Rethinking Profit

It's not all comics and football around here - sometimes I turn my incoherent ramblings on economics. And the thing I've been wondering about lately is profit.

I know that the business of business is profit. According to Milton Friedman, that's all a business should be thinking about - any other social benefits of profits generated are out of the business's sphere of responsibility, and shareholders can use the profit for whatever social purposes they want. This then leads to the idea that a publicly held business's fiduciary responsibility is to maximize those profits, and if its management fails to do so, then the shareholders have the right to exchange the board for one that will bring the most profits possible.

The problem I have with this is, a business has to have something in mind beyond just making profit, if it isn't actually in finance. Strictly speaking, Pfizer (a stock that I own) isn't necessarily delivering the greatest profit to shareholders, because it continues to develop drugs rather than fire all its scientists, hire investment bankers, and compete with Goldman Sachs. 

That may seem like a stupid analogy, but it isn't - drug discovery is extremely expensive, even if you discount Pharma companies' own claim that it takes a billion dollars to bring a drug to market. There are a lot of dead ends, where a molecule that seemed promising at the start turns out to make people's skin fall off or just drop dead; a Pfizer or a Merck or whoever can outsource the discovery process by buying promising companies, but that's expensive too. It'd be easier if they just turned into a bank, wouldn't it?

Same with, say, Ford. You don't have to reinvent cars every year or so, but you do have to keep building them, adding features that either customers want or that will keep them alive (funnily enough, these aren't always the same thing), and you have to pay people to build the cars for you. Those people have their own demands for profit, and the longer they stay, the more they cost you.

Perhaps I'm being willfully naive - I understand that Ford and Pfizer and every other publicly held corporation can't just pivot to finance, because then we'd have the ultimate externality, in which food, clothing, medicine and basically everything else isn't being produced. But profit doesn't really seem to serve any societal function of its own - whatever industry you're in, profit may be the ultimate goal but it doesn't get shared with the people who build it. Employee pay is an expense, which is why companies sometimes make layoffs in the midst of record profits: the market is stupid and it thinks that the company is making its operations leaner.

Michael Moore has a joke in Downsize This, where Wall Street goes through the roof because one day, every company decides to lay off every employee. I read that almost 30 years ago, but it's stuck with me ever since, as did an Economist article I read about 15 years ago or so that suggested that American companies were too profitable.

Now, it's one thing when Michael Moore criticizes corporations, but when the Economist thinks that corporations are sitting on too much cash, that bears paying attention to. Their argument was that this profit wasn't filtering out into the rest of the economy, it was just going to shareholders; indeed, a piece in Forbes this past year notes that nearly half of before-tax profits of non-financial corporations went to dividends, and that capital expenditures are at their lowest level in years. Companies aren't investing in R&D or strengthening their processes, because they're trying to funnel all that cash back to investors.

Now, this might seem odd for me, as a person who owns stocks in individual companies (as well as retirement vehicles like a 401k, an HSA and a Roth IRA) to suggest that there's too much focus on profits. I might have a different idea if my holdings were a few orders of magnitude larger.

I guess I see it through the lens of enshittification, the term Cory Doctorow coined to describe when online platforms decline in quality once they've captured their audience. He sees it in terms of Google destroying the market for online search by being better than all the other search engines, and then, when network effects and habit mean that people refuse to use Bing or whatever, Google fills its results with a tidal wave of shit, like sponsored links, adds, and now AI-generated garbage. 

But it's applicable in the analog world too, as we've seen with Boeing's ongoing quality-related struggles. When a business focuses on maximizing profit over everything else, then improving the physical products it sells is contrary to the desires of the shareholders. Performing quality control takes money and slows down launch of new products, so you get a lot of products rushed out before they're ready or you get a lot of incremental improvements being touted as new products, with a price premium to match.

This is where people normally protest that no, of course they're not advocating for socialism, they're totally in favor of capitalism, yada yada yada. It's true that I'm not arguing for a command economy, because I do believe that some amount of capitalism is needed for markets to efficiently find the best solution to a problem - after all, Google may be crap now, but before it destroyed all the competition, it simply did provide a better service. But I think that, as in all things, the incentives are misaligned.

At the very least, there needs to be some way for shareholders to reward profitability over a long period, rather than every three months. And maybe the shareholders should include the employees as a matter of course, since they're the ones who've made the profit possible? Tim Cook may be great at logistics and at understanding the big picture of getting his phones to my avaricious grasp, but he's not the one assembling the damn things, putting them in boxes to the store, or taking my order when I pop into the Apple Store to pay the Cupertino Idiot Tax.

If nothing else, sharing the profits more widely with those who actually do the work might help reduce income inequality, no?

Newsflash: People in Palo Alto Buy a Lot of Teslas

This headline is up there with "Trump Indicted" and "Dog Bites Man" for predictability, but it's worth exploring for a moment, because there are some trends underlying the popularity of EVs, especially here in places like Palo Alto. The main one is that they do primarily seem to be Teslas, and not other brands like Polestar or Rivian; the other is that, being Teslas, they're on the more expensive end, though I'll admit I'd find it hard to identify the electric versions of normal cars as I run past. The upshot, though, is that on my run this morning, I counted 96 American-made cars, and 49 of those were Teslas.

Taking a step back, this is one of the things I think about when I'm running (another prominent one being the Roman Empire, of course). I don't listen to music or podcasts when I run, because I want to be able to hear cars or bikes behind me, so I either think about history or I conduct little ad-hoc market research projects by counting certain types of cars.

I've been doing it for ten years now, and I've been running in the same neighborhood, so I've got a general sense of car buying trends, at least for that section of South Palo Alto. There might be a different picture if I crossed Oregon and/or Middlefield, but that'll have to wait for when I start training for marathons again.

Sometimes I count SUVs or Priuses, other times I count by country of manufacture, i.e. the US, Japan, Germany, Europe (counting British, Italian, Swedish cars, for example) and South Korea. Sometimes I'll count by manufacturer, and sometimes by sub-brand, though I have a better sense of that for Japanese cars, rather than all the brands that sit under GM, for example.

The trend I've discovered in previous years is that Japanese brands are the most common here, and not by a small margin: on a run a few years ago I counted over a hundred Toyotas alone, and a slightly smaller number of Hondas, with a few other brands here and there. Next most popular were German cars, predominantly Mercedes and BMW, with a few Audis but not many VWs. Lagging behind them were American cars, and on one of my runs I calculated that Teslas accounted for about one-quarter of the total.

