11 ms·

What Happened in the 2010s

167 points by notlukesky 7y ago

buboard 7y ago
personal blogs are still crashing as if it's 2010. that must mean, not much happened Edit: ok read the rest. - according to his admission, the subscription model did not scale - missing is the effect of planet-level monetary policy that massively benefited shares and their largest owners
- toastking 7y ago
  Yeah he's so close to getting the idea that the World Bank and the neoliberal monetary policy caused this inequality.
  - buboard 7y ago
    I dont know what you mean neoliberal, but i think in this decade we ll realize it was criminal
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    What does the World Bank have to do with this?
davewongillies 7y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20200101123154/https://avc.com/2019/12/what-happened-in-the-2010s/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200101123154/https://avc.com/20...
- ksec 7y ago
  May I ask why the Web Archive version is posted?
  - adventured 7y ago
    AVC.com was apparently being hammered by an avalanche of traffic. Not long after the articles about the 2010s and 2020s were upvoted to the HN front page, the site was persistently returning database connection errors. So archive links were posted in both threads.
cortesoft 7y ago
I think one of the big tech developments (hinted at in the article but not called out) is on demand video streaming and what that has done to how we consume media. It has changed the type of things we watch.
- toastking 7y ago
  On demand music as well. It's ironically lead to a bit of a monoculture with music that's concerning. Streaming arguably caused the whole kerfuffle with this year's Billboard list: https://www.stereogum.com/2068655/billboard-top-rock-songs-imagine-dragons/news/ https://www.stereogum.com/2068655/billboard-top-rock-songs-i...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- jacquesm 7y ago
  On demand video streaming has been with us since the 90's. The only thing that has changed is the scale at which it happens.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    On demand video streaming in the 90s was completely different. I was talking about the effect on our culture, and the shift that has occurred in the last decade has changed how we consume media in a way that did not happen with what we had in the 90s.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      All that happened is that media companies came to their senses and figured out that renting out the same content over and over again is more lucrative than selling it on physical media. It also was the one chance they had to put the piracy genie back in the box: a single SD card will now hold so much data that you could store all the music and movies you'd want to consume in a lifetime on one or two of them.
mmaunder 7y ago
"...the fact that the tech sector has such a powerful role means that it will be highly regulated by society." I think this reality will arrive hard and fast in the 2020's. The breadth and depth of regulation globally will depend on election outcomes. But it will happen either way. GDPR and CCPA are just a taste of what's to come. We'll see regulation in several key areas including: - Social media's goal of increased engagement vs mental health. - Cross border cybersecurity. - More jurisdictions adopting GDPR/CCPA-like privacy laws. - Cloud providers (consumer in particular) and vendor lock-in vs portability. Some is already happening, but expect to see a ramp up. Don't interpret this as me being pro/anti regulation. Just a reality that's coming IMO.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  OMG yes. I find it funny that there’re still so many CEOs that I speak to and they are constantly pushing the idea that tech should not be regulated. Even if you’re right, there’s probably not a single politician out there who wouldn’t use that as a way to build their career on.
brlewis 7y ago
> subscriptions better align the interests of the users and the developers of mobile and web applications and avoid many of the negative aspects of the free/ad supported business model The most significant negative aspect that subscriptions avoid is ephemeral spambot accounts. If a user account costs money, there's way more disincentive for behavior that will get that account banned.
iamaelephant 7y ago
I very strongly disagree with #3. Machine learning has not yet proved its value outside of a handful of key areas (image recognition, voice recognition/synthesizing, etc). I think it's entirely possible we'll look back on today as a kind of machine learning mania. I certainly believe there is plenty of room to build sustainable businesses without a machine learning asset (and the associated data collection), and it's in no way "table stakes for every tech company, large and small".
- chubot 7y ago
  Yup, I came here to question that as well. What are some examples of companies that hinged on machine learning? DATA is crucial, but that's very different than "sophistiated machine learning models". For example, do Uber and Lyft need machine learning? As far as I can tell, they need data about drivers, users, ride completion, maps, and a lot of people doing simple statistics on that data and improving the product. Machine learning might give them a few percentage points in some specific subsystem, but it isn't going to make or break the product as a whole. It's not "table stakes". Pick another industry and do the same thought experiment. What are some other breakout companies? Did snapchat succeed (in its day) because of machine learning? What about AirBNB? I think they are optimizing the product with "data science", not machine learning. Certainly not deep learning. Machine learning finally came of age in the 2010s and is now table stakes for every tech company, large and small. Accumulating a data asset around your product and service and using sophisticated machine learning models to personalize and improve your product is not a nice to have.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    You would be astonished at some of the non-public (not that they are secret) machine learning things that Uber does that you wouldn't even be aware of. My favorite is that they do pothole detection, prediction and routing around based on what they classified based on driver accelerometer data. They've also reduced traffic incidents with insights from the same dataset that drove product changes.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
