I'm seeing a big correlation between people getting older and screens getting bigger. And for people who rely on their phones for business, again, the phones are working devices, so their size and usability has direct payback for their working experience. So a phone's source of value directly corresponds with the price that people want to pay for the devices.

This is an open secret that's been known for decades. The best minds that I've work with are almost invariably from other majors. The sharpest programmer that I know came out of the music department. In most positions, technical skills represent about 1/5 of what you need to do a job. Those other 4/5 matter a whole lot. It's easier to teach a humanities person some technical skills than it is to teach a technical person humanities.

I learned early on, in the Palm days, that these electronic devices were horrible for me, so I formulated a way of interacting with them that put me on top and them on the bottom. I get where she's coming from. If you grow up in an always-connected culture, one where timeliness and instant response are vital, you don't make a decision about it. It's your culture. Now, she's making a decision and talking about the implications of that decision. She no longer gets a social reward for prompt reaction while paying a quality of life penalty. In other words, she's changing her game and learning to live by new rule, and that require purposefully developing new habits. If anything, she's the exact opposite of a special snowflake, and she's busy bucking up and taking responsibility. Go her.

Tax reasons. Are you writing off the expense? That's the #1 reason that I see people renting.

If you know your use case, then it's a good idea. For example, as a self-employed person, you would write off a phone rental as a business expense, keeping that expense predictable, and never having to worry about the headache of depreciation. I'm sure that there are other use cases out there.

Reading those numbers, some Americans are abandoning wired internet. Only SOME. The vast majority remained wired to the internet in some form or another. My guess is that singles prefer paying for one internet connection, their mobile device. Maybe couples. Families, however, have far different requirements than singles or couples, and those requirements for faster broadband are only likely to increase over time.

My wife tried them, did her best, then gave up. She now has dedicated reading glasses. I tried them by accident, as the glasses place sold them to me without telling me. I could not even walk around wearing them. I had to get them made three, complaining about the distortion, before we figured out that they sold me the wrong thing. Ick. I won't go there.

Your brain learns to do what you teach it. As indicated above, if you practice concentration, your concentration will get better.

I fell out of reading books for many years, now I'm back on the bandwagon. I've been cranking on books for about six months now. Once I got back into the rhythm, which took about a week, I was able to settle down and really read again.

Concentration is a choice, just like multitasking. All the cool kids showed off by doing many things at once, and now we think that's normal, but it's just a fashion like any other fashion. I've noticed a rise is "put your phone away on holidays," for instance, or willfully putting your phone down in meetings. This is an acknowledgement that multitasking doesn't work in many situations. You may also need sleep.

As said earlier, always learn. Never stop.

Learn to make a business case for best practices. "Best practices will save this company money/time/liability because ..." If you can make the case, support will follow. Avoid technical reasons in that explanation.

MOM: Why should we implement that?
YOU: We can get trainees up to speed quicker, which saves us money. We produce fewer bugs, which saves us money. Instead of wasting time squashing bugs, this lets us implement new features, which we can sell. That makes us money.

Have you ever debugged badly documented code? What about well documented code? Have you noticed a difference?

From my observation, you always want both. You want STEM folks because they think like STEM folks, and you want non-STEM folks because they don't. How many programmers remain programmers? How many become managers? Account herders? Sales drones? GUI experts? Customer support? STEM folks are no more qualified for many of those jobs than liberal arts people. The difference is that liberal arts people are more willing to learn and master whatever job they are at, while STEM folks want to do what they trained for.

My daughter LOVES to sit at my computer. It has two screens. She can play flash games on it. She prints on a 10 year old color printer (USB 1) using 3rd party ink. Tablets just don't do that. As for niche market, business isn't going away any time soon. Ergonomic needs will always prevail. The need for multitasking will prevail. The need for vast real estait will prevail. I know of no business which plans on ditching the PC. (They might exist, but I don't know about them.)

Did you read the actual article? He address those topics precisely. He waited to publish this article until he had a stack of corroborating studies using different methodologies. One study is nothing. Many different studies of many different places, and each one maps well? That's a whole heaping mound of coincidence.

Remodeling sucks down money. Focus instead on FURNITURE that matches the house. You will get far, far more return.

When throwing money into a project, ask yourself, "What tech will survive the next 10 years unscathed?" If a tech won't change much in that span, then it might be worth installing in the house. Otherwise, you are pissing money away. So that means that you invest in power outlets and upgraded power. Otherwise, invest in insulation and windows. Replace your fridge, especially if it's over 10 years old.

20k is chump change in the renovation game.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

A few things to add. I've met too many IT folks who berate people for their ignorance. Of course those people are ignorant, they are experts in a different area. If you spend a great deal of time building specializing in an area of knowlege, don't you honestly expect most folks to know less about that area? Strangely enough, the more that you know, the less that you appreciate your knowledge. You begin wondering why others don't know this simple stuff.

Once you allow people to be ignorant, then you can focus on treating them like people. And really, people out there know all kinds of cool stuff that you don't, and that's great fun. They aren't ignorant. They are specialists in areas where you are ignorant.