What you are missing is that ratings are assigned relative to the competition that existed when the rating was assigned. Go over to gamespot and check out the graphics of a game that got the top rating for graphics 8 years ago. Are those graphics still 10/10? Not even close. Go over to Amazon.com and search SD Cards by "Average Customer Review." Many of the top-ranked cards are little 8 and 16 GB cards that were rated up years ago.

There are various "dreams" of course, but the Gold Rush mentality has always been strong in US culture. Our current top marginal tax rates certainly support that assertion - average people pay dearly in real money to protect their fantasy future-self.

Any marketplace of infinitely scalable production is a lottery!

Before music recordings, if you wanted to hear music, somebody had to play it. A more popular musician could make somewhat more than an average musician - maybe substantially more - but the top handful couldn't entertain the entire planet singlehandedly. Now they can. The economy of agrarian farmers - where a 20% more productive farmer makes 20% more money - is over. Now it's winner-takes-all.

While I think that Jackson is an opportunistic jackass, resorting to racial epithets is completely unnecessary and only serves to undercut your message. Be better than this. You owe it to your society and yourself.

AND you can leave with a receipt for your returned equipment, plus the names of people you dealt with face to face. That could be extremely useful if they want to play the common game of "we never got your stuff and you still owe us monthly payments".

I liked your post right up to the last sentence when you said the real problem is our tendency to not check everything. That is simply not possible. Life rolls forward on a vast number of assumptions every moment, and most of them are correct, or good enough to get by on. (False assumptions that don't matter and cannot be observed - like this Amelia Bedelia thing - can linger indefinitely).

That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse

No, it's based on the premise of the Model-T being the cheapest possible automobile.

It's not obvious that the automobile would take off, though the piles of horse feces in city streets should have been a hint. But it is obvious that the best chance anybody has, starting a new market, is to go for the least-expensive possible vehicle.

otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.

Ford found a way to do it very cheaply, that had escaped all others. There were plenty of other car makers out there, and once they adopted the assembly-line model, they started competing with Ford, too.

That's terrible advice. If you want the big bucks, get into Python, Node.js, or Go and find a startup that just received VC and has tons of money to shove at developers. C++, Java, and C# are great for long-term "comfortable" jobs, but that's not where the seriously good money is.

"Staticness" and "strongness" are orthogonal properties. Python, for instance, has strongly typed values (you can't convince an int that it's a str), but dynamic variables (a=123;a='foo' is valid). And while C++ is statically typed, I'd be hard pressed to describe something with void* and unions as strongly typed.

TL;DR: Words have meaning. It's OK to disagree about whether a particular language is strongly or weakly typed, but it's not OK to claim that two different concepts are the same thing. When you make a fundamental mistake in the third paragraph, I'm likely to ignore anything else you have to say in the rest of the article.

However, he can't order the next President to continue his policies. There's a lot to be said for pinning these things down so that they can't be changed on a whim.

Which part do you find suspect? Tesla wants to make a major launch of a $35K all-electric car, which will require a huge number of batteries, above and beyond the current supply. The word "allegation" sounds as if you think the new Telsa model won't use batteries? Or that there's already enough production to support the new Tesla model, presumably going straight into a huge hole in the ground? Or what?

But there absolutely is a right to know the full details of the bargain. If EA isn't telling you that the game comes with OS-damaging (by definition) software, then they're not giving you the information required to make a considered decision.

The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.

Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.

Half of your customers buy the iPhone. All those people who said, "Oh, I'm going to buy QWERTY," boom, take them out of the equation."

Funny, because Sprint has pushed the iPhone harder than anyone. The cut-rate prices with the iPhone, even on already-cut-rate services like Sprint's Virgin Mobile, are tempting. They practically PAY YOU to take an iPhone. There were articles about how they were contractually required to sell X iPhones from their deal with Apple, but it sounds like they had to undermine the rest of their business to get it done.

I also specified Android, since almost nobody wants feature phones or Windows, which returned just EIGHT. Then I required LTE, which brought it down to just FOUR:

LG Enact (Available on Verizon)

LG Mach (no longer available, Sprint)

LG Optimus F3Q (Available on T-Mobile)

Samsung Stratosphere / Galaxy Metrix 4G (For sale on Amazon, not listed as available by Verizon. YMMV)