Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare:
"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."
Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less of a problem before. If you want to keep using an old Mac, there are plenty of OS install disks, copies of old shareware floating around, sites like Low End Mac which document what works and what doesn't. The hardware was also usually more repairable. I'm worried that current Macs in the age of App Store OS updates and glued battery will be rendered into expensive paperweights that much more certainly when Apple withdraws support.
You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.
I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers).
Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.
There could also be a desire to push partial-autonomy features in the short term, when Model 3 owners are making the decision day-by-day whether to drive the car completely manually or whether to rely on whatever level of Autopilot is available now or in 2 years. If driving the car without Autopilot is deliberately made to feel weird and akward, more people will turn on Autopilot in more situations.
I'm more concerned about whether the streetcar running on top of there will ever be more than just a sketch. An extension of the streetcar network in that direction has been proposed, canceled, procrastinated, debated for years but nothing actually happening so far.
To paint a less rosy picture, many countries are good at keeping out US based tracking / social media monopolies because they want to support their own tracking / social media monopolies. It's kind of a "well, duh" moment that China is going to support its own Internet services rather than let that data be collected by people in the United States.
Russia has a similar government-backed Internet services ecosystem going on, although they dropped the ball on blogging and wound up having to do a complex operation to buy Livejournal (where all the Russians were) and move the servers to Russian territory.
> After a lot of lunacy including running around in the backyard and driveway looking for a spot of coverage, we finally settled on a system of handwritten IOU notes, and most people had to buy in twice and have an appointed stranger promise to send them BTC later.
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> I would argue that there were few people savvier than our group when it came to Bitcoin, and we were having this experience? I realized I was maybe a little too immersed in the hype to see where Bitcoin was falling short in usability.
Ironically, this is not too different from how the financial industry solved the problem of having trouble moving large quantities of precious metals. Lots and lots of IOU notes. Eventually, the IOU notes were so ubiquitous that the underlying precious metals could be dispensed with entirely, and we got fiat.
The reasoning on this guy's website is often pretty fascinating: http://www.worlddreambank.org/P/PLANETS.HTM -- these are entire fantasy planets. For a warm-up exercise, he started out by tilting the Earth in different ways and working out how that would affect climate and biomes.
It's worth noting that conventional railways tend to sacrifice a bit of speed (relative to what you could engineer them for) in favour of being flexible in terms of how much passenger capacity can be provided, supporting a mixture of local/express services, and so forth. So the 'sweet spot' for a conventional or high-speed rail line between two locations may tend to be larger.
That's pretty similar to how languages like Scala with higher-order features translate down to the JVM bytecode (which is subject to certain restrictions).
I believe hype is actually Musk's primary product: by constantly coming up with these announcements he plays his part in maintaining the narrative of the US being the leader in tech innovation, over and above the narrative of the US being a formerly cutting-edge economy that is in the process of falling behind. (Which one is actually true is debatable, but managing perceptions is an important part of keeping the economy running.) Someone who merely organized solid electric car manufacturing or workable private space launches would probably not be as successful in attracting investment.
"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."