That's the first half. How about the second? Are they miserable?

I buy cheap products which break all the time. I'm mature enough to realize I made a choice of buying a cheap product which wouldn't last instead of an expensive one which would.

(Here's my favorite story. I wanted to install some crown moulding. A friend suggested I buy the cheapest compound miter saw I could from Harbor Freight. I did. The arm snapped in half right after I completed the room. But that was OK, the room was done, I could afford it, and I learned I liked having a miter saw enough to spring for a really nice one. It still works 20 years later.)

Another amazing thing is how often I can buy an inexpensive product and it actually lasts a long time. The instructions may be poorly translated but the product does what I need it to.

Maybe, maybe not. City councils and education boards are rife with petty tyrants and people who like wielding power. It's also entirely possible a room full of Zuck haters would show up and shout down the application. All the money in the world might not be able to fix it (and more money might make it harder).

As a side note, that's why it's attractive to buy an entire island, so you don't have to deal with neighbors who just want to cause trouble because they personally dislike you.

This is also why it's important to write regulations as "shall issue" rather than "may issue". Boards which have approval power need to have their decisions limited to factual and legal issues, not personalities and tyrannies of the majority.

Really? And why is that? What possible reason do you, I, or the nearby neighbors have to interject because there's a teacher present?

If it's a noise or traffic issue, that's fine, let's deal with that. But if this was just a daily play date for 30 kids, we wouldn't be having this conversation. What is it about educating kids that makes this special?

I get that this is the rule and we rules ought to apply to everyone. But perhaps the answer is to remove the rule.

You know what's the beauty of living now? We have the option to use a tablet or not. We didn't have that choice in 1960.

Maybe I use my tablet to have a (free!) video call with my kids who live hours away. Maybe you and I have a conversation about economic growth, informed by data we have at my fingertips in other tabs. Maybe I close the device and talk to my wife about my day at work and her new hobby. The world is our oyster, much more so than it was 60 years ago.

That is a deep philosophical issue: is a society just an aggregation of individuals or something more? It's been a central question of ethics and politics since at least the Enlightenment and probably longer.

I deeply feel society is just a shorthand description for the collective action of individuals and issues should primarily be viewed through the lens of how it affects individuals. Evidently you feel differently. I doubt we'll settle this issue here, smarter people than us have struggled with it for centuries.

Huh. What crappy products do you buy that you're miserable about after buying? Why do you feel badly after the purchase? If this happens on a regular basis, why is that?

I buy lots of things that which I'd like to be cheaper and have some additional features, but I'd also like to ride a luck dragon to work. That I can't buy the exact product I want at the price I want is no reason to for me to be upset. I chose to buy the product in front of me for the price being asked and I could have chosen differently.

In addition, there's no reason for me to be upset because some other person bought a product I chose not to buy. That's their choice, not mine, and it's wonderful that we have a right to choose differently.

The EU isn't a rival. European companies might be rivals of American companies, and vice versa. Economically speaking, that's no different from competing with domestic companies.

That's another goofy thing about contemporary economic and political reporting. Countries don't trade and don't compete economically. People do. Talking about a country doing this or that economically is just shorthand for saying some of the people in the country did this or that.

We've been over this a dozen times. No doubt we'll be over this a dozen more.

What's goofy about this mindset is the middle class today is way, way better off than the middle class in 1960. Houses are larger and more luxurious, cars are safer, food is more abundant, healthy, and inexpensive, travel is cheap, education is more widespread, entertainment is more varied and better (except rock and roll, that peaked about 1972). No one can look at our material standard of living now and honestly say they think things were better in the past.

(Here's an example: within arms reach I have at least five computers, two laptops, two phones, and a tablet, any one of which might be more powerful that all the computers on Earth in 1960 combined.)

There are any number of charts available showing that the middle class (by income deciles) is smaller than it was in real terms because we're mostly in higher income brackets. The middle class shrank because they became wealthy, not because they became poor. And they became wealthy because they moved en masse to jobs more productive than turning a bolt in a Chevy factory.

I don't understand the fixation on manufacturing. It's as if people think that's the only way to create value. There are lots of other ways, as witnessed by 80% of the US economy being services (e.g. banking, insurance, health care, education, professional services, entertainment, and my industry, software development).

We decreased our manufacturing jobs because we had other, more productive, things for Americans to do. Or to put it another way, our comparative advantage is in services, not manufacturing.

Successful companies produce great products at prices people are happy to pay, making everyone involved better off. How's that not being socially responsible?

That was the essence of Friedman's point, that serving customers is and ought to be the only goal for a company. You tell you're doing that well by measuring your profit.

I read a great report by the Rocky Mountain Institute around 2000. They went through all the math of various hydrogen solutions, taking into account all the various efficiencies. It would be fun to see an update.

As I wrote, suppose you have a spare kWh of electric power. What do you do with it? There's lots of choices, including just "venting" it if it turns out none of the storage solutions are cheaper than just burning a cubic foot of natural gas. The good news is we seem to have lots of people trying various things. If we're open minded about which solutions work, and follow the data even when it doesn't support our favored solutions, we'll eventually find what works best.

Right. And that's the interesting question, what's the best way to store surplus solar/wind electricity? Batteries? Hydrogen (to be burned or to run a fuel cell)? Sold to other grids who need it and bought back when they have a surplus? As hot sand?

I wouldn't jump to the assumption that generating, storing, and burning hydrogen is obviously best. It does have the nice benefit that one might generate it on-site (you've got the high capacity tie to the grid just sitting there, right?) and you're using a very efficient turbine/generator, which apparently we already intended to buy.

Sure but means (a) you may get fewer loads done in a given evening and (b) you're more likely to be tying up a dryer someone else wants to use and (c) more likely to find someone put your clean dry undies in an untidy pile somewhere.

My oven is wifi-conected. In theory, when the timer goes off, I can turn the oven off. But I have to wander into the kitchen anyway to take the food out so I've always been a little puzzled why this is a win. Until the oven comes with robot arms, it's an incomplete solution.

OTOH, being able to check the state of my garage doors, irrigation, and pool gear is often handy. I wouldn't ditch the dedicated controls for a phone app but they're nice complements.

I can also imagine that for new construction, I might want to disassociate switches from outlets. It would be nice to change what each switch does if needed. For the most part everything wired when the house was built is great. When I add switches or outlets, it would be nice to be able to program things. I'm not going to renovate my entire house around this, mind you.

The biggest issue I see is technical obsolescence. The gizmos I bought 10 years ago are at end-of-life and I don't want to keep replacing all my outlets every decade or so. When standards settle down and interoperability is a thing, maybe I'll rethink it.

Which is actually the best argument for twice annual clock changes. That's a good compromise between everyone getting up at the same(ish) time relative to sunrise while also letting us use published and well-know schedules ("the store opens at 9 AM").

I used to think we should just leave the clocks alone and if you wanted more evening light, start your day earlier. But think of the confusion that causes. Every store, office, and human interaction would be in flux all the time. "Oh, I forgot, your office opens at 7 AM May through September and 8 AM the rest of the year; ours opens at 7 AM April through October, because we're further north than you."

I'm starting to think that changing clocks stinks but is less bad than the alternatives.