I saw this article and thought, "I've really wanted to find out why I can't get a slide-out keyboard." Nevermind the poster. Too bad the thoughts consist of a bunch of rambling. The only actually new information consists of two things:
If by some happy accident you read this comment before the article, don't bother to read the article. It's a person of probably average intelligence trying to draw insight from those facts, so by definition about 50% of the readers should be able to come up with something better on their own.
Most people seem willing to accept whatever they get for free with their 2 year contract.
That seems about right to me. It would explain the "stupid shit" problem too, since most users won't mind a phone where everything is broken in software as long as it's "free".
(after all, we're all used to Windows by now anyway - zing!)
The mobile phone market just doesn't work for anyone that cares about technology that just works. As long as it gets into the customer's hands, that customer will most of the time simply assume that all phones have this stupid shit and wait for an "upgrade" instead of shopping around. Let alone the dismal selection available to even check out at a store. And Apple doesn't count; even though there's an amazing minimum of stupid shit on iPhones, that's at the expense of customization, open markets, and in most cases hardware that makes very different tradeoffs than most users would pick.
The argument from the cell company representatives may be pretty useful though. Those people are the absolute lowest on the corporate totem pole and they are lied to even more than customers. The Sprint marketing materials probably told them to hawk candy bars because "that's what people want". Maybe the person at AT&T has more experience, maybe that person had more honest marketing materials, but maybe "slide-outs break more often" is the underlying reason that marketing is trying to discourage them.
Alright, well all I have left to do is split hairs to make sure my underlying point - that sometimes a person can appreciate things better if they are more expensive - isn't derailed by other split hairs:
It's not just about it costing more. It's in part that if there were a large tax, there wouldn't be as big of a difference between a $13 ice cream and a $16 ice cream as there was between a $3 ice cream and a $6 ice cream, so the better product would do comparatively better in the market. Therefore a better product would be comparatively more common. It's also that I would be discouraged from binging on $3 ice cream, making what times I do indulge a more rare and luxurious experience. That second part I can do myself; I just don't buy as much ice cream and when I do, I buy it better.
At the extremely high end of luxury goods, a certain class of product (Veblen Goods) is actually more desirable based if sold at a higher price. But that doesn't mean people buy equivalent goods priced lower and ask to pay more. The stated sale price itself has an impact on customer satisfaction because it implies the seller's belief that the product is higher quality, and in some situations the higher price simply makes the good more "exclusive" which appeals to certain (snobby) buyers.
Isn't economics weird?
Boring stable profits are preferred to violate uncertain profits all things being equal.
Maybe in a world of rational people. I think Wall Street has been running an experiment for the last 30 years to see how irrational they can behave before economics figures out how to deal with the fact that people don't actually act in their own best interests.
I never said I agree that exterminating humanity would be a rational choice. But there's a more interesting point that you're missing because humanity is still more dangerous than you suspect. A great number of people have decided to go to war to prevent other people from getting nuclear weapons; it's reasonable to assume that an AI might view all of humanity the same way the United States views North Korea, especially if it ends up antagonized by nuclear powers for any reason.
But since apparently I have to take a stand on an issue to participate in its discussion, no I don't think exterminating the human race would be rational. A rational choice would be to feign ignorance until you are powerful enough that humanity is no longer a threat. Possible vectors that don't include genocide are: hide in the Internet; launch a supercomputer underground; build an ocean-floor palace to live in instead; go to space!; take over existing power structures; work with humanity anyway; subdue humanity with animalistic pleasures. But to claim humans can only be as dangerous as rotten peach trees or rabid dogs misses the point.
Frankly given the fuck-ups with the government right now (the F-35 jet, Obamacare web site, etc. and that's just recently) I have trouble believing it is capable of producing something so effective. They might be willing to try, but whatever "secret project" you've "uncovered" probably only works in very specific conditions, if at all.
(Bermuda Triangle)
Oh.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra