The problem is that they ask everyone a question where the honest answer, for the majority of candidates, results in rejection, but lying and getting caught results in rejection. So basically they filter down to who either have absolutely no technical curiosity at all, or people who can lie and get away with it. Both of those are bad for the FBI, since they'll be populated by luddites and liers.
Gun buyers might think that "The primary function of guns in private hands is to protect those who carry them" but the statistics don't support that. Homes with guns in them have 5x the suicide death rate of homes without guns. people in those homes are much more likely to get killed with the gun than be saved from a crime by the gun. That's not to say that guns are never used to defend your home, of course, but homes with guns in them aren't less likely to be broken into, because criminals try not to break into homes while anyone is home, so the gun isn't relevant.
And countries with strict gun controls have much lower gun deaths, without having higher crime rates. So not having guns doesn't promote crime.
So we're down to "having guns makes some people feel safer" but in reality they're just promoting suicide and shooting family members. Because everyone can get depressed or angry. And when they do, if they have a gun someone's much more likely to die. If they use their fists, or a knife, death is less likely.
Building is tightly regulated. There are building codes, inspections, etc., all to try to keep people safer. Yes, some builders cheat and get away with it, and some failures occur anyway.
There are about 14,000 gun deaths a year. Compared to 30 deaths from water heaters, I'd say that it's appropriate to focus more effort on the cause of 14,000 deaths more than the cause of 30 deaths. And right now, the water heaters are a _lot_ more carefully regulated than the guns. Perhaps that's why they're so much safer?
In reality, when fewer people have guns at home, they die less often from suicide. Because guns make it easy to commit suicide and are highly effective, and it's harder to commit suicide using a knife, hanging, etc., and you're more likely to survive the attempt. As a society, I think we want to discourage suicide.
No, when the assault weapons "ban" was in effect, there were fewer mass shootings. Though the "ban" was quite weak, allowing gun manufacturers to largely work around them largely with cosmetic changes (technically complying with the law, while still making it easy to kill lots of people), even a weak ban did correspond to fewer shootings and fewer deaths. http://aneconomicsense.com/201... . And if a weak ban with tons of exceptions (thanks, NRA) reduced mass shootings and deaths, and the end of the ban increase mass shootings and deaths, it's hard to argue against an assault weapons ban, and one more effective than the last one, in order to save more lives.
Similarly, states with lax gun control laws, like Virginia, Pensylvania, Arizona and New Mexico clearly want to sell lots of guns to criminals, who then use them in states like NYC and DC, undermining their gun control laws ineffective. When states like Arizona and Virginia pass laws specifically to encourage "straw buyers" to buy guns for cash then flip them to criminals, there's not much any other state can do to protect themselves. Heck, Arizona made it illegal for the ATF to follow even a homeless man who was buying $10K a week in guns with cash, and clearly doing so for felons who weren't allowed to buy the guns themselves. And even better, the NRA got a law passe prohibiting the government from retaining serial numbers of sold guns or identities of buyers or sellers, making it impossible to track guns used in crimes back to either the buyer or the seller. That's great if your goal is to make it east for violent criminals to buy guns, but bad for people who think that's a bad idea.
Nobody's arguing that it can be impossible for people to make guns at home. Anyone with a block of wood, a drill, a rubber band, and a nail can make a gun at home.
What they're arguing that it should be illegal to make untraceable, undetectable (by magnetometer) guns, or to distribute designs for them, so that when people do so, and then get caught, there's a strong enough penalty sufficient to deter people from doing so. Because penalties affect people's behavior, which is useful when they're too stupid to care about the broader repercussions of their actions, such as flooding the country with undetectable guns leading to lots of murders, but still care about personally getting thrown in jail for a decade.
According to the people who wrote the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment was written to ensure that States had the right to form a militia, not an individual right for anyone to own any gun with no restrictions. At the time, when someone tried to build a private army, they executed him for treason. And since then, there have always been laws restricting who can own what kinds of weapons. Nobody sane argues that literally anyone should be allowed any weapon. For example, violent felons shouldn't be allowed to have guns, nobody outside of the military can own military weaponry, etc. The only debate is where the line should be drawn.
Heck, for most of its history, the NRA supported conservative gun regulations, and opposed people walking around with guns in public without a specific reason. Their recent swing towards anarchy is a complete disconnect from their own historical positions, driven by the organization being taken over by gun salesmen when they forced out the gun owners in the 70s. Since then, they're willing to do anything if it leads to more gun sales. Make it easy for felons to buy guns and commit crimes, and make it impossible to track the guns back to where they were sold, so you can't stop it? Great! When people are more scared, they'll buy more guns! Who cares if a bunch of people end up dead, if it's highly profitable.
