Just compare a Samsung S8 or S9 Ultra tablet to an iPad pro 10th gen and you will see what I am talking about.
I suspect it has far more to do with price than anything. iPhones are just too damned expensive, even on the low end. You can get a decently built, solidly performing Android phone for $200 or less. If you're not an iTunes user, or iMessage devotee, there just isn't any real reason to pick an Apple phone over an Android phone.
"And nothing of value was lost"?
The Supreme Court already ruled that they can't regulate carbon emissions like this.
They also ruled that student loan forgiveness was (mostly) unconstitutional as well, and yet the President does it anyway.
We are entering "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it" territory again.
Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.
"Economic Hardship" has jack-shit to do with most of the declining birthrate. Women have more money than ever. If being poor hurt the birthrate, the Third World would have ceased to exist centuries ago. Women choosing careers over marriage has far more to do with it. Those that are getting married are doing so much later in life, when their fertility is already declining, and having few children is a consequence of that. Why do you think IVF and egg-freezing are in such demand? Because women that waited until 30 to get married discover, often to their surprise, that their best chances of pregnancy are in the rear window.
Women were told that they could have it all, the best of both worlds: that they could live like men in their twenties, living the single sexual life and moving up their corporate ladder, and after they had their fun, then they could marry the man of their dreams and have their family. All in a neat package. Except nature doesn't work that way. The Biological Clock is a thing, women have a set number of eggs, and by thirty, they start heading downwards in terms of fertility. Late pregnancies have a greater chance of complications and birth defects. The peak year for fertility and healthy birth is, IIRC, age 24 on average for females.
Life is a series of choices. And choices have consequences. Declining birthrates are inescapable considering the choices made.
Shouldn't wide open areas make it even more suitable for trains?
No, and because of passenger density and volume issues that affects costs. For high speed rail to pay for itself, you need fairly dense-packed areas with high traffic between each other. For HSR to successfully operate on a large scale in the US, it's going to have to be a political decision to subsidize it and eat the costs (see: the Acela).
Even liberal-ish groups that Rah-Rah things like public rail admit that it simply isn't self-supporting in the US. A decade ago, Brookings did a study on American rail, and concluded that if AmTrak was to be "saved", it was going to require a mix of killing off some routes, and subsidizing the remainder:
What Brookings found is not surprising. There are only two routes that do better than break even — New York – DC and New York – Boston — and even those only make money on an operating basis, they don’t cover their capital costs.
Brookings finds that the operating profits (if the federal government subsidizes capital expenses) would cover the top 26 Amtrak routes (which carry 80% of passengers). They recommend having affected states cover the losses of other routes if they want those to survive.
I’m not sure how it would no longer be a subsidy if the states are paying rather than the federal government, but the supposition is billion dollar operating subsidies may no longer be in the cards for Amtrak. So how can they save the service that people actually use, while recognizing that the Chicago – California routes (Chicago Zephyr and Southwest Chief) are unaffordable. Fifteen routes account for over $600 million in annual operating losses.
Put a different way, Amtrak’s long haul operation is bleeding the entire system of the funds it needs to maintain shorter and medium-length routes where the passengers are.
HSR tickets are also naturally going to be more expensive than snail-rail fares, too, further hurting traffic numbers, especially over the longer distance routes.
Some countries just can't do infrastructure. The US and UK are prime examples.
The US can do infrastructure just fine. What it can't do is ape a European rail model that is unworkable in the US. The United States, geographically and culturally, is as different from Europe as it is from Japan. It's a huge, wide-open area with large spaces between major metro areas outside of a small cluster in the Northeast US. Very unlike Japan and Europe in that regard. The train romanticists simply refuse to accept reality on that.
My Neice ended up going to a high school in Germany. She spoke English but quickly picked up German. One of the friends she made asked her one day what it was like actually understanding the lyrics of the songs they listened to. To them it was just a bunch of pleasant-sounding gibberish. So you can enjoy the songs without knowing the words.
Decades ago, there was an Italian music star named Adriano Celentano that came out with a song called "Prisencolinensinainciusol". The lyrics were nonsense. He wanted to make a song that showed how English sounded to the Italian ear. It was his biggest hit.
Is everyone at CNN as so self-centered as Jim Acosta?
Yes
Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually.
Annual license that is a complete pain-in-the-A$$
In other words How To Make Something Seriously Restricted Without Actually Saying So
Yeah, it sounds like they're intentionally driving away anyone but paying customers at this point.
Remember Munich, with much fanfare, adopted Linux in 2003 only to abandon it for Windows 10:
The plan was prompted by gripes about both the complexity of the current setup and compatibility headaches. According to Mayor Dieter Reiter, having two operating systems on municipal PCs is "completely uneconomic" -- it'd make more financial sense to simplify. And unfortunately for Linux advocates, Windows was more likely to win out in this case. Munich's council has had to keep a minority of Windows PCs around for apps and hardware that absolutely needed Microsoft's platform to run, and those were destined to stay.
Reiter also pointed to complaints about IT performance, although there are disputes as to whether or not reverting to Windows is the solution.
In addition to politics and cost, the issue of having to work in a Microsoft-centric world are likely to kill this.
I just can't see why a parent would think that missing a day of school is acceptable.
Because COVID taught them that
A) their kids can learn anywhere, anytime, with a variety of methods
B) they saw just how much of their kids school days had been taken up by crap that had nothing to do with academics
C) it's not necessary to be stuck in a concrete box 9 hours a day to learn, or even study 5 days every week to learn
Most of us are beginning to see what the late Michel Foucaultt meant when he said that "schools resemble prisons because they serve a similar function".
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
