But Rich People Live Here, So We Can't Be Going Broke

https://ift.tt/2CiDnmV


Our distant ancestors built Rome and Jerusalem and Xi'an and Teotihuacan. Our more recent ones Kyoto and Buenos Aires and Paris and Marrakesh, and many more of humanity's timeless cities. And most of them did it not through vast infusions of wealth, but through many average citizens working incrementally. You don't have to be wealthy by modern standards to create a great place and maintain it. The genius of the traditional development pattern is exactly that: your place has the potential to thrive in the future even if the people living there then are of modest individual means.

3. Your suburban town probably can't afford its development pattern even if it is rich.

Here's a common sense observation: There is a limit to the amount of public obligation we can take on. And that limit is separate from any question of short-term cash flow or debt financing—i.e. the ability to write the checks today and have them clear.

Reductio ad absurdum: Suppose we built Elon Musk's Hyperloop and connected every city over a million people in the U.S. to the system. Could we afford to do it? If someone were willing to lend us trillions of dollars, sure, in a sense we'd be able to "afford" it: we'd have a loan through which we could pay contractors to make construction happen. Would it be a good idea? No. It'd be completely insane.

So we should all be able to agree there is a theoretical limit on the amount of infrastructure we can afford per capita. This is obvious and trivial. What we're arguing about is where the line is between affordable and not affordable, sustainable and not sustainable. Crucial to the Strong Towns argument is that the line isn't where you think it is.

We've been living so long with an illusion of wealth that we assume, "We must be able to afford all this stuff we've built, because it exists."

Reductio ad not-so-absurdum: If the state of Georgia wanted to double its road network, and someone were willing to lend the Georgia DOT the money to do it—backed by promises that the new capacity would unleash a virtuous cycle of economic growth and the investment would pay for itself—it could do so. If the debt financing were available, humans could be put to work building those roads, and then they'd exist.

I bet most readers will agree that this would be over-the-top. That wave of economic growth wouldn't materialize, because road spending doesn't really create much prosperity; it just tends to move it around by enabling people to live and work in new places and commute longer distances. Georgia would be stuck with a lot of expensive pavement in need of eventual maintenance.

Georgia currently has an estimated 271,000 lane miles of public road. The cost of a new road is highly variable but let's go with a lowball estimate of $1 million per lane mile. The state could double its existing road network for the low, low price of $271 billion. Divided over 30 years (a reasonable estimate of the lifespan of a road) and 10.43 million current Georgia residents, that's $866 every year for 30 years for every man, woman, and child in the state of Georgia. (Note for the nerds in the crowd: Yes, this is extremely simplistic in countless ways—it's a thought experiment, not a fiscal analysis.)

That's just roads: what if we also doubled the extent of sewers, water mains, pump stations, treatment plants, sidewalks, and so forth? And keep in mind the state has still got to maintain all of the stuff it's already built.

The thing is, this isn't actually that preposterous. Because we have done it before, and in a place without Georgia's booming growth. As Jason Segedy points out, Cuyahoga County, Ohio—home to Cleveland—more than doubled its built footprint from 1948 to 2002, while its population ended up being exactly the same in both years: 1.39 million.

Cleveland built a whole new Cleveland for no net new residents. And we wonder why we're going broke.

Suburban Atlanta can be smug and say, "But Cleveland is a Rust Belt city. It's been in decline for decades. We're growing."

Oh yeah? For how long are you going to keep that up? What happens when you don't grow?

So let's lay to rest the excuses of those who claim that the math about the unsustainable cost of infrastructure under the suburban development pattern doesn't apply to them:

"No one would lend us this money if it weren't a good investment."
"We wouldn't take on this debt if it weren't a good investment."
"Our growth itself is proof that we're doing something right."
"Well-to-do people keep moving here, so we must be doing something right."
"A government budget isn't like a household budget. We take on debt today in order to spur the economic activity that will pay down the debt tomorrow."

Sure, some municipal investments do pay off multiple times over—but the onus is on the government to do a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, absent the hand-waving that typically accompanies assertions that new spending is an investment in growth.

This isn't a small-government argument. It's actually agnostic to the normative question of how small or large local government ought to be. If you, the residents of an affluent community, want to tax yourselves more to invest in your quality of life, go for it. But can you back out of that obligation if your circumstances change?

