Not even just spy satellites what about communication satellites? Maybe they don't want to risk someone getting mad at them and shutting off the phone/internet even more than it is already.
They aren't signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. They are parties to the outer space treaty but as long as the US and others have ICBMs I find it hard to argue that ICBMs are covered by that treaty. Makes sense since the weapons don't reside in space nor are designed to target space objects but just pass through space on the way to their targets.
I don't get the US centric bias towards military policy. Basically anyone that becomes capable of attacking the US is automatically an aggressor that needs sanction. What about the US' ability to attack everyone? How about those pricks disarm and reduce their military to 1/10th the size, stop toppling governments because they don't like them etc?
If I have a patent you don't have to pay me. You just can't use my ideas without paying me: come up with your own.
The patent holder only has the upper hand if they came up with the idea first. You/your employer could have saved yourself a bunch of time by looking for solution to your problem and licensing it from the patent holder rather than burn months re-inventing the wheel. The same thing happens with copyrights, trademarks etc. I can put fizzy water into a bottle too I just can't put it in a red and white can and call it Coke. I can write another brain dead song but it better not sound anything like Yellow Submarine or I'll get sued.
Running an R & D shop and letting lawyers find and license your patents is the equivalent of being an outsourcing shop that does nothing but payroll, or recruiting. There are firms that do the R & D on contract (ex. food scientists that will find ways to make your Twinkie's stay fresh for another 10 yrs or be cheaper to make etc). Patent holding companies are the same just doing it in reverse: they in theory, are solving or finding solutions to problems and consolidating them. Those with problems that those patents can solve come to them and buy the right to use the solution saving them all the delays of doing the R & D themselves or waiting for some outsourced research lab to do it for them.
A potential solution would be to require the patent holder to license the patent for a "reasonable" amount. Instead of having to fight in court to get a patent invalidated you could instead go to arbitration to settle on what "reasonable" is in your particular case. It sucks because yeah the first one to the patent office gets a reward but at least the others would still be able to use their parallel invention.
I build a house without a contract. If you like my house and want it you have to pay me for it. Similarly if I know how to do something you don't and you want me to show you how I can demand payment for it. Patents are just a bank for your ideas. Rather than having everyone keep their ideas to themselves and have society take the risk that they'll get hit by a bus before they find someone willing to pay the amount they want (which no single buyer might be able to), or for something that needs it to come up they can make their idea public knowledge but still maintain the ability to profit from their idea. I don't see anything wrong with that. Otherwise all the smart people that come up with ideas have to spend the majority of their time marketing/finding buyers for their idea (or weeks teaching each company one at a time) rather than let lawyers find the patent and come to them for licensing.
Patents, when granted to things that are non-obvious/prior art etc, can be a huge time saver freeing up the creatives to continue to innovate while at the same time removing the risk that ideas will die with the people that come up with them.
Short of the halting problem basically that means you deserve no compensation for anything that can be computed. Which means basically economics, accounting, banking, at least some forms of investing, lots of engineering, lots of science etc.
Also Mr. Coward states the opposite of my contention with no reason and you never actually implement the working details of those ideas, then you deserve NO compensation." He basically says: if you are an engineer working for a company that builds stuff you should get paid. But if you are that same engineer working by yourself to design something then want to sell/license your invention to someone else you shouldn't get paid. Once again (at least as it is in the US) corporations are "super people" they can endow the same activity with value where it had none before. Apparently they are better than normal citizens too because they can give as much money to political candidates as they want (heck even if they limited it to the individual cap X (number of employees + number of investors) there might have been some argument for it, but unlimited while limiting individuals "free speech" to a fixed amount...).
What about Samsung getting sued (I think it was successful) by Apple for designs that Android violates? Also: just because they can't successfully win a case against you doesn't mean they can't file then get you to settle rather than run up the expense of defending.
is "new technology" isn't guaranteed to be adopted. I'm sure a lot of people would like better battery life. But for desktops,small server installs (or ones dominated by massive per core licensing), or just plain people that don't give a crap they want more power: they don't have to go for the new tech. It could happen Intel converts a fab or two over to the new tech and people keep buying the old model for years forcing them back (or a competitor) to the old tech. Everyone is different but if I get > 3hrs battery on anything I'm good to go. All but say two flights a year I'm not further than that from plugging my junk back in. Would it be good to not have to bring my cords around? Sure. But if the system gets significantly slower to do that it is a trade off I don't want to make. waiting for a compile is bad enough already.