I miss the old NRA - I used to teach riflery to kids, and the old NRA was all about responsible gun ownership.
Keep in mind, his goal isn't to do anything of any practical value, it's to make a ideological point. Pragmatically, guns are cheap and easy to make already, and have been for a long, long time. But now he got to attach his pet obsession to 3D printing and CNC milling, getting some publicity. And in the case of his tiny CNC mill, he managed to sell a bunch of moderately expensive, tiny CNC mills to gun fanatics, which is profitable, if sleazy. Anyone who actually wanted a useful CNC mill would go for the less expensive, more capable CNC mills already on the market. But I imagine he found a sufficient number of customers who didn't know better.
Right. UK, Israel, Canada, Switzeland, German, Japan, etc., are all totalitarian states.
And for perspective, the first thing that Hitler did (relative to guns) was to eliminate German gun control laws, so his thugs could run around armed.
That's not to say that lack of gun control leads to totalitarian governments, of course, but it does rather clearly show that gun control isn't what leads to totalitarianism.
Keep in mind that it was the gun industry that had those exceptions injected specifically to try to render the gun control laws ineffective. But that doesn't mean that gun control laws are ineffective, just that gun control laws shouldn't be written by gun salesmen.
There's a place for NASA as well - private industry isn't going to explore space or do research, just commercialize business opportunities. Those "PR stunts" are what enabled private industry to start commercializing space.
It's very similar to how airlines got started. At first it was "PR stunts" that laid the groundwork, followed by airplanes being almost 100% government funded, with military and mail delivery contracts that pushed private industry to build the airplanes and infrastructure to deliver on the contracts, until decades later the airlines became self-sustaining (though heavily subsidized as they are now, with government-provided airports, control, weather, etc.). None of that magically happened, that was the result of a national policy to grow airplanes and airlines, with $billions invested.
In space, defunding NASA and replacing it with nothing just means that it's all moving at a snail's pace. We could have had bases on the Moon and Mars long ago, and should have. We're decades behind where we should have been, not because of the existence of NASA, but the reverse - defunding NASA slowed things down. Instead, we should have done what was done with the airlines, and continued the R&D and infrastructure, while putting out huge contracts to private industry to hit real targets. Not LEO satellite launches, though those are fine, but big targets - solar power satellites, lunar base, mars base, etc., that really push humanity forwards.
Except, of course, that metal is much stronger and more durable, and feels much nicer to hold than plastic. And it's true that metal can dent, but plastic cracks and shatters, which is worse.
Not sure what you mean by saying that plastic "even protects the screen somewhat better". The design of the bezel would be a factor, but I don't see how for an identical design the glass would be better protected by plastic than metal.
I think you missed the key point that the kids learn about computers, including building the computer that they then program, so the whole thing is less mysterious, and it's something that they own and control, not borrowing time on the "family PC". Note that the first part of the instructions is wiring up the Raspberry Pi, a speaker, etc., so they learn about electronics, not just computer programming. And they're targeting the Raspberry Pi, not a PC, because they're giving kids their own simple computer and teaching them all about it, and they don't want to assume anything but a TV. And the Pi is not only cheap, it's open and physically approachable, and kid sized.
If you don't care about hardware and want to teach kids programming on an old PC, that's great. But actually do it. It's not productive to whine about people actually doing something just because you want to do something different.
The kit is for people who want a computer, keyboard, software pre-loaded on an SD card, book, etc.
You're expected to plug it into a TV that you already own, which is why they don't include a monitor.
You can also just use the software. It's a free download (http://www.kano.me/downloads) and all of the source code is on GitHub. Heck, they even let you download the content of the books for free.
So the premise is that if you want the physical stuff (Pi, keyboard, books, software on SD card) it's $129, and if already own the physical stuff you can download the software and instructional content for free. Given that they invested a lot of effort into creating the instructional environment and the content, it's pretty good that the give it all away. But their goal is to educate kids, not to make a lot of money.
So how exactly is it a rip off? You're too lazy to download the software and books they give you for free, so you want them to package everything up for cheaper than $129? Really? Do you think their work is worth nothing?
The US has no real industrial/education policy, just quarterly ROI targets, so we destroyed our space program, manufacturing capability, etc., because it was in the short-term ROI interests of various corporations.