As you can imagine, that number's been going up in recent years. I like to joke that Palo Alto has an obscure law requiring that a Tesla (previously a Prius) be visible at all times in public, but the truth is that even Teslas lag behind Japanese cars and SUVs. Still, this was the first time that Teslas accounted for more than half of US brands parked in South Palo Alto driveways.

I've been seeing a lot of talk online recently about the reasons people buy EVs, and environmental reasons are low on that list. One former grad school classmate proudly said that she got hers five years ago to avoid gas stations, and friends who own a Tesla have also said that's a benefit.

There's also an element of conspicuous consumption: the reason I can count how many Teslas there are in my neighborhood is that no one covers them up. I remember laughing about how one house had two cars in the driveway, but the non-Tesla was covered up and the Tesla wasn't. Even when someone does put a car cover over their Tesla, it's helpfully branded so that everyone passing by can see what car it is.

Conspicuous consumption is probably why I don't see a lot of Chevy Bolts/Volts or other brands. To put it another way, the supply of cheap EVs is limited anyway, but if the average Palo Alto buyer was price-conscious, you'd see more of them (I wasn't counting Fiat 500s this morning, electric or gas-powered, but I'd have certainly noticed if there were any around).

On the other hand, Tesla sure does have advantages over other EV brands, premium or "cheap". The first one is brand recognition, since it's been selling cars for a lot longer - I've been seeing Teslas on my route since 2014. That first-mover advantage means that Tesla has had time to build more cars, and time to build more factories to increase supply even further. Contrast that with Rivian, which may make better cars than Tesla, or it may not, but it simply hasn't had the time to build out its manufacturing capacity; whatever the factor, I didn't see a single Rivian truck or SUV on today's run.

The other advantage Tesla has is its charging network, which is more widespread than rivals' networks and is also more reliable. The Biden administration has proposed rules to get uptime of non-Tesla chargers up to 97%, but Tesla's availability is better than that right now. As a result, a lot of EV makers are making their cars compatible with Tesla's network (which has also been politely asked to open up to other brands) and providing adapters.

Coming back to the conspicuous consumption thing for a moment, it's frustrating that the options for EVs seem to boil down to Tesla, Rivian, Polestar, and the only moderately affordable options are the Chevy Bolt/Volt and Nissan Leaf. I've read that the EV market is a lot more widespread in China, in part because you can find EVs for under $35,000 dollars.

It's great that a bunch of people with single-family homes in Palo Alto can afford to buy Teslas, but none of the dedicated EV brands seems to be doing anything for the next segment of consumers. Rivian is helpfully making a less expensive version of their SUV, but it's set to cost $40,000, which isn't exactly mass market pricing. Similarly, Tesla's cheapest Model 3 costs about $43,000, and that's without any add-ons like increased range and fast charging.

EV makers aren't the only ones at fault here, by the way. The availability of chargers is a crucial part too, because who wants to buy a car that they can't refuel/recharge? The Biden plan for chargers may address rules for how well they work, but they're still being built the same way as traditional gas stations: they are being placed in parking lots and other designated places that don't cater to people who live in higher-density housing.

One of the things that impressed me on my trip to Munich was seeing curbside chargers on the street, where you'd normally see parking meters. The US (and other countries) will have to place chargers similarly to cater to all the people who live in condos or urban areas and can't just plug their EVs in at their own garages. 

These thoughts are all a little far away from the number of Teslas I see on my morning runs, but this is where my mind goes when I start counting them like this. Regardless of how I feel about certain people associated with Tesla, or generally about Tesla owners' driving abilities and regrettable license plate choices, I'd love to see more EVs around - particularly because on today's run I got to drink in a cloud of particularly smelly diesel from a pickup by a building site. I just fear that if the EV companies only cater to the type of people who'd buy Teslas or Rivians, they'll have trouble making cars for people who want Civics and Camrys.

Thoughts on Apple Apps

I've got a number of things I wanted to write about, but I'm not quite done reading or watching them all, so I thought instead I'd talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently: Apple's various services.

If you have an iPhone, or are generally plugged into the Apple ecosystem, you've probably gotten alerts about free trials for certain services. They also do a pretty good job of tying these trials to specific devices that you've just acquired: when I got my Apple TV a couple of years ago, I also got a free 12-month trial of Apple TV Plus, which meant I could watch Ted Lasso like basically everyone else during the pandemic.

So for this post I'll summarize a few of these services and what I've discovered by using them. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but it should all give a good idea of what Apple's focusing on these days, given that the phone/hardware market is probably not going to be enough to sustain it in the long term.

Apple TV Plus

As mentioned, I picked this up a couple of years ago when I got my Apple TV. I hadn't been desperate to sign up for Apple TV Plus, because its opening slate of shows didn't exactly light the world on fire. But then Ted Lasso became everyone's favorite show during the pandemic, and it became a favorite of mine too. 

I actually cancelled my subscription after finishing season 2 of Ted Lasso, but renewed it for season 3, and then kept it because I wanted to finish a couple of other shows. I liked the first season of Little America, and of course I love Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, its creators, so that's on the list, along with Foundation and For All Mankind (which apparently got good). I'm also interested in Slow Horses, since I read one of the books in that series in 2021, but the main thing I'm watching right now is the Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel shows, starting with Long Way Round.

It does seem like Apple has some decent shows on there now, and it doesn't seem to be wielding the cancellation hammer like Netflix or Max, so that's nice. It's also interesting how the feed can pull in content from other apps, if you let it, though my experience was that it was super buggy with HBO Max (but then, that had so many bugs they could have called it Starship Troopers).

I don't know how long the trial period Apple offers is currently, but it's worth a look. It's also pretty cheap compared to all the other streamers, so that's another point in its favor.

Apple Fitness Plus

This was a bit of a misfire, in my opinion. I got a few months of it when I replaced my Apple Watch, and gave it a few tries, but ended up cancelling the trial early. There are some extremely clever aspects, like how it syncs your Apple TV to your Apple Watch, so that you can see your calories burned and your heart rate onscreen. It also has a bunch of different types of workouts, from yoga to HIIT to whatever, so you're not locked into one type of exercise.

That said, a lot of those workout types weren't very convenient for me, since I live on the top floor of a condo building and I don't have loads of space or equipment. I had to keep all my HIIT workouts to the low-impact versions (usually demonstrated on the side by a second trainer), so that I wouldn't annoy my neighbors or burst through their ceiling one quiet Sunday morning. Some workouts looked like they required a treadmill, which is cool, but I'm not taking my iPad to the gym, where it can get lost or stolen or broken. I'd like to have kept it, but I just couldn't use the damn thing to its full potential.

Apple Arcade

I got this one with my new iPhone a couple of years ago, and promptly loaded its constituent games on my iPad. I've also since signed up for it for a month or two at a time, to enjoy certain specific games (Kingdom Rush Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Vengeance, primarily). There are some fun exclusives, but the draw with those two Kingdom Rush games is that all the heroes and towers are unlocked, so you're not making in-app purchases.

Another game I spent a good amount of time on was the updated Oregon Trail. The Apple Arcade version looks great and its soundtrack sounds like a lost mid-2000s folk rock album, plus it has updated educational material about the Native tribes you'd have interacted with, as well as about race relations, gender relations and more. Maybe the only problem is that it's too addictive.

Now that I have a new iPad, with a little more horsepower, I want to check out Apple Arcade again sometime. It's also $5 a month, which feels like a ridiculously cheap price to get so many games.

Apple News

Not sure why I got offered a free trial to this one, but when I got the alert I decided to check it out, since it promises unlimited access to a bunch of news outlets that otherwise have paywalls or article limits.

It should be good, since I can check out the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal (on those rare occasions when I want to read it) and more. But it's really not. Of all the apps I'm writing about here, this is the worst, because of the lack of searchability and the fact that it doesn't integrate with other apps where you might find news.

To give you an example, I saw a New Yorker headline on my Facebook news feed. I tried to click on it, but I was at my article limit for the month or something. I went looking for it on Apple News, but News doesn't have a search function, so after sifting through a few issues' tables of contents, I realized I didn't know what issue it would have been in, so I had to search for it on Safari. When I found it there, I still couldn't read it because of the article limit. You'd think that two Apple apps could integrate, but you'd be wrong.

The original idea, of revenue-sharing with news outlets and aggregating news based on your interests, is good, but the execution is terrible. Avoid.

Apple Music and Apple Music Classical

From the worst to the best. I got a 6-month trial of Apple Music when I bought my Beats Fit Pro earbuds, and it immediately became my go-to music app, supplanting both Spotify and YouTube (for the most part). Unlike News, Music has a great search function, and unlike Spotify, it has pretty much every musical act I could want. I haven't spent a lot of time with its podcasts (nor did I listen to Spotify's), and its curated playlists are okay, so I can't speak to those, but I love the completeness of each artist's discography.

Another reason to get this app is that, if you like classical music, their Apple Music Classical companion app is included, though it's a separate app that you have to download, and it's designed for iPhone, so it looks weird on my iPad and doesn't exist on desktop. That said, it fixes the one glaring gap with the original Music app, which is that classical music discovery was pretty bad. This, on the other hand, lets you search by composer, genre, century, musician, etc. For the last few weeks I've been going through all the George Gershwin compositions, many of which are available in multiple recordings, and it's been fun to see how they all stack up against one another.

The other thing I like about Apple Music (the original) is that because it's natively on my laptop, tablet and phone, I can just listen to it whenever I want. That's particularly handy in the car, since I can connect my phone via bluetooth and play whatever I want when I'm driving, as long as I have signal. And unlike Spotify's free tier, Apple Music isn't ad-supported and it doesn't force you to listen to albums or playlists on randomly generated playlists. I've been a bit sad to leave behind my Spotify playlists, but I've had so much other music to listen to that I haven't had time to go back and recreate them in Apple Music.

This one is well worth the $10 a month, especially with its Classical companion. Which makes sense, since music was a key part of Apple's resurgence 20 years ago with the iPod and iTunes. They may not get all their services right, but it's good to see that this one is done so well.

Thoughts on the New Max Streaming Service: Discovery's Gotten Harder

I've talked on here about how much I liked HBO Max, so now that it's switched to Max, to accommodate all the Discovery content that came with that merger, I thought I'd do a quick post on first impressions. I've been thinking about this since the switch occurred on 23 May, but I saw a review on CNET today and decided to add my own two cents.

The first thing I noticed was that the menu along the side was stripped down, compared to HBO Max. It currently has only Search, Home and My Stuff, where before you could use that to get to the various content hubs (HBO, DC, Studio Ghibli, Adult Swim, etc). You could also get to the Browse section, where you could select movies, TV shows, and look at all the things that have just been added, as well as everything that was leaving soon.

Although not "everything", because in the lead up to this merger, HBO got rid of a lot of shows without announcing it ahead of time (admittedly, it's because nobody was watching them, but it was annoying to see a couple of things disappear from my list without warning). Still, for the stuff that they did say was leaving, it was nice to be able to check that section and decide if there were any movies I wanted to watch before they went.

That "leaving soon" section has now been moved to New & Notable, for some reason. It's way far down, and it doesn't show the date when each of those movies leaves, so I don't know how long I have to watch them. I guess the issue is that there's so much on Max (as there was on HBO Max), that it's hard to decide on the actual thing I want to watch. When I knew something was leaving, it was easy to prioritize that, even if in most cases it came back a month or two later. Or to put it another way, discovery of new content is more difficult than before, which is ironic for a service part owned by the Discovery Channel. 

(In case you're wondering, I wrote this blog post just so I could use that line)

To illustrate how bad discovery is on Max, I didn't even know about the Last Chance section until I read this Tom's Guide review, midway through writing this post. It's not particularly intuitive to put "Leaving Soon" in the "New & Notable" section, is it? Especially if you put it way down the rows, so that someone who doesn't know it's there doesn't bother to scroll that far down.

Also, as a quick note on the name, it still feels odd that WarnerDiscovery took HBO out of the app's name. HBO is synonymous with good shows and movies, and has been for essentially my whole lifetime, so it seems like an own goal to deliberately weaken your app's branding. But then, part of what makes HBO, the brand, so impressive is that it's continued to have so much good content despite being hamstrung by a series of terrible owners, going back to the AOL-Time Warner days and right through the time when it was owned by AT&T, of all people.

But let's talk about some positives, because they do exist. The first one is that the massive amount of content I actually might want to watch is mostly still there. It still has all the HBO, DC and Adult Swim stuff I've been checking out, plus a few other shows and a lot of standup comedy. This is the thing that makes HBO Max/Max the best streamer overall for me: Disney Plus has a lot of good, Francis-approved content, and Paramount Plus is essentially a way for me to subscribe to Star Trek (plus Champions League), but HBO's diversity of content makes it the king, and the reason why most of the movies I've watched this year have been on there.

