To the people who make optical systems, lens hoods, and such... I'd imagine it's pretty significant. Not every discovery needs to world changing to be significant.

It has been. The french government is democratically elected.

So long as the child traffickers sell them for adoption into family homes... and not to those who will raise them for prostitution, or raise them for farm labor, or raise them to cripple them and set them to begging, or...

Junior guys in [field] aren't as well known as senior guys and do most of the grunt work.

Film at 11.

The market doesn't shrink. The market is the number of exchanged goods. The market doesn't care if there are 200 merchants or 250 merchants. What changes is the distribution of goods and merchants, and when the number of merchants is very low and their concentration of market power high, we get into situations (oligopoly, monopoly) that we do not want because we know they are bad.

For the past 20 years, when I go to a bookstore and I want a book they don't have, they could almost always order it and have it for me the next day.

I'm not talking about a perfect equilibrium. I'm talking about the simple fact that if your country has one region with 50% unemployment rates and one region where employers can't find workers, your whole country will destabilze.

Of course there will always be differences. But if they get too extreme, the consequences are much higher and much more expensive then the costs of some small interventions.

I never said anything like that and my arguments are completely unrelated to technical or other progress. So please burn the strawman somewhere else.

MIRV's and decoys can cheaply and easily neutralize any form of missile defense.

Well, no. Because MIRV's can't defeat terminal defenses and effective decoys generally either a) aren't cheap, and/or b) have noticeable and significant impact on the weapon's performance. Much of the propaganda about decoys comes from either the 1960's (before the advent of modern signal processing techniques) or from folks who oppose the systems but haven't actually been able to provide examples of such cheap decoys.

Hamas fires inaccurate artillery rockets, unlikely to actually hit anything

Huh? What are you smoking? They're 100% gaurunteed to hit something as what goes up must come down. The problem they pose to Israel is that the something their going to hit is somewhere in a crowded city, meaning potential civilian casualties.

Because you need many, many competitors in a market for it to actually be a market. The amount of large corporations any market can support is limited and fairly low, general business wisdom has it that it is around 3-5 with the first 3 being profitable and two or so more being able to just barely make it.

If you want many participants in a market, most of them will be small. That is why small shops are worthy of protection.

You also want to have employment in your country be fairly even, and not have some areas with high demand and low supply and some with low demand and many unemployed, which is why local shops are worthy of protection.

Really, you just need to use your brain a little more and it's all very simple.

Maybe, but this is not at all about bookshops being replaced by something else, it's about small competitors being driven out by large competitors, so put the strawman away again.

And sometimes it is needed. The whole "free market über alles" philosophy makes assumptions that are not true in the real world, such as perfect transparency. To come even close to working as it should, the free market needs to be guided. Among other things, protecting small competitors guarantees that it remains a free market and doesn't turn into an oligopol or a monopol.

Unfortunately, they will not. Too many people will use the cozy atmosphere and the good service to make their selection, and then order it online because it costs a dollar less.

Except that Amazon has not invented the car. The buggy whip makers are not going to be out of jobs, they are going to be replaced by minimum-wage buggy whip warehouse slaves.

Let me guess: You are female, yes?

Us males, we have trouser pockets. My iPhone fits all the pockets on all my trousers perfectly. Something that is bigger by just a few centimeters would be uncomfortable or even impossible to put into some of them.

Having the stuff on your wrist in a way that may often require you to turn your hand is quite probably no less dangerous than having a phone in your hand.

They're already being replaced by fully-automated trading systems, in a few years we'll wonder why humans ever even did the job in the first place.

Earphone pieces already allow for this. Those from Apple, for example, let you stop, start, skip forward and backward. And it only requires one arm to do it, not both, which is more important in running than having a cute gadget.

Yes, which is why I'm waiting for one that makes me say more then "yeah, cute idea, I would need it twice this century."

And if you did, it would be a handmade analog clock from Switzerland, not a mass-produced electronic gadget from China.

If it is actually "smart" in any appreciable sense, I'm interested.

Right now, I see nothing on the market that even approaches anything that would justify using that term. The best that these watches have to offer at this moment is that they're about 3 seconds faster to look at than the smartphone in your pocket. Maybe if you're a lady and keep your smartphone dug in deep in your bag of holding and it takes you a minute of searching to find it that's interesting, but for most people I don't see any actual practical value (not that that would stop a million or so customers from buying it simply because it's new and flashy and advertisement budgets have convinced them it's the second coming).

I can't say what a watch would need to be interesting. If I could, I wouldn't post it here, I would sell it very expensively to Apple. So I'm looking for what everyone announces, maybe someone is smarter than me and I'll say "I didn't think of that, it's really cool". But so far, that hasn't happened.