to fall:
http://www.statista.com/graphi...
One might note that this decline has happened since the 90s, which was right about when the US saw widespread revision to make conceal-carry easier.
This of course could be simple coincidence.

Second, while it's convenient to say "it's the gun lobby" the fact is that tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans believe that it is an intrinsic right of an individual to provide for their own self-defense and that the government has no right whatsoever to impinge on that as long as the person is of sound mind and no criminal record. That is precisely why I own a firearm. I never concealed-carry (although I have the permit), and don't hunt.

I'd recommend this interesting article from the Guardian from 2013 about the crazy-quilt of US gun laws: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... - for example, Alaska and Idaho PROHIBIT *any* registration of firearms. If gun ownership were intrinsically dangerous, you'd think those places would be free-fire zones with many gun deaths; in fact, they're 26th and 42nd respectively for most gun-murders per 100k people.

And, forgive me for saying so, but considering the US Constitution has formed the structure of (debatably) the longest-existing functioning and most successful modern democracy on the planet, I'm going to go with their ideas in every single case over the outrage-fueled maunderings of some internet poster. If the US population wanted to remove the 2nd Amendment, they could; the process is really rather simple.

I understand that the US system is a difficult one for non-Americans to comprehend. Frankly, due to our crappy educational system, I daresay a majority of Americans don't really understand how it works. The fact is that the Founding Fathers were essential humanists: they believed that while a government was necessary in a Hobbesian sense, it should never be allowed to be more important than the rights of the individual.

I would argue that the culprit here is endemic, chronic, systemic narcissism ENABLED by the easy access to firearms. "Taking away the guns" wouldn't really fix the problem.

97% of mass shootings in 2015 were committed by men.

Maybe we should look at this first? Seems like a bigger issue.

But free speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed any one particular platform on which to express your views,

Not saying the contrary. Just that what Facebook is doing is still called censoring its users' speech.

and the user has plenty of other places to publish their views.

Until one site gets a near monopoly. Not there yet, but getting there...

Why is the parent modded as "insightful"? It's full of bullshit.

For example, the price of beef has NOT tripled: http://www.statista.com/statis... - it went from $2.09 per pound in 2006 to $3.05 in 2015. That's annualized 3.2% price growth rate - quite in line with the official inflation.

And if you don't believe BLS then there's an alternative: http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ - they collate prices from multiple sources (literally more than a billion price points a day) and compute their own inflation measurements. And it's in agreement with BLS.

Anecdotes like "BLS changes stuff to hide the TRUTH" are totally and ALWAYS a complete bullshit. Always. No exceptions.

Gees cherry pick data much. http://www.statista.com/statis... A better spread showing your chosen starting point as the very peak of Nokia. Also never forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... burning platform memo (an accident or done on purpose) and he go paid a bonus for the sell out and M$ paid for 70% of that bonus. Of course Elop is now at Telstra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... so you can bet a windows anal probe 10 only policy and forcing that on end users and a convoluted conspiracy to take over the NBNhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network at a massive discount and another multi-million dollar bonus for Elop and some really funny off share tax haven stuff for those politicians who appointed Elop.

From upthread. Nokia net sales: 2008 : 50.71 2009 : 40.98 2010 : 42.45 2011 : 38.66 2012 : 30.18 2013 : 12.71

MS bought them in 2014. You are apparently using an interesting definition of 'expanding'. Care to share? We can use a laugh.

Just three facts: Elop's Burning Memo and the M$ deal are from February 2011, the financial crisis of 2008 put the world economy in recession in 2009 and we're talking about the mobile devices division.

In 2009 Nokia as a whole (it was not just a cellular phone maker, but an industrial conglomerate with many divisions) suffered from the financial crisis, so it was hit hard like many other companies, but it expected to recover and grow in 2010 and it grew in effect (operating profit was up 73%) and then they expected to grow in 2011 too because markets were recovering, but then something happened. In 2011, after a good first quarter, Nokia smartphones shipments stopped growing (i.e. "expanding"), they began losing personnel (it lost 2% of its workforce in 2009 during the crisis, but it gained a 7% in 2010, then lost more than 25% of its workforce in 2011-2012), their best selling high end smartphone MeeGo based N9 was relegated to secondary markets to bolster their WP7 line up, which totally failed.