I'm not too bothered by the Discovery content, but one positive I've noticed is that now almost all of the CNN shows are back. Where before HBO Max only had season 1 of Parts Unknown, for example, it now has all 12 seasons, minus a couple of episodes that were pulled due to the circumstances surrounding Anthony Bourdain's death. They've also put on Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy, which is good on the one hand, but sad because CNN cancelled it after season 2.

The other positive is that, compared with HBO Max, the new Max is significantly less buggy. The CNET review claims the user experience is still glitchy, but so far the only thing I've found is that one comedy special I've been watching bit by bit hasn't been added to my "Continue Watching" section. When I watched the second Shazam movie (and I've got thoughts, but I'll address those another time), that showed up in "Continue Watching", so this might be a one-off.

HBO Max, by contrast, had something go wrong literally every day. Whenever I'd start the app, its loading would cause a lag between pressing the action button on my remote and it actually starting the show. This lag meant either that it didn't register the button-push, or it did, but on the wrong show. The other infuriating thing was how I'd finish a movie, and be taken to its page, but when I'd press "back", it would start the movie again. I'm happy to report that these problems have disappeared from Max, as have random freakouts like the time I tried watching Superman II but the audio consisted of a high-pitched, constant beep.

To sum up, the new Max app is still probably the best streamer overall. It has the best selection of movies and TV shows of any streamer, and has been bolstered by all the Discovery shows, if that's your bag. Fingers crossed, it's sorted out the bugs that plagued HBO Max, so that things don't randomly autoplay when you've tried to quit out of them. Finding stuff to watch has gotten a little bit more confusing, but that seems to be more because of how they organize those sections, rather than completely eliminating sections like "Last Chance". Hopefully they'll make that navigation simpler and more in line with the old version, but at least it's all still there in some form.

We Need More Cars Like in Europe

Just last weekend I got back from my yearly trip to Italy, which I undertook during February so that my dad and I could go skiing. As another deviation from the normal routine, I rented a car this time, one with an automatic transmission, so that I could take on some of the driving duties (I can technically drive manual, but I'm not comfortable doing it yet on European mountain roads).

The car I got was a Volkswagen Golf, which came with almost all the bells and whistles. Keyless ignition, which kept tripping my dad and I up, Apple CarPlay, lane assist, and even that functionality where the dashboard shows you the road signs near you. It beeped whenever I got too close to something in front or in back, but didn't have a backup camera, which is a little confusing on my car here but would have been nice paired with those proximity sensors.

It was a good car, though, and we agreed that it was extremely fun to drive. The pickup on it was monstrous, as I proved on the last morning when I had to overtake a big rig truck on a two-lane country road. It went from about 70kph to about 117kph in a couple of seconds, with nary a complaint from the engine, and I was out in front of the truck long before we got to the curve and any oncoming traffic.

A few of the levers and buttons were over-engineered and confusing to use, and the dashboard itself was curiously uninformative on matters like how much diesel I had in the tank or how far we'd driven. The only thing it showed was the range, which is the actual subject of today's blog.

When I picked up the car from the rental agency, its range hovered around 950 kilometers to about 1,010, or between 590 and 627 miles. This might be because it was a diesel, which typically gets better mileage than gas-powered cars, but either way, it beats the hell out of the nearly 400-mile range my Honda HR-V here in California gets.

The other notable thing about the Golf is that in the ten days I had it, we only took it to the gas station twice, and one of those was just a top-up on the final day to ensure that we brought it back with a full tank of gas. Technically, we could have skipped the first trip to the gas station, because my dad was worried that the stations along the freeway to the airport would be more expensive, but it proved not to be the case.

So to sum up, the Golf boasted a longer range than my own car, survived a road trip to the mountains and back without needing a fill-up, and accelerated more quickly and smoothly than my own car. This last is because it had about 100 horsepower more than my car.

The thing that really got to me, though, was that fuel consumption: I'd be interested to take the Golf on road trips of similar length to what I do in my car, but I have a hard time imagining circumstances where I could drive my Honda for nearly two weeks without needing to buy gas. I'm proud enough of its range that could get it from the Bay Area to LA on a single tank of gas, though whenever I drive down to Southern California I always fill up on the way. But that performance simply doesn't compare with the Golf's.

And by the way, it's not only this wonder-vehicle from Volkswagen that has great mileage. My dad has a Fiat Panda, one of those toy cars that are super common in Europe because they're great for city driving. Last year we calculated the mileage it had gotten on its latest tank of gas, and we came up with about 67 mpg. And here I was impressed that my Honda ekes out 42 mpg when I drive it down the length of the Central Valley.

I understand that the comparisons probably aren't too useful. The Panda has a manual transmission, lacks a lot of the electronics of my Honda, and is also pretty dinky in comparison. Yet it still gets about 50% better mileage than my car, a number that most American drivers could only dream of.

We're in the midst of an environmental crisis, where governments are trying to shift consumers away from gas- and diesel-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles, which are way cleaner to run, even if they end up being powered by dirty electricity. The fact that gas prices are so high, due to the war in Ukraine (among other factors), is providing another impetus for consumers to explore buying EVs, and to the credit of American consumers, we do seem to be going down that road more quickly than in Europe, or at least Italy.

On the other hand, European cars have always been a bit more fuel-efficient than American cars, in part because Europeans tend to buy smaller. You see very few monstrously huge SUVs or pickup trucks in Europe, because in addition to the higher fuel costs you'd have a devil of a time parking the damn things. So the average vehicle consumes less, which means drivers aren't in such a hurry to shift to hybrids or EVs.

And yet, a couple of months ago I was annoyed to learn that the latest model of the HR-V would have a hybrid option in Europe, but not here. It might be surprising, given that I drive a crossover SUV, but I do care about gas mileage, and having the option to reduce my trips to the gas station would be welcome. I just get annoyed that because most Americans don't seem to care, I don't get that option.

It's probably folly to sit and wish that the US were more like Europe in every respect, but this is one area where it could be achievable. European fleets are more efficient and smaller in part because gas prices are so much higher than here - I'm not suggesting that gas should cost as much here as it does in Italy, but Europe's high gas taxes have clearly spurred a lot more innovation toward fuel efficiency. Political opposition from Republicans aside, the Biden administration could easily mandate higher gas mileage throughout the US fleet.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't be moving toward EVs - they seem to make sense, and I'd have considered buying one myself the last time I was in the market for a new car. What stopped me was the upfront cost and the lack of range among non-Tesla models. Ironically, even though I don't have a long commute, I do think I'm more likely than many American drivers to drive long distances. But for all that I wasn't ready to go electric, a hybrid would have been a great option for me, if only it had been available.

