The article states that the workers in the amazon warehouse are frequenting the book sellers in the area. Whether they are treated badly, these workers have the disposable income to buy a book. I am big book buyer, but there have been times in my life when I went to the library instead of a bookstore. So as badly as these employees are treated, they are paid, though probably not as much as they should be, enough to have some expendable income.
And honestly, no matter what no independent retailer can compete with the big box or online stores. I used to pay extra just to support the local book and music dealers. Ultimately there were just not enough of us and they went out business.
How much is this really. As a comparison, our football stadium was supposed to cost $400 million in today's dollars. It actually cost closer to $600 million, also in today's dollars. About $350 million of that is paid by extorting fees from visitor to the city. I can't imagine how making visitors pay for something they have no use for makes, sense, but there it is.
This reminds me of people who complain about the $400 million cost to launch the Space Shuttle. The same amount of a high end movie. But what does a movie give us?
Issac Newton was 1700. Not a huge step forward, but embedded physics in a mathematical base. He was able to do some things that Galileo could not because of the math.
Between 1700 and 1900, there was much refinement, many extensions, and then the ultraviolet catastrophe among other things
So 1900 saw Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which solved some real problems with the classical physics that dominated in the 18th and 19th century. It explains so much, has lead to so much, but there is so much to know.
QM and Relativity don't work well together. Black Holes are infinities in real space. In the 21st century, for the first time, we have an expatiation for mass, it is no longer just an inertial concept. I don't know if we yet know why inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass.
We thought that if we could sequence DNA we would know everything. We don't. So there is a lot to find out.
This, of course, does not in any mean that these violent models imprint themselves on the player. But there is credence to the idea that if a person practices using aggression and violence to solve social problems, that she or he may use those same methods in more authentic interactions.
As mentioned before, MS does not have a great incentive to kill Android. MS get a free chunk of money for every handset sold. Cheap phones from Nokia simply mean that MS loses money.
Gentrification may also be an issue. When I was growing up one thing I noticed was the my friends who lived in more affluent or gated neighborhoods would talk about being taken home to their parents instead of arrested. They might be doing drugs, selling drugs, breaking into cars, whatever. We have seen a case where a teen has stolen beer, gotten drunk, and killed some people while driving, has gotten probation. The parents would pay reparations. So if a lot of wealthy parents are moving in, and protecting their kids, then those kids might be less motivated to not commit crime.
Now, it is true that with xcode you need a Mac, so add $1000 for the programming bit. xcode is also much more complicated that it needs to be for the purpose of teaching.
There are cheap ways to teach kids to program. For way under $100 you can give a kid an Ardiuno kit, then she can use sketch of process to code it. As mentioned, python can be used for free. I suppose we need something like codeschool for kids to get them started.
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine