Ok, but what constitutes a bribe. It is regular practice among my coworkers to buy each other coffee, and in so doing, establish a mutual social rapport that I, being an ethical non-bribe-provider, am iced out of. Is my assumption that they're clearly just psychopaths and any professional advantages that accrue to them thereby are wholly unethical because a bribe is a bribe. But every time I alert the HR department about it, they start calling *me* the psychopath.

In advertising, the line between ethical and unethical is just disclosure. Why this is the case can itself can be non-obvious to people (EG - everyone who is unconcerned when foreign governments attempt to influence our elections, or thinks that people getting prosecuted for being non-registered foreign agents are just political prisoners). But even what constitutes fair disclosure can be legitimately tricky to tease out even for people of good faith, especially in a world where your content can shift contexts so easily. IE - youtuber does a paid endorsement and puts in all caps in the description this is a paid endorsement. Company that paid for the endorsement embeds it sans context. What is the youtuber's ethical obligation here?

Marketing is important, but not because consumers are stupid. An important component of marketing is understanding your market, and the marketers understood that in 2002 what consumers wanted wasn't a huge 20 GB device but a 5 GB device that was small and light enough to comfortably fit into the pockets of your skinny jeans. (A UI that made it tolerable to navigate through a 5 GB music library in an era without touchscreens went a long way too, but the iPod hitting the sweet spot of storage vs portability was why it was far better than the Nomad.)

Italy shut down flights to China on Jan 31 and declared a national emergency, literally the exact same day they detected a case in their borders. (Also the same day as the Trump administration, which whatever one wants to say about it can hardly be accused of being politically correct so...) The problem is travel restrictions only do so much for you with an adequate screening/testing regime, as both Italy and now the US have discovered. I guess the optics of hugging Chinese people and educating against ignorant hatred looks silly to you but evaluated objectively, nothing about their response was meaningfully hampered by "political correctness." As usual "political correctness" is a thought-terminating culture war cliche that's used by the right as an all-purpose bogeyman.

Did you read the article, or even just the summary? The current use case for Glass is all in purpose-built enterprise applications for "logistics, manufacturing and field services." IE, foreman puts on Glass at the start of the shift to get some kind of operational AR feed.

If an unauthorized party were to get ahold of my online banking accounts they can do (at least) as much damage to my life as if my google photos account were hacked. Yet in the former scenario people pretty much universally and rightly recognizes that (1) I am in every way a "victim" if some hacker or scammer makes unauthorized use of my online banking funds, and that (2) the fact that online banking is not 100% secure in all situations ever hardly means I "deserve" the consequences of having my bank account hacked. "Don't film anything you don't want [everyone] to see" is a self-evidently absurd prohibition. We all have communications that we would prefer to be privileged in one manner or another. Yes one should take reasonable precautions to protect oneself, but the world is not just and it's a comforting lie - though a common fallacy - to believe that people "deserve" the bad things that happen to them. Just world fallacy. Google it.

I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. Of course there are models that are very accurate at a low resolution, but they fall apart at high resolution. The theory that the sun revolves around the earth is a very useful and accurate model for a Bronze Age goat herder. Indeed, this model only begins to fall apart when one begins to do some rigorous and repeated astronomical observation and wants to make astronomical predictions for (to an average person) insignificant non-lifegiving celestial objects.

Does this mean the "Sun orbits Earth" model is equally valid as a astronomical model as the currently accepted scientific model? That we should assign it the same epistemic value? That we should teach it in schools? Of course not.

Similarly, the "Theory of Qi" may be accurate on a very vague and general level, but it is entirely superseded by a more accurate and more useful model that we've acquired through modern medicine. So it's useless, and should be discarded as the outdated, just as we jettison all superseded models.

This is actually the whole point: Market Segmentation. Your goal with any product is to extract maximum sales revenue from it, which means finding the optimum point on the price/demand curve. But if you sell at only one price point, you actually leave money on the table from individuals who were willing to pay you more for that product. For example, suppose I've figured out that maximum revenue for my widget is at $10/widget. However, I also know that there are people who are willing to pay $20/widget; there simply aren't enough of them to make the $20/widget price more profitable than the $10/widget price. Wouldn't it be great if I could get the best of both price points? If I could sell the product for $10/widget to those customers who would only be willing to buy at $10, but also turn around and sell it at $20/widget to those customers willing to pay more? Wouldn't it be great if I could do this in such a way so that the $20 customer actually is pleased with his purchase, and doesn't feel ripped off, by providing some kind of extra value to that $20 customer?