Bluetooth Headphone Face-Off: Sony wins on sound, but Beats win on usability

I can't stop buying headphones. Since 2018 I've bought three sets for myself, received one set for my birthday and bought or advised on the purchase of two more. I thought I was cured when I bought my Sony WH-1000XM4 over-ear headphones in 2021, to celebrate getting a new job, but just last week I picked up a set of refurbished Beats Fit Pro earbuds, because they were on sale at Woot.com for $100, or half of what I'd pay for new ones at the Apple Store.

It's not like I need them. My M4s give me good noise cancelling for writing, while my first-gen AirPods connect easily to just about every one of my devices. But I persuaded myself that what I really needed was a pair of earbuds for working out, even though I don't listen to music while running and I don't go to the gym at the moment.

On the other hand, now that I've had a chance to play with them, I'm glad I got them. They may have edged out my AirPods, but I thought it would still be worthwhile to do a comparison of all three on certain aspects that I've found are important. So without further ado:

Fit

This refers to how they fit in my ear, or over it, and to how well they stay in place. With regard to the former, the AirPods are clear winners. They fit into the ear canal so nicely that after a while I don't even notice they're there. Their shape doesn't create the vacuum needed for noise cancellation, but that's actually a plus for me (which makes it even weirder that I got the Beats ones, but more on that below).

On the negative side, the ease of putting them in means they also fall out easily. I haven't lost them or had them fall out while walking, but I am constantly checking and adjusting them. Not only that, but when I did go to the gym pre-pandemic, I'd wear them while walking on the treadmill and the sweat would make them fall out more easily.

The Sony M4s (as I'll be calling them from here on) fit over the ears, so the band over my head helps keep them in place. They do create a bit of vacuum, but because it's over the full ears it's not so noticeable. They also stay in place nicely if I'm walking around with them on, but the weight of them makes that less desirable (and I'm a bit self-conscious walking around with them).

The Beats Fit Pros have that earbud tip that I usually hate putting in, but it makes sense for the noise cancellation. Unlike the AirPods, I'm aware that I'm wearing them at all times, but on the other time, I can trust that they'll stay put. I went out walking while wearing them this morning, and I appreciated not having to constantly adjust them. 

One of the reasons I got them was also the wings that are meant to hold them in place in the ear, and those are comfortable enough. If I do find that they're bothering my outer ear, I can adjust them and solve it that way. I have only two complaints: the feeling of ear pressure when they're in noise-cancelling mode; and the fact that when I used my phone settings to test their fit, it said it couldn't get a good fit on my left ear. I'll have to mess with the ear tips a bit, but hopefully I'll be able to fix that.

Connection

I've also noticed differences in how easily they connect to my other devices and how well they stay connected. I've connected each of them via Bluetooth to my iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and Apple TV. You'd think the AirPods would score highly here, but surprisingly they don't, even despite the ecosystem advantage. They pair relatively easily with each of the devices, though it took a while to get them paired with the Apple TV. Once they pair, though, they drop the connection pretty easily. I've noticed it mostly on my phone, where sometimes the connection fails mid-sentence while I'm listening to a podcast.

The worst, however, is on my laptop. They require an extra step, of going to the settings menu and choosing them for my audio output. This setting just drops out at random from time to time while I'm wearing them, even though they maintain the connection. This happens less often on the iPad or Apple TV, but it's particularly bad on the iPhone, since they're meant to go with you and should therefore be reliable.

The Sony M4s have the most reliable connection, but with an asterisk: I mostly use them with the cord plugged into my laptop or iPad. This makes them way more reliable, but also less portable. Because they're not Apple devices, there's a little extra trouble to connecting them via Bluetooth, and they don't seem to like connecting that way to my laptop. On the other hand, they connect just fine to the Apple TV.

The best overall are the Beats. Right out of the box they connected straight away to just about everything that was in reach. They even did so on the laptop, and don't require me to choose them for audio output, nor do they drop the Bluetooth connection. Even if I wander out of range, they connect right up again when I go back to my laptop. The only time they dropped the connection was when I was listening to a podcast on my phone and set a timer; when the timer rang, they dropped the connection.

Sound

I need to do a full test of how music and voices sound on each of my headphones, but even without doing a full test I've seen a bit of a difference among all three. The other part of this section is noise cancelling, which doesn't apply to my AirPods.

To be fair, all three sets of headphones sound good, certainly compared to the older, wired headphones that came with various devices over the years. One way I measure that is by how loud I have to set my devices' volumes when I'm connected to the headphones. When using the AirPods I have to set the volume on my laptop to its lowest setting, while when I wear the Sony M4s I have to reduce the volume even further, by lowering it in the app I'm listening to: this is the same whether it's on YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify. The Beats, on the other hand, don't sound as good at such low volumes, though maybe this is because of the issue with the fit on the left ear.

Turning to noise cancelling, my impression is that it's better on the Sony M4s than the Beats, both because of the fit issue and because the Sony ones cover my ears completely. The effect also seems to be more subtle with the Beats: when I turn on noise cancelling it blocks out the constant hum of my fridge and the nearby road, while the Sony headphones feel like they cut out the world. Noise still gets through, but not as clearly as when I wear the Beats.

The real test will be next time I fly. I wore the Sony M4s on the plane last summer and was impressed by how much engine noise they cut out. I'll be curious to see how the Beats fare on planes.

The only other thing to note with the Beats is Apple's spatial audio, which they're compatible with. I didn't notice it much when I listened to Apple Music on my laptop, but when I went walking with them I put on some music with spatial audio and there was a clear difference. Specifically, if I turned my head then the music concentrated in the earbud that was facing toward where my body was facing. To put it another way, if I turned to the left, the music sounded like it was coming from my right earbud.

It's kind of a neat trick but not the surround sound I was expecting. Maybe I need to try it again when I connect them to my Apple TV.

Battery

In normal use all three sets seem equally long-lived, though the Sony M4s may have the longest battery life. That could be because they're physically larger, meaning they can hold a larger battery. It could also be that I use them slightly less because they're larger and more unwieldy, whereas the AirPods and the Beats get more use during the day because they're easier to connect and I can move farther from my laptop with them.