So what? If your expertise isn't running a manufacturing company/marketing department but you spend your time coming up with good ideas that someone else can use to do so, why should you work for free? Are you saying working with your hands/mouth is more valuable than working with your mind?
Lots of people have ideas that they don't want to own a business in. These companies are full of lawyers usually. Lawyers generally speaking don't have the expertise or desire to develop a company that markets a Face Time/Skype product. By use I think it should just require that you don't sit on the patent you actively offer it for licensing. Of course the whole idea of patents is that they expire so it doesn't "stifle" innovation any more than it would if say MS got the patent and never licensed it to anyone else for its whole term.
I get the argument against the variety that sit on patents and wait for someone to infringe and then pounce. They wait till you have a huge proven market till they sue so that they can get the highest "license" fee possible. I could be wrong but it seems to me that people call anyone a troll that doesn't practice. I think that is plain silly. Do we complain about commodity traders that sit on millions of pork belly features but don't own a bacon factory?
For law changes: I think these companies that invest in patents should have to publicly post the list of patents that they hold and actively market them for licensing. If it is obvious someone holds a patent on the thing and it is easy to contact them and license (or re-engineer your product around it) then fine: if you infringe they can sue you to oblivion.
Apple, Cisco, Samsung et al might not have an excuse, bit I can see the problem for small startups to be able to afford to do a patent search before developing. Kind of painful if you have a huge expense up front before you can even start developing and getting a feedback loop to even validate the market opportunity.
I'm sure I'm missing something but why do they actually have to find TS emails? It might not be illegal but it should be: if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll be receiving classified materials you should be responsible for ensuring you are prepared for securing them. She did the equivalent of having a PO box at a local FedEx and telling people to send her documents there. That alone should be illegal.
I agree. 110M devices sold I think that says it all. Who is leaving a market when they are selling 110M, say because of the large position in developing markets, devices at $150 a pop on average. Oh no we only made 16B dollars in revenue lets run for the hills.
I don't know if the pendulum will ever swing back their away for them to be a strong market share position but even if they can go from 2% or whatever to 10% buy gobbling up the blackberry market ("we need secure/business") and reaching good enough status that people in the low end of the market don't just ignore them that would be huge numbers for them. Lumping all Android and iOS together too is a bit BS, many, many Android vendors, a bunch of them selling $30 phones in China. Quite possibly if they go upmarket they might end up in low end WinPhones because there's no way without 5Xing their salary that they are getting an iPhone.
I see your point on the bad defaults and unwanted collection. Some of them I was shocked were the defaults. I'm used to installing VS or SQL Server and being prompted to join the "experience" program but have that be the default, especially something so much broader like the OS is crazy.
They should be less aggressive with the prompts to upgrade. But: I can see a counter argument. They took it easy and after the 1yr of free upgrade option you then decide you want win 10 because you need Direct X 15 or whatever. Now they ask you for your $200 and you bitch to high heaven. "But I thought it was free?" Why was it free before but now that it is presumably more obsolete I have to pay full price? Etc. Of course the artificial deadline of 1 year is all for their benefit so they can say Win 10 is the best ever and sell it to devs, use it to push the whole eco-system etc. But they are a business and they don't have to give their product away so for all those who would eventually upgrade they are kind of doing them a favor pushing them to accept it while it is still free.
I don't think the corporate tax rate in the US is quite 50% yet.
I see your point though. Their cash position is more like 150B. Nothing says they have to spend their cash in the US after all. They can still find plenty of Chinese slave labor to hire for the next iGadget.
I do the same thing BTW. Several accounts with 10's of k invested each while still having a mortgage. 1.85% interest is cheap money I can make more than that likely while also getting a tax write off in the process (mortgage interest isn't tax deductible).
Maybe try to take over the Blackberry space would be better. MS = enterprise; BB = enterprise phone. 10% of a huge market is still a huge opportunity especially if you are making money on both software and hardware.
I have a Lumia 920. Solid phone (that said I'm not a demanding smartphone user). I can check my emails, play videos and podcasts, browse, navigate etc. All the basics. I have no interest in social networks (FB, twitter, pintrest, snapchat etc). If I was and one of those was missing on the platform yeah it would be a deal breaker, but I'm not and I don't. I'm definitely not typical in the developed world that way though I think. But someone with a $10 phone looking for a $50 smartphone in India or China? Might be for them. Especially if what would be a big draw network isn't popular is is even actively blocked from being accessed in their country. Who cares if you can't use FB if no one you know is using it?
