In the TFA, he speculates that these multipurpose devices are now "good enough" to suit most needs, and I think that is true, But it is true that the quality of our audio and video experience seems to have gotten worse of the last couple of years.

When it look at the pictures, or listen to the audio generated by the phones and tablets, or watch the video. It works, but, it just isn't very good.

What's happening is that the middle layer of high-end consumer products are just vanishing: everything is either multipurpose devices or pro devices.

For me, anyway, I still use digital camera and I still use dedicated audio that I used to play CDs and records. I'm a grumpy old man, I guess, but, it sounds better.

Absolutely. I spend a lot of time coding using the whole C + EMACS + Autotools + 100 random barely documented libraries that have been cobbled together to form the GNOME GNU Linux API. I care about software freedom. But Visual Studio and C# and MSDN is just so clean and complete and well documented. It really improves productivity. One day coding on Visual Studio == 3 days coding in C on EMACS.

Los Angeles is somewhat unusual for California in that its electricity generation is owned by the city, instead of being a privatized monolopy.

It is a 3 Tier system, where, during the summer, the 1st tier (350 kWh per month) is the cheapest and the 3rd is the most expensive. Oddly, during the winter, all three tiers cost the same. Go figure.

Anyway, looks like a kWh costs about 0.14USD on Tier 1. I don't have air conditioning, so it would be pretty hard to exceed 350 kWh. 350 kWh works out to an average power consumption of 500W constantly all month long. I use about half that.

That's a fair point. I guess I do think of a photo editor as part of the dev environment, but, that is really stretching the definition of "dev environment" too far.

But the point I was trying to make, I guess, is that the native apps I use are used in my role as a developer. Rarely do I use native apps in the role of end user.

Despite being in free software for a bajillion years and using it as my desktop, I can't say that I've used any native Linux apps for anything really. For the past few years, it has just been a way to get a webbrowser running and to get online, and as a place to cache content. I also use Emacs and the dev environment to make my own (web) apps, and Apache to serve them.

The only native apps I use are games that need native audio/video control.

I read on the intarwebz that you need 0.1 acres to feed a person. So if I'm going to give up my software job and become a subsistence farmer here in LA, I just need to buy a couple of houses so I can farm.

So all I need is $500k in startup capital and I'm good to go.

I think the real question from TFA is if we all do pointless crap like market analysis, marketing, branding, and search engine optimization like the guy in the article, are we going to someday have a future where these skills can no longer be converted into food and shelter through the magic of the market.

For a while now, I've been wondering what the purpose of the USA economy is.

There are the basics, of course. I work so that I can have food, water, clothing, shelter, free time, fun. But it is through the magic of the world economy that I get those things by writing software specifications and unit tests. The economy somehow figures out how many lines of code I need to write to buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.

I suppose I don't worry too much about the fact that most of the work we do is of dubious importantance, so long as it is still convertible into food and shelter. But there is a tipping point somewhere. If everyone in the USA worked making click-through ads, we'd reach a point where no amount of work could be converted to food and shelter.

The truth is that this is all about the hard capitalist reality. But if it is important for the USA to retain at least some technical capability, we need find a way to bring wages down in the near term. To do that we need to find a way to reduce systemic costs for workers so that they can accept lower wages. For example

• Make college free
• Socialized medicine
• Free transit
• Lower rent

(Note the conundrum, soft forms of socialism like in China and Germany is the best way to compete in a capitalist world.)

But, with lower wages for the workers, you'll have to shift the tax burden to corporations and individuals that profit from lower wages for workers, which, of course, is impossible in the USA. So, there's nothing that can be done. American workers will continue to migrate to those jobs that pay well.