So to put it in a way that even a M$ shill can understand: Nokia smartphone shipments were growing steadily, even if less than Apple and Samsung, until the Nokia-M$ deal, then they crumbled, while their feature phones, Symbian based Asha, were the only reason why the mobile devices division didn't get the whole company bankrupt.

14% of $191 billion is $26.74 billion. Multiply that by 1.81 and you get $48.40 billion. That's a difference of $21.66 billion dollars, or 1.3 million U.S. jobs lost.

You do realize that you've just argued that if "U.S. fast food industry" was "forced" to pay minimum wage of $15 - they would have to let go 1.3 million of their 1.6 million employees?

Which would be a bit tricky, cause then they would have to do the same job with only about 19% of their workforce.
So... not only are you arguing that they would have to fire most of their employees - they would also have to close shop. End of fast food.
Just so they would not be "forced" to continue to have the same growth in revenue, which would cover most of the $21.66 billion difference ($19.19 billion of it) by the far and distant future of - 2018.

And that's NOT including increased purchasing power OR higher growth due to positive publicity.

My iphone is warped. Your products are becoming crap. Please stop. Full stop.

I don't want a thinner laptop but I would like a more tactile keyboard. (sent from my 2015 mac pro)

They still sell iPhones?!?!?!?!? hahahaahahaha

Yeah. Only about 51 MEELION iPhones last QUARTER. Poor Apple. Might look into it.

According to the stats (direct link: http://www.gartner.com/newsroo...), Windows share fell by 1.8% across a single quarter. However, iOS's share fell by an even greater amount: 3.1%. Android's share increased by 5.3%. This could be because of a new market coming online, or China or India's growth in smartphone purchases (which would consist mostly of low-end Android phones).

The important statistic is the percentage in North America, which is responsible for the vast, vast percentage of app purchases. iOS share continues to grow in the USA, with Android and Windows staying fairly flat. iOS seemed to gobble up nearly every bit of Blackberry market as that platform diminished, which is how it grew while the others stayed flat. (source: http://www.statista.com/statis...)

Only if you count all the out of date crap. I dont count ANY phone not running Android 6 as ...

It doesn't much matter how you count. For example, here's a graph of new phone shipments. Android phones are more than 80% at the end there, and climbing. Here's one for actual sales. The best you can say for Apple here is that they are bouncing around under 25% (with Android over 75%). This has been going on for 5 years now, so installed base graphs should (and do) show almost the same picture.

On the plus side, since this has been going on for 5 years now, there's no good reason to believe Apple's 20-25% of the market is suddenly going to go away. There's also, of course, no good reason to believe it will enlarge.

Buffet doesn't play the stock lottery. That is, he doesn't try to make money off of the appreciation in stock price from when he buys it to when he sells it. He concentrates on acquiring stocks of companies which he feels are solid long-term investments, and will allow him to make money off the dividends they pay.

Jobs hated paying dividends. Apple stopped paying them in 1995 to entice him to return to the helm, and didn't start paying them again until late-2012 after Jobs died. (For those who don't know, dividends are profits distributed to shareholders. Under Job's watch, Apple kept all its profits as retained earnings, making AAPL what's playfully called a baseball card stock. That is, a stock which doesn't pay dividends, so whose only value is being able to impress dinner guests by showing them that you own it, and how much you can get selling it to someone else. Google is still a baseball card stock - they don't pay dividends either.)

The $232.9 billion Apple has in the bank almost exactly matches its net profit during the time it didn't pay dividends (2005-2015 adds up to $232.78 billion). In other words, rather than paying stockholders dividends or investing the money into R&D and expansion like you're supposed to with retained earnings, Apple has just been putting it into a bank account. Kinda makes me think that was a condition Apple's board put on Job's policy of not paying dividends. Maybe Buffet has a hunch about what they're going to do with the money?

The N900 sold all available units on little more than word of mouth and the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement - thus a fair assumption.

