Reddit was started as an experiment in free speech.

Wait, what?

I recall Alex coming on Slashdot a lot to promote Reddit when he first launched it. "An experiment in free speech" was not anything I recall being discussed. I also remember him posting on Slashdot while still developing reddit.

What I recall, is promotion of a general interest platform that was more open than Slashdot (unlimited moderations for all!) and less susceptible to vote brigading than Digg.

It was while ago, so I may be a bit foggy on the specifics.

I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course.

First, I think that's a ridiculous assertion. Smart farmers don't diversify because the taxpayers bear the risk of their crop failure, or of crashing prices; they have insufficient incentive to diversify.

Second, if we had a true free market, dumb farmers would go out of business and we would be left with smart farmers allocating resources efficiently. Isn't that the point of economic libertarianism?

Note: I am far from libertarian.

What do you mean by cyclical? Do you mean the livestock/fertilizer/crop/fodder cycle? Do you mean crop rotation? Or something else entirely?

Just curious, since I'm not aware of either cyclical production or crop rotation being a requirement for organic farming (although both are considered best practices).

How about on the roofs that don't have gardens on them? Not like we're going to put a garden on every roof. At some point there is really no excuse for not putting solar panels or gardens or something productive on rooftops.

Your choice and that's fine but it puts you firmly in the minority these days.

Strange that I have nearly minimum wage employees working for me that somehow manage to afford a smartphone. Maybe you should use some of your time to seek a better job instead of posting here. Anyway it's quaint how you think that not having a smartphone makes you immune to eavesdropping. I think you might have a little of the paranoia. Here's a clue, "dumb" phones are just as easy to track as smartphones.

Once you put away your tinfoil hat the answer is yes.

The Zune wasn't a terrible product. It was a terrible value. The iPod rules the market at the time. For Zine to matter it either needed to be substantially better than the iPod or substantially cheaper to get people to care about it. It needed to be a better value proposition. Instead it was roughly comparable for a similar price. If your choice is between two effectively identical products, people are generally going to pick the one that is more popular and better known. People already knew the iPod worked pretty well and it already had the mind share. Microsoft hugely overestimated the value of their brand and provided nothing more than a me-too product with little to set it apart.

I think it's pretty much safe to say that almost nobody agrees with you on this. Even if all those things were technically better like you claim, they weren't enough better that it mattered. The sound from an iPod and the screen quality was more than good enough for all but the pickiest of customers. Zune did not change that. As for the software Zune being "better", I think you'll have a hard to proving that objectively even allowing for the fact that iTunes is widely regarded as rather poor quality. It certainly wasn't better enough to matter and I cannot recall any press proclaiming it to be even the slightest bit revolutionary or superior.

Really? You can't figure that out? My phone as a 128GB capacity and my music library is less than that. No disrespect intended but you have what is basically a cheap phone by today's standards. I never, ever need to sync my phone to change the music on it and honestly I couldn't be bothered even if storage capacity were an issue.

So don't. I never have. Buy a phone with a large enough capacity and get on with life.

Where is the irony? There are all sorts of resurgences of old fashions all the time. But it isn't obviously ironic. I was alive during the 70s and trust me when I say that they haven't brought back 70s fashions in any meaningful way. Fashions cycle in and out all the time and I've seen stuff from previous decades brought back multiple times. Thin ties were in during the 80s and they are back again now. Happens all the time but it's rarely ironic.

That's the way fashion works but I'm not seeing the irony here. Throwback fashion is routinely a thing. There's even old jokes about wearing something so long it comes back into fashion.

PBR and Rolling Rock are just cheep beers. There may be a bit of irony going on with PBR though I'm not entirely convinced.

Not obviously ironic though a reasonable example if true. The evidence is ambiguous and seems mostly anecdotal. Still I'd need a LOT more evidence to start to buy the notion that ironic embrace of vintage is a meaningful way to cause old products to see a resurgence. Not saying it can't happen but I just don't really see examples of it happening in the real world.

Nothing ironic there that I can see. There are people who earnestly believe that vinyl sounds better and the audiophile crowd is willing to spend absurd amounts of money chasing even the chance of "better sound". Personally I think that the supposed superiority of vinyl wouldn't stand up to double blind testing like so much other nonsense that comes from audiophiles but that is a separate issue.

That's the problem though. Nobody ever really claimed that Zune was terrible. But there were very few reasons to buy one instead of an iPod. It wasn't better value for money for most people. It didn't have meaningfully better features, didn't cost a lot less, and by the time it came out many people who really wanted an MP3 player were already locked into Apple's ecosystem. Microsoft didn't make a horrible product but being solid isn't good enough when you are that late to the party. You have to be substantially better or substantially cheaper and Zune was neither.

I do the same thing but I do consider whether the popularity of the device or feature will matter in time. For example I could get a cordless drill from a no-name manufacturer but then 5 years later I won't be able to get replacement batteries most likely. Sometimes popularity and the network effects it generates matter as much or more than the more tangible aspects of the product design. Sometimes it doesn't matter but you have to consider whether it will.

Not really. I'm just querying whether this is a particular subset of the use of the term, particularly with respect to those who intentionally pick products slightly outside the mainstream. If someone bought a Zune in a (lame) attempt to be trendy that would seem to be "hipster" behavior. Buy the unusual product which is likely doomed to failure and look down your nose at people who buy the more mainstream products. More of a social tactic than a demographic.

Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.

I think aspects of what we call "hipsters" exist in society though I think you'll have a hard time finding a canonical example of one. People who are seriously into fashion sort of fit the bill. They're always looking for the next trend to jump on. You can find corollary examples with other products - movies, technology, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone who adopts that worldview for everything they do.

OS X is basically a riff on BSD unix underneath. It's roughly as capable as any other version of unix so I'm not sure why you think that. OS X on the Macbook Air is the same as any other Mac. You can argue that you don't like Apple's operating systems and I wouldn't quibble but to say the software lacks functionality is just false.

If you don't like the hardware on the Air, I get that. It's necessarily a design with some tradeoffs that don't work for everyone. When you go as light as possible you have to leave some stuff behind. But that gets back to my point which is that Apple is really a software company. They put the software in a pretty box but (almost) nobody would give a shit if it ran Windows instead of OS X.

Disagree that Apple's products haven't earned their reputation for ease of use. I've used Apple products on and off since the early 1980s and I've spent even more time with their competitor's products. As a general rule Apple products tend to be easier to teach to the technologically impaired, require less support and generally work more consistently and with less fuss than the competition. There are exceptions of course but on average it's usually true. That's not to say their products are perfect by any means. But having used, watched and supported others I have to say that the evidence largely points to Apple products being above average in ease of use.

When someone who is not a geek asks me whether to get a mac versus a PC or iPhone versus Android, I usually point them at the Apple product (budget permitting) because it will be less painful for them 95 times out of 100. When I converted my parents over to a Mac and iPad from Windows machines the number of tech support calls I got went from 1-3/month to 1-2/year. Furthermore if you live vaguely close to an Apple store it's a LOT easier to get support for a Mac than for most PCs.

Judging by the popularity of the Kardashians I very, very, very much doubt that.

Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.

That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.

That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.

Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?

Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.