1) Bitcoin has the potential to destroy the tools of monetary policy. 2) Bitcoin has the potential to hide taxable income from governments. 3) Governments with dwindling tax bases may react by printing traditional currency, hastening the flight to Bitcoin in a vicious cycle. 4) Traditional currencies may collapse as people rush to convert them into Bitcoin. 5) Unable to tax coercively, traditional governments may collapse.

What might replace them? Toll roads and kickstarter philanthropy in Randian democracies?

(Is this in the ballpark for Bitcoin's potential impact or not?)

Anyway the most common reaction may be to accept the judgement that you feel has been passed on you - that you are worthless - but at some point someone has to come along who refuses to accept that, and realises that the whole system is founded on narrow-minded bullshit. Then that person can build a challenger to the chaebol - one fueled by fresh thinking and real inspiration.

I mean look at LG and Samsung. Where's the passion and love in their products? Raw technical competence and business acumen might lead to limited success, but these companies seem completely soulless. At the end of the day, the world will never love a Samsung like they do an Apple. No matter how big they get, they'll never be able to make it to the next stage, where they actually inspire people and have devoted, passionate fans. So the space for alternative approaches within Korean culture seems (from an outside perspective) huge, even if the first steps are going to be very hard.

The iPad Air looks amazing for example, but compared to the OS-level features offered by tablet Windows 8.1, I think it's lacking.

Feels very disheartening.

Now you can trade a grind in one settled area for a slightly more profitable grind in another. With the tradeoff of losing contact with your whole social milieu and having to start a lot of things from scratch in the new place, while you're surrounded by people who have a lot more than you because they've been grinding in that place for years.

Not appealing, so it's no surprise that it's mainly the highly-educated who can a) seek high value economic opportunities and b) are guaranteed a welcoming social reception from university or work colleagues :)

People like us should be more generous about the incentives governing the lives of the new post-mobility local cultures.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6564956

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

>Macbook Pro on a flat desk - no mouse, no external keyboard, no keyboard tray, no eye-level monitor.

Stuff like this makes me think this guy is a jackass. Steve Jobs never "disrupted an established revenue stream" - in 1999 he started with nothing, and built everything from scratch. He died with the company in full throttle, and that's that. Never had the need or the chance to do what this author is suggesting.

Furthermore, how exactly can you fault Apple/Cook's performance post-2011? Their releases have all been solid improvements which have sold like hotcakes. Their products still command global consumer consciousness like no other brand. The iPhone and iPad stand as the centre of gravity of the mobile market, and the confusion and noise of the myriad products churned out by Apple's ertswhile competition only further cements their stature. Other than a few small exceptions (screen size in particular), they still control the focus of consumer desire - the average consumer only knows and cares about a particular feature once Apple has pointed to it. Watch what happens post-5s - if other phone manufacturers release a spree of devices with novel unlocking mechanisms, you can guess why.

Everything Apple has done has been profitable and popular. They're playing from a position of incredible strength, so why should they rush out and reinvent the wheel? They have time, their current position is stable, and it would only advantage competitors to reveal their next plans before Apple is ready or it is even necessary to do so.

I think the mistake people make here is in confusing what happened to Microsoft with what might hypothetically happen to Apple. But Apple isn't Microsoft. There's no indication whatsoever that Apple is taking their current strength for granted - moves like the new campus suggest a firm focus on and faith in a very long-term future. The only people who are dissatisfied with Apple's performance are impatient, ignorant tech commentators, who seem to depend for their sense of self-worth on a deluge of new gadgets to critique. It's a serious cognitive failure to imagine that just because Apple overturned incumbents, Apple must be equally vulnerable to being overturned, as if the marketplace just cycles through the same rough dynamic with little to no variation. Apple blew the competition out of the water because it was better, and in so doing it set a new bar for product and ecosystem execution that until now no other device manufacturer could equal - a bar which it has only maintained and even raised.

We're only now starting to see the market rebalance with Google and Amazon emerging as real competitors, with Microsoft a big question mark about when and if they will ever rise to the occasion. But the ball is thoroughly in the competition's court, so right now Apple can watch, analyse, and plot its next move. We don't have even close to enough data to evaluate Apple's "performance" yet because we haven't seen it.