On the flip side, we accidentally made the internet, so roughly half the people on the planet have access to virtually limitless knowledge, empowering anyone to do amazing things. That's good.
The question isn't whether "mainstream" users buy midrange computers - of course they do, since that's the definition of mainstream.
The question is whether a faster CPU has significant benefit in the things that mainstream people do, so there is a real value to them in a faster and faster CPUs. These days, the CPU is rarely the performance bottleneck - for mainstream applications, more RAM, SSD, faster network, longer battery life, screen resolution, etc., are all of more value to users. So if you're going to spend more to make a "better" device, faster CPU isn't an obvious choice, because the faster CPU means higher cost, shorter battery life, etc., so users might well be much happier with a slower CPU but better battery life, lower cost, etc.
Yes, if a faster CPU didn't cost more, and had no other impact on the device, of course everyone would like a faster CPU. But in the real world, putting a 6 core i7 into a watch would be stupid.:-)
I hope you're right. But battery density really hasn't improved ever - they're the same as they were decades ago. All of the reduction in cell phone battery size has been due to reduced power consumption. A huge factor is improved cell tower penetration. The smaller the cells, the closer the antenna, so transmitting takes less power (half the distance = a quarter the power). And the protocols have been designed to be more power efficient, and the CPU, etc., has gotten smarter, allowing the parts of the phone not in use to power off. So they've done wonders in reducing power consumption. But if something could improve battery power density the way CPU speed has, that would change everything!
Look at it this way - since Apple is the only company selling iPhones, once the display is so good you can't see the pixels there's no rational reason to make the resolution higher as that just increases costs and slows performance with no benefit to the user, and Apple's all about optimizing user experience. In the Android market, there are a bunch of manufacturers all losing money trying to compete in a cut-throat market, so somebody's going to push the screen resolution just so they can put a bigger number on the box and try to get sales that way. And most consumers won't realize that they're buying pixels they can't see, and getting slower performance and shorter battery life, because the manufacturer sure isn't going to put that on the box.
Phones aren't just about specs. Anyone can put a bigger display on a phone - that's easy! The challenge is in making the right tradeoffs between screen, battery, CPU, GPU, camera, etc., to give the best user experience balanced with battery life and size. And Apple is great at making those tradeoffs, because they can apply resources to do "impossible" things, like buying 10,000 CNC mills to mill their phones' "unibody" frames from solid metal in mass production, when any sane phone company would use injection molded plastic because that's cheap and easy. So Apple changed the rules, and makes phones that no other manufacturer can physically make, and they got people to care about it because it lets them make phones that are beautiful and slim. Ditto the innovations in the glass, display, etc. That's not to say that the other companies don't innovate - they do, but they tend to do less interesting, more incremental stuff, like pushing clock speed or screen resolution up a bit, and they leave most of the R&D up to Google and Intel.
Nobody's saying that innovation should stop, just that CPU is "good enough".
Faster CPU is not the only possible innovation, and not increasing CPU speed does not mean "status quo". If the CPU is fast enough for mainstream users, innovation can apply to other aspects that people actually care about, like camera quality, battery life, voice quality, data speed, waterproofing, improved functionality, screen quality,... you name it!
To state the obvious, if people didn't think that 16 GB was enough storage, they'd buy more of the models with more storage.
Surprisingly large percentages of smartphone buyers only install a few apps and no media. They apparently talk on the thing!:-) For them, paying more for more storage would be a waste of money.
Look, if people want what you don't, that doesn't mean that they're all deceived and "fleeced", it means that most people care about things you don't care about. I had an engineer who reacted to the iPod Nano launch with the verdict that it was "stupid" and that nobody would buy one because the price/storage ratio was terrible, and it couldn't store all your music, after which the Nano rapidly became the best selling MP3 player of all time (at the time). Because what people cared about wasn't storage, or cost per GB, it was convenient access to some music, and a nice looking, durable, easy to use device.
If most users are buying 16 GB phones and are happy with that, why would Apple add more storage to the base model? Instead they can take the dollar or two saved and use that to pay for the improved camera, glass, etc., which people might care about more.
Best selling means that most actual consumers think that 16 GB is enough. That means that while _you_ want more storage in a smartphone, most people don't. That doesn't make them wrong.:-)
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The problem is that they ask everyone a question where the honest answer, for the majority of candidates, results in rejection, but lying and getting caught results in rejection. So basically they filter down to who either have absolutely no technical curiosity at all, or people who can lie and get away with it. Both of those are bad for the FBI, since they'll be populated by luddites and liers.
