More importantly, does Amazon know what brokers are expected to do for that 15%? You can try to "appify" everything but unlike a taxi, trucking actually has some significant legwork done by "dispatch/brokers". Do customers and drivers really want to directly communicate with each other about arrival times, dock bays, etc. and if they do, are customers going to ignore the cost of the extra staff they will have to hire to communicate with the drivers?
I helped install and configure truck dispatching software in the late 90's / early 00's, and I am honestly surprised that profession still exists today. Lack of technology investment is the only answer I can come up with. There is nothing they did a decade ago that cannot be done by software.
They recommend the best routes for the drivers -> A large truck optimized version of Google maps could do this much better than any human They keep track of fuel costs and other transportation costs to ensure each route is profitable -> Easily done by software They know their driver's habits -> So would tracking software which would be far more objective They look ahead for connecting loads -> Much better done by algorithms They basically work 60-80 hours a week -> Algorithms work 168 hours a week They negotiate load price -> As if Amazon couldn't do this in a more automated fashion. It's certainly in their core competency.
They have a friendly relationship with their drivers -> The one thing software would have trouble with, but virtually all communication could easily be moved to call centers.
The working class wouldn't be stagnating if their proportion of earnings had scaled along with the CEOs.
That is certainly not Bush's fault any more than it is the fault of every President for the past 30 years. Labor does not have the same value it did 50 years ago. Recent productivity gains are not the result of a more skilled overall workforce, like it was in the 1950's, they are the result of the investment of capital and a small subset of the population with greatly increased skills. This has caused the wealth of the wealthy and the size of the upper middle class to explode in the past 30 years.
Every President of the USA in the past few decades bears responsibility for not creating policies to help the working class more (such as increased funding of education / job re-training and overall income redistribution) but none of them caused the problem itself. Progress did.
Had there been a different president (even a different republican one), I suspect the recession still would have hit, but at least there could have been at least ATTEMPTS to acknowledge and begin to combat the systemic problems.
As a point of clarification, Bush is still certainly responsible for many bad things that happened in this country and around the world in the past decade and a half. I was merely referring to those who blame Bush for how the world is right now. Obama and four Congresses have had plenty of time to fix problems or make them worse in the last eight years. Even if Bush is still the root cause of some problems, the same could be said for Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagon, and all the way back to our founding fathers. At some point we need to take responsibility for not fixing what was broken, instead of blaming the person who initially broke it.
I think that time passed some time over the past few years for Bush, which is why I don't blame him for nearly any of our country's current problems anymore.
I'd say Bush's foreign policy can be directly linked to a lot of the shit that has gone on over the last six or seven years.
I was admittedly only thinking of domestic issues when I wrote my comment. I think that comes from my living in the USA's upper middle class, where those foreign policy blunders have had virtually no negative effect. Affluent people in my country tend not to join the military, and the USA does not have the same level of refugee and terrorist risks that places like Europe and the Middle East do.
I certainly agree Bush's Iraq invasion set the stage for a large amount of the problems the world is facing right now in the Middle East, but then again you would need to go back centuries to get to the root causes.
Why not? There's still people around here blaming Bush...
Most of the time you see people "blaming Bush" (and other previous administrations) is when others try to blame the Great Recession on Obama, or try to compare this recover to those which followed much smaller and less systemic recessions. If you are going to rate Obama's performance it is necessary to acknowledge he was left with the worst recession since 1929, and its more apt to compare the 2009-2016 recover with 1929-1936. Pointing that out often includes at least some casting of blame on previous administrations.
There is honestly very little to blame on Bush at this point. The systemic problems we still face either reach back to policies built up over the past 30+ years, or are primarily the result of a changing world (such as working class stagnation). At this point the only two major things I can think of to blame on Bush is the extra stimulus spending necessary because he let things get so bad and the after-effects of the war(s) he started. But even though I have little love for the man, its not very reasonable to blame many of our current problems on Bush anymore.
I'm sure people will blame Obama for leaving Trump too good of an economy, but overall he will have a hard time credibly blaming any of his problems on Obama. Then again he doesn't hasn't had to worry about his statements being credible for them to be believed so far.