medymed 7y ago
In medicine, the 2010s may be remember as a period of explosive growth of engineered therapeutics. This is driven primarily by better understanding of diseases (and their molecular targets) and also by an expanding reach of bio-engineering platforms. Monoclonal antibody approvals especially have accelerated briskly for inflammatory conditions (there are 13 or more for the skin condition psoriasis alone) and perhaps more famously redefined many cancer treatment regimens with checkpoint inhibitors. Chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T cells) are (very) expensive ex vivo gene-edited cell-based treatments, and other platforms for gene editing with are nearing or entering trials. This trend does not appear to be decelerating or plateauing.
Lerc 7y ago
>the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view. There is a lot of industry built around supplying the half a trillion a year military. They are well practiced in resisting reductions in funding. If the US becomes isolationist does that military might get turned inward. Which option do you think is more likely a) Stop buying so many toys b) Overflow our sandpit into the rest of the yard c) Play with our toys in other peoples' sandpits Isolationism requires cutting out c as an option.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Looks like you commented on the wrong article. You're quoting the 2020s piece.
hateful 7y ago
I was just thinking about the whole "what happened in the last decade". While the 90s ended with the rise of the web, and the 00s saw the rise of what we can do with the web, the 10s felt like an experiment of what NOT to do with the web.
williamDafoe 7y ago
Very few new capabilities for mankind were discovered in the last 10Y mainly CRISPR and CAR-T therapy and two level neural networks (Google translate, alphago). Lithium-Ion batteries got 50% stronger and 6x cheaper (see photo in https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72ct5hNM7 https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72c...). Most scientists focused on confirming what was already there (gravity waves, higgs boson, water on moon, water on Mars, etc ). Carbon fiber increased passenger air travel efficiency and became commonplace in bicycle frame design. The 2010s were not a creative decade ...
CM30 7y ago
May as well give some thoughts on this: > 1/ The emergence of the big four web/mobile monopolies; Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook I'm not sure you could class Apple alongside some of the others for monopoly power either. They're still less popular than Microsoft for desktop operating systems, Google for mobile ones and virtually every other major service in their other areas of business. Apple is a very profitable business, but they're arguably more of a luxury goods maker than a monopoly right now, especially outside of tech circles. > 2/ The massive experiment in using capital as a moat to build startups into sustainable businesses has now played out and we can call it a failure for the most part. This is an interesting point, and I definitely wonder how it'll affect the tech industry in future. > 4/ Subscriptions became the second scaled business model for web and mobile businesses, following advertising which emerged at scale in the previous decade. Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films, TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't done nearly as well as expected. For instance, subscriptions still haven't worked in the media industry for news/journalism, as much as certain publications are hoping they would. They also haven't done too hot in the games industry either, if Google Stadia's performance is to be believed. Jury's still out for YouTube/Twitch creators too, with Patreon type services being the de facto monetisation method right now. Free with ads has usually beat out subscriptions when in competition with it. > 7/ Technology inserted itself right in the middle of society this decade. It sure did, though it's more like people took notice this decade, since the political tides went one way rather than the other. > And the stagnation of earning power in the lower and middle class is absolutely the result of technology automation, a trend that will only accelerate in coming years. It's effects on politics will accelerate too, as shown by this decade's move towards more extreme political parties and policies worldwide. This might not end well, especially with environmental issues caused by global warming/climate change at the same time.
- RestlessMind 7y ago
  > Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films, TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't done nearly as well as expected. A pattern I identified was that subscriptions work really well when property rights are strong and enforced strongly (TV shows, movies, music, books etc). It doesn't really work well when property rights can be bypassed easily or have a convenient alternative (you want to read NYT story without a subscription? read that story on some other outlet).