The one extreme case where the Sony M4s have done clearly better than the AirPods is on long video calls. I regularly play Dungeons & Dragons, for sessions lasting 3 hours, via video calls on Discord. I usually use the Sony headphones for noise cancelling, and they always hold up well for the entire three hours. For one session I wasn't able to use them, so I tried the AirPods, and they lost their charge after a short time, meaning I had to switch to another set of headphones. I haven't had that happen again, but I'm curious if the Beats would work for as long.

Other stuff

The AirPods have the smallest, most portable case, which is nice, but it also feels more flimsy than that of the Beats. The Beats also have a stronger magnet in their case, which snaps them in place for charging. The case for the Sony M4s, meanwhile, is huge and unwieldy, but that makes sense because they're over-ear headphones, so can't be as small as the earbuds.

Both the Sony headphones and the Beats charge via USB-C, which is nice for most people, but because I'm so locked into the Apple ecosystem I actually find it nice that I can use Lightning cables for the AirPods. This means I can use one charging cable for my phone, tablet, iPod and AirPods, whereas the other headphones require another, special cable that doesn't go with all of my other chargers and power banks.

Verdict

For audio quality and noise cancelling, the winners have to be the Sony M4s. They're a little heavier and more unwieldy, but the sound is clearer and I suspect they block out more noise than the Beats. They're not great for walking around, but they're also not terrible at it, and at least I can trust that they won't fall out.

For everyday use, I'd say the Beats have overtaken the AirPods. They may be a little less comfortable, but I never have to worry about them falling out while I walk, or even while I'm lying down. They also connect to all my other devices more easily, which makes them more convenient and quicker to get started using.

The AirPods will probably remain best for listening to stuff while I'm lying in bed or watching TV or generally staying still. Their sound quality is good considering that they don't have noise cancelling and so don't have to create a vacuum in my ear canal. I also appreciate the comfortable fit, though that fit is probably why they slide out of my weirdly shaped ears.

Tips for Writers: LinkedIn Learning

One of the perks of working for a large company like my previous employer, State Farm, is that there are a lot of resources available to employees. These ranged from discounts on stores via its Perks at Work program, to learning resources like Degreed and Linkedin Learning (formerly Lynda.com). The content on Degreed is mostly client-generated and client-collected, meaning that State Farm itself was putting together courses on subjects it deemed important, and cribbing from across the web to populate them.

But my big discovery was that LinkedIn Learning also contains a bunch of courses on creative stuff, which is why I was glad to find that my new employer also gives us access to it. There are a number of creative subjects on LinkedIn Learning, like photography, but the area I want to focus on is creative writing, because there's a fair amount of content on the platform that writers will find useful.

The first thing to say, though, is that you're probably better off accessing LinkedIn Learning through your employer's subscription, if they have it. It costs $29.99 per month for a monthly subscription, or $19.99/month if you take out an annual subscription, so it can be costly; if your employer doesn't offer LinkedIn Learning, you can find a number of the same courses on Udemy starting at around $15 per course. By the way, I found an article comparing the two, which claims LinkedIn offers a la carte courses, but I couldn't find anything on its pricing page other than its monthly prices, so that's potentially a strike in Udemy's favor.

The other point about LinkedIn is that it's better for fiction writers than screenwriters. I was able to find just one course related to screenwriting, but I stopped using it after a couple of days, because the teacher seems to have only one credit to his name, which I'd never heard about before. The fiction writing courses are run by actual authors (e.g. Jessica Brody) or writers who have made a career of focusing on the way stories work (e.g. Lisa Cron). I may never have heard of Jessica Brody before LinkedIn, but a quick google search reveals that she's published over 20 books - so at least she knows the industry and is a working writer.

Some of it can also be very basic. The first writing course I watched was Foundations of Fiction, which features a lot of explanations of types of point-of-view, exercises on writing types of characters, and so forth. But that proviso should only put you off if you're already a bestselling writer - those, like me, who are getting their writing careers off the ground can probably always stand to go over the basics again, every once in a while.

(It's also interesting how easy it is to not learn the basics if you're entirely self-taught, in any subject. At least a basic course will frequently explain these points in a systematic manner)

Jessica Brody also has courses that are aimed at the business side of writing, like how to sell your novel to a major publisher, and developing ideas that sell. I haven't gotten to those courses yet, but I am going through one on productivity hacks for writers, which is full of good tips even if your writing time consists of just an hour a night before bed.

One other course that I've bookmarked to watch at some point is on using Scrivener. I bought it a few years ago, and while my prose stories are still all in Word, I always consider it would be good to learn how to use it to full effect (I've also written screenplays in it).

Beyond the writing courses, there are some good courses on time management and productivity, which have some useful tips and approaches that can transfer over to writers. I'm also partial to the Desk Yogi series on movements you can do to mitigate the effects of sitting at your desk all day - like time management, these are relevant for writers and non-writers alike.

Overall, there's a good amount of creative writing content on LinkedIn Learning, enough that if you have a few minutes free at the end of your workday, you should be able to learn some useful tips or approaches to writing. It's also good to keep your mind thinking about writing, even outside of your normal writing time (though I don't think you should spend all your work time fooling around on LinkedIn Learning).

LinkedIn Learning may not have the brand-name appeal of MasterClass, but if your employer offers it for free it's a good resource, and I highly recommend it.

Solar Just Makes Sense

In the last year I've started to get more interested in power banks and solar energy, both to reduce my usage since starting work-from-home in March, and to have energy ready to charge my phone and stuff in case I lose power here at home. This interest got more acute in the last couple of weeks, when Texas's power grid failed spectacularly.

I already had a collection of power banks acquired from conferences in my old job, and two of those were at least nominally solar-powered. I then decided to buy another one at Christmas, from a name-brand power bank manufacturer, but while it has a lot of capacity it turns out to be pretty bad as a solar charger (it's from Anker, incidentally, but I intend this to discourage you from getting the solar versions of these power banks, rather than that brand).

So instead I went on Wirecutter and found a rundown of portable solar panels, and bought one to see how it worked. I got the X-Dragon, their second choice, because the Big Blue was more expensive than what Wirecutter had (prices change).

Since then, I've set up the panel in my office window every morning, and connected up or two devices. Usually I'm filling up one of the power banks (primarily that solar Anker), and sometimes I'm charging the iPhone or AirPods or something. But usually it's the power banks, since filling those up lets me charge other devices when the sun isn't out.

