I think there are quite a lot of people who are only interested in playing and never deliberately practising. They do not get that far (they do not have to!).

And then the vast majority of aspring guitar players who frequent learning online material (including me) spend all of their time practising and learning, and too little of it playing for fun and performing. Most are constantly frustrated about their progress.

Then there is a small group of people, who spend a lot of time playing for fun and performing, but also a good amount of time deliberately practising. In my experience, those tend to be the ones people think are great players.

Piano is very different than the guitar, it is much more technique and repertoire focused (as opposed to improvisation and interpretation of guitar).

In comparison to guitar, there is much more and much higher quality material available for piano as it is being taught for hundreds of years, but most of it is accessible through classical teachers.

There is definitely opportunity for someone to create the justin guitar of piano though, I do not think it has been done yet.

Actually I can say the same thing for programming, I can build most software I would think of building when I started 20 years ago, but there is still a large gap between what I can build but what I discovered later and now would like to be able to build (I'd need to learn lots of maths in addition to other things).

We currently have two broad mechanisms to equate people's value.

*Employees:*

Easy to replace = Low Salary = Gets Few Resources

Hard to replace = High Salary = Gets Many Resources

*Entrepreneurs:*

Output consumed low = Low Pay = Gets Few Resources

Output consumed high = High Pay = Gets Many Resources

(Resource consumption ignored)

In a world where machines do everything, aspects of these change:

*Employees:*

Easy to replace = Gets whatever resources

(no-one hard to replace)

It is up to us to define whether 'whatever' is bleak or not. If we decide that resources need to be shared fairly, it could be heaven, not hell.

*Entrepreneurs:*

Resource consumption: Whatever

It is up to us how much resource consumption we allow. If we decide that resource consumption need to be sustainable, it could be heaven, not hell.

1. The idea behind UBI is that it is near-zero effort, the cost to operate UBI should be minimal. UBW cannot be low overhead I suppose. 2. What motivation do I have to do the work if I can’t get fired?

What used to take incompetent developers 5 days - it is still taking them 5 days.

There are of course people who buy Rolexes or whatever for the brand. There are probably more people who buy Mac Books for the logo.

But most people are rational. Most people would pay that much money for a watch only if it does not impact their finances in a meaningful way, but within that, they would want to buy the highest quality they can. And for some people that means an IWC, Omega, Longines, or whatever. If they could buy the same quality from a less known brand, they would. Lots of people buy Grand Seikos at Rolex prices. I buy normal Seikos at $300. We all pay for the quality we can afford.

Brand is important because it is an insurance that you are not being scammed. Besides that, it is not the main factor let alone “era defining” as the article is trying to make it out.

This particular article, I would say compherensive, but lacking substance.

The very promise of this article, that people primarily paying for brand name is simply wrong and it does not take too much time to spend in watch circles to know this.

What people pay is not performance/features/value, obviously. But the prime factor is also not the brand name. With the exception of Rolex, practically nobody knows if your watch costed $100 or $100,000.

What people pay for is artistry, reliability, and level-of-polish. These all have a cost that justify the price of the watch. Nobody pays $10,000 for a watch that could be produced for $100 just because of its brand name.

Also, watches are status symbols to a really narrow niche. Vast majority of people cannot name a non-Rolex expensive watch and would assume Seiko (and maybe Tissot) are the best watches after Rolex, followed by Swatch (and maybe Timex).

https://www.iwc.com/gb-en/watches/pilot-watches/iw388106-pil...

https://www.omegawatches.com/en-gb/watch-omega-speedmaster-m...

https://www.rolex.com/watches/submariner/m124060-0001