Infrastructure is perilous because it's physically permanent. Cannibalizing your future tax base, via TIF or another means of jump-starting development right now, is perilous. When you commit your children's generation to paying for something you built, you need to think differently about that decision: because you don't know their situation, or even who will be living in your city then.



from Hacker News https://ift.tt/YV9WJO
via IFTTT

Why does sorting in computer science mean ordering rather than categorizing?




from Hacker News https://ift.tt/YV9WJO
via IFTTT

How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

https://ift.tt/2CjNnME


As a new immigrant to the United States in the early 1970s, Jayantibhai Patel slept very little. By day he held down a job at a bank in San Francisco. By night he toiled in the city’s run-down Tenderloin district at the Vincent Hotel, a property he had acquired not long after moving to the country. Patel’s sleepless nights paid off. By the 1980s he and his two sons were running several motels and hotels in California, and now, four years after Patel’s death, his granddaughters are taking the family business forward. (Read more about the South Asian American experience here.)

Pratima Patel takes a photo of her father (at right) and his two siblings inside the Vincent Hotel as her sisters, Sita and Katki, look on. In the early 1970s their grandfather, Jayantibhai Patel, bought the hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The granddaughters now run the family business, San Jose–based Lotus Management, which owns 12 properties.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ISMAIL FERDOUS

 

The success of Patel and his family mirrors the rise of Indian Americans in the U.S. motel industry. About half the country’s motels are now owned by Indian Americans. A majority of these owners are from Gujarat state’s industrious Patel community, leading them to be jokingly referred to as the Patel Motel Cartel. Growing up in motels run by their immigrant parents, many second- and third-generation Gujaratis in the United States imbibed an entrepreneurial spirit and ethic of hard work, which they are applying to modernizing the businesses they inherited and launching new businesses of their own.

“The way that my uncle and father worked was very mom-and-pop style,” says Katki Patel, one of Jayantibhai Patel’s granddaughters who is director of finance at the family’s San Jose–based Lotus Management. Starting in 2006, Katki’s older sister, Pratima, centralized the accounting processes for the company, allowing lenders and investors to easily assess the financial health of the properties managed by it. “Without this, it would have been impossible to grow the business,” Katki says. A certified financial planner by training, Katki got a real estate license so that she could broker deals on behalf of the company. Her younger sister, Sita, is in charge of developing new hotels. The company currently owns 12 properties and plans to open three new ones by the end of the year.

Bimal Patel and his father, Mahendra, stand in front of Hotel Zico in Mountain View, California. The two men, as well as Bimal’s wife, Supna; his cousin, Milind; and a colleague, Parag Vedawala, grew a collection of small businesses into a midsize real estate company. PHOTOGRAPH BY ISMAIL FERDOUS

The first Gujarati hotelier in the United States was a man named Kanji Manchhu Desai, who joined two Gujarati farmworkers in California in 1942 to take over a 32-room hotel in Sacramento, California, after the property’s Japanese-American owner was forced to report to a World War II internment camp. According to Mahendra Doshi, a California-based historian who is working on a book about early Gujarati hoteliers in the United States, Desai moved in 1947 to the Hotel Goldfield in San Francisco, whose doors were always open to new immigrants from Gujarat. He encouraged them to enter the hospitality business: “If you are a Patel, lease a hotel.”

Many followed his advice. “They would give each other handshake loans—no collateral, no payment schedule, just pay when you can,” Doshi explains. Once a family purchased a motel, they would live there, and the family members would do all the tasks needed to run it, from cleaning rooms to checking in guests. That helped keep costs down, and profits went toward acquiring new motels. By the 1980s Gujaratis had come to dominate the industry.

Akash Kalia (right) talks to Victor Floyd, a veteran and resident of the Palms Inn in Santa Rosa, California. Kalia converted his parents’ struggling motel into housing for veterans and chronically homeless people. The center hosts regular social gatherings for residents and offers social services. Kalia is also a member of the local planning commission.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ISMAIL FERDOUS

 

For many second-generation Gujaratis who were raised in a motel run by their parents, life was hard. Manoj Pandoria, a cheerful 47-year-old man with bright eyes, grew up at the Holiday Motel in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, which his parents took over in 1981, shortly after his family moved to the United States. Set on three acres in the middle of pine forests and cornfields, the 23-room property was a lonely place to live as a child. “My weekends were spent cleaning rooms with my parents,” Pandoria says.

