Most people get their mobile replaced as part of their contract every 2 years. I don't know many person for which it is not the case: they tends to either do not care at all and have a non-smart phone, or they come from a country where getting a mobile with your contract is not legal (which btw does not mean they don't replace their phone every 2 years regardless).

Samsung is going to sell thousands of its smartphone to contracts for each one they sell to somebody like you and me ( I'm using my second smartphone ever and I have had one since 2007 ) The market has spoken and since you don't spend, you don't get to vote.

Well you actually give a good reason why increasing minimum wage is good.

See, minimum wage zealot ( in the US, elsewhere that's different ) only ask for the minimum wage to be raised to the level where those worker do not cost more money in social security. The outcome you highlight are correct and good.

The first one, some people are replaced by robot. In effect, too low minimum wage padded by social security was just subvention of inefficient business model. Now social security cost is still the same ( more jobless, less padding ) but the industry has become more efficient.

Second effect, increase in cost, is good too. Because McDonald didn't pay its employee enough, the taxes of all non-McDonald customer served to give a discount on the meal price of McDonald customers. Worse was that McDonald was making profit i.e. part of the non-McDonald customer taxes going straight in their pockets ?

You cannot look at minimum salary in isolation. If you have a social security system that is going to help people in trouble, that is stupid to have a minimum wage that still need to be padded with extra help. So either you increase it to social security level, or you reduce social security level to the same level as full-time minimum wage. ( ideally you would reduce it to less than that, because otherwise you give negative incentive to work - i.e. why would I work at McDo when I can get the same not doing anything )

Now, obviously this is a simplified view of the world. In practice, determining the level of minimum wage where somebody is self sufficient is tricky and that's where the real debate is. The consequence you listed are only negative when you get over that level.

At the time MS changed all the fonts in Windows, people complained about the loss of readability if you were not using a LCD and enabled sub-pixel rendering ( consolas ) . Specifically developers either still using CRT or remote connecting to a computer with a tool not handling that.

People moan a little but it did not make any type of mainstream noise, because at the end of the day, unless you need to read the screen all day long and are stuck in such circumstances you have bigger problem. Same thing here, if you are a heavy mac user looking at system menu all day long, you most likely are using a high dpi screen already or looking for an excuse to buy one. Otherwise, if you are like the majority of mac user and use your computer to browse the web, watch tv, ..., this will have 0 effect on you.

The only reason it makes some noise is that with Apple people, everybody and his dog feel they have been elected UI experts and sole representative of all computer user past/present/future.

It's shit like that. When firefox/chrome change slightly the way they render font online, it is going to affect order of magnitude more effect on users. And that happens - if you have ever used a Mac - rendering in browser have been weird from time to time. But who cares about that ? Nobody, because expect for some web designers, the effect is not bad enough that it makes Joe User think anything else rather than "hmm, weird, outlook.com looked different somehow".

Wait - that's still an issue, vaccine are not 100% efficient, so some people take the shot and are not vaccinated. Some people are too weak despite being vaccinated, very young babies are not yet vaccinated, some people think they are vaccinated but they were not ( after all you were like 2 to 6 months old when that happened, all the proof you have is a note in a book - mistake happen ).

Well they have sort of a point and a few years back they had it. The thing is, the recent push for more privacy by tons of companies is because they abused this power when they had it.

They are not even apologising for their past misuses, they just ignore it and moan.

I think Microsoft gives manufacturers a discount if they limit their ram to 2 GB.

They are really shooting themselves in the foot, because a web browser can easily use 2 GB by itself, bringing the computer to a crawl.

Seriously.. my cell phone has 2 GB of ram.... This laptop will be nearly unusable without more memory.

This is as counterproductive as outlet stores. Sure, you pay a little less but the clothes shrink or fall apart.

And there on my ruined clothes it says Gap or Banana Republic - 2 brands I've bought lots of stuff from before, and will never ever buy again. But they made a little money, and I 'saved' a little money.

This laptop is the outlet mall version of an HP laptop - itself a brand that doesn't exactly exude quality these days..

BTW the law is maybe old in the Germany, but similar law has been created in the UK only 10 years ago. In order to run a mini-cab service, you need to make sure to follow a few regulation like all your car must pass a car inspection and your driver must be insured, with valid license, ...

The UK is a lot closer to the US and yet, they created that law a decade ago.

More importantly - timing matters. Even if they are 100% correct, power companies will continue to make money for a decade. As for the "market disruptor", if you are just a few year wrong, you would have put your money in MySpace rather than Facebook. If you sold your investment in real estate in 2006 you hit gold, if you did it in 2004 or 2008, you lost.

The reasoning being this is that video viewer are increasing demand in child porn, hence indirectly causing the raise in child abuse. Same reasoning why drug consumption and prostitution clients are charged. This rule applied outside of common sense means that following a link you don't know lead to CP and actively seeking CP is theoretically punishable to the same extend.

Kid being shot in a remote country is not driving the same demand.

That was an accident ! Can we move on I was young, times were different back then.

C# is radically different. Your IDE, your test env, your OS, your frameworks, language features, ... all those are different enough so that you will not feel at work when coding with it.

That's just not the way it works unfortunately. People take fashion advice from looking at some star on tv, not from market analysis. The behavior of people at the top definitively matter. So flying your jet around and buying "eco-credit" while preaching abstinence for the common folk will always translate in people mind that this is all bullshit.

The last time there was a crisis, with the ozone layer, a few years later you could not find a can of anything containing that attacked it. For regular Joe, that means 2 things: 1. people in power are not really convinced that there is something wrong, 2. the day they decide there is something wrong the peasant will all need to go f* themselves because it will be legally impossible not to be fully-200% green, and that means live the lifestyle you want while it lasts.

That said, I agree with your 3rd point. I'm not hoping much from the carbon credit though - it has been at least a decade of green consciousness (here in Europe), and green still mean premium for almost everything and for the rest a 5+ investment (if government financial help are not canned like they did this year for solar panels in my country)

If you live in a dense city, cycling is a serious decision. My most safety conscious colleague are in a near miss situation once a year. For the most reckless ones, that's once a week at least. 2 cyclists have been killed / seriously injured this year alone in front close to my office (bus - cyclist joust both time, cyclists lost). Over the last 3 years, all of my cycling colleagues have had a least one physical injury (generally falling: pot holes, white lines, manhole covers are a bitch)

Of course, if you live in a dense city, you may as well take the public transports instead ( and if that city is outside the US, you pretty much have too if you want to get to work at all )

Just nitpicking there, but worded like this, it definitively is. The easiest way to get rich/powerful is to be the child of somebody rich/powerful. Of course, as you wanted to say, the reason has nothing to do with genetic.