First, the N900 sold with Maemo, not MeeGo. MeeGo was made for the never sold to the public N950 and the well received but dead on arrival N9. Second, one product selling a handful of units to some core fans is hardly sufficient evidence to believe that MeeGo would have been "highly likely" to succeed. The N900 sold less than 100,000 units in it's first 5 months which on the market. That's a rounding error. The iPhone sold somewhere close to 16 million units during the same period. And you think such ludicrously bad sales figures are evidence it was going to take the market by storm? There is NO objective evidence to realistically believe that MeeGo was likely to capture substantial market share. None.

Putting a manager from a rival in as his first ever attempt at being a CEO did that. Before Elop turned up Nokia was selling more mobile telephones than any other company in the world.

Nokia was already fading in the smartphone business before Elop showed up. Elop became CEO in September 2010. Nokia's market share had fallen from near 50% in 2007 to about 40% at the start of 2010. Their market share fell to around 32% in 2010 prior to Elop taking over. So the fall was well underway long before Elop arrived. He merely threw gas on the fire. That is a 25% fall in market share in 9 months. This is after MeeGo was released and before Elop took over. If people were really excited about MeeGo (which they weren't) then it makes little sense that Nokia would have seen continued market share erosion after its release and before Elop killed the platform in February 2011. Fact is that almost nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys. It wasn't that it was a bad product but it was WAY too late to the party to really matter in all likelihood.

Not forgetting the 30% drop in number of people in the house, I trust:

http://www.statista.com/statis...

Also, I would put the housing boom down more to more people wanting single-family-detached and wanting *ownership* rather than apartment rental. Ownership had both psych value (it passes down from the Depression era and is carried in by many immigrants that ownership of home and a yard you can garden provides independence in times of poor economy) and real value, in that the bubble made them look like by far the best investments available to lower-middle-class: what do they know about whether Lyft will beat Uber? But they know housing has gone up for decades.

Wendy's net income for 2015: $161 million. The CEO is eating up fully 13% of the total profit of the Wendy's chain.

The rate of crime has steadily decreased over the last twenty five years, while unemployment has had its ups and major downs. You couldn't be more wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Germany - 32.04 cents per KWH - Date - Feb 1, 2015

How about another one:

http://www.statista.com/statis...

2015 - Germany - 0.33 cents per KWh

Where exactly did you.. "Check" that?

According to http://www.statista.com/statis... They currently have 1,000 million users, up from 900 end of last year.

You cannot get a $0.15/kWh power plan in Germany for private homes, only for large industrial plants.
The cheapest price (by kWh) I can get for my German home is 0.23€ ($0.26) / kWh plus 60€ ($69) per year, so it's 0.25€ ($0.28) / kWh in total.

Latest statistics say the average price for private customers is 0.28€ / kWh:
http://de.statista.com/statist...

Ok, maybe so from your sources but I searched for "electricity prices in Germany" and found more than one source that said German electricity was around 15.22 cents per kWh in 2015 and the prices are dropping a little. Try this link.

My main point was this:

But the real question here is how much is it going to cost you in 20 or 30 years when the effects of AGW really start kicking in and we're spending big money on trying to adapt. Are you really saving anything in the long run by hanging on to your cheap power now?

... where Apple has 92% of the all global smartphone profits.

all the EPA grants on climate change research already presume that it is happening and that it needs to be stopped

Well yeah, that was firmly established long ago. It's been taken for granted in the science community for ages (hence TFA), and issuing grants to determine if it's still actually happening would be like researching whether the sun will shine tomorrow.

people who don't agree with the party line on climate change find it almost impossible to publish, get academic positions, or get research grants.

That isn't true, or at least the first part isn't. Further research establishing the (non)existence of AGW would never be ignored - if it's sound. If (and only if) your methodology is good and your evidence is strong, you'll get published, even - nay, particularly if you can actually show clearly that current warming is natural or not happening (and of course explain all the existing evidence to the contrary). Journals would love to publish a bombshell like that - if it's bombproof, and not just a bomb. Granted, for funding you may have to look outside mainstream sources unless you've got a strong case to start with, but I don't doubt Exxon, the Heartland Institute, Koch bros et al would happily pony up. For academic positions, likewise. Of course, that would change fast if you were The Guy who published evidence strong enough to be taken seriously.

government budgets that run into the trillions

Right, because the government would devote trillions to overblowing a crisis so that they could put a price on carbon /s. They already did that with SO2 emissions for far less money, and nobody freaked out. While it's true the government could potentially pressure researchers (as Bush did), that would come to light very quickly - and would have minimal effect all those climate researchers everywhere else in the world...

