Excepting the high-end stuff, ~zero purchasers prioritize your "simple, functional, reliable".
Compared to pretty much every other tech product, printers have lots of moving parts. Especially the nightmare called paper. Talk to a engineer some time about how wildly the mechanical properties of paper can vary - even before you leave it sitting around unsealed, at whatever humidity and temperature.
Subtitle: "Linux Foundation Europe boss predicts EU will run as fast as it can from US tech companies"
Reality: Linux Foundation Europe boss desperately hopes that the EU will actually do more than endlessly talk, squander money, and tout a few symbolic little projects.
Yes. And France has a history of taking its sovereignty a bit more seriously, for us to take the article's "ministries should submit their plans by fall..." a bit more seriously.
But even if that goes perfectly...France is only one of 20+ countries in the EU. The great majority of which are far less well-positioned to do anything similar.
Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.
The hard work would be maintaining a database of ideas which were similarly hyped over the past (say) couple centuries - including details on if/when each idea worked out, or fell out of hype-space, or was proven useless.
From that, you might be able to draw useful conclusions. Well...you'd also need correction factors for how profitable the hype itself was, over time, in the various scientific & technical fields.
The business model would be selling db access to VC's, R&D managers, and other folks making decisions about real money.
In the mid-1900's, my parents raised 6 kids. Owned a decent home. And put the 6 of us through good colleges, debt-free.
All on dad's so-so white collar income, with close to zero "family" wealth on either side. Mom was a mother and housewife, but not a helicopter parent - it was normal and accepted to let us kids walk to & from school every day, and to roam the neighborhood (alone or with friends) during daylight hours.
There wasn't anything special about this - plenty of relatives, friends, and neighbors did similar.
Vs. these day - unless you were in the lucky 0.1%, could you even dream of doing that?
On the one hand - d'oh, yes, why didn't they do this years ago?
OTOH - from current comments on the article's site, Brit's seem to have very low opinions of their government's competence. Ditto both intentions, and police practices.
Because the financialization of homes, plus the interests and insecurities of tens of millions of homeowners, create hellishly powerful incentives to restrict the supply of homes.
Everything else is just piddly details on exactly where & how & how much water is inevitably flowing downhill.
People don't need incentives to try and block projects; they do that on their own. NIMBYism only requires that someone not like change and that desire often prevails despite financial benefits of change.
So...did all Americans like change pre-1970, when America was building plenty of affordable new homes? I'm thinking "no".
And whatever sepia-toned tales of the quarter century from 1945 to 1970 are currently being told by right-wing folks, that was a period of enormous change.
(Yes, in philosophical theory, "NIMBYism only requires that someone not like change". But getting from there to "that desire often prevails", in the real world, requires the support of very large social, regulatory, and legal structures. You might want to talk with an old attorney in this area, or someone on a local zoning board.)
Perhaps. But if you look into the history of that idea, you may notice that it's almost always applied to the young and the lower classes. Perhaps the Baron, Bishop, and Business Magnates are too godly to be at risk?
I don't mean it in a clock more hours in at the factory way. Some people can direct themselves. But you've got to do something, even if only for the personal outcomes, i.e. comparing retirees who keep busy to those who do not, you'll find a significant effect on health, satisfaction with life. And of course there's a ripple effect on others, I am one who gets many presents cooked up in that workshop, and am hardly alone.
That's the ideal. Really is a complex grayscale, depending greatly on the person's current circumstances. And, factory or not, for society to function it needs 99% of people to pick from a pretty short list of fairly prosocial choices.
> But you've got to do something, even if...
Yes-ish? I'm not saying it was good - but society didn't much mind people being couch potatoes watching 1960's-era TV. Vs. falling down the addictive rabbit holes of modern social media - that's not looking like it can end well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
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