The solution to this problem is to segment your market. With some goods this means coming out with slightly different products for each market segment. (eg, Mercedes has a C-series, an E-series, etc. etc. etc.). The solution in other products is to segment by time, so your most ardent customers pay extra to get the product right away, while more value-conscious customers wait for price drops or sales.

This is in fact the solution used for most entertainment products, and honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with it. The brand new game may start at $60, for those fans that are very interested in the product and want it right away. (Market segementation also goes higher, with special and collector's editions with extra doodads for superfans). Then the price gradually drops until it covers every level of enthusiasm/budget for the product, until it shows up in a Steam sale for $5 and even those people who say "meh, looks interesting, guess I can try it" become customers. This system nicely balances multiple interests - it makes the same product accessible to a wide range of consumers, with each consumer paying what they think that product is worth to them (and the ones paying more getting some benefit from that higher price).

Increased productivity never translates into less work/more leisure time (unless you choose to work/earn less and live with a 1950 standard of living - no internet, computer, old car, etc. etc. etc.), it translates into more stuff. The rapid advances in productivity since the dawn of industrialization has always translated into more stuff for everyone, not less work/more leisure time.

"More stuff" does not necessarily mean higher inflation-adjusted median wages (in fact, it almost never does). Instead, it's reflected in purchasing power: the emergence new/cheaper/higher quality goods and services. Everyone now has a flat screen, DVD player, cell phone, cheap computer with net access, air travel is cheap and widely available, etc. Even though our wages are stagnant, everyone can now afford what once were extravagant luxuries. How is this possible? Automation and higher productivity makes expensive goods cheap and creates new goods (which start out expensive and themselves become cheap).

Our standard of living is rising, we just don't notice because everyone around us is seeing the same SoL increase, and our wages are staying the same. BUT your wages staying the same and your SoL rising is pretty much the inevitable consequence of more productivity across the entire economy.

If increased productivity caused unemployment, unemployment should be at like 70% right now. Instead it's remained within its historical range for as long as we can figure (the Great Depression is the only outlier, and it turned out to be just that: an outlier). Our current unemployment is like 9%. That's nothing, in historical terms, simply on the high end of the historical range. It was higher than that before the Civil War, and they didn't have any computers or machines "stealing people's jobs."

Increased productivity never translates into leisure time, it translates into more stuff. The rapid advances in productivity since the dawn of industrialization has always translated into more stuff for everyone.

"More stuff" does not necessarily mean more inflation-adjusted wages. Instead, it means: new/cheaper/higher quality goods and services (everyone now has a flat screen, DVD player, computer with net access, air travel is cheap and widely available, etc.) Our standard of living is rising, we just don't notice because everyone around us is seeing the same SoL increase, and our wages are staying the same. BUT your wages staying the same and your SoL rising is pretty much the inevitable consequence of more productivity across the entire economy.

If increased productivity caused unemployment, unemployment should be at like 70% right now. Instead it's remained within its historical range for as long as we can figure (the Great Depression is the only outlier, and it turned out to be just that: an outlier).

Really? Here's an non-exhaustive list of adult western animation: Archer. South Park. The Boondocks. Family Guy. Simpsons. Some of the items on my list are positively hip and on the cutting edge of cool. (Archer, for instance.)

Apple's margins are bad for a software company. Apple's margins are exceptional for a hardware company. (HP, HTC, and RIM's margins are all in the 10-20% range. They would kill for a 38% margin.)

Judging purely from the financials, it's almost as if Apple were a hybrid software/hardware company or something.

From TFA we learn that Apple has tripled revenue over the past 4 years. Future growth prospects is baked into market cap, and based on past performance exceptional revenue growth is a reasonable expectation for Apple.

Now I personally don't believe Apple's current growth rate is sustainable. But there are many investors who do, and they have a reasonable basis for that belief.

