Not so. In fact, farming is a way of life for almost nobody in developed countries.[1]
Ursa shows us that there is indeed a market for "simple and reliable" equipment -- but it's not cheap or affordable. There is zero market for "affordable" equipment, because almost nobody does small scale farming anymore
Small farms became economically and socially irrelevant almost a century ago in developed countries. Petroleum based fertilizer and industrial machinery drove the marginal cost of food to zero, and it is now only profitable to farm at very large industrial scale.
The main social outcome there was that starvation and malnutrition became vanishingly rare in these countries.
(In fact, _obesity_ is now, for the first time in human history, a widespread problem for the poorest in these societies.)
Society chose "nobody starving" as a better outcome than preserving romantic small farms for the sake of tradition.
Ah yes, millions of people = “almost nobody”. Do you also believe trans people are irrelevant because they make up less than 1% of the population? Let’s also ignore that plenty of people live on homesteads and do small scale agriculture for their own needs (eg feed for animals) while working other jobs. If all you have is statistics and you’ve never lived in the country, maybe you shouldn’t pretend to be an authority. But please go on and continue telling other people their lived experiences aren’t real. It’s sure to make you plenty of friends. This is exactly why a lot of normies hate tech people, extreme arrogance and a complete inability to see outside your bubble.
Cook has done more or less the opposite of what Jobs did.
Jobs was all about bold innovation, hugely risky bets on gamechanging products.
Cook is a timid logistics optimizer, and he's good at that. We reliably get an iPhone with slightly more RAM, slightly faster CPU on schedule every year. No category changing products.
Innovation has stopped -- after Jobs, there is only minor incremental improvement
Reminds me of the Godfather and how they called Tom Hagen not a "wartime consigliere". This was at a time when conflicts were starting up again and Vito had just been gunned down. Tim is Tom. Steve was Vito.
When Steve Jobs came back in 1997 Apple was against the ropes and they needed some radical change lest they sink.
But after they stabilized around 2010s then they didn't need radical shakeups but to maintain the good thing they got going. Tim was the man for that. And he did it well.
And yes I get that in this case one is a consigliere and one is the Don but there's similarity here.
I don't own one, but the Apple Watch did very much change the category, defined it even. Vision Pro was a innovative bet, maybe not a great one. Apple Silicon completely changed the game.
The Apple Watch is a niche product for a few tech nerds (at least outside of Silicon Valley tech circles), not an ubiquitous feature of everyday life for normal people the way the PC, the iPod, and the iPhone are.
Vision Pro was a science experiment that few people have even heard of.
Apple Silicon is a perfect example of a purely internal-facing logistics optimization: sure, it's fine in terms of saving money and boosting performance. 99% of end users do not know or care whether they have Apple Silicon or Intel chips.
Just utter nonsense about the watch. They're very popular with normal British people like my mother. M1 was a performance per watt revolution. Sounds like you're either clueless, hate Apple or Tim Cook, or all of the above.
Let's keep it quantitative rather than relying upon personal anecdotes: Apple does not break out unit sales for the Watch (which in itself is telling.)
According to third party analyst estimates which are readily obtainable from search engines, the Apple Watch has shipped just over 100 million units worldwide since inception. Upgrade cycles are weak to nonexistent. Growth flatlined years ago -- even declining slightly in recent years. After the initial burst of interest from early adopters -- that is, tech nerds plus a few outliers here and there among normies -- demand fizzled.
The iPhone has shipped 3 billion units. It is in an entirely different category. While demand has roughly plateaued, there is a strong upgrade / replacement cycle. Annual iPhone sales are in the ~250M range -- far more iPhones are sold every year than all Apple Watches that have ever been sold in history.
The Apple Watch is firmly in the "niche product" category. It's not a "gamechanger for everyday life for normal people," notwithstanding the existence of a few normie outliers here and there.
That's the bar you set. So you're saying the Apple Watch did not change the watch category? And likewise Airpods, or Apple Silicon laptops?
I don't know where the comparisons to iPhone have come from. No, it's not comparable to iPhone. Nobody said it was. That would be crazy.
You call Vision Pro a science experiment and dismiss Apple Silicon as irrelevant to users, but also say there's been no innovation. How do you square that?
