The context was shoveling a barn, and you can't leave it until it dries out, can you? I don't know how often you have to clean a barn, or how long it takes for the manure to dry, but my naive assumption would be that it takes too long to dry for how often you need to shovel.
Not sure I agree. When I first saw the 1st gen iPhone I was so impressed with it, I went out and got one a few days later. This is before the App Store. Yes compared to today it might “suck” compared to the latest version, but the first iPhone was super compelling by itself at the time and started selling very well
Yeah I used my iPhone 1 for 4 years until I moved to the phone 4 (a year after it was released because I couldn't afford it new). It was a great device, only let down by its ridiculously slow data connection.
Citation needed. The 1st gen iPhone sold 6 million units over two years. The Nokia N95 (not a super mainstream device, but in a similarish price category) sold 10M. Other Nokia phones of the time period sold 100+ million devices. BlackBerry, LG, and Sony/Ericcson was in the tens of millions per device model.
Let’s not forget:
1. The iPhone didn’t support 3G, which essentially all other phones of a similar price point had
2. Was only available for AT&T customers in the US (then still known as Cingular Wireless)
3. Cost significantly more ($500-600 w/ two year contract) than the average consumer paid for phones (almost always under $150 with contract, but usually “free”) at the time.
4. No App Store
5. No cut and paste
6. No removable battery
7. No physical keyboard (a positive for me, but was a deal breaker for so many back then)
That’s not to say the original iPhone wasn’t amazing in many ways, but let’s also remember the past accurately.
> How many countries was the Nokia N95 available in VS. the 2G iPhone?
Way more, especially since the original iPhone was only available in the US for the first 5 months. It was available across Europe, North America, South America, China, and Australia at minimum.
> I don't think it launched in Asia or most of Europe.
The N95 was heavily across Europe, that was the primary market for it in fact.
Sure do. But it’s also a quite a bit more expensive phone too, which helps level the playing field some. Either way, there will never be a perfect apples to apples comparison.
That said, there is sufficient evidence to support my claim made in my original post.
Is the claim that sales numbers are the only way to measure success? And since the 2g iphone didn't measure up in that department it doesn't qualify as a success?
If you have a counter claim, especially one you can back up with as much facts as I did, please do so. Otherwise, please either stop straw manning or find some other place to do so.
The iPod, iPad and Apple Watch are all products from Apple where the first version didn't take off. I'd say they did just fine and the iPhone is largely an outlier in Apple's history of new products. Even the initial iMac suffered relative to its later revisions.
At one point in time people probably said the same thing about employer provided health insurance, and now it’s expected. Tough to get good talent if other companies are providing better perks
Employer-provided health insurance comes from World War 2 and the US government locking market pay rates for the war. To compete, employers had to add non-monetary perks such as health insurance. Unfortunately we didn't transition out of this and it ballooned into the current mess.
In the US I think it's also a retention strategy. Nobody will just up and leave before they have another job lined up because health insurance is unaffordable. One US colleague mentioned $1000 per month!
It's a big deterrent IMO especially compared to Spain where healthcare is free
Last I checked the feds treat income as an annual thing that happened a year ago. A six month period of unemployment does not mean your income is zero by their accounting.
in theory yes, but if you own a home with a lower mortgage rate, are you really gonna lower the price of your house, so that you can then buy another home with a higher rate? you may just stay with your lower rate
I would expect other factors to play in a little more, but I can't say they will. (Size, location, etc.)
That is, I don't think moving is usually driven just by prices. Is it? Investing largely is, but investment firms buying up neighborhoods is its own problem.
If price was never an issue, people would generally move a lot more. Move to be closer to school. Move to be closer to a new job. Obviously moving is a PITA and you have things like maybe moving further way from a family etc.. but we can see when the market is rising that quite a lot of people move.
