You're conflating "social class" with "economic class". The old marriage thing was more about social class than economic - a man could marry a girl with no money if she came from a "good" family but marrying some rich girl with no lineage would be frowned on. (see: All of Downton Abbey) Also, one could be from "respectable society" but not be rich, if you had "good blood" or "good school", etc.
In modern life and in the US, we're much less aware of social class at all (or actively dislike the concept), and it's gotten (somewhat) decoupled from economic class. Someone who has become a lawyer or otherwise economically successful could be from any class and it's not unlikely they might choose to marry someone from a similar social class (with similar background) rather than someone with similar economic class.
Based on those numbers, 20% of units not rented out by a landlord or vacant are seasonal/occasional use in Manhattan. That seems like a pretty major chunk, considering this isn't a vacation town. (And don't forget "Manhattan" includes a huge chunk of rental housing above ~96th street, which is a much less appealing market to foreign buyers.
It's definitely relevant to the overall housing market, because while 20 years ago the bankers and lawyers would have rented or purchased on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side, they're now (often) priced out and buying places in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 15 years ago I used to see a working class neighborhoods when I walked around on the far side of the river in Brooklyn, LIC or even Hoboken/Jersey City; now there are multi-million-dollar apartments there.
Any time you hear investment bankers talking about how they can't afford a 2-bedroom in Manhattan, something's gone seriously out of whack with the real estate market.
Except they do remain empty, which is why this is such an issue in NY and London right now.
Which now looks pretty much like this: "In a large swath of the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey."
The housing isn't vacant because it's not occupied. It's vacant because the owners have their primary residence elsewhere. Or have several homes. London has neighborhoods where full time residency runs around 30% as well, leading to "ghost towns" - supposedly much of that is Russian or eastern euro money being kept outside of their home countries less as an investment than a value store. I have a friend who is about to close on a condo in LA - all cash - and already owns homes in Asia and New York. She views them as investments but having paid cash she has no interest in renting them out.
From an NYT article a few years back, the estimate for Manhattan was that 30% of new condo sales (admittedly a minority versus coops in NY) were foreign buyers. That would still be a material share of overall sales. In an already tight market that's a huge number of sales not tied to local income growth.
That's true of Manhattan but much less so for other boroughs. And rich people still tend to occupy only one unit. Foreign buyers remove units from the pool entirely while contributing less to the local service economy, mad there have been large new luxury buildings where most of the units lack full time residents. That's unhealthy for the city.
Most of Manhattan got too pricey for working class families a decade or more ago (unless hey have rent control.) it's a much bigger crisis that large portions of the other boroughs might head that way.
It's not necessarily true. It's just idle / uninformed speculation with almost no insight into Amazon's internal operations or supporting facts. That's why it's getting downvoted.
Just because he doesn't know how they can do it profitably doesn't mean they don't know how to do it profitably.
Amazon very carefully tracks the profitability of each SKU they sell. If they're selling it to you, they've figured out how to do it profitably. Consider that you'd pay a similar price for it in a retail store, where it had to be handled multiple times, stocked on a shelf, subject to theft and loss, etc. - there's enough margin to cover that, so if Amazon can drop it in a box and ship it to you for less, they can make money on it.
Maybe some kind of appeal to institutional buyers who want that form factor (and maybe the old port / shape) to keep their fleet of device consistent? Maybe just a lot of extra components / panels for that design?
"If AOSP were more open he wouldn't have left."
Can you substantiate that statement at all? AOSP's "openness" is determined by its licensing, which is a standard Apache 2.0 license. The issue was whether certain vendors would contribute to AOSP under that license, not whether AOSP was open enough.
That's a mischaracterization of his own comments on why he left. It had to do with open sourcing GPU drivers, which is probably an issue with other vendors, not Google.
If you're on a decently setup wifi network, this isn't true for practical purposes. The connection from your house to your ISP is going to be effectively your bottleneck 99% of the time.
Having handled one, it's a lot nicer than the netbooks are. The performance is pretty good, the form factor is much more comfortable in terms of screen size and keyboard size, and the build quality is pretty high. While I wouldn't use one myself (because I want Photoshop / Lightroom), it seems like a great device as school / homework laptop for a grade schooler, for example, or the grandparents use case.