purplezooey 7y ago
It's sad, the point about the bay area. We could have done a lot more but nobody wants to make any sacrifices. I hope in the next decade the state will take a larger role and force local communities to drastically increase housing, density, and transit rights of way.
- twblalock 7y ago
  I've lived in the Bay Area for most of my life and I have zero confidence the situation will improve. It would have happened by now if it was going to. The transit situation in particular will not improve because people prefer cars. People have little experience with public transit, and the experience they do have was bad, so they don't see themselves using it on a regular basis. They want to live in suburbs and drive cars, and they will try very hard to prevent anyone from increasing the density of housing or transit anywhere near their houses. Those people vote, so a state government that tries to push for more public transit and housing density would not do well in the next election.
- briandear 7y ago
  Houston doesn’t have a housing problem, nor particularly good transit. It also doesn’t have zoning and a local government that pulverized developers by charging them fees for things already paid for by property taxes like building schools or forcing them to have “low income” units which end up making housing more expensive. Texas also doesn’t have rent control, nor excessively reactionary building height restrictions, nor does Texas have Prop 13 incentives that reduce housing market liquidity. “Transit” and “Density” isn’t the problem in the Bay Area — it’s that it’s excessively punitive to attempt to build anything there. If you were to be able to afford available land, cities such as Mountain View want to milk developers to pay for things that the city should be paying for themselves out of normal tax revenue. I remember when Steve Jobs wanted to build Apple Park and some fool on city council wanted Apple to provide WiFi for the city for free: Jobs said that it isn’t Apple’s job to provide city services — Apple pays their property taxes, if Cupertino wanted free WiFi, then Cupertino should do it. There are also cases where if a developer wanted to build some houses; they’d also have to give the city a free park and dedicate a certain number of houses for “low income.” That isn’t a developer’s problem. If the city wants low income housing, the city should use some of its own land and budget to build it. You don’t have that sort of extortion happening in places like Houston — and coincidentally, you don’t have affordability problems in Houston either. A developer also is shy about investing hundreds of millions into a project only to get it derailed by NIMBYs or other activists or worse, be a single election away from having severe rent control or confiscatory tax policies enacted that would destroy any hope of a profit from the substantial risk of property development. I don’t disagree with allowing high density where it is appropriate, but density isn’t the issue, it’s the extreme high costs, both political and monetary of doing business in the region. There is plenty of land, but given than almost every empty cow pasture ends up getting claimed as “open space,” makes it really hard to build anything. Case in point: the “preservation” of North Coyote Valley. I appreciate open space, however, they literally preserved 900 acres of flat farmland to be used for hiking despite the region being chock full of thousands of acres of open space already. You can’t claim a housing shortage while simultaneously taking away 900 prime acres that would be perfect for housing developments. Clearly there isn’t a housing problem when so much easily buildable land can be sequestered away so vegan hipsters can have yet another thousand acres to roam with their rescue dogs. The Bay Area has no shortage of open space, yet they keep adding more to it while people literally sleep in RVs in El Camino and a young family has no hope of ever owning a house in the area.
ksec 7y ago
I am surprised with no mention of Smartphone. Which is arguably the most important innovation in modern history. 2010s, Smartphone ( iPhone 3GS at the time ) went from niche to 4B users ( iOS, Androids and KaiOS ), that is nearly every person on earth above age 14 in developed countries. I dont think there has ever been a product or technology innovation as important that spread faster than Smartphone. And it changes everyone's life. The post mentioned of Google, Facebook and Amazon empire, all partly grows to this point because of Smartphones. Technology companies together now worth close to 10 Trillions. The whole manufacturing supply chain exists and became huge in Shenzhen because of Smartphone. It was the reason why TSMC managed to catch up to Intel in both capacity and leading edge node. It was the reason why we went from 3G to 5G in mere 10 years because of all the investment kept pouring it. It was the reason why everyone went on to the Internet and had Internet economy. It brought a handheld PC and Internet to a much wider audience. I would even argue it was the Smartphone innovation that saved us from the post 2008 Financial Crisis doom as it created so much wealth, innovation and opportunities. And the 2nd most important thing not mentioned in the article. ( May be it is not important to others... ) We lost the man who bought us the Smartphone era; Steve Jobs.
whyineedaccount 7y ago
In my opinion, machine learning is going to replace all of us, now or in the future. We don't know but it will eventually happen, not in this decade...

