Many companies miss how important this is, too: they get caught up in "but if they buy it second-hand, they're not buying our new stuff!". When people buy the stuff second-hand, though, they become Bose fans — that means when the second-hand Bose stuff dies, they're more likely to replace it with new Bose stuff. That's particularly true with audio equipment, where people become attached not only to how something works but how it sounds. If they like Bose's rather particular audio signature, they'll keep buying more.
Between that and the good-will they're getting from this move, this is making a ton of life-long Bose fans out of a lot of audio geeks. And if there's a community well-known for creating religions out of their hardware preferences...
Another thing companies miss is that the second-value is priced in to the price. If I know I can resell a thing for some value, that makes it more valuable than if I can't resell it all, and I can pay more for it. Contrary to what the companies think, they were in fact compensated for the after market value, and it's even better then they hoped, because that compensation occurred at time of first sale rather than some random time years later.
The most amusing anti-example of this was the Switch generation: $60 for a cartridge, or $60 for a digital license. Guess which is actually more valuable? Guess which you were more likely to find discounted, even if only by a marginal amount, by some store desperate to move stock out of the way?
By contrast, I'm not worried about the fact I can't resell my copy of Game X I got on Steam when I only paid $5 for it in the first place.
Indeed, and also people buying second-hand are pretty unlikely to buy brand new if they aren't able to find the second-hand item (or use it). It's similar to piracy in that respect, that some people who pirate might have actually bought it, but the majority likely would not have anyway so can't just say "1,000 people pirated our thing, therefore we lost 1,000 sales". The cynic in me thinks they know that and just use it as a convenient way to over-inflate the damage piracy is doing to them, but that's a separate topic
On the other hand, lots of people buying audio gear new DO take the second-hand market into account, and will spend more on the initial purchase if they think the product will retain its value.
Genuinely saddened by this. I had Dr. Newby for a Linux admin class in college in the late 90s and it was one of the courses that got me interested in systems administration. I remember him as patient, kind, and enthusiastic about open-source and the possibilities Linux represented for changing the Internet.
Agreed, and it’s not just the hardware keyboard (on which I could comfortably have written an entire novel) that I miss. It had just enough access to email that I could reply to things when necessary, even if it required a bit of typing (something very uncomfortable on a screen keyboard), and later on it had access to maps and enough web browsing to be able to look something up quickly. But the lack of an enormous app ecosystem and limited Internet access meant it didn’t become a doom-scrolling device to nearly the extent my current smartphone has, so I was more inclined to either pick up a laptop and do something deliberate or put it down and go do something useful like reading.
Side note that not remembering it has nothing to do with memory deterioration. Neurons that fire together wire together: if you haven’t used that particular piece of information in a while, your brain gradually clears out links to it to make room for stuff you are currently referencing. So not remembering it is really more a demonstration of how much ICQ use has deteriorated. :)
I know. I probably hadn't thought of that number even once in the preceeding fifteen years, and yet it was still there. I had a stroke in 2020, prior to which random detritus like my ICQ number stuck around, along with genuinely useful things like a dozen or two poems that I love. Some of those I've tried to re-learn, and they no longer stick for very long. It is what it is, and I'm not objectively badly off - I'm still able to do a cognitively-demanding job, for instance - but I miss those little things.
The en vogue 'Supreme Court always sides with the Administration' is a lazy and inaccurate take. (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')
If people actually took the time to read the opinions [0], they'd realize...
1. Many of the 'allow the administration to continue' rulings are overriding stays, rather than actual decisions. Those cases are still pending in the courts and will eventually end up back at the Supreme Court.
2. Of the actual Supreme Court decisions, the news typically gives the most dumbed-down, hot take version.
3. Even to people without a legal background, much of the decision or dissent is written in plain English, attempts to lay out the rationale, and can be read by anyone with a secondary education.
> (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')
Just FWIW, giving up wasn't my point at all. I'm just not particularly optimistic that putting anything in front of the current SCOTUS bench will result in a lot of welcome rulings. That doesn't mean we don't seek legal remedies; it just means we need to plan for them to not work out and act accordingly. I'm heartened by the amount of work people are putting in at the state level and getting appropriately creative with bending the rules — for instance, the recent effort to redefine corporate powers at the state level in order to obviate _Citizens United_.