I'd thought I might have trouble keeping all of the power banks charged, but between charging my iPad and iPhone every day, I'm actually running a surplus of power for those (which means I can connect a USB-connected desk fan my sweetie gave me last year). Unfortunately I can't connect the solar panel to my laptop, or to anything that connects to it, so any reductions in energy I'm using are relatively small, though consistent.

But this leaves me with the sense that we need to build out much more solar capacity, at least in parts of the world where sunshine is easy to count on. With technology like Tesla Power Walls, we'd be able to store up a lot of capacity for when the sun isn't shining, and by pairing with other renewables, like wind (properly winterized, of course), hydroelectric and geothermal, we should be able to generate enough electricity in any sort of weather.

The other thing that occurs to me is that everyone having their own home electrical battery - let's say supplied by their building or homeowners' association or even their city - would completely change the nature of electrical utilities, if not do away with them.

You can argue that the function of a PG&E or a Con Edison is to maintain the physical infrastructure of the power network, including the cables and wires that bring the centrally generated power to each home. But if each house has their own decentralized way of generating that power - most likely to be solar or geothermal, since wind and hydro are harder to generate at that scale - what is the utility company's function?

Because solar is unreliable, and geothermal is expensive and not available everywhere, the utility probably needs to continue to act as a central storehouse of energy. Though again, if the individual home's storage is designed well enough (and with enough capacity), the central power grid becomes redundant, doesn't it?

This is all spitballing, because I'm not an electrical engineer or an architect of power grids. But the question becomes relevant - if a common carrier service like electricity generation actually should be run by a private corporation with a profit motive that doesn't necessarily align with the needs of its customers.

That's not to say that profit is by its definition wrong - but the quarterly driven thinking of basically all companies nowadays means that an energy provider's focus is on increasing its profit at the end of the quarter, rather than on providing the best amount of energy to its customers.

As I said, all spitballing. But again, my experience with solar in the last week or so is showing me that we're missing a huge opportunity to generate clean and reliable energy, for free, from a completely renewable resource. It's great that I can charge my iPhone, iPad, iPod and AirPods (and as I discovered today, my Apple TV remote) completely from solar energy collected on my Anker power bank. But those are a drop in the bucket compared to my TV, personal laptop, work laptop (and monitor), lights and appliances.

It'd be good to figure out this question sooner rather than later.

Not Sure Disney Plus is Going to Kill Netflix

Managed to get onto Disney+ this weekend, and I've been poking around for a couple of days, looking at what they have. I may be atypical in that I'm not too bothered by what original content is on a streaming service - I want to have access to stuff that I like and stuff that I might like.

Although, that said, an interesting-looking series that isn't available anywhere else will make me take notice. The Mandalorian is this service's standout at launch, and I'm looking forward to starting on it with my girlfriend for the Thanksgiving weekend.

(As an aside, I'd like to thank any deities or higher powers out there listening for connecting me with a girlfriend who loves Star Wars - it's an especially nice thing to have in common with someone)

They've done a nice job of organizing the main channels of content that they think people will want, such as Star Wars, Marvel and so forth. And once you're in there, you can find everything organized by type of content (movies, TV, extras) and in some cases in chronological order.

What's a little annoying is looking through a channel like the main Disney one and searching for classic Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck shorts - like on Netflix you have to know what you're looking for because it's not going to serve it up for you in a logical fashion.

The other thing I like is that it really does have a lot of content, especially stuff you can't find elsewhere. I'm not 100% sure if I'm going to devote a lot of time to rewatching old shows like DuckTales, Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers or Darkwing Duck (hopefully TaleSpin is there too), but it's impressive that you can find them somewhere, given that a lot of these shows aren't available elsewhere, or even really on DVD.

On the other hand, is $6.99 per month a reasonable amount to pay for knowing that you have access to all this stuff? I suppose it is on its own, since it's a lot lower than what Netflix or any of the other streaming services charge at the moment. But not necessarily if it'll be one of several streaming services that people own.

This gets to my discomfort with the whole premise of what analysts are calling the streaming wars - Disney's jumped in, AT&T is going to bring out HBO Max next year and eventually NBC will launch Peacock. In contrast to something like CBS All Access or DC Universe, which have positioned themselves either as their own company's repositories or as niche services, these three new ones look to be aiming explicitly at stealing subscribers from Netflix, by getting big-name shows that Netflix won't have.

Should NBC, AT&T and Disney really be aiming for supremacy, or is it better to hope that they can coexist? Speaking for myself I don't see myself cancelling Netflix until it ends the physical DVD service (which I still get) and its backlog gets completely gutted with only original content left. But even then, I'd probably just jump to the service that has the most stuff I want to watch.

Another issue for me, but which is probably not coming into the calculations of AT&T or NBC, is international viewing. Those two services in particular are probably not going to target viewers in other countries, so Netflix will likely continue to have a dominant position abroad because it'll remain the primary place to watch a lot of American shows - even if local rights holders in each individual country pull their own shows and movies off the service. That presence internationally will give it a sizable war chest to commission new shows or buy rights to stuff that no one else has.

The other thing that concerns me is the maintenance of shows that are only owned by one streaming service, or that belong to services that go out of business. John August has already highlighted on his podcast Scriptnotes the fact that a lot of movies aren't available anywhere anymore, because the DVDs aren't widely available and no one has (or can get) the streaming rights.

If every service moves to hosting only its own content, something will inevitably fall through the cracks, and I'm curious what's going to happen to it. For example, a key reason I'm not signing up for DC Universe is because I'm expecting it to go out of business soon - I don't know how much content is on it beyond the (admittedly cool-looking) original shows it has, which are Titans, Doom Patrol and Swamp Thing. Should Netflix completely succumb to its new competitors, I'd hate to see all its content disappear never to be seen again.

But this is all a long way off, I think. The oft-quoted (but possibly not accurate) figure is that Disney+ had 10 million subscribers by Day 1, but this still isn't catching up to Netflix for a while. Its back catalog is good, but not particularly diverse, and given that focus on Disney-branded movies and shows, it likely won't be very attractive to viewers who want to see more edgy or grownup content. And Netflix will still have the edge in interesting foreign shows or movies, to say nothing of its finely tuned recommendation engine.

That may be enough, at least in the short term, to let it fight off its competitors, even when they're as big as Disney.