Avinash Bhakta (standing) meets with employees at a Staybridge Suites hotel in San Antonio, Texas, that he manages for his family’s business. His parents bought their first motel, in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, in 1979. Bhakta’s father, Dinesh, says the inn had a picture of an apple tree with the saying “Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” “I guess you could say that is how my life was,” Dinesh says, “always taking risks.” The family’s business now has investments in 10 hotels.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ISMAIL FERDOUS

 

No boundary existed between work and life. “Any time that someone wanted a room or wanted to buy a snack or needed toilet paper, or anything, they would come to the office,” he recalls, “and we would have to stop whatever we were doing and serve that client.” The only playmates Pandoria and his siblings had were some kids who lived in a trailer on the other side of the highway. That’s why they loved the summers, when the motel’s swimming pool would attract kids from the neighboring areas.

After college, Pandoria worked at IBM and at a hotel before starting a chain of beauty spas. (His parents sold the motel to a Patel family.) Looking back, he says he owes his entrepreneurial drive to his growing-up years. “I saw my dad working in the middle of the night,” he says. His mother had to straighten up rooms every morning without fail, no matter how tired she was. To succeed requires diligence, he says: “Hard work is not an option.”

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a contributing writer for the magazine, came to the United States from India when he was 26. Photographer Ismail Ferdous moved from Bangladesh to New York City about two years ago.


from Hacker News https://ift.tt/YV9WJO
via IFTTT

What to Do When Your Sex Drive is Low

https://ift.tt/2LUp0oa

GIF
GIF: Angelica Alzona (Gizmodo)

A reader asked this question during our live Q&A a few weeks back:

Is there anything that can actually be done about a lack of sexual desire in women? I was such a horny teenager and in my early 20s it was like a switch was flipped and it went to zero. I’ve been told all kinds of stuff by doctors from ‘Have a glass of wine and forget about the dishes for a while’ to ‘It will come back in your 30s (I’m 37 now and nope)’ to ‘Yeah that sucks.’

I’ve heard a lot of similar stories about doctors who give terrible (and frankly, insulting) advice. “Just have a glass of wine” is particularly infuriating. (It’s also the most common advice doctors give to women who have never had an orgasm.) Unfortunately, you don’t need to get much training in sexuality to become a doctor, so a lot of doctors are woefully unprepared to deal with sexual issues. In my experience working with clients, it’s almost always possible to pinpoint the reason why your sex drive started to decrease. Read on for my advice on how to figure out why your sex drive disappeared.

Find a New Doctor

It can take a lot of time and patience, but I highly recommend trying to find a doctor who is more versed in working with sexual concerns. Read Yelp reviews and/or speak with the doctor before scheduling a visit.

Advertisement

It’s worth going through this effort because there are a lot of medical conditions that can cause a decrease in libido. Some of the most common ones include:

  • Imbalanced hormone levels (This can be checked with a simple blood test)
  • Depression and anxiety
  • Thyroid imbalances (Also an easy blood test)
  • Arthritis
  • Cancer
  • Diabetes
  • Heart disease
  • High blood pressure
  • Neurological diseases
  • Sleep problems
  • Chronic pain
  • Kidney disease
Most of us take our sex drives for granted, expecting that they should just function on their own.

Check Your Medicine Cabinet

Medications can also frequently cause a decrease in libido. Most doctors don’t talk about the sexual side effects of medications, and most people don’t read all the fine print in the little pamphlets that come with medications. As a result, a lot of people get surprised by a sudden decrease in libido because they didn’t make the connection to their medication.

The most common medications that cause decrease in libido include:

  • Anti-seizure and anti-anxiety medications, like Valium, Ativan, and Klonopin
  • Antihypertensive medications, like beta blockers, and ACE inhibitors.
  • Cholesterol-lowering medications, like Lipitor and Crestor
  • Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. Even Wellbutrin, which is advertised as having fewer sexual side effects, can still have sexual side effects
  • Hormonal birth control, like birth control pills, rings, and the hormonal IUD

Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate the effects of medications, including:

  • Changing the dosage
  • Changing what time you take your dose
  • Adding other medications
  • Trying similar classes of medications

Of course, you need to speak with your doctor before making any changes to your medications.