167 points by notlukesky 7y ago

personal blogs are still crashing as if it's 2010. that must mean, not much happened Edit: ok read the rest. - according to his admission, the subscription model did not scale - missing is the effect of planet-level monetary policy that massively benefited shares and their largest owners

toastking 7y ago
Yeah he's so close to getting the idea that the World Bank and the neoliberal monetary policy caused this inequality.
- buboard 7y ago
  I dont know what you mean neoliberal, but i think in this decade we ll realize it was criminal
- H8crilA 7y ago
  What does the World Bank have to do with this?

davewongillies 7y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20200101123154/https://avc.com/2019/12/what-happened-in-the-2010s/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200101123154/https://avc.com/20...

ksec 7y ago
May I ask why the Web Archive version is posted?
- adventured 7y ago
  AVC.com was apparently being hammered by an avalanche of traffic. Not long after the articles about the 2010s and 2020s were upvoted to the HN front page, the site was persistently returning database connection errors. So archive links were posted in both threads.

cortesoft 7y ago

I think one of the big tech developments (hinted at in the article but not called out) is on demand video streaming and what that has done to how we consume media. It has changed the type of things we watch.

toastking 7y ago
On demand music as well. It's ironically lead to a bit of a monoculture with music that's concerning. Streaming arguably caused the whole kerfuffle with this year's Billboard list: https://www.stereogum.com/2068655/billboard-top-rock-songs-imagine-dragons/news/ https://www.stereogum.com/2068655/billboard-top-rock-songs-i...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 7y ago
On demand video streaming has been with us since the 90's. The only thing that has changed is the scale at which it happens.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  On demand video streaming in the 90s was completely different. I was talking about the effect on our culture, and the shift that has occurred in the last decade has changed how we consume media in a way that did not happen with what we had in the 90s.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    All that happened is that media companies came to their senses and figured out that renting out the same content over and over again is more lucrative than selling it on physical media. It also was the one chance they had to put the piracy genie back in the box: a single SD card will now hold so much data that you could store all the music and movies you'd want to consume in a lifetime on one or two of them.

mmaunder 7y ago

"...the fact that the tech sector has such a powerful role means that it will be highly regulated by society." I think this reality will arrive hard and fast in the 2020's. The breadth and depth of regulation globally will depend on election outcomes. But it will happen either way. GDPR and CCPA are just a taste of what's to come. We'll see regulation in several key areas including: - Social media's goal of increased engagement vs mental health. - Cross border cybersecurity. - More jurisdictions adopting GDPR/CCPA-like privacy laws. - Cloud providers (consumer in particular) and vendor lock-in vs portability. Some is already happening, but expect to see a ramp up. Don't interpret this as me being pro/anti regulation. Just a reality that's coming IMO.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
OMG yes. I find it funny that there’re still so many CEOs that I speak to and they are constantly pushing the idea that tech should not be regulated. Even if you’re right, there’s probably not a single politician out there who wouldn’t use that as a way to build their career on.

brlewis 7y ago

> subscriptions better align the interests of the users and the developers of mobile and web applications and avoid many of the negative aspects of the free/ad supported business model The most significant negative aspect that subscriptions avoid is ephemeral spambot accounts. If a user account costs money, there's way more disincentive for behavior that will get that account banned.

iamaelephant 7y ago

I very strongly disagree with #3. Machine learning has not yet proved its value outside of a handful of key areas (image recognition, voice recognition/synthesizing, etc). I think it's entirely possible we'll look back on today as a kind of machine learning mania. I certainly believe there is plenty of room to build sustainable businesses without a machine learning asset (and the associated data collection), and it's in no way "table stakes for every tech company, large and small".