But the fossil fuel industry's very existence is at stake. They really are risking trillions, so their motive for pushing back is huge. And the industry isn't exactly short of funds either, so they have means as well as motive. When you add in the existing examples of them already funding misinformation, the case against them is far from laughable. So it's curious that you put more stock in unfounded claims of climate researchers falsifying results, despite the only specific accusations being thoroughly cleared of any wrongdoing.

Let ME be clear about it: the people speaking out against the "AGW FUD" have yet to show any good evidence to back their claims. All they've been doing the whole time is attempting to cast doubt on the reams of evidence that the climatologists have produced over the last forty years. That is the very definition of FUD. You might be one of the rarer people who accepts AGW yet thinks the consequences aren't so bad, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against that too. If you want people to listen, end your own FUD & vague accusations, and come up with real evidence for a change - if you can.

using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter .....

the vegetable oils mentioned in the article are not necessarily the most commonly used (which are oils made of olive, sunflower, coconut, and palm).

Ummm..this looks wrong. The most common two cooking oils in the USA are Soybean Oil and Canola Oil. Soybean alone dwarfs everything else put together (but I threw in Canola because that's what my family uses for most needs). Soybean oil is a bit over 50% linoleic acid. Canola is about 20%.

So if you live and eat in the USA, this probably applies to you.

The FBI attorney is (purposefully?) confusing possible and probable as well as level of risk. Is it possible that terrorists will see WhatsApp's encryption, flock there, and plot a huge attack resulting in many deaths unseen by law enforcement? Certainly. It is also possible that the terrorists will wake up tomorrow morning realizing that this whole "kill everyone different than us" thing is idiotic, will drop their weapons, and take up a less destructive hobby. Both are possible, but are also not very probable. The recent attacks have been planned using SMS and other unencrypted communication methods. If law enforcement can't catch them when they're not encrypting, why go through the bother of deploying encryption?

As far as of level risk goes, there were 32,727 deaths due to terrorism worldwide in 2014 (Source). Even adding all terrorism deaths together since 2006 gives 161,834. Remember, this is worldwide. If we wanted to limit this to US deaths from terrorism, we'd get 303 American deaths from 2004-2014 (Source). In contrast, 2014 had 17.6 million identity theft victims in the US alone. (Source)

This all means that you have almost a 639,000 times greater risk of being an identity theft victim than a terrorism victim. Granted, I doubt many people are going to use WhatsApp to share information that could be used in identity theft, but this isn't the FBI vs. WhatsApp any more than it was just the FBI vs. Apple. It's the FBI vs Encryption. They want to see encryption either go away or be backdoored so they can get in at any time. Unfortunately, if this were to happen, a lot more people would find themselves vulnerable to various scams and the number of terrorists captured would be at or near zero.

This isn't even "trading liberty for security" as much as it is "trading security for some nebulous promise of possible security later on."

Not true. You can't just arbitrarily raise prices when there are substitute goods available.

Which is why it's a minimum wage law and not merely a minimum wage suggestion. The whole point is that if there are price increases, they should be across the board and not particular hurt one substitute good over another (generally).

Fast food is labor intensive. If the price goes up, more people will cook at home or purchase low-labor pre-packaged food at grocery stores (using the self-checkout line).

Comparatively, fast food is NOT labor intensive. Which is to say, the amount of laborers to produce a burger is not very high vs a lot of other jobs producing a finished good (say automobile parts). Meanwhile, prices have gone up substantially on fast food because of the sharp increase in beef prices due to the long-term drought in the southern/western US, yet revenue keeps increasing. Seriously, as much as your argument isn't empty, the fact is that people buy fast food not because it's particularly cheap (it's not as you note) but because it's convenient. Add more money in the pockets of people through higher wages and you may well see fast food purchases increase--that bastard Henry Ford might have been on to something.

California already has a much higher minimum wage than the rest of the nation. If you go in a McDonalds in California, you don't see teenagers working there. You see adults, since the pay is enough to attract them. Adults are more productive than teenagers, so you need fewer of them.