Not being able to do tip in your head has nothing to do with being bad at mental arithmetic. It is a lack of understanding of what percentages represent. Multiplying by 0.15 is not very easy for most people, but dividing by ten and either adding half of that, doubling it, or something in between is easy for anyone with very basic arithmetic skills.
People who think calculating tip is difficult are usually the same type who complain about the common core not being intuitive.
So essentially, they could be saying "We have 25,000 government contracting positions for which we are being told that employing H1B visa holders can jeopardize the awarding of contracts. So for these contracts, when an employee leaves, we will replace them with U.S. workers."
She could be saying that, but considering her careful wording it is quite doubtful. The language of her actual article includes the same language CEO's are using to justify H1B labor today. This includes stating we need new skills for the new economy (with the implication her current and former employees couldn't have been retrained) and that the US government needs to redouble efforts to train more future employees (or else IBM will need to continue hiring H1B holders).
Obviously you cannot know for certain what IBM will do based on a self-serving and cryptic newspaper article, but based on IBM's history no reasonable person could conclude any changes are coming from them. Not based on these statements anyway.
As always, the real problem is that people don't realize that these announcements are written in a way to deceive from the outset, maths has nothing to do with any thing.
I admittedly was lumping concepts like logical reasoning and number sense into the field of mathematics when I made my comment. But that certainly wasn't clear when I used an example of simple computation to criticize math skills. IMO, the worst part of having poor math skills is not the inability to compute numbers, but the inability to identify flawed reasoning especially when numbers are involved. A personal pet peeve of mine is when someone says they were good at math in school except for word problems, which only shows they were quite poor at math but could at least do some simple computation.
Your comment seems half in jest, but then again so must IBM's statement be. Saying they will hire 25k professionals over 4 years is meaningless. They didn't say they will have a 25k net greater number of US professionals, just that they will hire 25k people over 4 years. With 84k US employees today (roughly), it would only take a 7.5% yearly turnover for them to hit that target with no net job increases at all. The only extra bit of information is that they intend their US workforce to be greater in 2020 than it is today, which would be true even if they only gain a few dozen jobs.
This type of PR drivel is only possible in a country with math education so poor there is a market for tip calculators.
I can't believe i have to spell it out for you. The courts can easily see through the circular logic of requiring language skills to work with the people in the outsourcing company for jobs being filled by the outsourcing company.
It isn't circular logic. You hire an outsourcing company because they are much cheaper. They need liaisons in the US who can communicate with cheaper labor overseas (there is no requirement that overseas labor needs to be paid US-level wages). So it is perfectly reasonable that those US workers be able to effectively communicate in the overseas workers' native tongue.
Unless you have a reason for them needing to speak this language, other than to exclude local talent then this will fall flat on it's face.
There is a reason: so you can communicate with offshore staff more effectively. I have always enjoyed having a Hindi speaker with good English skills on my US-based team (usually H1B) when I have to work with India-based contractors. Communication is much simpler when they can speak in their native tongue than trying to do everything in English. In truth I usually have more trouble understanding their English than they do understanding mine, especially over the phone.
It may be a rare language in India, but that still means over 75 million Indians speak Telugu natively. That is three times as many people that speak Dutch, for instance. So it may be rare, but if the offshore development shop is in Visakhapatnam then it wouldn't be unheard of for a number of them to speak Telugu natively.
You dumbshit. I am from Gujarat. We don't speak telugu, but we sure as shit know what it is.
I am not from India, so I can only go off published data such as the Indian census, but there are apparently over 75 million native Telugu speakers in India. I agree it would be more common to have a Hindi language requirement, but it looks like there are still plenty of Indians speaking Telugu. Nearly all educated Indians may speak English as well, but almost every Indian/Chinese/Argentinian/etc. developer I have worked with was more comfortable speaking in their native tongue than English. If I had to manage a large team of offshore native Telugu speaking developers I would certainly want some local Telugu speaking contractors / employees to help communicate with them.
That's the fallacy of "Globalization" right there. It does not pull people up, it drags them down.