Gun buyers might think that "The primary function of guns in private hands is to protect those who carry them" but the statistics don't support that. Homes with guns in them have 5x the suicide death rate of homes without guns. people in those homes are much more likely to get killed with the gun than be saved from a crime by the gun. That's not to say that guns are never used to defend your home, of course, but homes with guns in them aren't less likely to be broken into, because criminals try not to break into homes while anyone is home, so the gun isn't relevant.
And countries with strict gun controls have much lower gun deaths, without having higher crime rates. So not having guns doesn't promote crime.
So we're down to "having guns makes some people feel safer" but in reality they're just promoting suicide and shooting family members. Because everyone can get depressed or angry. And when they do, if they have a gun someone's much more likely to die. If they use their fists, or a knife, death is less likely.
And I'm pretty sure we're all anti-death. Right?
Building is tightly regulated. There are building codes, inspections, etc., all to try to keep people safer. Yes, some builders cheat and get away with it, and some failures occur anyway.
There are about 14,000 gun deaths a year. Compared to 30 deaths from water heaters, I'd say that it's appropriate to focus more effort on the cause of 14,000 deaths more than the cause of 30 deaths. And right now, the water heaters are a _lot_ more carefully regulated than the guns. Perhaps that's why they're so much safer?
When Israel stopped letting soldiers take their guns home, the suicide rate of soldiers dropped to 1/6th the rate. That's a lot of lives saved.
In reality, when fewer people have guns at home, they die less often from suicide. Because guns make it easy to commit suicide and are highly effective, and it's harder to commit suicide using a knife, hanging, etc., and you're more likely to survive the attempt. As a society, I think we want to discourage suicide.
No, when the assault weapons "ban" was in effect, there were fewer mass shootings. Though the "ban" was quite weak, allowing gun manufacturers to largely work around them largely with cosmetic changes (technically complying with the law, while still making it easy to kill lots of people), even a weak ban did correspond to fewer shootings and fewer deaths. http://aneconomicsense.com/201... . And if a weak ban with tons of exceptions (thanks, NRA) reduced mass shootings and deaths, and the end of the ban increase mass shootings and deaths, it's hard to argue against an assault weapons ban, and one more effective than the last one, in order to save more lives.
Similarly, states with lax gun control laws, like Virginia, Pensylvania, Arizona and New Mexico clearly want to sell lots of guns to criminals, who then use them in states like NYC and DC, undermining their gun control laws ineffective. When states like Arizona and Virginia pass laws specifically to encourage "straw buyers" to buy guns for cash then flip them to criminals, there's not much any other state can do to protect themselves. Heck, Arizona made it illegal for the ATF to follow even a homeless man who was buying $10K a week in guns with cash, and clearly doing so for felons who weren't allowed to buy the guns themselves. And even better, the NRA got a law passe prohibiting the government from retaining serial numbers of sold guns or identities of buyers or sellers, making it impossible to track guns used in crimes back to either the buyer or the seller. That's great if your goal is to make it east for violent criminals to buy guns, but bad for people who think that's a bad idea.
Nobody's arguing that it can be impossible for people to make guns at home. Anyone with a block of wood, a drill, a rubber band, and a nail can make a gun at home.
What they're arguing that it should be illegal to make untraceable, undetectable (by magnetometer) guns, or to distribute designs for them, so that when people do so, and then get caught, there's a strong enough penalty sufficient to deter people from doing so. Because penalties affect people's behavior, which is useful when they're too stupid to care about the broader repercussions of their actions, such as flooding the country with undetectable guns leading to lots of murders, but still care about personally getting thrown in jail for a decade.
According to the people who wrote the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment was written to ensure that States had the right to form a militia, not an individual right for anyone to own any gun with no restrictions. At the time, when someone tried to build a private army, they executed him for treason. And since then, there have always been laws restricting who can own what kinds of weapons. Nobody sane argues that literally anyone should be allowed any weapon. For example, violent felons shouldn't be allowed to have guns, nobody outside of the military can own military weaponry, etc. The only debate is where the line should be drawn.
Heck, for most of its history, the NRA supported conservative gun regulations, and opposed people walking around with guns in public without a specific reason. Their recent swing towards anarchy is a complete disconnect from their own historical positions, driven by the organization being taken over by gun salesmen when they forced out the gun owners in the 70s. Since then, they're willing to do anything if it leads to more gun sales. Make it easy for felons to buy guns and commit crimes, and make it impossible to track the guns back to where they were sold, so you can't stop it? Great! When people are more scared, they'll buy more guns! Who cares if a bunch of people end up dead, if it's highly profitable.
