sirkneeland

As the former PM of a competing dating app, I agree.

Is it comically cheap if you don't consider inflation?

Because while air travel has undoubtedly gotten less comfortable, in most (if not all?) cases it's also gotten cheaper. With every passing decade air travel because accessible to broader and broader swaths of the economic pyramid. Now it's at the point where the cost of the taxi to a London airport can cost more than the airfare of whatever budget airline flight I'd be on.

I am [not really] too young to have flown on the Concorde, but a Googling of "Concorde flight cost" suggested between $6000 and $12000 round trip for NYC-LON flights. That doesn't strike me as cheap.

Could be a bubble. I'm imminently planning to leave the city for the suburbs (34, newly married)

also, feedback is more granular by several orders of magnitude. In a political democracy we roll up every single issue (including mutually contradictory ones) into a bundle of policies, multiply that by an uncertainty factor of the personality of the person you are voting for, and then a fraction of us actually turn out to make the decision.

Meanwhile in the market I can decide down to the level of "no, these oranges aren't sufficiently orange-y for me".

I'm no market fundamentalist, mind you. I'd rather find ways to make the public sector more responsive to public feedback than through occasional elections.

Wouldn't that drastically increase the sun exposure on the internal elements and artifacts in the church? Sun damage is noticeable in just a few years, let alone on a time scale of centuries...

Wait, how does FB have my sent emails? I'd think sent emails were one of the few things they don't have access to

Indeed. The more interesting question would be how many Googlers internally talk of people leaving Google as though they've left a religion vs those who meet it with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But this doesn't include the Nokia ones, does it?

Ironically enough, the name “Shanghai” (上海) literally means above ("Shang" 上）the sea ("Hai" 海).

although really from the perspective of battling NIMBYs, the benefit (first-order, anyway) of Shanghai is not that one man can say no, it's that only one man has to say "yes"

I'd go so far as to argue you need to find what comes next after the hand-held smartphone. It could be a smaller, more intimately worn device (think smart glasses, or a smarter watch, or even something implanted), with more processing done off-device.

My favorite song on the Pet Shop Boys' 2006 album Fundamental ("Integral") was a protest against Blair's Identity Cards Act

"if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear / if you've something to hide, you shouldn't even be here"

peloton (comes from french word for platoon, so, close enough)

I think you're mistaken here. I know countless conservatives on Twitter, and they're real human beings.

As someone who is literally that background (from a moderate Republican family in the suburbs of Philadelphia) I can say the Democrats definitely picked up my vote...

Actually no, it's more accurate to say the Republicans lost it.

(I don't know how my family members voted--we're far too WASPy to do anything but keep it private), but I suspect my parents stayed with the GOP while my siblings and I went to the Dems (I voted Hillary for President and GOP everything else. Turned out to be a miscalculation)

At any rate, it seems there weren't enough of us to outweigh Pennsylvanians who continued to vote Republican or who converted to voting Republican.

It seemed pretty acrimonious and left scars that haven't healed to this day.

I mean, I grant that in the grand scheme of things (and certainly in comparison to how Spain bungled this), you are correct, the UK handled it as well as possible.

But don't Japanese companies replicate this setup even when they set up factories the USA?

I think you're thinking of Keurig's K-cups (a different and of course wholly incompatible means of coffee capsule thingy)

The British had wanted to continue their period of rule in Hong Kong as the expiration date neared. It was a subject of negotiation between China and the UK in the 1980s. They wanted British rule or even some kind of joint administration. Even Thatcher (hardly a shrinking violet when it came to using force to get her way) couldn't get a deal to continue British rule in Hong Kong. China made it perfectly clear that the British would be leaving in 1997.

And so, for better or for worse, they came to an agreement in the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The British were essentially "consensually kicked out" (as the Brits might say, "mustn't make a fuss" ;) )

Not "railing against" to be fair to your original point but this study (FiveThirtyEight thinks it's sound) says millennials value democracy far less than their predecessors.

As a % of people who think it is "essential" to live in a democracy:

Born in 1930s - 75% millennials - 30% https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democracy-meh/

wouldn't they be popping corks at Labour HQ? I mean, this isn't really "strong and stable"...

> Nokia tried the "photography first" smartphonecamera - it didn't fly

I worked at Nokia at the time. The Lumia 1020 didn't fly because it failed to ship with an OS that was considered "good enough" (and yes, "good enough" means "has apps") by consumers.

A Lumia 1020 with Android would have sold better (and shipped sooner)

well, in terms of anecdotal evidence, I live and work abroad and tools like Facebook and WhatsApp make it possible to communicate with my friends and family back home at a cost of next to nothing.

A decade ago, international phone calls and SMS would have cost me an arm and a leg, and there's really no equivalent for Facebook which lets me keep in touch with the lives of people I care about on the other side of the world.

Yes, there was email but that doesn't really substitute for the short low-latency, ubiquitous worldwide communication of WhatsApp (and it certainly didn't 10 years ago when it was largely tethered to a desk) nor the ability to keep up with my friends unsolicited that is Facebook (what am I supposed to do, ask all of my friends to write me an email of what they're doing once a week?)

Are global migrant workers an edge case? perhaps. But while forfeiting FB and WhatsApp wouldn't make me a hermit, it would certainly make communications with my friends and family back home to be lesser in number and richness.

Their stock price in the last few months would disagree with that assertion.

I say this as an unfortunate shareholder.

It was driven by Ballmer's ego more than a rational plan.

They imagined they could speed time to market for devices by eliminating frictions inherent in being 2 companies working on 1 product (and as an employee I can say there were indeed inescapable frictions). But ultimately it couldn't get around the core problem: (almost) nobody wants a Windows Phone.

Nokia brand, Nokia design. And an outlet for whatever cool tech Foxconn has stumbled upon in Shenzhen?

In an era when smartphones are increasingly commoditized, it could work well enough to carve out a sustainable business.

Carrier sales reps didn't like selling Windows Phones, and you can't blame them. From their perspective, they want to sell you a phone in the shortest amount of time that has the lowest probability of return.

Windows Phones had a different UI that meant the sales rep had to spend time showing how it worked, and even if he/she did make the sale, he faced the high risk of a Lumia getting returned because the customer found out some key app wasn't available on Windows Phone but was easily available on iOS and Android (their bank, or airline, Snapchat, and let's not forget Instagram wasn't there for a while)

(source: I'm a former Nokia employee)

3 possibilities (and probably many more):

1) go all-in with their own Symbian/Qt/MeeGo strategy

2) go all-in with Google Android

3) go all-in with a Nokia fork of Google Android (a nonstarter today, but back in 2011, with Nokia's considerable heft and before Google started rolling so much of Android into non-open Google Play Services, things could have played out differently)

In terms of Nokia's performance as a phone company, it is more or less impossible for any of these options to have done any worse than Nokia did with Windows Phone.

HOWEVER, for Nokia as a company, Windows Phone "worked out" in the sense that they had a willing buyer for an asset that was long-term uncompetitive against Asian players in a commodity market. (then again that too has a counter-argument that the phone division would have been worth more than $7 billion had it not dedicated itself to the losing proposition of Windows Phone)

This is not incorrect.