chubot 7y ago
Yup, I came here to question that as well. What are some examples of companies that hinged on machine learning? DATA is crucial, but that's very different than "sophistiated machine learning models". For example, do Uber and Lyft need machine learning? As far as I can tell, they need data about drivers, users, ride completion, maps, and a lot of people doing simple statistics on that data and improving the product. Machine learning might give them a few percentage points in some specific subsystem, but it isn't going to make or break the product as a whole. It's not "table stakes". Pick another industry and do the same thought experiment. What are some other breakout companies? Did snapchat succeed (in its day) because of machine learning? What about AirBNB? I think they are optimizing the product with "data science", not machine learning. Certainly not deep learning. Machine learning finally came of age in the 2010s and is now table stakes for every tech company, large and small. Accumulating a data asset around your product and service and using sophisticated machine learning models to personalize and improve your product is not a nice to have.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  You would be astonished at some of the non-public (not that they are secret) machine learning things that Uber does that you wouldn't even be aware of. My favorite is that they do pothole detection, prediction and routing around based on what they classified based on driver accelerometer data. They've also reduced traffic incidents with insights from the same dataset that drove product changes.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

medymed 7y ago

In medicine, the 2010s may be remember as a period of explosive growth of engineered therapeutics. This is driven primarily by better understanding of diseases (and their molecular targets) and also by an expanding reach of bio-engineering platforms. Monoclonal antibody approvals especially have accelerated briskly for inflammatory conditions (there are 13 or more for the skin condition psoriasis alone) and perhaps more famously redefined many cancer treatment regimens with checkpoint inhibitors. Chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T cells) are (very) expensive ex vivo gene-edited cell-based treatments, and other platforms for gene editing with are nearing or entering trials. This trend does not appear to be decelerating or plateauing.

Lerc 7y ago

>the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view. There is a lot of industry built around supplying the half a trillion a year military. They are well practiced in resisting reductions in funding. If the US becomes isolationist does that military might get turned inward. Which option do you think is more likely a) Stop buying so many toys b) Overflow our sandpit into the rest of the yard c) Play with our toys in other peoples' sandpits Isolationism requires cutting out c as an option.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Looks like you commented on the wrong article. You're quoting the 2020s piece.

hateful 7y ago

I was just thinking about the whole "what happened in the last decade". While the 90s ended with the rise of the web, and the 00s saw the rise of what we can do with the web, the 10s felt like an experiment of what NOT to do with the web.

williamDafoe 7y ago

Very few new capabilities for mankind were discovered in the last 10Y mainly CRISPR and CAR-T therapy and two level neural networks (Google translate, alphago). Lithium-Ion batteries got 50% stronger and 6x cheaper (see photo in https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72ct5hNM7 https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72c...). Most scientists focused on confirming what was already there (gravity waves, higgs boson, water on moon, water on Mars, etc ). Carbon fiber increased passenger air travel efficiency and became commonplace in bicycle frame design. The 2010s were not a creative decade ...

CM30 7y ago

May as well give some thoughts on this: > 1/ The emergence of the big four web/mobile monopolies; Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook I'm not sure you could class Apple alongside some of the others for monopoly power either. They're still less popular than Microsoft for desktop operating systems, Google for mobile ones and virtually every other major service in their other areas of business. Apple is a very profitable business, but they're arguably more of a luxury goods maker than a monopoly right now, especially outside of tech circles. > 2/ The massive experiment in using capital as a moat to build startups into sustainable businesses has now played out and we can call it a failure for the most part. This is an interesting point, and I definitely wonder how it'll affect the tech industry in future. > 4/ Subscriptions became the second scaled business model for web and mobile businesses, following advertising which emerged at scale in the previous decade. Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films, TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't done nearly as well as expected. For instance, subscriptions still haven't worked in the media industry for news/journalism, as much as certain publications are hoping they would. They also haven't done too hot in the games industry either, if Google Stadia's performance is to be believed. Jury's still out for YouTube/Twitch creators too, with Patreon type services being the de facto monetisation method right now. Free with ads has usually beat out subscriptions when in competition with it. > 7/ Technology inserted itself right in the middle of society this decade. It sure did, though it's more like people took notice this decade, since the political tides went one way rather than the other. > And the stagnation of earning power in the lower and middle class is absolutely the result of technology automation, a trend that will only accelerate in coming years. It's effects on politics will accelerate too, as shown by this decade's move towards more extreme political parties and policies worldwide. This might not end well, especially with environmental issues caused by global warming/climate change at the same time.