I miss the old NRA - I used to teach riflery to kids, and the old NRA was all about responsible gun ownership.
Keep in mind, his goal isn't to do anything of any practical value, it's to make a ideological point. Pragmatically, guns are cheap and easy to make already, and have been for a long, long time. But now he got to attach his pet obsession to 3D printing and CNC milling, getting some publicity. And in the case of his tiny CNC mill, he managed to sell a bunch of moderately expensive, tiny CNC mills to gun fanatics, which is profitable, if sleazy. Anyone who actually wanted a useful CNC mill would go for the less expensive, more capable CNC mills already on the market. But I imagine he found a sufficient number of customers who didn't know better.
Right. UK, Israel, Canada, Switzeland, German, Japan, etc., are all totalitarian states.
And for perspective, the first thing that Hitler did (relative to guns) was to eliminate German gun control laws, so his thugs could run around armed.
That's not to say that lack of gun control leads to totalitarian governments, of course, but it does rather clearly show that gun control isn't what leads to totalitarianism.
Keep in mind that it was the gun industry that had those exceptions injected specifically to try to render the gun control laws ineffective. But that doesn't mean that gun control laws are ineffective, just that gun control laws shouldn't be written by gun salesmen.
There's a place for NASA as well - private industry isn't going to explore space or do research, just commercialize business opportunities. Those "PR stunts" are what enabled private industry to start commercializing space.
It's very similar to how airlines got started. At first it was "PR stunts" that laid the groundwork, followed by airplanes being almost 100% government funded, with military and mail delivery contracts that pushed private industry to build the airplanes and infrastructure to deliver on the contracts, until decades later the airlines became self-sustaining (though heavily subsidized as they are now, with government-provided airports, control, weather, etc.). None of that magically happened, that was the result of a national policy to grow airplanes and airlines, with $billions invested.
In space, defunding NASA and replacing it with nothing just means that it's all moving at a snail's pace. We could have had bases on the Moon and Mars long ago, and should have. We're decades behind where we should have been, not because of the existence of NASA, but the reverse - defunding NASA slowed things down. Instead, we should have done what was done with the airlines, and continued the R&D and infrastructure, while putting out huge contracts to private industry to hit real targets. Not LEO satellite launches, though those are fine, but big targets - solar power satellites, lunar base, mars base, etc., that really push humanity forwards.
Except, of course, that metal is much stronger and more durable, and feels much nicer to hold than plastic. And it's true that metal can dent, but plastic cracks and shatters, which is worse.
Not sure what you mean by saying that plastic "even protects the screen somewhat better". The design of the bezel would be a factor, but I don't see how for an identical design the glass would be better protected by plastic than metal.
I think you missed the key point that the kids learn about computers, including building the computer that they then program, so the whole thing is less mysterious, and it's something that they own and control, not borrowing time on the "family PC". Note that the first part of the instructions is wiring up the Raspberry Pi, a speaker, etc., so they learn about electronics, not just computer programming. And they're targeting the Raspberry Pi, not a PC, because they're giving kids their own simple computer and teaching them all about it, and they don't want to assume anything but a TV. And the Pi is not only cheap, it's open and physically approachable, and kid sized.
If you don't care about hardware and want to teach kids programming on an old PC, that's great. But actually do it. It's not productive to whine about people actually doing something just because you want to do something different.
Or you can buy a Raspberry Pi and an SD card, download the software and books for free, and stop whining (parent poster).
The kit is for people who want a computer, keyboard, software pre-loaded on an SD card, book, etc.
You're expected to plug it into a TV that you already own, which is why they don't include a monitor.
You can also just use the software. It's a free download (http://www.kano.me/downloads) and all of the source code is on GitHub. Heck, they even let you download the content of the books for free.
So the premise is that if you want the physical stuff (Pi, keyboard, books, software on SD card) it's $129, and if already own the physical stuff you can download the software and instructional content for free. Given that they invested a lot of effort into creating the instructional environment and the content, it's pretty good that the give it all away. But their goal is to educate kids, not to make a lot of money.
So how exactly is it a rip off? You're too lazy to download the software and books they give you for free, so you want them to package everything up for cheaper than $129? Really? Do you think their work is worth nothing?
The US has no real industrial/education policy, just quarterly ROI targets, so we destroyed our space program, manufacturing capability, etc., because it was in the short-term ROI interests of various corporations.