Maybe my.Net fanboy showing but as a dev Win Phone is much more attractive to me. Relatively open to devs both in getting stuff into the store, technology stack, lack of 100 "also does" apps in the store already, cross platform support (in the sense of XBox Windows and phone) etc.
You're maybe a better coder than I or people I've worked with. I find the majority of my time isn't spent "writing" it is spent finding the stupid little errors like a != that should be an == or forgetting to do a null check etc. I type about 60wpm but commit maybe 100 loc of production ready code a day. The bottleneck isn't writing. It isn't thinking either: my list of "good ideas" and simple should do refactors grows faster than I can do them. I'm limited by my ability to find and debug stupid mistakes in code, whether mine or falsely blamed on me by CI.
Pair programming could help with that I think (haven't done it for more than an hour at a time so don't feel confident stating an opinion one way or another0 because my tendencies towards stupid mistakes might not be the same as my pair. A quick: wait that is dumb every 10 min could save me hours of debugging. My guess though is that you should change pairs frequently so you don't start falling into the same mistakes as your partner or end up with 2 people that are the only guys that can review each others work because they are the only ones that have worked on X for a year.
Have people never heard of email/call forwarding? Leave your work phone in the office, forward the calls to your personal number. Is it that hard?
I've never carried a work phone or been on call without compensation and refuse to do so. The only reason it is "assumed with the salary" is because people refuse to ask: and what will I be being paid for those hours? Never got a huge amount of money but about 100-150 for a weekend or so + 1.5X time if I actually got a call for a minimum of 4 hours pay. Ie you call me and it takes 10 min to fix I get my $100 oncall + 6hrs pay. You have to make your personal time expensive so your employer doesn't feel free to waste it.
It is assembled in Texas all the electrics are from elsewhere except maybe a few chips and the screws. It is also probably their lowest volume product (iPod might be less by now not sure) and isn't exactly drawing many crowds if you haven't noticed what was expensive is now ludicrously so and obsolete (~2.5 yr old CPU, 1/2 speed ram versus "enthusiasts" DDR 4 now etc). I get it is ECC ram and PCIe SSDs but damn.
Lets see them try to source the majority of the parts and manufacture in the US a high volume item like say the iPad mini: good luck.
Exactly fewer Asians. Not sure how it is/was in the US of 'eh but in Canada they used to, if not still do, have quotas for number of visas available and from which countries/regions. Given how large the Asian population is in most metro areas I'm guessing they don't do it anymore (T.O. ~37% Asian, Vancouver 48%), though that could just be a simple matter of doing it but allocating the visas more fairly based on population of the region. Maybe tell Apple, Google and MS they can have the H1-Bs they want but only from Africa, South America and Europe.
The pic in the link makes them look like medium tinted sunglasses. I wouldn't want to look though that for any long period of time. Augmented reality that makes reality dim kind of sucks. I'd rather smoke a joint and drink a six pack and call it a day.
$3000 unless something changed as far as I know it was $3000 and only approved devs that had access to the device. "Go to the Manhattan store and buy yours" this is the first I've heard of it, and last I heard of it was ~ last week.
Finally what the heck is the point of listing the word document battery life? Do people really think that their companies SWOT analysis doc is going to be improved by holographic projection?
What TV lasts longer? My parents had a TV for something like 30 years it was the late 80's before they replaced it: the old one was still black and white and you had to get off your ass to change the channel. They still exist but how many people do you see without a flat panel? How long did the 720p flat panel last before you "had" to replace it with a 1080p? Now it is OLED or UHD pushing the need to upgrade. Even if they do last and we pass them on to our kid's room or whatever it still means we are picking up a new TV every 1-2 years because we got 4 of them on the go at any given time.
You're blind if you don't see that we have way more crap than before.
I get your point but in a way we have. We have public schools, either public healthcare, or at least most people (maybe not in yankee doodle land but I think it is the case there too) public or employer provided healthcare, heck paved public roads and highway systems. We got more infrastructure with some of our money instead of higher income. Of course that doesn't mean the rich didn't get a disproportionate more benefit.
But we don't want just one cellphone. We want a new one every 1.5years and one for each member of the family. Once we accomplish that we start google-eyeing the next iGadget or whatever. The time we have to trade is fixed our desires aren't. Kind of the rule with work scheduling the project will expand to use all time allotted.