Examine Your Lifestyle

Most of us take our sex drives for granted, expecting that they should just function on their own. That may work at certain points of our lives or relationships, but it’s not a successful long-term strategy. Your sex drive needs your ongoing support in order to flourish.

Advertisement

Try asking yourself this question: “Does my lifestyle support a healthy sex drive?” Here are some factors to consider:

  • Do you even have the time to be intimate? Or is every single minute of your day scheduled?
  • Do you have the energy to feel desire? Are you taking care of your body by feeding it healthy foods, exercising, and getting enough sleep?
  • Do you have a good environment for having sex? Take a look at your bedroom, or wherever you most frequently have sex. I’ve found that people often underestimate just how much of an effect our surroundings have on our desire. Does your space inspire desire? Or has it become cluttered, messy, and distracting?

Take an Honest Look at Your Relationship

Your relationship can have a huge affect on your sex drive. Whatever dynamics are going on between you and your partner outside of the bedroom are going to affect things inside of the bedroom. If you and your partner have grown distant, if you hardly see each other anymore, or if you’re fighting constantly, you’re not going to feel the desire to be intimate. The differences in your sex drives can cause issues too. If you’ve always been the partner with the higher sex drive, sensitivity to frequently being turned down by your partner may have caused your own sex drive to tank.

Advertisement

If you’re having problems in your relationship, I highly recommend seeing a couples counselor or sex therapist. It really helps to have some outside support in examining and repairing the issues that are driving a wedge between the two of you. Even if things are fine in your relationship, it can still be worthwhile to see a sex therapist. The simple act of investing yourself in your sex life mentally, emotionally, and financially can naturally bring some energy back to the bedroom. You can also get ideas for reigniting the spark in your relationship.

Think About the Sex You’ve Been Having

Your sex drive is a self-perpetuating cycle. That old saying “Use it or lose it” sounds horribly cheesy, but it’s sort of true. If your sex life is boring, predictable, or stale, your sex drive is naturally going to decrease. It just doesn’t make much sense to feel strong desire for something that isn’t that enjoyable.

Advertisement

The truth is that maintaining an active and satisfying sex life - and the accompanying sex drive - takes a lot of work! If you put effort into having better sex, you’ll probably notice your sex drive improve as well. Some options to consider include:

  • Scheduling sex or date nights
  • Trying new things in the bedroom together
  • Re-examining your boundaries and seeing if you’re willing to experiment with something different
  • Being vulnerable and sharing more of your desires or feedback with your partner

Consider the Possibility That Nothing’s Wrong

The reader mentioned that her sex drive changed dramatically when she entered her 20s. Most people have pretty intense sex drives as teenagers. Desire can be more subtle as we get older, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. One of the most common patterns I see is that people start needing more of a “nudge” to feel desire. For example, you may not feel desire until you’re already kissing your partner, or already taking your clothes off. Or you may be more sensitive about needing to set the mood with candles or music. Try asking yourself, “What kinds of dynamics or situations typically help me feel even slightly more interested in sex?” Taking the time to look for patterns can make a world of difference.



from Lifehacker https://lifehacker.com
via IFTTT

Gorsuch's Record Was More 'Liberal' Than Kennedy's This Term: New at Reason

https://ift.tt/2NJE3Ty

Here's a curious fact about the U.S. Supreme Court term that concluded in June: Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch racked up a more "liberal" voting record than Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kennedy did not join the Court's liberal bloc in a single 5–4 decision in the entire 2017–2018 sitting. That's unusual. In previous terms, Kennedy's fifth vote decided such contentious issues as gay marriage and abortion.

Gorsuch, on the other hand, did side with the liberal bloc in Sessions v. Dimaya, which struck down a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act dealing with the power of the federal government to deport any alien, including a lawful permanent resident, convicted of an "aggravated felony." Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Gorsuch, who concurred in part and joined in the judgment, provided the tie-breaking fifth vote, writes Reason's Damon Root.

View this article.



from Hit & Run : Reason Magazine https://reason.com/blog
via IFTTT

Japan starts space elevator experiments

https://ift.tt/2LzcQRE

Shizuoka University and contractor Obayashi aim to launch two small (10 sq cm) satellites connected by a 10m steel cable from the International Space Station.