Just want to check your email and browse some web pages with zero hassle? This is perfect for that.
The average price for a Windows 8 laptop last Q4 was ~$430... so at $280 they're about $150 under that. I suspect that if you start getting close to that $430 mark you lose some of the willingness of consumers to try something other than Windows.
Because you can probably buy a USB ethernet adaptor, and hardly anyone uses wired ethernet with a laptop anymore - that's why lots of other laptops have dropped it. Ethernet is a relatively large connector and the port itself can be hard to integrate into current laptop form factors.
I agree 100% with you about the schools problem (and I'm facing it myself.) I've lived in a number of cities and SF has stunned me at the near total lack of school-age children. It's stunning - especially in my neighborhood (SOMA) you just never see kids walking to school in the morning. This has to be the largest drawback to living in SF, and one of the biggest reason middle-income to upper-middle-income families move out of town.
NYC traded finance for tourism? Something like 1/3 of the cit is still employed in jobs tied to the financial industry (and it pays over half the wages in Manhattan). I literally can't remember knowing a single person working in tourism when I lived there.
Fair enough, but even then, he has nothing to support the idea that the current exodus is any different from the normal inflow-outflow of population that goes on every year in any major city. "People sometimes move out of SF so they can buy a house elsehwere" is considerably less compelling.
There's a lot that can be done. The most obvious thing to do is remove rent control and zoning restrictions and push for the construction of higher buildings with more units. Stop living in the past and pretending it's a quaint coastal town.
San Francisco is statistically the second most dense city in the US, wedged into a geographically bounded ~50 sq miles. It's dumbfounding that there were probably more high rise apartment buildings (>20 stories) in my zip code back in NY than in all of SF.
Having fewer places in town results in meeting people you know more often. Having fewer people doesn't - your probability of meeting someone is the number of people you know (which is arguably larger in a city) divided by the number of places they could be. The number of people you don't know in a place is mostly irrelevant.
I'm pretty sure it maps out the same if you filtered for, say, non-Hispanic white voters. The curve might shift towards GOP overall, but the correlation would still be there, because the cities also tend to skew more educated and that correlates in a positive way with voting DNC.
We tend to know the same number of people total, so when you're in a more densely populated area, you're dividing the same number (or even a larger number) by a much, much larger number of people around you. Maybe it's not that people in small towns are more social; they just have a smaller pool.
AOL has an ongoing cash flow from subscription payments. Those payments keep coming from customers until they either quit the service or die off.
Blackberry sells devices. They don't have significant recurring revenue streams - customers have to come back and re-up to a new device every 2-3 years, or they don't get any money. That means as soon as you're no longer offering a competitive product, the revenue stream can dry up very quickly. Especially if carriers and retailers decide you're no longer worth carrying.
Look at the 50% drop they've taken in the past two years. Even if that line just stays constant, you're talking about a decrease of 90% in 6 years total. It's rare than you can scale a tech business down 90% or more and still operate it in any reasonable fashion.
Or maybe because it's a huge, intensely competitive market where multiple top-tier companies are trying to draw users from each other: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo. You can't stand still and expect your user base to keep growing. You might make your current users unhappy sometimes, but the goal is to keep getting new users, not just hold onto the ones you have.
That works if it's a factory. It doesn't work that well in a mobile device manufacturer. Anyone selling wireless devices is subject to ongoing changes in the regulatory environment, plus security threats. If they don't have a team better than what you get by paying "just enough", bitrot will set in within a year.
Blackberry has rapidly declining sales (-50% in 2 years)... you'd have to hope to not just cut costs, but cut them faster (and repeatedly) to stay ahead of the current decline in sales. And you'd have to expect that decline to accelerate if you're cutting back on R&D (and probably facing general brain drain - why would a good mobile engineer keep working for a company in obvious wind-down? Nobody likes to work on an EOL platform.)
By that logic, we should freeze all Software UI where it is. Any UI change is going to run into some level of change aversion, no matter how brilliant it is. Software makers have to balance that with the need to keep innovating on a piece of software - otherwise someone else will just do it and make them obsolete.