This discussion reminded me of my best Diff Eq prof. He would start each lecture by putting a small clock on his podium, and starting at the precise time listed for the start of the lecture. Then he would leap into action, chalk dust flying around him as he explained the subject of the day. He would often go through more than six full-size chalkboards, having a student erase a few chalkboards behind him so he could return to use the first chalkboard when he ran out of room on the sixth one. Then at the precise time scheduled for the end of the lecture, he would take the clock off the podium and leave the room.
You could often see him walking around campus, covered in a fine white dust, looking like a ghost.
It's been 30 years, and I couldn't remember his name, but man do I remember his lectures.
Update: after typing this, I searched for him, and unfortunately found him almost immediately. He just passed away, and there was a memorial to him on the front page of his math department: https://www.math.fsu.edu/DepartmentNews/Articles/Fac_Nolder....
I note this line from the memorial: His students marveled at his ability to draw a perfect circle on the blackboard with a single stroke.
My crazed DQ Prof was an excitable Russian who worked in a classroom with a chalk board that wrapped around the entire room. He'd start on the right side of the door and end on its left side. Everyone had to rotate their desks during class as he worked his way around.
Happy owner of an iPhone SE here. I feel like the large manufacturers have trouble selling small phones because they just don't understand the small phone market. It's a lot like the electric vehicle market before Tesla came along. When the Prius was the best electric car on the market, car executives thought that electric cars were for hippies who wanted to make an environmental statement and who didn't care about horsepower or style. Then Tesla came along and ate their lunch because they understood the market better.
The offerings on the market, including the SE (which is probably the best small phone), seem to say, based upon features and price point, "Here is a phone for those of you who can't afford a full-size phone". But that's not why we want a small phone. I would have happily paid twice the price for my SE, so for me the low price was a bonus, but it's not a bonus when they are pricing them too low for sustainability. They should jack up the price and get more margin from it. We'd still buy it.
The number one reason why I prefer a small phone, is because I have plenty of other computers. Your 'big' phone screen doesn't impress my gaming PC. So what I want is a device that fits a niche in my ecosystem of devices, and that niche is portability. Anything that takes away from that is a minus because it's trying to do the job of some other device, which I already own. In other words, make a small phone for professionals. There are plenty of us, we like to buy devices, and we have money. Features we would be willing to pay for include working with our other devices and not having bugs associated with software expecting bigger screens.
For people whose only computer is their phone, big screens totally make sense. And I understand that is the majority of people. But there are millions of people who have another computer other than their phone. The manufacturers are discontinuing the dirt bike because they'd rather sell you an Escalade, but there is an unaddressed market out there for a Ducati.
This is the comment on here I most relate to myself. I'm also from a family with old roots, although our family heirlooms date back only to the Fourth Crusade at earliest. My mother passed away a few years ago, and I was made responsible for an awful lot of items that people would generally be surprised to find outside of a museum.
So, yeah, it's a lot of mixed feelings. There are certain things that it's easy to know what to do with. For example, I inherited a box, which is worth maybe $1k at most on the market, but which was part of a story which has been passed down in my family for 800 years. It's really nice to be able to finish that story with "and we still have the box." So, yeah, its easy to know I'm never getting rid of that one.
But there are other things that I kinda wish I didn't have to take care of. Now I have at least four more colonial dressers than I have room for. Marie Kondo would say that if it doesn't give me joy, I should get rid of it. And they don't give me joy. But getting rid of something that has been in my family for 300 years just because it doesn't fit in my house right now, that would give me guilt. I'm not sure that's healthy, but it's true.
I grew up in a house that was a lot like a museum, full of antiques, don't touch, hey that's older than the US, don't play on that. My mother did too. I don't know if that was always the best environment for a kid, but it did teach me a reverence for the past and for history.
So, I try to be a good custodian of the past. Visitors to my house might not know much about Ras Gugsa, Mother Seton, or Boudwyn of Constantinople, but I have interesting items on display that often prompt questions, so I can then tell stories. It's the other things, the dressers and silver chafing dishes, that are a burden rather than a privilege to have. I'm not sure how to have one without the other.
One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the more guilt-burdensome items, not just for me but for people in general, are those things that used to be valuable and prestigious but aren't anymore. In 1920, a top hat or silver chafing dish showed you had class. Now, those things don't signify anything. But their importance to our ancestors of a previous time lingers on a bit. We feel like even though they are worth little that they should be worth more somehow. I suspect that in a few generations our grandkids' generation will be stressing over what to do with our Rolex watches and Coach bags.
As far as I can tell, the problem isn't so much a lack of jobs or a lack of homes but rather that they aren't in the same place. In small town America, the problem isn't a lack of housing stock, it's that it is hard to afford it with few good paying jobs. In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.
I think this is a large reason behind the polarization in America today. We aren't all facing the same aspect of this imbalance.
I was hoping that the work-from-home movement was going to help with this, but RTO seems to be in full swing. So, I think our best bet would be to stop incentivizing the concentration of job creation. Absent a fix, we will have to wait a few decades for the imbalance to even out.
It's a little unfair to blame startups, they largely just set up shop where the capital is. Most VCs required startups to be headquartered near by for easier management/communication. The tech scene in SV had such exceptionalism that it quite literally viewed any startup not in SV as an inevitable failure. Even YC mandated startups be in SV.
Most of the real estate "in the mountains" here in Colorado is basically SF prices, with a whole extra set of challenges. Even the front range I think has even worse home price to median income than a lot of the other places people think about when bitching about housing affordability.
I had also hoped WFH would solve that problem. For sure it alleviated it for the time it lasted - at least some people moved to more affordable locations. Unfortunately, for some reason many CEOs decided to take a step back.
> In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.
Maybe the more fundamental problem is that in big city America, it's easy for existing homeowners to band together to forbid any further housing stock from being built.
See Silicon Valley: amazing concentration of high-paying jobs, laughably low population density.
