Gogmagog

You must have missed the last 10,000 years of human development, because the elite have always been at the forefront of human development. It is part of what makes them elite. Humankind does not advance because of the efforts of the average person, it simply continues.

Having said that... Why Julia Sweeney is always at TED is still a mystery to me. When one of her videos come up, I can't find the skip button fast enough.

You need water to run a Photovoltaic farm. Mirrors or Solar panels, you need to keep them clean. The efficiency of both degrades with dust, which is not in short supply in the desert. While not technically necessary in the immediate process of power generation, as a practical mater, access to water is required for all power generation except wind.

If Apple is handling Billing, Subscriptions, Payments, Merchant fees, etc, then isn't that a savings to the content maker? Does the economies of scale with handling those services rest of the vendor, or with Apple?

From everything I have ever read about iTunes and App stores, the 30% cut isn't profitable for Apple. It covers operating costs of the stores. Could someone point to me the place where Apple is making an actual profit on this?

Something that people might want to keep in mind... The "Emulator" that is used to test iPhone and iPad isn't emulating the iOS hardware. It is implemented with MacOS APIs. Essentially the iOS that you use on the synthetic target is just the same graphics and system libraries that are compiled for the Mac hardware instead of the ARM. That is why the emulator works so fast, even on underpowered machines.

There is no porting for Apple, it is the same.

90% of all blog posts are lazy. 99% of all comments are lazy too.

Economics experiments always seem to tell you exactly how Graduate students in an Ivy-league Econ 503 class would behave in any situation. :P

She is saying,

Economics is not a hard science. People often try to use it as a hard science to "prove" something in the social realm. Those people are using economics as a pseudo-science.

She has made the case before(in other stories) that Economics is more like psychology than physics. While psychology can give useful information, guide treatment, and affect outcomes, it will never be able to "prove" anything about any person.