Containers on the cable will move forward and back recorded by a camera.

 Obayashi envisages a space elevator using six oval-shaped cars, each measuring 18m x 7.2m holding 30 people, connected by a cable from a platform on the sea to a satellite at 36,000 kilometers above Earth.

The  elevator would be powered by an electric motor pulley.

The cars would travel at  up to 200kph and arrive at the space station eight days after departure from Earth.

The total length of a cable to be used for the vehicle will be 96,000 kilometers, and the total cost is estimated at $9 billion.

The cost of transport is expected to be about one-hundredth of that of the space shuttle.

Carbon nanotube is the most likely material to be used for the cables.

 

 



from Hacker News https://ift.tt/YV9WJO
via IFTTT

9 science fiction and fantasy books coming out this September you should add to your reading list

https://ift.tt/2Po1LVV

We’re going to start doing something a little different with our monthly book list here on The Verge: we’re shifting this column from a monthly schedule to a bi-weekly one. Each list will be a bit shorter and hopefully, a bit less daunting than a longer list.

Speaking of shorter and less daunting, I packed two books when I went on a trip out of state recently: The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark and War Cry by Brian McClellan. The two are fantasy novellas from Tor’s Tor.com imprint, and each are tiny adventures set in a much larger world.

The Black God’s Drums is set in an alternate 19th century where the American Civil War persisted long past 1865. In New Orleans, a young girl named Creeper overhears a group of Confederate soldiers plotting to grab a scientist who developed a terrible weapon, and she goes off to seek an unlikely ally to try and foil their plot. In War Cry, we follow a ranger unit stationed on an isolated plateau in the midst of a World War that’s lasted for as long as people can remember. A changer, Teado, is one of the last of his kind, and he and his fellow soldiers embark on a risky supply mission behind enemy lines, and are forced into an untenable situation that might end the war.

In both short books, we’re treated to a couple of well-sketched characters who face a situation that could drastically alter the world around them, and they’re forced to make some hard decisions to act. What impressed me in both stories was just how rich and vibrant each world is: they’re each layered with history and backstory, and I hope that both Clark and McClellan return to explore them again.

Here’s what’s coming out over the next two weeks.

September 4th

Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman

Claire Coleman’s debut novel Terra Nullius came out last year in her home country of Australia, but it’s now hitting the United States for the first time. In it, mysterious invaders have come to Australia to set up a colony, and the natives whose lands they take suffer the consequences. Coleman is part of an indigenous group called the Noongar, and she told The Guardian that her experiences visiting a memorial dedicated to a massacre of her people helped inspire the novel, using science fiction to look back on the darker history of Australia and the invasion of the British colonists in the late 1700s.

Read an excerpt.

Image: Tor.com

Worlds Seen in Passing by Irene Gallo

Tor.com celebrated its 10th year this July. The website has become more than just a company blog to promote the publisher’s authors: it’s become an indispensable source for news and reviews within the SF/F community, not to mention home to original stories. Irene Gallo, who oversees the site, has collected some of the best stories that they’ve published over the years in this anthology, and it includes some of the biggest names in SF/F publishing: Charlie Jane Anders, N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, Max Gladstone, Jeff VanderMeer, and many, many more.

Halo: Silent Storm by Troy Denning

We might have a year or so to go before the next Halo game, but over the years, 343 Industries turned out a number of books to complement the games. The latest is set in 2526, a year after the start of the Human-Covenant war, and follows Master Chief as he’s assigned to lead a desperate mission to buy humanity some time.

Listen to an excerpt.

Image: Penguin Random House

Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton explores the distant future in his latest novel, Salvation, switching between two distant but connected eras. In 2204, humanity is beginning to explore the rest of the galaxy through a newly invented gate technology. Travel to the stars is now easy, and after the discovery of a crashed spaceship on a newly explored world, a team is sent out to investigate — only to discover that the ship carries a strange cargo. Meanwhile, in the 51st century, a team of genetically engineered soldiers is preparing to confront an implacable enemy.

Read an excerpt.