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Yep land of the free and home of the brave (drone pilots).
Not even just spy satellites what about communication satellites? Maybe they don't want to risk someone getting mad at them and shutting off the phone/internet even more than it is already.
They aren't signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. They are parties to the outer space treaty but as long as the US and others have ICBMs I find it hard to argue that ICBMs are covered by that treaty. Makes sense since the weapons don't reside in space nor are designed to target space objects but just pass through space on the way to their targets.
I don't get the US centric bias towards military policy. Basically anyone that becomes capable of attacking the US is automatically an aggressor that needs sanction. What about the US' ability to attack everyone? How about those pricks disarm and reduce their military to 1/10th the size, stop toppling governments because they don't like them etc?
If I have a patent you don't have to pay me. You just can't use my ideas without paying me: come up with your own.
The patent holder only has the upper hand if they came up with the idea first. You/your employer could have saved yourself a bunch of time by looking for solution to your problem and licensing it from the patent holder rather than burn months re-inventing the wheel. The same thing happens with copyrights, trademarks etc. I can put fizzy water into a bottle too I just can't put it in a red and white can and call it Coke. I can write another brain dead song but it better not sound anything like Yellow Submarine or I'll get sued.
Running an R & D shop and letting lawyers find and license your patents is the equivalent of being an outsourcing shop that does nothing but payroll, or recruiting. There are firms that do the R & D on contract (ex. food scientists that will find ways to make your Twinkie's stay fresh for another 10 yrs or be cheaper to make etc). Patent holding companies are the same just doing it in reverse: they in theory, are solving or finding solutions to problems and consolidating them. Those with problems that those patents can solve come to them and buy the right to use the solution saving them all the delays of doing the R & D themselves or waiting for some outsourced research lab to do it for them.
A potential solution would be to require the patent holder to license the patent for a "reasonable" amount. Instead of having to fight in court to get a patent invalidated you could instead go to arbitration to settle on what "reasonable" is in your particular case. It sucks because yeah the first one to the patent office gets a reward but at least the others would still be able to use their parallel invention.
I build a house without a contract. If you like my house and want it you have to pay me for it. Similarly if I know how to do something you don't and you want me to show you how I can demand payment for it. Patents are just a bank for your ideas. Rather than having everyone keep their ideas to themselves and have society take the risk that they'll get hit by a bus before they find someone willing to pay the amount they want (which no single buyer might be able to), or for something that needs it to come up they can make their idea public knowledge but still maintain the ability to profit from their idea. I don't see anything wrong with that. Otherwise all the smart people that come up with ideas have to spend the majority of their time marketing/finding buyers for their idea (or weeks teaching each company one at a time) rather than let lawyers find the patent and come to them for licensing.
Patents, when granted to things that are non-obvious/prior art etc, can be a huge time saver freeing up the creatives to continue to innovate while at the same time removing the risk that ideas will die with the people that come up with them.
Short of the halting problem basically that means you deserve no compensation for anything that can be computed. Which means basically economics, accounting, banking, at least some forms of investing, lots of engineering, lots of science etc.
Also Mr. Coward states the opposite of my contention with no reason and you never actually implement the working details of those ideas, then you deserve NO compensation." He basically says: if you are an engineer working for a company that builds stuff you should get paid. But if you are that same engineer working by yourself to design something then want to sell/license your invention to someone else you shouldn't get paid. Once again (at least as it is in the US) corporations are "super people" they can endow the same activity with value where it had none before. Apparently they are better than normal citizens too because they can give as much money to political candidates as they want (heck even if they limited it to the individual cap X (number of employees + number of investors) there might have been some argument for it, but unlimited while limiting individuals "free speech" to a fixed amount ...).
What about Samsung getting sued (I think it was successful) by Apple for designs that Android violates? Also: just because they can't successfully win a case against you doesn't mean they can't file then get you to settle rather than run up the expense of defending.
is "new technology" isn't guaranteed to be adopted. I'm sure a lot of people would like better battery life. But for desktops,small server installs (or ones dominated by massive per core licensing), or just plain people that don't give a crap they want more power: they don't have to go for the new tech. It could happen Intel converts a fab or two over to the new tech and people keep buying the old model for years forcing them back (or a competitor) to the old tech. Everyone is different but if I get > 3hrs battery on anything I'm good to go. All but say two flights a year I'm not further than that from plugging my junk back in. Would it be good to not have to bring my cords around? Sure. But if the system gets significantly slower to do that it is a trade off I don't want to make. waiting for a compile is bad enough already.
