That's a $500 lease payment and basically in line with a BMW 3 Series, not exactly demotic pricing but there's a lot of people shopping for something in that range, particularly after tax creds and discounting gasoline.

the entire enterprise of philosophy is some sort of academic scam

It pretty much is once you understand it.

That's what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said.

Because every possible distance gets tested...

Umm, you realize this is a photograph and not a ray-tracing exercise?

Parallax isn't going to hide something like that on a device of that size.

This is a function of focal length and subject distance.

We demand strict orthographic projection in all marketing materials!

But how many people with LA degrees have mastered these?

The idea that the aim of education should be professional mastery and specialization is very modern and has significant detractors, particularly among those who would say that it simply turns the University into a factory that produces graduates like goods.

Also this debate happens in the context of middle-class university education. The children of the rich are absolutely still getting rigorous liberal arts educations, as this seems to be a prerequisite for politics and leadership, for people who look forward to living rich and full lives, and not merely being a useful commodity for someone else to consume.

PS. On (3), I don't think it's any accident that the government of the People's Republic of China is made up of engineers to a large extent, or that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many Iranian politicians are engineers, or that many members of the Muslim Brotherhood (including Ayman al-Zawahiri) are medical doctors.

STEM fields give intelligent people a way of working in the world that will not fundamentally challenge their philosophy or beliefs.

... employees with STEM degrees have critical thinking skills *and* STEM degrees. Just sayin'.

Hrmmm. Just some random thoughts, as someone with a film degree that also codes and has a highly technical job -- I am a sound designer and a recording engineer. I will to some extent generalize, but that's what we're doing here.

1) I've noticed that people can have really extensive technical knowledge but really not have any concept of social context or even the social utility of what they do. Indeed they'll often argue that the social utility is meaningless when compared to some teleological "search for knowledge," which is portrayed as valueless and objectively good, and questions of economy and competing interests are morally inferior.

2) STEM people can be total philistines. They'll often deride art and creative pursuits as somehow less essential or necessary than the cause of science and progress. They don't seem to understand that "progress" itself is a moral concept deeply embedded within a complex philosophical value system, and indeed a lot of STEM people know nothing of philosophy or epistemology, and think the entire enterprise of philosophy is some sort of academic scam. I love me some Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but he's completely put the foot in his mouth on several occasions when he thinks he's talking about philosophy of science, and I loved the new Cosmos but his depictions of certain historical events, particularly about Giordano Bruno, were glib and lacked rigor or sensitive knowledge.

3) I've noticed that a lot of people with an engineering or medical background are subject to many forms of woo, quackery and crank ideas. Whenever someone prints a list of "scientists" who oppose Evolution/Global Warming/Old Universe, take your pick, the list is generally chock full of engineer Ph.Ds.

4) Relatedly, I've noticed a lot of engineers are dilettantes who tend to see all problems in the world as simply problems of applied computer science, who don't respect professional expertise or knowledge, or respect the fact that things in the world can fundamentally differ in kind from the problems of science and engineering.

5) Some STEM people can be highly dogmatic, if you ever get into an argument with one over some point they will not let go of, eventually they'll resort to some form of scientism, and insist that the thing you believe is false because its existence cannot be falsified. An important part of exposing yourself to art and creativity is acknowledging that you can't prove beauty exists falsifiably, and everyone can argue over wether this or that tulip is beautiful, but beauty exists.

It's easy to throw together a new language and compiler.

It happens often enough, but I don't know if I'd describe it as "easy."

enum Vertigo {
  case Uni
  case Dos
  case Tres
  case Catorce // FIXME
}

Go back to 2002 or so and s/Objective-C/Java. They're committed for the time being, but if they see people switching to Swift uniformly they'll dump Obj-C like a bad habit.

They're commoditizing media and I can't think of a single thing we're going to lose as a consequence that I'm going to miss.

I work in media.

But even at $7 a month it's not clear it's worth as much as one HBO, it's first-run original programming is pretty thin, all you've got is the back catalogue, which competitors can easily replicate -- just as Amazon has. If a shop like Netflix wants to keep subscribers they have to offer something beyond just the library, in a cost game there's not much question an Amazon can destroy them -- the original programming is the tail that wags the dog, they have to constantly produce it an improve it. HBO's sub growth is driven almost completely by people wanting to get into new original programming, just having movies wasn't enough.

It'll never be $70 a month, but $20, or $30?

Note that the reverse trend is happening. Thanks to the very low cost of production and distribution, there are many, many, many alternate "shows" out there that you can watch.

As a happy contributor to Red Letter Media on Patreon, I've found that the quality of this kind of indie, samizdat prodcutions to be pretty uneven, it'd be hard to get any kind of mass penetration with it. From a producer's perspective, that's the big peril of going YouTube -- you'll definitely get your stuff out there, and you may even be able to make a living, but there's never going to be a "hit." Even if you do hit, there's really no good way for you to monetize your programming long-term, all of the rents in the system that used to flow to creators through copyright now flow to advertisers and search aggregators.

You'll only make a killing if you turn yourself into a sort of brand celebrity, a Lady Gaga or a Justin Beiber, who, musical talent aside, are salient primarily due to their ability to brand media and consumer experiences. They're a substrate for ads -- they're the kind of artists the world gets when no one pays for art.

I think the undesirable qualities of cable TV would find their way into Netflix and similar services.

Your Netflix bill is already paying for Orange is the New Black and House of Cards -- these are very good shows, so that's a saving grace, but it's not like you can tell Netflix to take $2 off your bill in order to skip their original programming. And presumably as Netflix expands its original content offerings, your bill is going to be subsidizing a lot of content you couldn't care less about. Shops like Amazon and Crackle already crank out unruly gobs of uneven content, they only get away with it because Amazon Prime offers many other valuable services, and Crackle doesn't charge subscriptions.

Further, it's still not realistic for a producer, even a David Fincher, to just set up his own website somewhere and get people to give him $10 a month to make a TV show. He needs to piggyback off of a platform like Netflix, which already has a lot of brand recognition and traffic.

The problem with "a la carte cable channels" is the presumption that people want channels. They want shows that are suited to their tastes. The center of value is the program, that's what brings in the people, but due to underlying economics, the center of costs remains the channel, this Netflix must offer its subscription on a channel-wise, take-it-all or leave-it-all basis.