I hate to break it to you, but you see the same situation in Indiana (which is not to say that there are NO teenagers, but it's nothing like wall-to-wall high schoolers). Meanwhile, you see the same situation at Wal-Mart and other retailers. It's not that the pay is attractive. It's that ANY pay is attractive. Productivity has shit to do with it, although I like your ageism--sense any sarcasm?

So California has removed an important rung on the economic ladder, by turning entry level jobs into permanent no-skill "careers" flipping burgers. This effect is worst in minority neighborhoods which already have extremely high teenage unemployment.

Sorry to break it to you, but flipping burgers has never been that much of a "rung on the economic ladder". There obviously aren't enough burger flipper jobs to remotely cover all teens seeking employment. Meanwhile, the notion that we should in fact cripple the ability of people to be paid decently "for the children" is disgusting. It's the same shit that kept children in coal mines because "how else will they eat if the family is barely making it as it is"? It's the narrow-mindedness that somehow believes in supply and demand when it's convenient but totally ignores that radical shifts in economic markets can happen in years time. Johnny might not find a job at the malt shop. I guess Johnny might have to find work elsewhere or be a "child" a little longer.

The horror.

I saw on the news the other day, that students were saying they had been traumatized by someone writing in chalk "Trump 2016". I mean, I'm no Trump supporter, but seriously, traumatized?

Others have pointed out that the report was utterly false.

Still, look at how well the lie plays among self-righteous bigots with a persecution complex. And yet we still allow Trump and his ilk to spew this shit, because free speech. Astonishing, isn't it, how people will allow people such as yourself to fill yourself with ill-informed tripe, and yet you're the ones who are persecuted?

If you aren't for the latest gay agenda...

Respectfully: What The Fuck is a 'gay agenda'? Equal rights? Enjoying the same rights as everyone else everywhere?

or if you raise the concern that a certain group does seem to have most of the terrorist problem coming from their ranks....

Just say it, for fuck sake: MUSLIMS. You mean those dirty, rag-headed, gutteral, snarly, infidels who chop people's heads off and want to impose Shariah law on you and your loved ones? That's who you mean, right, when you spew mealy-mouthed phrases like 'certain groups'? How fucking precious.

And how fucking wrong. In the United States, Muslims terrorists are not more numerous than others. Historically, levels of terrorism in the US and Europe are down, not up.

well, you just cannot speak about that without repercussions. It isn't even just being shunned, but you are actively suppressed these days.

Goddamn right, you're being suppressed. If by 'suppressed' you mean 'told to shut your fucking yap until you derive at least the slightest clue about the subject you keep ranting about'.

Look at how many comedians these days, won't do shows on college campuses anymore....

Okay, that one is a fair cop. People on both sides of the political spectrum are way touchier than they've a right to be.

That said, I would treat them to the same derision I'm showing you if they failed to adhere to the facts and basic logic.

Theres major concern that any dissenting speech is being supressed, if it goes even remotely against the new social agenda.

For as long as the 'new social agenda' constitutes actually caring about the truth, and upholding basic human rights and equality under the law... then Fucking A Right, nothing deserves—even remotely—to go against the new social agenda.

... and for as long as the 'new social agenda' is a bunch of gluten-free, artisanal hipster snowflakes busy enabling and affirming themselves while old Brooklyn cries in shame, then they can go get fucked too.

Even what used to be common sense has no place in the public square these days.

Bigotry used to be common sense for far too long and for far too many people. It deserves to die a death, and those people who perpetuate it deserve to be told to shut their cake-holes.

Look, I get how you feel, but dude, seriously, your views are not just wrong, they're hurtful and harmful. Not to people's precious feelings—to their lives. When you oppose the 'latest gay agenda', you're sentencing some very good friends of mine to not being able to hold a loved one's hand in the hospital. You're saying that someone who devoted their life to caring and tending for a home shoul

"Apple makes money on hardware and not on the sale of customer data."

iAd ... http://advertising.apple.com/
iBeacon ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
iTunes ...

All of these use user data to facilitate advertising or other revenue for Apple.

Revenue breakdown for Apple:
http://www.statista.com/statis...