So what? If your expertise isn't running a manufacturing company/marketing department but you spend your time coming up with good ideas that someone else can use to do so, why should you work for free? Are you saying working with your hands/mouth is more valuable than working with your mind?
Lots of people have ideas that they don't want to own a business in. These companies are full of lawyers usually. Lawyers generally speaking don't have the expertise or desire to develop a company that markets a Face Time/Skype product. By use I think it should just require that you don't sit on the patent you actively offer it for licensing. Of course the whole idea of patents is that they expire so it doesn't "stifle" innovation any more than it would if say MS got the patent and never licensed it to anyone else for its whole term.
I get the argument against the variety that sit on patents and wait for someone to infringe and then pounce. They wait till you have a huge proven market till they sue so that they can get the highest "license" fee possible. I could be wrong but it seems to me that people call anyone a troll that doesn't practice. I think that is plain silly. Do we complain about commodity traders that sit on millions of pork belly features but don't own a bacon factory?
For law changes: I think these companies that invest in patents should have to publicly post the list of patents that they hold and actively market them for licensing. If it is obvious someone holds a patent on the thing and it is easy to contact them and license (or re-engineer your product around it) then fine: if you infringe they can sue you to oblivion.
Apple, Cisco, Samsung et al might not have an excuse, bit I can see the problem for small startups to be able to afford to do a patent search before developing. Kind of painful if you have a huge expense up front before you can even start developing and getting a feedback loop to even validate the market opportunity.
I'm sure I'm missing something but why do they actually have to find TS emails? It might not be illegal but it should be: if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll be receiving classified materials you should be responsible for ensuring you are prepared for securing them. She did the equivalent of having a PO box at a local FedEx and telling people to send her documents there. That alone should be illegal.
I agree. 110M devices sold I think that says it all. Who is leaving a market when they are selling 110M, say because of the large position in developing markets, devices at $150 a pop on average. Oh no we only made 16B dollars in revenue lets run for the hills.
I don't know if the pendulum will ever swing back their away for them to be a strong market share position but even if they can go from 2% or whatever to 10% buy gobbling up the blackberry market ("we need secure/business") and reaching good enough status that people in the low end of the market don't just ignore them that would be huge numbers for them. Lumping all Android and iOS together too is a bit BS, many, many Android vendors, a bunch of them selling $30 phones in China. Quite possibly if they go upmarket they might end up in low end WinPhones because there's no way without 5Xing their salary that they are getting an iPhone.
I see your point on the bad defaults and unwanted collection. Some of them I was shocked were the defaults. I'm used to installing VS or SQL Server and being prompted to join the "experience" program but have that be the default, especially something so much broader like the OS is crazy.
They should be less aggressive with the prompts to upgrade. But: I can see a counter argument. They took it easy and after the 1yr of free upgrade option you then decide you want win 10 because you need Direct X 15 or whatever. Now they ask you for your $200 and you bitch to high heaven. "But I thought it was free?" Why was it free before but now that it is presumably more obsolete I have to pay full price? Etc. Of course the artificial deadline of 1 year is all for their benefit so they can say Win 10 is the best ever and sell it to devs, use it to push the whole eco-system etc. But they are a business and they don't have to give their product away so for all those who would eventually upgrade they are kind of doing them a favor pushing them to accept it while it is still free.
I don't think the corporate tax rate in the US is quite 50% yet.
I see your point though. Their cash position is more like 150B. Nothing says they have to spend their cash in the US after all. They can still find plenty of Chinese slave labor to hire for the next iGadget.
I do the same thing BTW. Several accounts with 10's of k invested each while still having a mortgage. 1.85% interest is cheap money I can make more than that likely while also getting a tax write off in the process (mortgage interest isn't tax deductible).
Maybe try to take over the Blackberry space would be better. MS = enterprise; BB = enterprise phone. 10% of a huge market is still a huge opportunity especially if you are making money on both software and hardware.
I have a Lumia 920. Solid phone (that said I'm not a demanding smartphone user). I can check my emails, play videos and podcasts, browse, navigate etc. All the basics. I have no interest in social networks (FB, twitter, pintrest, snapchat etc). If I was and one of those was missing on the platform yeah it would be a deal breaker, but I'm not and I don't. I'm definitely not typical in the developed world that way though I think. But someone with a $10 phone looking for a $50 smartphone in India or China? Might be for them. Especially if what would be a big draw network isn't popular is is even actively blocked from being accessed in their country. Who cares if you can't use FB if no one you know is using it?