Roam Like Home: What I learned from three months of using my phone abroad

I've talked a little about my three or so months in London this past winter, where I was working on a contract to make some money after having lost my job back in December. From a money, and cultural, and social standpoint it was an interesting experiment - getting acquainted with a new company, new parts of London and new people, alongside all the things I already knew well about the place.

But there was another aspect that struck me about it recently. In the months I was away, although I bought a little pay-as-you-go burner phone, because my contract required me to have a local number, I continued to use my US smartphone as my primary means of communication. Not only that, I didn't make a phone call on it once - my bills from T-Mobile during that period remained resolutely the same as always.

The key is that my mobile operator here in the US is T-Mobile, which alone of the four big carriers offers free roaming for texts and data, albeit super-slow data, although as it turns out that wasn't such a problem. Voice calls are charged extra if you're abroad, whether making or receiving, but at 20 cents per minute (now raised to 25), even that wasn't excessively high.

Back when smartphones were newish, a number of reporters and analysts that I followed on Twitter were running experiments to see how they coped with using a smartphone as their primary or only computer. The conclusion seemed to be that they were actually pretty good as computers, and that if you needed to downsize you could do so without too many problems.

The result of my experiment feels a little more radical, somehow - in three and a half months of using a smartphone for messaging, surfing, texting and the like I didn't make a single phone call.

(OK, that's not strictly true, because I used my burner once or twice, but even in those circumstances I could have gotten around it - the burner was, as I said, more for my job and for signing up for stuff there in London, like a gym near my flat).

I guess we're still conditioned to think of our smartphones as phones first, but we've come to a point, with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, social media and so on, to say nothing of texting, where the old voice calling capabilities are probably not as important as they were even as recently as the 3G years. There are so many ways of communicating with each other that voice isn't as necessary as it used to be, and even when real-time communications are necessary you can now just video call on FaceTime or WhatsApp and use your data rather than your minutes (though this proved a little tough when I was away from Wi-Fi, because as I said, my data was SSSSLLLLLOOOWWWW).

As 4G was rolling out in Europe and North America, one of the big ideas was Voice Over LTE, or VoLTE, similar to VoIP technology that apps like Skype use. This would have allowed users to make voice calls over the LTE networks that their phones connected to, rather than having to switch between the 2G or 3G radio and the 4G radio to call. But it seems we've bypassed that a little bit, by using video calling or just plain old VoIP through Skype and WhatsApp, and by having data allowances that are large enough to cope, if not actually unlimited.

One aspect of this unintended experiment that I didn't get to test was how long it would have lasted. T-Mobile's fine print says something about not roaming long-term, but doesn't really give a set amount of time after which they cut you off. I kept waiting for some kind of notice that they needed me to come back, but every month I just got another "Welcome to the United Kingdom" text explaining the terms of my roaming.

The reason this is important is that I do spend a lot of time overseas, and to be quite honest, I'd like to spend even more time overseas. But I don't want to have to cut off all my services when I do go, or fiddle about with things like prepaid phones (which get disconnected after three months of non-use), or any of that.

So I have to welcome the fact that some services just continue to work regardless of what country you're in. In fact, during those months not only did I use my US smartphone much as I always have, I also used my Netflix subscription as normal, with the exception of watching certain things that are only available overseas (like Star Trek Discovery). In a world where almost every aspect of living across multiple countries is a pain in the balls, frequently by design, it's nice to see that some companies don't hassle you too much about it.

I've mentioned T-Mobile US here, but a couple of European operators do it too, and with the abolition of roaming in the EU, this stuff is going to get even easier. And I can't help but welcome it.

Throwing a Ring around the World

I don't usually post about tech stuff on this blog. When I worked for Ovum, I kept this strictly separated from that stuff, in part because I could put opinion pieces on our work blog and get my tech-writing yah-yahs out that way. During the (brief) period I was freelancing, I kept that side of things over on my other blog. But sometimes an idea comes up that's good for either, so here we are:

I was thinking about Ring today. It's the smart doorbell manufacturer that got snapped up by Amazon for a billion dollars back in February, and a company I wrote about extensively for Ovum. The interest at the time was this upstart company that just kept attracting funding (including from Amazon's Alexa Fund back in 2016), and when it came onto my radar in early 2017 it had just picked up $109 million for its Series D, making it the most-funded smart home company on my old investment tracker.

That, and their range of products, made them a good target for us to write about, so I chatted with them a few times to prepare a research note, essentially introducing them to Ovum's clients. The thing that stuck with me, and that I was thinking about today, was their approach to the smart home camera sector. Instead of focusing on what was happening inside the home, they reasoned that a good way to make an individual home safer was by making the neighborhood around it safer.

So the Ring doorbell was intended to see what happened out in front of the house, including at other houses on the same street. After all, if someone broke into the house across the street from yours, it would be relevant because your own home could be next. They followed this concept up with smart outdoor lighting, which could help protect your yard, and so on.

As I said, this stuck with me, to the point that of all the companies I wrote about during that time, it's one of the most conceptually interesting ideas I came across. It's also affected my thinking in seemingly unrelated areas, like immigration and foreign policy. The way it applies there is, if a country wants to be safe from illegal immigration, human trafficking, the drug trade, and so forth, it's not enough to combat those things inside its own borders - it'll have to work with its neighbors to sort those problems out at the source.

You can see it here at the US's southern border, where migrants are fleeing violence in their own countries (for example Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador). You can also see it in Europe, where Syrian refugees are fleeing the violence from their country's civil war and the depredations of Daesh/ISIS. In either case, the most enlightened and just policy has to include helping to make their home countries safer (in addition to not mistreating the ones who do arrive seeking asylum or simply a better life).

If you want to stick to tech, this concept is relevant to cybersecurity, and any number of other areas as well. One of the key complaints about smart home devices is the fact that security is often an afterthought, but securing the device, while necessary, is probably not sufficient. You want your network to not be compromised, which means that ideally your neighbors' Wi-Fi networks should be secure too. And so forth.

Amazon obviously bought Ring because its technology could be integrated with the Alexa suite of smart home devices, and because its technical expertise offers a different view on the home than the Echo device had. Also, I don't know Jamie Siminoff at all (I've never met him or spoken to him), but I presume he isn't a bleeding-heart leftie like me.

Still, it's reassuring to know that someone's successfully implemented technology that takes into account the inter-connectedness of communities, and that acknowledges that what's happening outside your house does affect you. This is a powerful but understated idea, and I'd love to see it take root in more of the tech industry - as well as in politics.