On the flip side, we accidentally made the internet, so roughly half the people on the planet have access to virtually limitless knowledge, empowering anyone to do amazing things. That's good.
The question isn't whether "mainstream" users buy midrange computers - of course they do, since that's the definition of mainstream.
The question is whether a faster CPU has significant benefit in the things that mainstream people do, so there is a real value to them in a faster and faster CPUs. These days, the CPU is rarely the performance bottleneck - for mainstream applications, more RAM, SSD, faster network, longer battery life, screen resolution, etc., are all of more value to users. So if you're going to spend more to make a "better" device, faster CPU isn't an obvious choice, because the faster CPU means higher cost, shorter battery life, etc., so users might well be much happier with a slower CPU but better battery life, lower cost, etc.
Yes, if a faster CPU didn't cost more, and had no other impact on the device, of course everyone would like a faster CPU. But in the real world, putting a 6 core i7 into a watch would be stupid. :-)
I hope you're right. But battery density really hasn't improved ever - they're the same as they were decades ago. All of the reduction in cell phone battery size has been due to reduced power consumption. A huge factor is improved cell tower penetration. The smaller the cells, the closer the antenna, so transmitting takes less power (half the distance = a quarter the power). And the protocols have been designed to be more power efficient, and the CPU, etc., has gotten smarter, allowing the parts of the phone not in use to power off. So they've done wonders in reducing power consumption. But if something could improve battery power density the way CPU speed has, that would change everything!
Look at it this way - since Apple is the only company selling iPhones, once the display is so good you can't see the pixels there's no rational reason to make the resolution higher as that just increases costs and slows performance with no benefit to the user, and Apple's all about optimizing user experience. In the Android market, there are a bunch of manufacturers all losing money trying to compete in a cut-throat market, so somebody's going to push the screen resolution just so they can put a bigger number on the box and try to get sales that way. And most consumers won't realize that they're buying pixels they can't see, and getting slower performance and shorter battery life, because the manufacturer sure isn't going to put that on the box.
Phones aren't just about specs. Anyone can put a bigger display on a phone - that's easy! The challenge is in making the right tradeoffs between screen, battery, CPU, GPU, camera, etc., to give the best user experience balanced with battery life and size. And Apple is great at making those tradeoffs, because they can apply resources to do "impossible" things, like buying 10,000 CNC mills to mill their phones' "unibody" frames from solid metal in mass production, when any sane phone company would use injection molded plastic because that's cheap and easy. So Apple changed the rules, and makes phones that no other manufacturer can physically make, and they got people to care about it because it lets them make phones that are beautiful and slim. Ditto the innovations in the glass, display, etc. That's not to say that the other companies don't innovate - they do, but they tend to do less interesting, more incremental stuff, like pushing clock speed or screen resolution up a bit, and they leave most of the R&D up to Google and Intel.
That's true of everything but minimal food and shelter.
But people use their phones a lot more than any other device, other than perhaps a car or shoes, so it's rational that they want to optimize them.
Nobody's saying that innovation should stop, just that CPU is "good enough".
Faster CPU is not the only possible innovation, and not increasing CPU speed does not mean "status quo". If the CPU is fast enough for mainstream users, innovation can apply to other aspects that people actually care about, like camera quality, battery life, voice quality, data speed, waterproofing, improved functionality, screen quality, ... you name it!
To state the obvious, if people didn't think that 16 GB was enough storage, they'd buy more of the models with more storage.
Surprisingly large percentages of smartphone buyers only install a few apps and no media. They apparently talk on the thing! :-) For them, paying more for more storage would be a waste of money.
Look, if people want what you don't, that doesn't mean that they're all deceived and "fleeced", it means that most people care about things you don't care about. I had an engineer who reacted to the iPod Nano launch with the verdict that it was "stupid" and that nobody would buy one because the price/storage ratio was terrible, and it couldn't store all your music, after which the Nano rapidly became the best selling MP3 player of all time (at the time). Because what people cared about wasn't storage, or cost per GB, it was convenient access to some music, and a nice looking, durable, easy to use device.
If most users are buying 16 GB phones and are happy with that, why would Apple add more storage to the base model? Instead they can take the dollar or two saved and use that to pay for the improved camera, glass, etc., which people might care about more.
Best selling means that most actual consumers think that 16 GB is enough. That means that while _you_ want more storage in a smartphone, most people don't. That doesn't make them wrong. :-)