Maybe my .Net fanboy showing but as a dev Win Phone is much more attractive to me. Relatively open to devs both in getting stuff into the store, technology stack, lack of 100 "also does" apps in the store already, cross platform support (in the sense of XBox Windows and phone) etc.
You're maybe a better coder than I or people I've worked with. I find the majority of my time isn't spent "writing" it is spent finding the stupid little errors like a != that should be an == or forgetting to do a null check etc. I type about 60wpm but commit maybe 100 loc of production ready code a day. The bottleneck isn't writing. It isn't thinking either: my list of "good ideas" and simple should do refactors grows faster than I can do them. I'm limited by my ability to find and debug stupid mistakes in code, whether mine or falsely blamed on me by CI.
Pair programming could help with that I think (haven't done it for more than an hour at a time so don't feel confident stating an opinion one way or another0 because my tendencies towards stupid mistakes might not be the same as my pair. A quick: wait that is dumb every 10 min could save me hours of debugging. My guess though is that you should change pairs frequently so you don't start falling into the same mistakes as your partner or end up with 2 people that are the only guys that can review each others work because they are the only ones that have worked on X for a year.
Have people never heard of email/call forwarding? Leave your work phone in the office, forward the calls to your personal number. Is it that hard?
I've never carried a work phone or been on call without compensation and refuse to do so. The only reason it is "assumed with the salary" is because people refuse to ask: and what will I be being paid for those hours? Never got a huge amount of money but about 100-150 for a weekend or so + 1.5X time if I actually got a call for a minimum of 4 hours pay. Ie you call me and it takes 10 min to fix I get my $100 oncall + 6hrs pay. You have to make your personal time expensive so your employer doesn't feel free to waste it.
It is assembled in Texas all the electrics are from elsewhere except maybe a few chips and the screws. It is also probably their lowest volume product (iPod might be less by now not sure) and isn't exactly drawing many crowds if you haven't noticed what was expensive is now ludicrously so and obsolete (~2.5 yr old CPU, 1/2 speed ram versus "enthusiasts" DDR 4 now etc). I get it is ECC ram and PCIe SSDs but damn.
Lets see them try to source the majority of the parts and manufacture in the US a high volume item like say the iPad mini: good luck.
Exactly fewer Asians. Not sure how it is/was in the US of 'eh but in Canada they used to, if not still do, have quotas for number of visas available and from which countries/regions. Given how large the Asian population is in most metro areas I'm guessing they don't do it anymore (T.O. ~37% Asian, Vancouver 48%), though that could just be a simple matter of doing it but allocating the visas more fairly based on population of the region. Maybe tell Apple, Google and MS they can have the H1-Bs they want but only from Africa, South America and Europe.
The pic in the link makes them look like medium tinted sunglasses. I wouldn't want to look though that for any long period of time. Augmented reality that makes reality dim kind of sucks. I'd rather smoke a joint and drink a six pack and call it a day.
$3000 unless something changed as far as I know it was $3000 and only approved devs that had access to the device. "Go to the Manhattan store and buy yours" this is the first I've heard of it, and last I heard of it was ~ last week.
Finally what the heck is the point of listing the word document battery life? Do people really think that their companies SWOT analysis doc is going to be improved by holographic projection?
What TV lasts longer? My parents had a TV for something like 30 years it was the late 80's before they replaced it: the old one was still black and white and you had to get off your ass to change the channel. They still exist but how many people do you see without a flat panel? How long did the 720p flat panel last before you "had" to replace it with a 1080p? Now it is OLED or UHD pushing the need to upgrade. Even if they do last and we pass them on to our kid's room or whatever it still means we are picking up a new TV every 1-2 years because we got 4 of them on the go at any given time.
You're blind if you don't see that we have way more crap than before.
I get your point but in a way we have. We have public schools, either public healthcare, or at least most people (maybe not in yankee doodle land but I think it is the case there too) public or employer provided healthcare, heck paved public roads and highway systems. We got more infrastructure with some of our money instead of higher income. Of course that doesn't mean the rich didn't get a disproportionate more benefit.
But we don't want just one cellphone. We want a new one every 1.5years and one for each member of the family. Once we accomplish that we start google-eyeing the next iGadget or whatever. The time we have to trade is fixed our desires aren't. Kind of the rule with work scheduling the project will expand to use all time allotted.