Solo: A Star Wars Story by Mur Lafferty

Solo: A Star Wars Story hit theaters in May, but the novelization for the film is out this week. While many of us have seen the film already, this book is being touted as an “expanded edition.” It adds some additional scenes that didn’t make it into the film, giving the story a bit more depth to the characters and flesh out the world a bit more.

Read an excerpt here and here.

Image: Columbia University Press

The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction edited by Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters

China has a vibrant science fiction community that’s been gaining prominence in the west in the last couple of years: more and more, we’re seeing English translations from the country. Mingwei Song, an associate professor of Chinese at Wellesley College and Theodore Huters, professor emeritus in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles has put together a tome of stories published since the turn of the century, and includes some already familiar names, like Liu Cixin, Han Song, Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and more.

The Accidental War by Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams kicks off a new trilogy set in the world of his Dread Empire’s Fall novels. The Accidental War is set after the events of the Naxid War, which saw Senior Captain Lord Gareth Martinez and Senior Captain Caroline Lady Sula exiled after going against the Terren Fleet’s traditions during the conflict. But after a crisis cripples the Commonwealth, Martinez, Sula, and their allies must escape and rally their fleet to end off a larger enemy looking to take advantage of their weakness. Publisher’s Weekly says that it’s “a solid start to a series that military science fiction fans should enjoy.”

Read an excerpt.

September 11th

Image: Tor.com

State Tectonics by Malka Older

The final installment of Malka Older’s The Centenal Cycle, follows Infomocracy and Null States, a political thriller set in the distant future that imagines a world governed by micro-democracies — blocs of 100,000 voters known as centenals — and the efforts by major organizations to game the system to win control. Five years ago, sabotage and an earthquake threatened the last election, and as a new election approaches, an unknown group is attacking the underlying infrastructure of the system. Kirkus Reviews gave the novel a starred review, saying that it’s “satisfying as a novel, anxiety-inducing as a comment on our society.”

Read an excerpt.

Port of Shadows by Glen Cook

Glen Cook made a name for himself with his Black Company series, a gritty story of a group of elite mercenaries. He’s returned to the world over the years, and his next, Port of Shadows, is set between the first two books of the series, The Black Company and Shadows Linger. In it, the soldiers of the Black Company are in the service of a mysterious sorceress known as the Lady. One of their numbers had been taken into the Lady’s Tower and returned unchanged, earning him a certain amount of attention from a group of sorcerers called The Ten Who Were Taken. As the company is dispatched to fight against a rebel army, they run into some strange occurrences. Publisher’s Weekly says that the book doesn’t have a huge impact on the larger series, but that it “makes for a pleasant diversion for fans.”

Read an excerpt.



from The Verge https://ift.tt/1jLudMg
via IFTTT

$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

https://ift.tt/2LGBaRH


reader comments 5

  • Lenovo Yoga Chromebook, stand mode.

    Lenovo

  • The new Inspiron Chromebook is the first premium Chrome OS device from Dell.

    Valentina Palladino

  • The new HP Chromebook x2 detachable.

  • The original Pixelbook's 12.3-inch QHD display has large bezels around it for better grip in tablet mode.

    Valentina Palladino

Among the new hardware launched this week at IFA in Berlin are a couple of premium Chromebooks. Lenovo's $600 Yoga Chromebook brings high-end styling and materials to the Chromebook space, along with well-specced internals and a high quality screen. Dell's $600 Inspiron Chromebook 14 has slightly lower specs but is similarly offering better styling, bigger, better quality screens, and superior specs to the Chromebook space.

These systems join a few other premium Chromebooks already out there. HP's Chromebook x2 is a $600 convertible hybrid launched a few months ago, and Samsung has had its Chromebook Plus and Pro systems for more than a year now. And of course, Google's Pixelbook is an astronomically expensive Chrome OS machine.

These systems should cause ripples in Redmond.

Most Chrome OS systems are cheap: plastic instead of metal; TN displays instead of IPS; screen resolution that felt cramped and low a decade ago; inexpensive ARM processors rather than more powerful and pricier Intel ones. In a lot of regards, Chromebooks are hitting the same price points—with the same compromises—as netbooks did in the mid-2000s. This has given Chromebooks great appeal in the K12 education market, where the low price and almost disposable nature of the devices makes them a good match for careless student users.