Heck, they might be right. In 2006 Apple was selling lots of iPods and skeptics said yeah, its a hit, but the MP3 player market is maturing so where is the growth potential? Apple stock was "overvalued" based on existing product and product sales numbers. As it turns out the growth potential was in iPhones and iPads. Today the Apple skeptics (and I count myself one) believe that there won't be any new hit market-defining products from Apple that can give them the same levels of stratospheric growth. But hey, maybe we're wrong. We were wrong in 2006 after all.

Yes, our standard of living has been rising steadily in absolute terms, but yes, it matters a lot that our economy is growing more stratified. It's well-established that human happiness is affected more by relative wealth than absolute wealth. So someone living in poverty doesn't see that a 2010 Hyundai compact car is in absolute terms better than a 1950 Cadillac in every quantifiable way (save status). They don't see that we now have easy access to air conditioners, even if just in public spaces, something rare back then. etc. etc. etc. There are countless examples of how our absolute standard of living and absolute wealth have increased, but this does not actually increase human happiness. Human happiness is a function of relative status, so we should try to encourage more equitable distributions, as long as doing so does not stagnate the growth of the economy, and create excessive unhappiness among those being redistributed away from.

This is one reason why I'm a big fan of "indirect" wealth redistribution. Labor laws and standards are a form of indirect wealth redistribution. So is public education. So are public libraries. Etc. These things work better than straight redistribution because the actual redistributive effects are obscured by the subtle market forces that they manipulate.

I don't think absolute wealth (vis a vis relative wealth) means what you think it means, or at least, you are failing to see the distinction. See, you're comparing what the median worker can purchase with their contemporaneous workers. That's relative wealth. To compare absolute wealth, we need to put the median 1950 and median 2010 lifestyle side by side; in that sense the median life today is a life of abundance

Obviously, while an iPod or a Kindle would be a priceless object in 1950, because they are a category of product that simply didn't exist then, their ubiquity today means they are devalued in our eyes. But in absolute terms our lifestyle is better, and our failure to see it simply highlights my point about how human psychology is flawed in that it tends to value relative wealth over absolute wealth. Obviously I agree with you that wealth stratification is an issue we should address, because if your goal is human flourishing, you must take into account the foibles of human psychology.

We _do_ live in abundance, compared to 100 or even 50 years ago. Our standard of living has increased immensely thanks to increased productivity (from automation, computerization, etc.). As an economy we've converted this extra productivity into more/better goods and services, instead of extra time.

Oh, and before you suggest that median 1950 US citizen had a higher SoL than median 2010 citizen... taken quantifiably, SoL includes things like the size of your TV, car, access to medical care (1950 US medical care is worse than 2010 rural Indian medical care), cost of services like travel (inflation-adjusted plane tickets are like 10% the price of what they once were even 35 years ago), etc.

Technology will not take our jobs, technology will increase our standard of living in the future just as it has done throughout all recorded history. The thing is, absolute gains in personal wealth/GDP/SoL don't actually make us happier. It's an unfortunate quirk of human psychology - our absolute wealth doesn't make us happy, our relative wealth is what makes us happy. Because people tend to live around people who are about their wealth level, this means no one is very happy. (Another unfortunate quirk of human psychology - we tend to compare ourselves with people just above us wealth-wise, and assume there are more of them than we think.)

So, now that we are self-aware about our psychological quirks, here is my 3-step plan to lasting happiness
a) Recognize that on an absolute level, we are wealthier in every measurable way than before. Your TV is bigger and sharper than your grandparent's TV. You have access to lifesaving technologies, with new being developed every day. You have the freaking INTERNET for chrissakes. Now of course, _everybody_ around you also has these things... but now you are lapsing into thinking about *relative* wealth, not absolute wealth.
b) When it comes to relative wealth, start hanging out with people poorer than you. It'll make you feel rich.
c) Support some redistributive economic interventions, because more even distributions of wealth lead to more happiness that highly stratified wealth distributions. These policies will reduce our future growth of wealth as an economy, but as long as we are careful not to take it too far, it doesn't matter. Remember - relative wealth makes us happier than absolute wealth, so even if pure pro-growth policies do make us all much wealthier than the alternative, it will actually make us more unhappy if it serves to stratify the economy,