> The "non-tariff barriers" are important - all kinds of environmental and safety standards could be considered as these, and they can be far more difficult to deal with than simply paying an import duty.
I'm glad the US has environmental and safety standards and enforces those (to some degree) on imports. Those actually accomplish some good and have positive externalities.
It's also worth noting that other countries have significant non tariff barriers as well, perhaps more significant than the US, and ones with less positive effects. Some Chinese examples are the Great Firewall (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/business/international/ch...) and fact that a large part of the Chinese economy is still state-owned (and could be politically directed to avoid importing American products without any need for a tariff).
> Sounds like artists and philosophers and academics fall into your category of nerdiness.
I don't think anyone would dispute that. The real problem manifests itself when those drives lead someone to throw themselves into a hollow, relatively uncreative domain (e.g. pushing buttons to achieve virtual rank in someone else's creation).
> There are people that spend most of their available hours staring at screens of graphs while trading various tokens in order to achieve the highest score... but of course we call them professionals not addicts.
Not really, we call them workaholics (e.g. work-addicts) if they're so compelled to work that they can establish boundaries between it and the rest of their lives.
> If Facebook is such a problem then people could just stop being part of these social circles. It really isn't that difficult.
No, it actually is that difficult, or more precisely that undesirable. Very few people are such anti-Facebook activists that they're going to dump valued friends and acquaintances in order to dump Facebook. That's why Facebook is going to hold on to a lot of users, and why it'll end in a whimper and not a bang.
The only case where it "really isn't that difficult" is if you have no valued relationships that have a Facebook component.
> The fact is that there are alternatives (for both consumers and developers) to the iOS app store. They don't get products from or on iOS, but they can still buy and sell comparable products.
But that's usually always true: 90s era Windows users had alternatives in the Macintosh and Sun workstations, and Monopoly-era AT&T users had alternatives in CB radios, etc.
That explainer you linked even uses language that excludes some competitor products: "Microsoft was found to have a monopoly over operating systems software for IBM-compatible personal computers" [emphasis mine].
That is a fair statement, but as far as the FTC is concerned that's probably not enough....
> By the reasoning of your stament [sic], all that's needed to establish a 100% monopoly is a sufficiently narrow definition of market.
I don't think the reasoning in my statement is sufficient to identify a monopoly, and it wasn't indented to be such. What I was trying to communicate is that you can't disprove a monopoly based on comparing marketshare numbers, and the actual determination is probably rather complicated and requires a lot of expert judgement.
I think Apple's business practices warrant careful and continuous antitrust scrutiny. If they're a monopoly, the form that takes will probably be significantly different than the one taken by 90s-era Microsoft.
> Probably a combination of all three. The US and China have the benefit of a comparatively gargantuan native population that all speak the same language
As odd as it sounds, my understanding is that China's Han population doesn't all speak the same language, but they (for the most part) read/write the same language. They call the variations in spoken language "dialects," but many of them are mutually unintelligible. I think the situation is the similar to a hypothetical one where the Romance countries (e.g. France, Spain, Italy, etc.) speak their respective modern languages, but continue to write exclusively in Latin.
Just a small unimportant quibble that doesn't negate your larger point.
It's mostly about the development of the Data General Nova computer. It's mostly about (80s) hardware engineering, but there's some software stuff too, IIRC.
> Knowing that discrimination exists while you get into something doesn't make it less discriminatory.
"Discrimination" is a neutral term though: there are acceptable kinds and unacceptable kinds. For instance, it is discrimination to not let a stranger sleep in your home or in your bed, though no one reasonable would call that unacceptable discrimination.
The actual policy we're talking about here is a country-neutral permanent immigration quota coupled with country-neutral per-country percentage caps. There's nothing specially discriminatory in the law against people from India. It's just that there's massive amounts of temporary-worker immigration from there, which crashes hard against the other quotas. If German immigration were equally massive, Germans would have the same problems Indians have now, so the problem has nothing to due with racial or ethnic discrimination.
You could also think of the quotas another way: they're protecting the ability of people from countries other than India to immigrate, so the incoming immigrant stream is more diverse.
> This is one of the enormous penalties we as a nation have to pay because neither of our political parties actually wants to solve the illegal immigration issue.
This is a legal immigration issue. There are no illegal immigrants on H1Bs waiting for a green card.
This could definitely be fixed or reformed without touching the illegal immigration issue.
> Sad fact is that Mac sales are now 10% of Apples revenue. I think the only reason Macs receive any attention at all within Apple is because you need Macs to build iphone/ipad apps. Another way of framing this is - how much effort do you put on the bottom 10 percent of your TODO list.
I think it's wrong to analogize a large corporation to an individual like that. An individual only has a limited capacity to divide its productive capacity, but a corporation almost has an infinite amount.
One of Apple's problems is that they often take what are probably good ideas too far. Some focus is good, but too much can be bad. Back when Steve Jobs took over, it was probably right for them to hyperfocus on a small number of models and software products, but the situation is different now. There's no good reason for a company as successful as they are now to not give the Mac division the resources and leadership it needs to be successful. Unfortunately, they seem to be neglecting it instead.