But these $600 machines aren't aimed at those same students. Lenovo reps told us that its new Chromebook was developed because the company was seeing demand for Chromebooks from users with a bit more disposable income. For example, new college students that had used Chrome OS at high school and families who wanted the robustness Chrome OS offers are looking for machines that are more attractive, use better materials, and are a bit faster and more powerful. The $600 machines fit that role.

And that's why Microsoft should be concerned. This demand shows a few things. Perhaps most significantly of all, it shows that Chrome OS's mix of Web applications, possibly extended with Android applications, is good enough for a growing slice of home and education users. Windows still has the application advantage overall, but the relevance of these applications is diminishing as Web applications continue to improve. A browser and the Web are sufficient to handle the needs of a great many users. No Windows necessary, not even to run the browser.

Second, this demand makes clear that exposure to Chrome OS in school is creating sustained interest in, and even commitment to, the platform. High school students are wanting to retain that familiar environment as they move on. The ecosystem they're a part of isn't the Windows ecosystem.

Finally, it also shows that Chrome OS's relatively clean-slate approach (sure, it's Linux underneath, but it's not really being pushed as a way of running traditional Linux software) has advantages that are appealing even to home users. The locked down, highly secure Chrome OS machines require negligible maintenance while being largely immune to most extant malware. And the platform's cloud syncing means that even chores like backups can be largely avoided. Microsoft may be trying to offer the same with Windows, in particular Windows 10 S-Mode, but it's going to take a rather more radical change to Windows to really rival Chrome OS in this regard.

Not just bad for Windows

Again, this is bad news for Windows. Windows' position in the consumer space has already been vastly eroded by rise of the smartphone and the subsequent loss of the smartphone market to Android and iOS, but Chrome OS's expansion beyond K12 education into both college and home environments means that Windows' home turf—the PC—is coming under attack. Windows' traditional third party application advantages are in many situations irrelevant at best, and downright liabilities at worst. If Windows were still the place to run a browser, it could stick around in these consumer markets. But if all you want to do is run a browser, Chrome OS undoubtedly has advantages over Windows.

In time this will percolate into the corporate space, too. It won't be immediate, as the corporate world has a lot more inertia to overcome, but when these college students take the next step in their lives and get jobs, that preference for Chrome OS isn't going to disappear. It might take a while for these people to be in decision-making roles, but they'll get there in time, and they won't have the same default, almost reflexive preference for Windows that's currently the norm. Chrome OS will start making inroads on the corporate desktop.

The consumer space and enterprise are not cleanly separated discrete markets. One influences the other...

The naive response to this is to say that it doesn't matter; Microsoft understands, after all, that Windows is in a difficult position, and that's why the company is prioritizing the cloud and its enterprise offerings. But this ignores the interconnectedness both of Microsoft's offerings, and of Google's.

Those Chrome OS users likely aren't just using Chrome OS, after all. They're probably also using Google Apps. Mainstream productivity, one of Microsoft's major cash cows, is being handled by Google's online services—maybe not for every student, every time, but for a chunk of them. That preference, too, will only spread: no longer tied to the desktop Office apps, Office 365 becomes much less appealing or interesting, and Google's suite will be the one with the familiarity and experience edge. Key elements of Microsoft's cloud business will be undermined, so it's not just Windows that loses out. The contagion likely spreads beyond, too: Microsoft's reduced visibility can only make selling other cloud services such as Azure that bit harder.

The consumer space and enterprise are not cleanly separated discrete markets. One influences the other, and the loss of mindshare on one side can diminish reach on the other side.

Thus far Microsoft's main response appears to have been Windows 10 S Mode, running on netbook-priced PCs, and perhaps the Surface Go (though a Surface Go with a keyboard cover is much more expensive than the cheap Chromebooks, and starting to rival these more expensive ones). But Windows itself remains a liability in this regard. Windows 10 S machines simply aren't as tightly restricted as Chrome OS systems. They have more ways to go wrong.

For now, Chrome OS's success seems limited and fairly US-centric. If it remains that way, then the knock-on effects in both consumer and enterprise spaces should be reduced. Nonetheless, this kind of development isn't just bad news for Microsoft's position in the consumer market; it's bad news across Microsoft's entire business.

Listing image by Lenovo



from Hacker News https://ift.tt/YV9WJO
via IFTTT