The problem with Globalization is not that its benefits are a fallacy, it's that its benefits are not evenly distributed. The greatest gains are to those with enough capital to invest in companies which benefit from global markets. Then there are those in developing countries, such as China where the average salary has tripled in the last decade. The professional class in developed countries also benefit greatly, such as in the USA where 2/3 of the people leaving the middle class are moving into the upper middle class.
Then there is the working class in developed countries, who are likely to be hurt by globalization. They get to take advantage of lower priced goods like everyone else, but only if they stay employed. Most of them do stay employed, but it only takes a few percentage points of the population to lose out for millions of people to be negatively affected.
The problem is that the working class may be even worse off without globalization, since even cheap workers in developing countries are starting to have trouble competing with automation. Reduced globalization reduces the market for products the developed world still needs skilled working class employees for, and the working class still cannot compete with automation for the manufacturing brought back to the US.
> Not if a job requirement was specified as being able to speak in Telugu.
I hate to be a party pooper. But courts are capable of seeing through something that transparent.
Telugu is not some made up language. It is a real language native to India, and if the outsourcing company is using two Indian natives for every one local employee, it is very reasonable for the job requirements to include speaking the language. Nothing for the courts to refute.
Your company isn't responsible for your future employability.
Any company that thinks like this doesn't care about people and will do unacceptable things to exploit you as an expendable resource. The world is rapidly become a shitter place because of this.
I agree that a company which doesn't take an employee's career into significant consideration is a poor employer, but the strategic needs of a company will often not coincide with all of its employees. The thought that employees should be able to absolve responsibility of handling their career to their employee is essentially treating them as children incapable of caring for themselves.
Which is why you don't stick around at a company which is too far behind the times. Your company isn't responsible for your future employability. You are. Once enough exit interviews show them why their best people are leaving they will either change or keep losing all but their worst employees (probably forcing them to bring in contractors).
There is only one thing a food needs to be to be considering a pie. And that is to be called a pie by a significant number of people. And pizza clearly meets that definition. Considering early pies were a mix of meat and vegetables, while fruit pies didn't appear for another 300 years, pizzas arguably have more in common with the original definition than what you would traditionally find in a bakery.
If you can't find a phone you want in 2016 then you may be a bit too picky. Hard to have real feels for such people.
It isn't about finding a phone you want, its about finding a phone you are willing to pay $600-$800 for. If the Note 4 and the Note 5 were the same price, I would pick the Note 5. But it certainly isn't worth $200-$300 more than the Note 4, in my opinion at least. IMO the Note 7 wasn't worth the upgrade either, which is why only my wife upgraded and not me.
There aren't any flagship phones with a stylus and 5.7"+ screen, so right now there aren't any real competitors to the Note line for those who care about those specs.
There is a good argument for better software design being more important than Moore's Law when it comes to complex breakthroughs in computing. It can be hard to quantify how algorithm improvements compare to hardware improvements, but the field of numerical algorithms gives some insight.
In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.
My guess is we have plenty of room for improvement as we find ways to live within the confines of physics. Even if we don't find a better alternative to silicon based computing, advances in computer science has the potential to improve our computational ability by a factor of millions without needing Moore's law.
They should be forced to reimburse you the full price of the item they damaged. That will teach them. Oh wait...
And reimburse you for any cancellation fees for any carrier plans you may have signed up for, and replace your old phone for the same price you traded it in for. Lets not pretend Samsung fully reimbursed their Note 7 customers.
In the US many people still buy phones as part of a contract and Samsung has not even offered to buy out the new contracts that were bought as part of the purchase. What Samsung has offered is only partial reimbursement of the costs incurred.
On top of this, many people trade in their old phones and were forced to either buy a new phone they didn't want or buy a refurbished version of their old phone at likely $100 more than they traded in the old one. That is what happened to my wife.
Except if people know they can own a movie in just two short weeks and be able to watch it in the comfort of their home, they will not pay the $30+ to go to the movie theater.
You are assuming the movie rental would be under $30. I remember recently reading an article on a similar topic which estimated the cost of an in-home rental for a major movie still in theaters could be around $40-50. This is primarily to ensure going to the theater is still the cheapest option, and only those who really need the convenience would view from home.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, does Amazon know what brokers are expected to do for that 15%? You can try to "appify" everything but unlike a taxi, trucking actually has some significant legwork done by "dispatch/brokers". Do customers and drivers really want to directly communicate with each other about arrival times, dock bays, etc. and if they do, are customers going to ignore the cost of the extra staff they will have to hire to communicate with the drivers?