So they make 80% of their revenue from hardware. iTunes exists because of the hardware. All of that other stuff like iAd/iBeacon is probably a rounding error.

Oh and:
http://www.engadget.com/2016/0...

So? You don't think these kind of changes happen overnight, do you?

Yes, if technology causes people to become be permanently pushed out of the labor force, I expect that to show up in some statistics over the span of decades.

Even if we did see that kind of effect, it wouldn't necessarily be bad: it would mostly mean people retiring earlier, kids getting more education, and parents spending more time with their families. You know, all the things that progressives say we should want. It's bizarre that the same people who say we should work less throw such a tizzy when people actually might achieve that.

Gross production income, then.

total GDP, per capita GDP, labor force participation rate

Both GDP and labor force participation rate have been steadily climbing over most of the last several decades. Labor force participation has been going down a bit since 2000, first because of demographics, then arguably because of Obama's welfare policies.

Sorry, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that people are permanently becoming unemployed because of automation. Long term unemployment is, in fact, much less of a problem in the US than in other countries.

It looks like the price has gone down in real terms, accounting for inflation: http://www.statista.com/statis...

Colorado is cheaper than average, especially for gas and considering how little renewable energy it has: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=...

Where are all those players today?

Although I agree with your underlying point that there are many factors involved so boiling it down to price/performance isn't sensible, I can't understand the rest of your point. Where are they now, well I guess the same could be said of the ipod (I assume it's still sold, but I doubt in the quantities it was) a quick search of amazon shows various for sale. I'm sure the overall number is less and I'm sure that there are some that have left the market, that's device convergence for you most/many use their phones for that these days so the standalone players have taken a lesser role. And in terms of overall sales (i.e. volume) "Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players" is a bit of distortion - http://www.statista.com/statis...

Why is it that so much malware and online crime comes from Russia? The country simply refuses to police themselves, even when things are obviously illegal. The overall effects are pretty severe to other countries. I'd support sanctioning Putin directly to prevent him from entering the EU. Then I'd also effectively cut them off from the internet by terminating any wired links between them and the EU while dropping all connections coming from IPs assigned to entities in Russia. Cutting Russia off from the internet to the best of our ability is really the only way to stop the excessive crime from that country.

According to these sources, America was the leading source of attacks in 2015:
http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://www.enigmasoftware.com/...

So be careful what you ask for :-)

Economists tout free trade as benefiting everyone because of rationalizations and predictions. There's no strict math involved, and it is based on flawed assumptions.

I predict that economists will get their dander up and respond with "Nuh-uh!", so here's a challenge.

Without appealing to the argument of "current school of thought holds that...", answer the following questions:

1) What is the right formula for calculating inflation?
2) What's the right value of inflation to have?
3) How important is it to hit this value exactly (ie - is it catastrophic or minor to be off by a percent?)

If you say you can't give a numerical value because "it depends", or "it's complicated", then what is the formula to calculate the value based on the dependencies?

Inflation is a simple concept and there *is* a right/best value to have, but economists are so entangled in "schools of thought" that they don't bother to think things through critically or rationally.

Also, note that inflation dipped negative for a couple of months last year.

Did we just come through another recession?

Here are some examples of Bay Area jobs and what they pay

The Bay area is one of the most expensive places in the world though. There are plenty of areas in this country where $15/hour suddenly gives you close to a median income.

Statistically speaking, people who make more money tend to get better education, and this results in having fewer kids, not more.

Yeah but I don't think you can assume that if you're artificially raising salaries. With respect to education, this raise will affect many people who are already done with education, as well as people who simply aren't capable of finishing high school or going to college.

With respect to birthrate, if this chart is accurate ( http://www.statista.com/statis... ) you're right that there is a shockingly high birthrate among the very poor and it declines quickly with additional income. But even if we assume artificially raising salaries will lead to the same results, it becomes question of whether more people will be bumped from the very poorest into a lower birthrate bucket, or from the $20k range into the $30k range which would result in an increase.

Anyway these were just some quick hypotheticals to illustrate how the effects of a minimum wage increase might increase overall prices more than just (cost of big mac * percentage share of labor cost * percentage minimum wage increase)

The other comment someone else made is around the microSD slot. Particularly for a tablet, which is a pure media consumption device, it should have an SD slot.