It doesn’t say that. It says that the D.C Court of Appeals issued one in 1963, and then quotes the DOJ as saying “ nationwide injunctions remained ‘exceedingly rare’ for a few decades after 1963[,]” notwithstanding one issued by a district judge in New York in 1973.
Regardless of what you think about nationwide injunctions, your original assertion that “prior to this year,” a decision by a federal appellate court would apply the entire country is categorically false.
Seems like a perfectly valid one. If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized? Especially when the question isn't on something with a lot of particularized tests that's sensitive to the exact case, eg 4th amendment law? Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?
> If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized?
Because one judge in one county shouldn't be defining the laws for the whole country? Sure it's great when they issue a ruling you like, but what about when it's a ruling that you don't. If it's a knife-edge situation then letting several judges rule and having the supreme court sort it out is the right thing; if there's an obvious right answer then every court will rule the same way and it doesn't matter.
> Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?
Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.
It's rarely down to one judge in one county though, most are entered pending appeal and the appeals court can immediately put the injunction on hold or in cases like this the first injunction might come from a circuit court who's far from one judge, by the time it gets to a circuit it's gone through multiple judges and some cases are heard by a bank of judged instead of just one.
> Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.
I don't have a spare million sloshing around even if I could get granted standing for various things I would like to defend. It's not just a problem of willingness.
> It's rarely down to one judge in one county though, most are entered pending appeal and the appeals court can immediately put the injunction on hold or in cases like this the first injunction might come from a circuit court who's far from one judge, by the time it gets to a circuit it's gone through multiple judges and some cases are heard by a bank of judged instead of just one.
When the circuit court rules the ruling is binding on that whole circuit, which is a pretty huge area and population (bigger than most countries). When one judge in one county rules the ruling is binding in that county, when the supreme court rules it's binding on the whole country. Isn't that kind of how it should work?
Rights violations because of federal laws or actions are almost never contained to a particular circuit and if the Supreme Court wants to quietly allow them to continue it can refuse to hear appeal(s) from the circuit decision so without nationwide injunctions the only way to relatively quickly vindicate people's rights is to file 11 cases one in each circuit wasting tons of time and money when it can easily be decided by a singular case.
On the other side, why should one crazed/corrupt judge in some state which has nothing to do with me be able to infringe on my freedoms and make my life worse? Worse, why is it possible to jurisdiction shop for the single bad actor and impose your will on the entire country?
You're not wrong, but (like most issues in a 350M-person country) it's complicated. The system is tailored to some expected level/type of corruption and bad actors. If you expect that the government is basically fine and that out of 50M people per region surely somebody will file suit if the issue is important then the current system makes a lot of sense. You get judges with more knowledge and awareness of your local issues, anything important still gets addressed, and you're resilient to some degree of random bad judges and bad actors. If those expectations are out of whack then you get worse outcomes.
In reality, the world is complicated enough that even boiling down the lists of judges and whatnot to that simple of a description is misleading at best. Neither solution is anywhere near optimal by itself. So...what next?
Yeah it's a definite mixed bag and maybe the solution is to require them to be approved by at least a multijudge panel at the circuit level before going in to place. In effect that basically already happened though, the normal pattern was for injunctions to be stayed for a few weeks pending the appeal and the appeal court would be able to extend that stay if they believed it was flawed or unjustified. The characterization of it being "one crazed judge" doesn't really hold up to the pattern of their actual use, and where judges didn't put in a stay the appeals court could as well.
Ursa shows us that there is indeed a market for "simple and reliable" equipment -- but it's not cheap or affordable. There is zero market for "affordable" equipment, because almost nobody does small scale farming anymore
Small farms became economically and socially irrelevant almost a century ago in developed countries. Petroleum based fertilizer and industrial machinery drove the marginal cost of food to zero, and it is now only profitable to farm at very large industrial scale.
The main social outcome there was that starvation and malnutrition became vanishingly rare in these countries.
(In fact, _obesity_ is now, for the first time in human history, a widespread problem for the poorest in these societies.)
Society chose "nobody starving" as a better outcome than preserving romantic small farms for the sake of tradition.
[1] Less than 1% of the US population works in agriculture today (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12961) as compared to ~30% in the early 20th century.
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