I helped install and configure truck dispatching software in the late 90's / early 00's, and I am honestly surprised that profession still exists today. Lack of technology investment is the only answer I can come up with. There is nothing they did a decade ago that cannot be done by software.
They recommend the best routes for the drivers -> A large truck optimized version of Google maps could do this much better than any human
They keep track of fuel costs and other transportation costs to ensure each route is profitable -> Easily done by software
They know their driver's habits -> So would tracking software which would be far more objective
They look ahead for connecting loads -> Much better done by algorithms
They basically work 60-80 hours a week -> Algorithms work 168 hours a week
They negotiate load price -> As if Amazon couldn't do this in a more automated fashion. It's certainly in their core competency.
They have a friendly relationship with their drivers -> The one thing software would have trouble with, but virtually all communication could easily be moved to call centers.
The danger of overpopulation.
Easily solved. Just charge $25k/person/year. And wallah, negligible increased overpopulation.
The working class wouldn't be stagnating if their proportion of earnings had scaled along with the CEOs.
That is certainly not Bush's fault any more than it is the fault of every President for the past 30 years. Labor does not have the same value it did 50 years ago. Recent productivity gains are not the result of a more skilled overall workforce, like it was in the 1950's, they are the result of the investment of capital and a small subset of the population with greatly increased skills. This has caused the wealth of the wealthy and the size of the upper middle class to explode in the past 30 years.
Every President of the USA in the past few decades bears responsibility for not creating policies to help the working class more (such as increased funding of education / job re-training and overall income redistribution) but none of them caused the problem itself. Progress did.
Had there been a different president (even a different republican one), I suspect the recession still would have hit, but at least there could have been at least ATTEMPTS to acknowledge and begin to combat the systemic problems.
As a point of clarification, Bush is still certainly responsible for many bad things that happened in this country and around the world in the past decade and a half. I was merely referring to those who blame Bush for how the world is right now. Obama and four Congresses have had plenty of time to fix problems or make them worse in the last eight years. Even if Bush is still the root cause of some problems, the same could be said for Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagon, and all the way back to our founding fathers. At some point we need to take responsibility for not fixing what was broken, instead of blaming the person who initially broke it.
I think that time passed some time over the past few years for Bush, which is why I don't blame him for nearly any of our country's current problems anymore.
I'd say Bush's foreign policy can be directly linked to a lot of the shit that has gone on over the last six or seven years.
I was admittedly only thinking of domestic issues when I wrote my comment. I think that comes from my living in the USA's upper middle class, where those foreign policy blunders have had virtually no negative effect. Affluent people in my country tend not to join the military, and the USA does not have the same level of refugee and terrorist risks that places like Europe and the Middle East do.
I certainly agree Bush's Iraq invasion set the stage for a large amount of the problems the world is facing right now in the Middle East, but then again you would need to go back centuries to get to the root causes.
Why not? There's still people around here blaming Bush...
Most of the time you see people "blaming Bush" (and other previous administrations) is when others try to blame the Great Recession on Obama, or try to compare this recover to those which followed much smaller and less systemic recessions. If you are going to rate Obama's performance it is necessary to acknowledge he was left with the worst recession since 1929, and its more apt to compare the 2009-2016 recover with 1929-1936. Pointing that out often includes at least some casting of blame on previous administrations.
There is honestly very little to blame on Bush at this point. The systemic problems we still face either reach back to policies built up over the past 30+ years, or are primarily the result of a changing world (such as working class stagnation). At this point the only two major things I can think of to blame on Bush is the extra stimulus spending necessary because he let things get so bad and the after-effects of the war(s) he started. But even though I have little love for the man, its not very reasonable to blame many of our current problems on Bush anymore.
I'm sure people will blame Obama for leaving Trump too good of an economy, but overall he will have a hard time credibly blaming any of his problems on Obama. Then again he doesn't hasn't had to worry about his statements being credible for them to be believed so far.