Yeah, no one would by a tablet without a microSD slot!

Ok, here's a search: Ultrabooks (that category that doesn't have a use case according to you) have over 40% market share. http://www.statista.com/statis...

So that's at least 40% without VGA. And that would be assuming ALL non-ultrabook laptops have VGA out - which is far from the truth.

Exactly, that's a nice list of patched vulnerabilities. Every one of those seems to be present in versions prior 9.2.

Considering that the most prevalent version of Android is 4.4 Kit Kat, released in September 2013, this is also why I have an iPhone.

While the G3 may (or may not) get an update to that specific piece of software, there are no guarantees. A similar vulnerability in an iOS would definitely be patched in the newest update.

No. America uses those. I'm Canadian and I find Amazon is great for reviews, and so-so on pricing. Their prime offering is a hilarious joke that needs to die ($80 and all I get is 'free' shipping on a very few items? LOL!)

Really so when I travel to Asia and see people using iPhones, that is all my imagination? When I am in Europe and see people using Windows, I must have had hallucinations? You seem to have a very binary way of thinking about who uses what. In Asia, they do use iPhones. They also use Galaxy phones too. It's not binary.

Microsoft could cease to exist and I wouldn't care.

Yes, you don't care. Companies that use Microsoft products do care.

Apple could cease to exist and nobody here would care. I know one person with an iPhone. They've dumped it for Android.

You, you, you, and your world. That does not reflect the actual world.

For 2015 alone, Apple sold more than 231 million iPhones worldwide. Now according to you that must just the US. Considering that the US has about 323 million people, that would be the most marketshare I've seen in any country by a product. That would mean most men, women, and children bought an iPhone in 2015 alone.
OR
You simply have no idea who owns an iPhone and live in your own reality.

The trouble is the USA thinks they are the world. It's really odd. I hear news from the USA about this Craigslist thing selling access to hookers for roses. Never heard of it otherwise. The site looks quite shitty.. Canadians use Kijiji. Your household brands are simply more replaceable than you think.

The companies listed are known worldwide. They are used worldwide. These are simple facts to look up. But you won't, will you? For example, Facebook usage by country definitely shows that more than Americans use it. A survey in 2013 shows that that Google is used worldwide. While they are places like China and Japan that use prefer other engines, calling Google only an American company is just denying facts.

No. America uses those. I'm Canadian and I find Amazon is great for reviews, and so-so on pricing. Their prime offering is a hilarious joke that needs to die ($80 and all I get is 'free' shipping on a very few items? LOL!)

Really so when I travel to Asia and see people using iPhones, that is all my imagination? When I am in Europe and see people using Windows, I must have had hallucinations? You seem to have a very binary way of thinking about who uses what. In Asia, they do use iPhones. They also use Galaxy phones too. It's not binary.

Microsoft could cease to exist and I wouldn't care.

Yes, you don't care. Companies that use Microsoft products do care.

Apple could cease to exist and nobody here would care. I know one person with an iPhone. They've dumped it for Android.

You, you, you, and your world. That does not reflect the actual world.

For 2015 alone, Apple sold more than 231 million iPhones worldwide. Now according to you that must just the US. Considering that the US has about 323 million people, that would be the most marketshare I've seen in any country by a product. That would mean most men, women, and children bought an iPhone in 2015 alone.
OR
You simply have no idea who owns an iPhone and live in your own reality.

The trouble is the USA thinks they are the world. It's really odd. I hear news from the USA about this Craigslist thing selling access to hookers for roses. Never heard of it otherwise. The site looks quite shitty.. Canadians use Kijiji. Your household brands are simply more replaceable than you think.

The companies listed are known worldwide. They are used worldwide. These are simple facts to look up. But you won't, will you? For example, Facebook usage by country definitely shows that more than Americans use it. A survey in 2013 shows that that Google is used worldwide. While they are places like China and Japan that use prefer other engines, calling Google only an American company is just denying facts.

This says 69 million subscribers worldwide.

http://www.statista.com/chart/...

So I was off by about 40 million high and yours is off by about 15 million lower.

Your estimate is much closer! On the Price is Right, you'd get the free Netflix Subscription.