I would agree that grit is critical to success, but not actually accomplishing anything. Years ago I was offered a Dilbert like bit of advice in an office which was "Don't go anywhere without a clipboard or file in your hand; even if you are heading to a meeting or doing something productive, enough people wander around socializing that not looking productive for even a moment will lump you in with the useless sorts."

But I have seen variations of this in the school system with my favourite example being my nephew going through engineering. They tortured him and his classmates with overwhelming amounts of stuff to learn and work to do. But what they taught him and how they taught him was a combination of useless, out of date, and just the wrong approach. While his innate ability to learn was amazing and resulted in top marks, he still had to work very hard. So the primary thing they tested was his "grit" but they hardly did anything with his near total lack of a single engineering gene in his body. He was completely in the wrong course and should have been in pure mathematics. I suspect that this same course would be repelled by an engineer with a natural Hillbilly/MacGyver ability who wasn't so keen on completing yards of work that their common sense told them was never going to be used and was effectively busy work.

One of the things that I think has happened in much of modern education is that it won't acknowledge that there are two types of people in things like science. There are the great minds and there are the bottle washers; with the bottle washers greatly outnumbering the great minds. So the bottle washers have created a system that gives them a chance to rise to the top while many of the great minds end up becoming garage mechanics because they just didn't have the "grit" to jump through the hoops that the bottle washers set up as an initiation rite.

A near perfect example of the bottle washers taking over would be the ITER fusion project. This is a perfect long term project where whole careers can be spent doing "science" without having to deliver a single thing beyond marketing, hype, and spreadsheets. But I am willing to bet that many of the top people working on that project have qualifications coming out their asses. Qualifications that can only be obtained through pure "grit". While I don't doubt that a few people working on that project are making actual science happen it would be almost despite the top leadership as opposed to because of them.

But seeing that any real scientist must pass these initiation rites it is absolutely a requirement that they have the ability to grit their teeth and appease the stupid gatekeepers.

That said it is very difficult to accomplish much if someone is not willing to put in a huge amount of hard work. The critical difference is that students of today have to do a huge amount of stupid before they are allowed to do anything smart.

I don't even want a radio in my next new car. I literally want a radio, including satellite, as much as I want an 8 track, a cassette player, or even a CD player. I want the sound system and controls to interface with my phone and that is pretty much it. Maybe just maybe I could use a little in car storage for the rare time that I don't have my phone.

I have the spurs and the whip going hard on my startup and one of the first things I would contemplate buying with genuinely spare cash would be a Tesla. Mostly for my inner geek but the concept of walking into a Mall (I don't really like malls) store and saying, "I'll take one in black." and not having a sales dick try and bamboozle me for the next 8 hours really really appeals to me.

I was in a restaurant a few months ago with a friend and at a nearby table there were a group of guys who all fit some strange demographic. They were very well groomed but in a Walmart mannequin sort of way. It was all not-GQ and sort of sad. We stared at the lot of them and just couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with them. Then I realized. We were in a diner near all the car dealerships and this was a bunch of salesmen on a late lunch. I don't ever want to deal with these guys who spend every day trying to figure out ways to rip me off including dressing badly so I think they are stupid.

My test for TV is the commercials. CNN had a prime time advertisement for catheters the other day. My guess is that 5 years ago CNN simply wouldn't have accepted their money; nor could such a niche product afford prime CNN advertising 5 years ago.

What I meant is that due to things like cars being better and inspection requirements keeping most of the total junk off the roads people just don't do that much. Even things like killing your battery by leaving the lights on is much harder as the smarter cars will just turn them off.

There was that chug chug chug as the motor would either catch or almost catch along with the lurching and spring noises of the car bouncing with each engine turnover. But the whole choreographed event is something that I haven't seen in years. Yet even in the early 80s there were people(often students) who's cars pretty much always needed a push start. They would strategize only parking their cars pointing downhill.

I loved when those movies would be brought out. I could stop pretending to pay attention in the dark.

