Maybe he did? Maybe he has been enjoying the sea for the past 12 hours? Jesus, you really don't have better things to do than making assumptions and sharing them with people?
It's funny and sad when you realize that you care more about knowledge, learning etc. when you're out of school. Or maybe I was just not mature enough to appreciate it.
I'm not sure why you wrote that post. I mean, Zed is not saying that having/buying faster hardware is bad, it's just unnecessary for him most of the time. What is that you're arguing about?
He states that he does this for personal reasons. To me it sounds like: "I know it's slow, but I don't want to waste my time sitting on HN all day long, so I'll just download what I need to".
I've been using it for only few days, but I think evil and Emacs makes a really nice enviroment. I finally managed to get capslock to be the key for evil-normal-state (default is ESC) and the world is a better place now. I recommend giving it a shot :-).
Your post sounded a little bit like Steve Yegge's talk about how we should focus on more important stuff. Instead of doing another pointless startups we should read some hard math and do some hard stuff. Did you happen to watch it? ;-).
Among other, smaller things - it's fast. And by fast I mean: it doesn't use 50-100% of processor. In Chrome, opening more than 2 tabs was a nigthmare. Same with Firefox.
I've tried using Emacs with Caps Lock as Control key, and it didn't worked well. So I changed Ctrl to (1)right-click-menu key (or whatever it's called) and to (2)right Alt; and turned Caps Lock into Alt. Now I can easily move around Emacs without hurting my pinky to much :). Long live Emacs!