And you have a not insignificant number of 1%ers in Saudi Arabia and China, and scattered around the rest of the world as well. Wasn't the CEO of Alibaba the richest person in the world for a minute circa 2020?
Near the end he makes clear that his concern was about having a robot with a more or less static script hastily replace the human who has some actual authority. I think we've all experienced this to some extent and it is definitely getting more commonplace.
The way you define Americans making a choice sounds a lot like a simple hill climbing algorithm. Once you're on the path of your nearest hill you're stuck there until conditions change, even if you can see a mountain in the distance you would have our whole society ignore it and stay on our little hill? That's why China is and will continue lapping us at transportation. Yes you should care, or at least be able to expect someone to care, or at LEAST not try to talk someone who does care out of it.
>I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me.
But you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
Not at all. There is no such thing in a landscape that is changing on time scales that are visible to people, as our societies are. You can't stay stuck on a local maximum if the landscape changes it out from under you. You have to keep reconsidering things.
> you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
The (pretty limited) time I have spent posting in this discussion has not been wasted. I'm having fun.
You can get tightly boxed into one solution. In the US, car culture has caused a fundamental transformation of cities, which makes it extremely difficult to reintroduce public transit. Roads are very wide and there are massive parking lots everywhere, so it's difficult to reorient cities towards walking and public transit. You would have to eliminate those huge parking lots and reduce the number and size of roads in city centers, but because everyone already owns one or two cars, most people are dead-set against such changes.
There is another local optimum, which is extensive public transit and walkable city centers. I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable, but transitioning there is very difficult.
But because the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution, they have no idea if they would prefer the alternative. That's my point.
> the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution
I disagree. It may be that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to your particular preferred solution, but that's also true of the vast majority of people who live anywhere except a few East Asian cities, according to you. So I don't see why you are singling out Americans. You should be chastising basically everyone outside of East Asia for being backward. (And then, of course, you would just have even more people ignoring you.)
Most Europeans have a decent idea of what good public transit looks like, and the "few East Asian cities" include almost every large city in China and Japan.
As for why I'm singling out Americans: this thread began with a discussion about Americans.
I don't think the idea that the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation holds water. What was the mechanism of that choice on an individual level, free of influence from car companies, between a future with car infrastructure with all the impacts understood (including the land space costs preventing density and efficiency) and other solutions?
It is demonstrably the correct answer, regardless what the largely un- or just as often mis-informed think, not that they were really "asked" in the first place.
> the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation
This is a fantasy in any society, not just America. No piece of social infrastructure on the scale of "cars vs. public transportation" in any country gets decided by "the general, informed will" of all the people.
The "mechanism of choice on an individual level" in a free country is simple, and I've already described it: people look at the alternatives reasonably available to them and choose the one that suits them best. And the aggregation of all those individual choices shapes the infrastructure, which in turn of course affects what alternatives are reasonably available to the next generation. That's how free markets and free societies work. But of course such a process does not involve any "general, informed will" of the people as a whole. It just involves a huge number of individuals interacting.
The other possibility, in a country that's not a free country (such as one large East Asian country one city of which has been mentioned, not by me, in this overall discussion), is for some small group at the top to decide how they think things should be arranged, and then just impose that on everybody. In such a country there is no "mechanism of choice on an individual level" regarding large scale infrastructure at all; it is imposed by those in charge. People do of course still make individual choices in such countries, but their choices don't really affect the social infrastructure the way they can in a free country.
The US today is not fully a free country in the sense I described above, since there is quite a bit of top-down imposition of things (and not just by governments--there were of course a number of large corporations pushing car-centric infrastructure in the late 19th and 20th centuries), so it's really a mix of the two possibilities I gave. But neither possibility involves "the general, informed will of Americans" deciding anything.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. The simple truth is that people's opinions are usually a product of their upbringing and experiences. People raised in a warmongering society tend to favor warmongering, and people raised in a peaceful society tend to favor peaceful societies, for instance. In the case of cars, Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.
So, if you try polling a bunch of suburbanite Americans and ask them if they'd favor abolishing their suburbs and turning them into extremely dense and generally car-free (or at least "car-inconvenient", i.e. narrow, slow roads and very little parking) urban areas, of course the vast majority of them are going to say "no". You can see it right here on HN every time this kind of discussion comes up: regular Americans like things the way they are. If they didn't, they'd be voting for something radically different, but they aren't. Sure, there's a minority of anti-car-culture Americans and even some activists, but they're a minority.
As for your characterization of Japan as an authoritarian society, that really seems extremely ignorant and probably even racist. It's a democracy, in case you've never read Wikipedia, so just like any democratic society, if people get angry enough, they'll vote for someone different, which happens from time to time.
Given the characterization of Americans that you gave elsewhere upthread, and which I responded to, you are in no position to make any such accusation, even if I were in fact talking about Japan, which, as I have posted already, I wasn't.
"These days" that wasn't the case four years ago when they arbitrarily took it away. How would you know what the level of demand is? I would selectively purchase a phone with a headphone jack over one without, but that demand is meaningless without an option. Apple led the pack with the highest R&D budget of them all, with a premium smartphone. They, uniquely, took the headphone jack away while launching airpods.
It isn't even "Bluetooth vs 3.5mm" it's 3.5mm vs. Not having 3.5mm
Every phone prior to 2020 had both. If your 3.5mm broke that sucks, but that would just put you in the exact situation we have today generally. If you never use it anyway why do you care?
I just don't understand how so many people are arguing in favor of a company obviously making a move to force their customers into buying something they didn't necessarily want.
Same, one generation 3.5mm was a given, next time I needed a phone I have no choice. Who asked me? I would have, if given the choice, bought a phone with wired headphones, an SD card slot, and an IR blaster like my previous phone had but none of those were options. Now the phone I have is bigger than I wanted, has worse battery life, and kills my run tracking apps once the screen has been off for 2 minutes with no option to disable that behavior (obviously spackling over the pitifully small battery by annoyingly killing anything using power)
On the plus side it has a 120 hz display that doesn't help me either.
They missed my biggest frustration with Bluetooth audio. I want to connect to the TV or my phone, but my headphones want to connect to my computer upstairs or vice versa. Now I have to go upstairs, apologize to the person using that device, and reach over their shoulder to unpair before it lets me connect to my phone. With a 3.5mm I know exactly which device I'm going to connect to and I don't have to negotiate with any 3rd parties for the privilege.
Totally - the user interface is so much easier with a 3.5mm jack. Want to pair it to a different device, just unplug it from the current one and plug it in the new one. No limits such as being only able to pair with two or three devices.
This is incredibly frustrating with iPhones. At least Android and Windows lets you disable automatic connections, but on an iPhone your only choice is to unpair.
I think this apple in general. It astounds me that after so many years there is still no option in OSX to disable automatic connection to specific bluetooth devices.
There are many, many threads on various forumns on the web, going back years, looking for a resolution to this, and the fix from apples end would appear to be trivial.
The “don’t make me think” mantra got noticed by too many product stakeholders who made it their life motto, and so didn’t notice when it metastatized into “don’t let me think.”
I wish NFC pairing was more widespread. It's only really supported on Android phones but it solved that issue. Just tap the two things together and boom paired.