Interestingly, it has held up quite well, too: outside of the occasional bit of old tech sticking out here and there, the whole thing could be set in 2025 with a minimum of updating. The problem the MacGuffin solves, the methods for conducting their various heists, even the inclusion of the post-Soviet Russians as a player are all still valid today.
sigh Is it that time of the year again that we start publishing these? Boy, how time flies...
Too frequently, what people (and clearly the author of this piece) mean when they say "tougher grading" is just a return to forcible bell-curve application and faculty who take out their personal insecurities and annoyance over being required to teach classes on their students. That's not making academics more challenging, it's just torturing statistics and arbitrarily modifying the race-course in order to satisfy other agendas. If you have a good teacher and a good course and more than half the class does well, you should consider making the next iteration more challenging, but you should not feel obliged to fail 10% of them because "there's always a bell-curve", nor should you be using grading as a means to "humble" your students.
I emphasized the word "consider" up there because not every course needs to be a slog up Everest, either — an "intro to X" course might well be a class in which many people do well. Some percentage of them will be people looking to make that their major, so they'll already know enough to be ahead of the curve in an "intro" course. Others will be bright people who learn well and adapt to the material. As someone who teaches classes regularly at the college/grad-school level, I try to make the content interesting and challenging, but if most of my students turn in work that exceeds standards and are coming out with a good understanding of the content, I feel like I've accomplished my goals — academia is supposed to be about learning after all, and they're displaying that they've correctly learned the content I wanted to communicate to them. I do spend time trying to re-work the course regularly (something I'm forced to do much more since the explosion of sites like Chegg...), but past a certain point if something is clearly working, why am I obliged to break it?
Terminology -- 'grading on a curve' and bell curve are two different unrelated things. A grading modification curve is not a bell curve. But the rest of your argument makes sense.
Note that Quakers never rejected the possibility of being killed for their beliefs, just the choice of killing others for them. Pacifism does not equate to passivism, after all: it simply means that they reject the notion of visiting violence on others.
It's also important to note that pacifism has been a divisive issue for Quakers from very early times. The play 'Sword of Peace' that's performed throughout the year in Snow Camp, NC, is about Meetings in the US struggling with the question of pacifism vs. the desire to aid their nascent country during the American Revolution. It was a debate for Friends during the US Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and onwards – one of the tenets of Quakerism is the need to wrestle with those issues by listening to the 'still small voice within' rather than blindly accepting the dictates of others. For many Friends, the threat posed by British colonial rule, the Confederacy, or Nazi Germany simply outweighed the demands of their conscience not to bear arms.
Friends often refer to the anecdote of William Penn asking George Fox (one of the founders of Quakerism) whether Penn should stop wearing his sword because he was now a Quaker. Fox told him, 'wear thy sword as long as thee is able' — meaning he should give it up because his conscience dictated it, not because he was a Quaker.
Thanks for the background! I am admittedly not very familiar with Quakers or their history. The clarification in the first part of your post helps with the context, I'll agree it's an entirely different story if it's a moral that is strived for but not strictly enforced (follow this or you're not one of us)
In seriousness, I agree — it's always odd to see Quakerism discussed in other contexts, as well as running into other Quakers in other contexts outside of things like /r/quakerism or such. I do wish it were a more widespread practice, as I feel like it's such a good anodyne to the modern "I got mine, forget you" approach endorsed by so many megachurches.
I was puzzled by that, too: I'm always mystified when people share their entire screen on a Zoom call instead of just the one window they need to show me. Zoom even makes it easy to change out what you're sharing (add / subtract) any time.
Having seen a giant work meltdown stemming from a colleague's Slack DM accidentally broadcast over a Zoom call, I'm always paranoid about it.
Between that and the good-will they're getting from this move, this is making a ton of life-long Bose fans out of a lot of audio geeks. And if there's a community well-known for creating religions out of their hardware preferences...