Not being able to do tip in your head has nothing to do with being bad at mental arithmetic. It is a lack of understanding of what percentages represent. Multiplying by 0.15 is not very easy for most people, but dividing by ten and either adding half of that, doubling it, or something in between is easy for anyone with very basic arithmetic skills.
People who think calculating tip is difficult are usually the same type who complain about the common core not being intuitive.
So essentially, they could be saying "We have 25,000 government contracting positions for which we are being told that employing H1B visa holders can jeopardize the awarding of contracts. So for these contracts, when an employee leaves, we will replace them with U.S. workers."
She could be saying that, but considering her careful wording it is quite doubtful. The language of her actual article includes the same language CEO's are using to justify H1B labor today. This includes stating we need new skills for the new economy (with the implication her current and former employees couldn't have been retrained) and that the US government needs to redouble efforts to train more future employees (or else IBM will need to continue hiring H1B holders).
Obviously you cannot know for certain what IBM will do based on a self-serving and cryptic newspaper article, but based on IBM's history no reasonable person could conclude any changes are coming from them. Not based on these statements anyway.
As always, the real problem is that people don't realize that these announcements are written in a way to deceive from the outset, maths has nothing to do with any thing.
I admittedly was lumping concepts like logical reasoning and number sense into the field of mathematics when I made my comment. But that certainly wasn't clear when I used an example of simple computation to criticize math skills. IMO, the worst part of having poor math skills is not the inability to compute numbers, but the inability to identify flawed reasoning especially when numbers are involved. A personal pet peeve of mine is when someone says they were good at math in school except for word problems, which only shows they were quite poor at math but could at least do some simple computation.
Your comment seems half in jest, but then again so must IBM's statement be. Saying they will hire 25k professionals over 4 years is meaningless. They didn't say they will have a 25k net greater number of US professionals, just that they will hire 25k people over 4 years. With 84k US employees today (roughly), it would only take a 7.5% yearly turnover for them to hit that target with no net job increases at all. The only extra bit of information is that they intend their US workforce to be greater in 2020 than it is today, which would be true even if they only gain a few dozen jobs.
This type of PR drivel is only possible in a country with math education so poor there is a market for tip calculators.
I can't believe i have to spell it out for you. The courts can easily see through the circular logic of requiring language skills to work with the people in the outsourcing company for jobs being filled by the outsourcing company.
It isn't circular logic. You hire an outsourcing company because they are much cheaper. They need liaisons in the US who can communicate with cheaper labor overseas (there is no requirement that overseas labor needs to be paid US-level wages). So it is perfectly reasonable that those US workers be able to effectively communicate in the overseas workers' native tongue.
Unless you have a reason for them needing to speak this language, other than to exclude local talent then this will fall flat on it's face.
There is a reason: so you can communicate with offshore staff more effectively. I have always enjoyed having a Hindi speaker with good English skills on my US-based team (usually H1B) when I have to work with India-based contractors. Communication is much simpler when they can speak in their native tongue than trying to do everything in English. In truth I usually have more trouble understanding their English than they do understanding mine, especially over the phone.
It may be a rare language in India, but that still means over 75 million Indians speak Telugu natively. That is three times as many people that speak Dutch, for instance. So it may be rare, but if the offshore development shop is in Visakhapatnam then it wouldn't be unheard of for a number of them to speak Telugu natively.
You dumbshit. I am from Gujarat. We don't speak telugu, but we sure as shit know what it is.
I am not from India, so I can only go off published data such as the Indian census, but there are apparently over 75 million native Telugu speakers in India. I agree it would be more common to have a Hindi language requirement, but it looks like there are still plenty of Indians speaking Telugu. Nearly all educated Indians may speak English as well, but almost every Indian/Chinese/Argentinian/etc. developer I have worked with was more comfortable speaking in their native tongue than English. If I had to manage a large team of offshore native Telugu speaking developers I would certainly want some local Telugu speaking contractors / employees to help communicate with them.
That's the fallacy of "Globalization" right there. It does not pull people up, it drags them down.
The problem with Globalization is not that its benefits are a fallacy, it's that its benefits are not evenly distributed. The greatest gains are to those with enough capital to invest in companies which benefit from global markets. Then there are those in developing countries, such as China where the average salary has tripled in the last decade. The professional class in developed countries also benefit greatly, such as in the USA where 2/3 of the people leaving the middle class are moving into the upper middle class.
