Sammy's posterous

One of the most important constraints on the purchase of iPhones is the state of 3G (or, more broadly, mobile broadband) networks. An iPhone is a mobile computer whose primary value is derived from high bandwidth data communication. Because this bandwidth is not universally available, the iPhone faces a restricted addressable market.

This is a different kind of argument.
Essentially, Horace is saying that the lack of 3G is what's restricting iPhone from larger market shares in China. He assumes that carrier partners can always sign on later. What is not mentioned in this article is whether much of this addressable market in China has the income to buy an iPhone. This exclusion seems to imply that he doesn't think that it matters as much as most other analyst thinks.

It’s the service providers that are bugging me though. These folk are meant to be helping the operators compete with immensely cool new services that should completely eclipse anything Apple could dream up.

MWC was filled with service providers busy selling software and services in this regard. Yet most of their executives had already gone native.

I think that’s why merely reading a lot won’t make you a great writer, just like listening to a lot of music won’t suddenly make you a piano virtuoso, because reading emphasizes the drawbridge words. On the flip side, writing a lot without reading much leaves you all backwind and no drawbridge, trying to get from point A to point B without stopping to admire the view. It’s only by doing both reading and writing that you start to understand how to string the different words together.

Possessions tend to breed more possessions. Once I started ridding myself of them, it became clear just how little I needed and how easy it was to live without.

Economists always ask us to ‘imagine’ how things must have worked before the advent of money. What such examples bring home more than anything else is just how limited their imaginations really are. When one is dealing with a world unfamiliar with money and markets, even on those rare occasions when strangers did meet explicitly in order to exchange goods, they are rarely thinking exclusively about the value of the goods. This not only demonstrates that the Homo Oeconomicus which lies at the basis of all the theorems and equations that purports to render economics a science, is not only an almost impossibly boring person—basically, a monomaniacal sociopath who can wander through an orgy thinking only about marginal rates of return—but that what economists are basically doing in telling the myth of barter, is taking a kind of behavior that is only really possible after the invention of money and markets and then projecting it backwards as the purported reason for the invention of money and markets themselves. Logically, this makes about as much sense as saying that the game of chess was invented to allow people to fulfill a pre-existing desire to checkmate their opponent’s king.

This is fucking awesome.

ssh host cmd /c dir

Cool!