When I was a kid this was a pretty standard noise. The things holding the crappy muffler were themselves crappy and between the heat and road salts they simply didn't stand a chance. I am pretty sure that if you stood by a busy downtown road in 1975 that you wouldn't have to wait an hour for a dragging muffler car to go by.

I am not sure that I have heard that sound in a decade or more.

I simply don't hear radio much anymore. My kids don't listen to it, I don't hear it in cars driving by, I don't hear it much in stores, and I certainly don't listen to it.

But the simple numbers that tell an absolute and unmanipulable truth is the advertising revenue. Every other statistic is a complete and total fabrication created in an effort to prevent the total freefall of existing sales and stock prices. A great example of these desperadoes is that they often show revenues from 2009 to the present. This makes it look like a growth industry but in reality it is a recovery from the disaster that was 2008.

Quite simply people don't want to be told by a bunch of baby boomers what music to listen to. They have a device in their pockets that gives them total control. Remember these are the same sort of people who loved putting one good song on each CD so that people were effectively paying $20 per song.

I really hate when they find one guy with a PhD who just finished a well researched report proving that torture doesn't work and another guy who supports torture and was a general who knows none of the specifics and just keeps using phrases like "Think of the children" or "We must protect the boys in uniform." and after he is pounded into the ground the host will throw in a statement that the FBI thinks that they are justified in trampling rights because they are the "good guys"

Or when the news hosts will say things like "He learned too much math."

Nearly everyone I know has dumped cable and in most cases it wasn't to make their budget better but that once they got Netflix that commercials became insufferable and the cost per cable hour watched then skyrocketed. In my area to have a half decent set of packages you will end up paying around $100 per month. So for people who were just watching the occasional news show and not much else they realized that they were paying pretty much the same per show as the entirety of their monthly Netflix cost.

But then I hear other complaints which is that the news is becoming wildly biased while the quality of most programming is in freefall. I hear that it is becoming clear that many of the new programs are being made on silly low budgets. For instance I was over at a cable using friend's house and the weather reporter was talking to a camera on a tripod. They had eliminated the cameraman. Plus some of the travel shows are basically all selfie shots with a selfie stick or a tripod.

And CNN really took the cake when they had 1000's of hours of reporting on the missing airliner when their only two real facts were that it was missing and that it turned left.

So while in 1994 I would have killed to get my channels a-la-carte at this point it is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Yes your last point of pissing off makers can be very important as if they stay pissed off long enough they will be actively searching for an alternative and will jump onboard as fast as makes economic sense; whereas if they too were fat and happy they might stick with Amazon even when it didn't quite make sense. For instance I know a pile of people who hate google adsense yet they can't find an alternative. But if one comes along and they switch, Adsense would pretty much not be able to ever get them back as they hate google because how they feel adsense has been treating them.

But the fat and happy is how companies relate to their suppliers and customers when they want to stay in business for centuries vs being an MBA driven flash in the pan.

I'm not sure that AWS is making money. I think that this seems to be a debated topic.

I can say that at this point one American that I know will check Amazon first for pretty much every purchase. The question is can that be translated to another company or collection of companies? Amazon isn't like ebay in that ebay is a terrible auction site but they have all the people bidding which attracts all the products which attracts... So breaking into that market against ebay would be very hard. But alibaba.com seems to look like they might weasel in on both ebay and amazon at the same time.

After it someone comes along and eats amazon's lunch it will probably be completely obvious in hindsight as to why they were able to.

If so then MS was even more cunning in finding out where Borland could be severely damaged with a simple blow. That compensation probably didn't total up to an accounting error in Visual Studio sales.

Yes and it won't be done by someone who just builds another Amazon. It will be something fresh and innovative. Sort of like when Geiko went whole hog and completely cut out the insurance broker. Their simple reasoning was, "OK we are paying a 15% commission to salesmen who are selling a product that people are legally required to buy? How about not anymore and then we sell for 15% less than anyone else?"