RestlessMind 7y ago
> Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films, TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't done nearly as well as expected. A pattern I identified was that subscriptions work really well when property rights are strong and enforced strongly (TV shows, movies, music, books etc). It doesn't really work well when property rights can be bypassed easily or have a convenient alternative (you want to read NYT story without a subscription? read that story on some other outlet).

purplezooey 7y ago

It's sad, the point about the bay area. We could have done a lot more but nobody wants to make any sacrifices. I hope in the next decade the state will take a larger role and force local communities to drastically increase housing, density, and transit rights of way.

twblalock 7y ago
I've lived in the Bay Area for most of my life and I have zero confidence the situation will improve. It would have happened by now if it was going to. The transit situation in particular will not improve because people prefer cars. People have little experience with public transit, and the experience they do have was bad, so they don't see themselves using it on a regular basis. They want to live in suburbs and drive cars, and they will try very hard to prevent anyone from increasing the density of housing or transit anywhere near their houses. Those people vote, so a state government that tries to push for more public transit and housing density would not do well in the next election.
briandear 7y ago
Houston doesn’t have a housing problem, nor particularly good transit. It also doesn’t have zoning and a local government that pulverized developers by charging them fees for things already paid for by property taxes like building schools or forcing them to have “low income” units which end up making housing more expensive. Texas also doesn’t have rent control, nor excessively reactionary building height restrictions, nor does Texas have Prop 13 incentives that reduce housing market liquidity. “Transit” and “Density” isn’t the problem in the Bay Area — it’s that it’s excessively punitive to attempt to build anything there. If you were to be able to afford available land, cities such as Mountain View want to milk developers to pay for things that the city should be paying for themselves out of normal tax revenue. I remember when Steve Jobs wanted to build Apple Park and some fool on city council wanted Apple to provide WiFi for the city for free: Jobs said that it isn’t Apple’s job to provide city services — Apple pays their property taxes, if Cupertino wanted free WiFi, then Cupertino should do it. There are also cases where if a developer wanted to build some houses; they’d also have to give the city a free park and dedicate a certain number of houses for “low income.” That isn’t a developer’s problem. If the city wants low income housing, the city should use some of its own land and budget to build it. You don’t have that sort of extortion happening in places like Houston — and coincidentally, you don’t have affordability problems in Houston either. A developer also is shy about investing hundreds of millions into a project only to get it derailed by NIMBYs or other activists or worse, be a single election away from having severe rent control or confiscatory tax policies enacted that would destroy any hope of a profit from the substantial risk of property development. I don’t disagree with allowing high density where it is appropriate, but density isn’t the issue, it’s the extreme high costs, both political and monetary of doing business in the region. There is plenty of land, but given than almost every empty cow pasture ends up getting claimed as “open space,” makes it really hard to build anything. Case in point: the “preservation” of North Coyote Valley. I appreciate open space, however, they literally preserved 900 acres of flat farmland to be used for hiking despite the region being chock full of thousands of acres of open space already. You can’t claim a housing shortage while simultaneously taking away 900 prime acres that would be perfect for housing developments. Clearly there isn’t a housing problem when so much easily buildable land can be sequestered away so vegan hipsters can have yet another thousand acres to roam with their rescue dogs. The Bay Area has no shortage of open space, yet they keep adding more to it while people literally sleep in RVs in El Camino and a young family has no hope of ever owning a house in the area.

ksec 7y ago

I am surprised with no mention of Smartphone. Which is arguably the most important innovation in modern history. 2010s, Smartphone ( iPhone 3GS at the time ) went from niche to 4B users ( iOS, Androids and KaiOS ), that is nearly every person on earth above age 14 in developed countries. I dont think there has ever been a product or technology innovation as important that spread faster than Smartphone. And it changes everyone's life. The post mentioned of Google, Facebook and Amazon empire, all partly grows to this point because of Smartphones. Technology companies together now worth close to 10 Trillions. The whole manufacturing supply chain exists and became huge in Shenzhen because of Smartphone. It was the reason why TSMC managed to catch up to Intel in both capacity and leading edge node. It was the reason why we went from 3G to 5G in mere 10 years because of all the investment kept pouring it. It was the reason why everyone went on to the Internet and had Internet economy. It brought a handheld PC and Internet to a much wider audience. I would even argue it was the Smartphone innovation that saved us from the post 2008 Financial Crisis doom as it created so much wealth, innovation and opportunities. And the 2nd most important thing not mentioned in the article. ( May be it is not important to others... ) We lost the man who bought us the Smartphone era; Steve Jobs.

whyineedaccount 7y ago

In my opinion, machine learning is going to replace all of us, now or in the future. We don't know but it will eventually happen, not in this decade...