But a lot of these moves are just improvement moves. Move to a bigger place to have more room for kids. Move to a smaller place to save on mortgage for empty nesters. Move to make your 1 hour work commute 15 minutes. People would love to make these moves, but if the money doesn't line up - it isn't going to happen. Very few of these are REQURIED moves.
For sure required moves exist. Live in a studio and have a kid or two. Get a very good job 1000 miles away. Graduate college. But these are not "most" moves.
Makes a ton of sense. My mental model is that I only consider moving for utility reasons, but I think it is undeniable that that is not the main driver there. Would be neat to see full breakdowns on these numbers, but I fully expect what you are describing.
Has some actual numbers that are interesting. Moves slowing down as you age lined up fairly similar to my path, I think my entire life moves were at like:
21, 22, 23, 28, 30, 33, 37...
and I may not move again, or if I do I would see it as 10+ years out.
Censorship on the platforms changed from moderation to a kind of gaslighting (as per the twitter files), cloud services consolidated their control over email as a medium, the web is almost fully intermediated by google, akamai, and cloudflare.
There is no "internet," it's just some propaganda outlets attached to the surveillance devices you have to keep in your home to participate in the economy. It is no longer a popular elsewhere, 2018 marked the inflection point or epoch of the internet becoming just another homogenized organ of the leviathan, not to connect people, but to atomize them, imo. It is a walled garden that is completely surveiled.
I'd speculate that the majority of people who use the internet now are young enough to have almost never lived without it, and it forms the substrate of their ontology, instead of being just a thing that is separate from real life.
They have no sense of it being an objective fantasy realm.
I honestly can’t tell whether you think Twitter now, under Elon, is now less or more moderated than before, whether you are on the left or right of current political thought (or somewhere else entirely), or whether you consider unmoderated communication to be a good or bad thing (but I’m pretty sure it’s one of those).
I honestly can’t tell you why almost any of that is pertinent to the conversation at hand.
Why does it matter whether he has shackled himself to one side of a political binary, or cares for the happenings of a singular website and its owner?
As for moderation, I believe they were lamenting the corporatization of the Internet and how it has become a hotbed for controlling the populace, rather than connecting the populace. Which would presumably fall under a preference for unmoderated communication.
The US left took those Trump-Russia files as gospel, even though it turned out that the whole thing was most probably a set-up.
As such, the same US left now saying that one shouldn't take those Twitter files seriously is quite disingenuous, if anything, the Twitter files seem more real than any of that Trump-Russia fiasco.
The Trump Russia files were exposed as a 'work in progress' investigation from a former spy that wasn't supposed to be leaked yet. Stuff he was still researching. If you think the "US left" took them as "gospel", you may be consuming too much propaganda. Nobody thinks the Twitter files were fake, they just didn't reveal anything as damning as claimed. Is it surprising that the president's team asked them to remove (illegal) stolen pictures of his son's dick? Seems expected and reasonable.
There should be some kind of Litmus test to see how a platform is moderated. You could use it to find where in the political spectrum the moderation team is to see if the platform suits you.
I propose, for example, "equating abortion to murder", "misgendering someone", "calling someone the f-word", "saying that f-words are molesters", etc.
Most of the big platforms (such as Twitter or Meta) are just in the middle. Twitter before Musk moved one point to the left, making misgenderisation a bannable offence, but I think Musk undid that. As a data point I have had comments flagged for doing the first one here, so you can tell where this community stands.
I have absolutely no faith in changes made by Musk, but I have to say I still remember the days when the platforms, instead of silencing everybody by default, trusted you to make a judicious use of the block button, like a grown-up would.
It all started back in late 2016 (guess why), I'd say that by 2018-2019 the momentum was already strong enough for the general population to also get hold of it.
It all culminated in the summer or 2020 (for the Anglo- and Anglo-influenced world, at least), but, hopefully, I'd say that right now we're in the middle of a vibe shift. Evidence number one is the launch of Threads itself, which feels like the launch of a dead carcass out in the sea.
All this to say that the OP is correct, social media is dead.
