Houston's urban geography is not appreciably different from that of LA. Other than it's a lot cheaper. Yes, the weather is terrible and there are no hills or mountains.
Well, now, a simulated heartbeat implemented in a pacemaker and connected to a pump does cause real blood to be pumped.
A real brain adds real numbers, and so does a computer brain. A real brain composes real words, creates real emails, issues payments, requests shipments. Those are not less real than the words, emails, procedures, payments, and shipment requests that computers make today.
Not only was it possible to do everything in SMIT (or smitty) on the command line, smit would tell you the exact command line and options that it was running for any given operation, making it very easy to script and learn.
Apple doesn't keep the base model small to save costs. They do it to increase revenue (and margins).
The cost to go from 16GB to 32GB is inconsequential. (They upped the step-up from 32GB to 64GB with no increase in price.) In fact, the cost to them from 16GB to 64GB is probably inconsequential. It's certainly nothing near the $100 in price.
The reason they keep it at 16GB is to make more people upgrade to 64GB. If the base model was 32GB, far fewer people would upgrade to 64GB, precisely because you would no longer have an unacceptably bad user experience.
The article also claims that it's a free market. While Hong Kong has a very free-market economy in most things, real estate and development is the one thing where it is less free than most places. It is the part of economy where the government is most involved. The government controls all land, and sells/leases it to developers at a restrictive pace, under its own requirements. There is in fact a lot of land area in Hong Kong, but the government only makes it available to build on in a very limited way. That is really one reason prices are so high, the supply restrictions. The government is fine with that as it keeps prices high when it sells rights to develop land eventually.
This is also one of the least transparent, probably most corrupt, and definitely most expensive and inefficient parts of Hong Kong's economy.
There is probably some role for the government to preserve open space and plan and so on, but to suggest that the free market is at work at the macro level in Hong Kong real estate is ignorance.
They actually do say "unlimited phone, and 7GB tethering". It's very explicit, and limited tethering is a specific part of the "unlimited phone" plans. And as the article says, if you want more tethering, you are able to add and pay for that separately. The issue is people bypassing the tethering limitations.
Oh, they're different. They cost more, take five or ten times as much plastic to make, take more fuel to transport, and take up more space in landfills.
Think about just how little material the thin bags use, and think about how many of them you'd have to stack to equal the thickness of the thick bag.
Well, that makes sense. But then, the cost of the bag should roughly reflect the cost of all these external harms from using them. What if it turns out that the cost is something like 10c a bag? That seems like a plausible number to me. It's certainly nowhere near $5 a bag, taxes and fees for street cleaning and parks aren't anywhere in that ballpark. In which case, we've already discovered that's not enough to eliminate the use of the bags (it does reduce it).
Does Austin allow give-aways of re-usable bags? I am not familiar, but I somewhat doubt it. Those bags typically sell for 99c in San Francisco. The 10c charge is for single-use bags (typically a paper sack, but plastic at some establishments).
If they're 99c, I would think that people are thinking of the value just fine. It's just that they're not thinking of using such a bag 130 times, and throw it away after, say, 25 uses.
Also it's not clear to me that the environmental resources required to wash a reusable bag on a household scale (sink, water, soap) is lower than that required to produce a disposable bag on an industrial scale.