Then there is the working class in developed countries, who are likely to be hurt by globalization. They get to take advantage of lower priced goods like everyone else, but only if they stay employed. Most of them do stay employed, but it only takes a few percentage points of the population to lose out for millions of people to be negatively affected.
The problem is that the working class may be even worse off without globalization, since even cheap workers in developing countries are starting to have trouble competing with automation. Reduced globalization reduces the market for products the developed world still needs skilled working class employees for, and the working class still cannot compete with automation for the manufacturing brought back to the US.
> Not if a job requirement was specified as being able to speak in Telugu.
I hate to be a party pooper. But courts are capable of seeing through something that transparent.
Telugu is not some made up language. It is a real language native to India, and if the outsourcing company is using two Indian natives for every one local employee, it is very reasonable for the job requirements to include speaking the language. Nothing for the courts to refute.
Your company isn't responsible for your future employability.
Any company that thinks like this doesn't care about people and will do unacceptable things to exploit you as an expendable resource. The world is rapidly become a shitter place because of this.
I agree that a company which doesn't take an employee's career into significant consideration is a poor employer, but the strategic needs of a company will often not coincide with all of its employees. The thought that employees should be able to absolve responsibility of handling their career to their employee is essentially treating them as children incapable of caring for themselves.
Which is why you don't stick around at a company which is too far behind the times. Your company isn't responsible for your future employability. You are. Once enough exit interviews show them why their best people are leaving they will either change or keep losing all but their worst employees (probably forcing them to bring in contractors).
There is only one thing a food needs to be to be considering a pie. And that is to be called a pie by a significant number of people. And pizza clearly meets that definition. Considering early pies were a mix of meat and vegetables, while fruit pies didn't appear for another 300 years, pizzas arguably have more in common with the original definition than what you would traditionally find in a bakery.
If you can't find a phone you want in 2016 then you may be a bit too picky. Hard to have real feels for such people.
It isn't about finding a phone you want, its about finding a phone you are willing to pay $600-$800 for. If the Note 4 and the Note 5 were the same price, I would pick the Note 5. But it certainly isn't worth $200-$300 more than the Note 4, in my opinion at least. IMO the Note 7 wasn't worth the upgrade either, which is why only my wife upgraded and not me.
There aren't any flagship phones with a stylus and 5.7"+ screen, so right now there aren't any real competitors to the Note line for those who care about those specs.
There is a good argument for better software design being more important than Moore's Law when it comes to complex breakthroughs in computing. It can be hard to quantify how algorithm improvements compare to hardware improvements, but the field of numerical algorithms gives some insight.
In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.
My guess is we have plenty of room for improvement as we find ways to live within the confines of physics. Even if we don't find a better alternative to silicon based computing, advances in computer science has the potential to improve our computational ability by a factor of millions without needing Moore's law.
They should be forced to reimburse you the full price of the item they damaged. That will teach them. Oh wait...
And reimburse you for any cancellation fees for any carrier plans you may have signed up for, and replace your old phone for the same price you traded it in for. Lets not pretend Samsung fully reimbursed their Note 7 customers.
In the US many people still buy phones as part of a contract and Samsung has not even offered to buy out the new contracts that were bought as part of the purchase. What Samsung has offered is only partial reimbursement of the costs incurred.
On top of this, many people trade in their old phones and were forced to either buy a new phone they didn't want or buy a refurbished version of their old phone at likely $100 more than they traded in the old one. That is what happened to my wife.
How ironic that we are quick to label countries who constantly find themselves involved in warfare as "civilized".
While I may wish it wasn't so, I see no indication from history that civilization and warfare are diametrically opposed.
Except if people know they can own a movie in just two short weeks and be able to watch it in the comfort of their home, they will not pay the $30+ to go to the movie theater.
You are assuming the movie rental would be under $30. I remember recently reading an article on a similar topic which estimated the cost of an in-home rental for a major movie still in theaters could be around $40-50. This is primarily to ensure going to the theater is still the cheapest option, and only those who really need the convenience would view from home.