Month: March 2010

Have you had the chance to play with a Blackberry Storm? Or a Palm Pre? Did you get the feeling that the touch screen, the primary input device, just didn’t feel as good as the iPhone? I’m not talking about the ignored taps that the Google Android suffers from, but that, “darn, I’m sure I tapped the right spot, but I sure didn’t get what I wanted” feeling. It turns out there’s a quantifiable reason the iPhone touch screen seems to work better.

TV doesn’t just make you stupid and fat, it also makes you obedient:

…the manipulative power of television further increases people’s willingness to obey. – Fake TV Game Show ‘Tortures’ Man

Even the Iranian regime is willing to play Hollywood movies to entice its citizens to stay home and watch TV.

It makes me wonder what we’ll be discovering and saying about the internet in the next couple decades.

Playing a HD movie against the snow white ceiling of a snow cave is unreasonably appealing. Thankfully, the 3M MPro120 is priced high enough that I can avoid the temptation.

It’s Banks vs. Families, Who Will Come Out on Top?

The short version is that I studied the economics of the middle class and I began to see that credit products were becoming increasingly dangerous. Families didn’t know how much they were spending on credit and comparison among the products was practically impossible…
….
The idea behind the current model is, “I will hold something shiny in front of your eye, 3.9% financing, and the way I’m going to make money is on tricks and traps that I’ve buried in the fine print: $29 there, $49 there, triple interest rate, double cycle billing, over and over and over … .”

…one of the issuers took me aside and said, “We get that our business model is unsustainable over the long haul, but no one of us can jump first.” On the plane home from the meeting with the issuer I realized how broken the market is….

The new Mustang ships with 305 ponies and gets 31mpg. The article doesn’t mention if the back seat has room for two child seats.