Technology pricing usually declines over the top of the curve of that technology's widespread usefulness, it's not unique to Apple's supply chain. Apple is usually pretty aggressive about using high-end components in its high-end models, then aggressive about pushing them downmarket in a generation or two (displays are a great example here; see the iPod touch gaining the same screen as the iPhone). They can only do this by taking advantage of declining cost as economies of scale improve and cutting edge features progress. The retail price rarely declines, but neither do margins increase substantially; instead, they regularly cycle through new/improved parts to justify the same prices and margins. And again, it's not so unique, it's fairly common for consumer products. The only reason it's not as common in the computer industry is that the OEM model favors low-margin-high-volume strategies over other kinds of differentiation.

"Poor" and "rich" are not finite states. The wealth divide has been increasing at a pretty incredible clip. That doesn't happen spontaneously, it's a consequence of policy... set by the rich and powerful.

The voting system has more features than who appears on a ballot. Appearing on a ballot doesn't overcome the spoiler effect: less established parties are recursively seen as not viable and then can't establish viability. It's a predictable effect of "first past the post" voting systems.

Let me paraphrase, as an analogy, what you've given me.

"The Bible explains everything you need to know about sexual morality."

What does it explain? Can you give me a reason to consider the Bible a sexual morality reference? There's oodles of books out there competing for my attention. What is the content I'm supposed to be motivated to go look at? Do you have an outline or even a few quotes?

Incidentally, I've continued to reply because I'm genuinely interested in the subject. Why are you so determined not to sell me on this, and so condescendingly at that? I've given you many opportunities.

You keep saying it addresses certain subject matter, but you haven't specified any of its content.

You haven't given me any reason to pursue the book. You've said it has some stuff in it but not even a hint as to what any of that stuff might be.

Why would I buy a book without any substantive comment on what I might expect to find in it? Is it really so involved that you can't provide a short synopsis that would help me understand your point? I think I'm being pretty generous by inviting you twice now to state what you want me to take away from your comment.

Well, you didn't give me a lot of substance, so I really can only respond to this:

No, of course not. And human children aren't even sentient nor conscious in the same way that human adults are. I didn't say it's the same.

Mewing is verbal.

I didn't have any comment on the analogy, just on the point about sentience.

I'm not doing anything of the sort. Like I said, I had no comment on the analogy.

The savvy part is the fact of manipulating the media, not the way it's done.

The last time I had a conversation with my cat is this evening. If you mean direct, two-way, verbal communication, it was this morning. Her food bowl was empty, which she told me, by mewing and physically showing me what she was mewing about. She free-feeds, and sometimes it isn't empty, and she doesn't typically mew and go to her food bowl when it's not empty; when she does, something else is wrong and she knows that is a way to prompt attention.

Generally, the response I get to these sorts of scenarios is that I'm projecting and I can't adequately judge a non-human animal's attention without human language (which, by the way, begs the question). But this sort of reasoning easily devolves all the way to cogito ergo sum: nothing can be truly known but what's in your mind. What a hopelessly chaotic worldview. My cat and I communicate, sometimes with mistakes just as with human-human communication. But it shows an enormous lack of experience or empathy to believe that non-human animal sentience doesn't exist.

So are animals.

Except that's obviously a pick-one list. It can't be "retarded" to successfully manipulate "retarded" media. Either the media manipulation is successful—and the effort is savvy—or it fails—and the media is savvy.

So, you're actually saying that if you introduce toll lanes, the demand for those lanes will fall... and the people who previously had that demand will just vanish? Or will they just use the (now more congested) toll-free lanes? Demand for the good whose price increased may fall, but unless you impose tolls on all of the lanes (and then all of the alternate routes), you're just moving the congestion around, almost certainly non-optimally. The only way to actually reduce congestion would be to eliminate alternate routes for those who can't or won't pay the tolls. Which, considering the sort of oligarchic, myopic worldview this represents, is really a pretty good reason to discard this sort of "rational" economic reasoning altogether.

If you really don't believe that programming is math, what exactly do you think that a processor does with those "words"?