I find a large part of depression is not being able to recognize the "sometimes" aspect of your second point. The author isn't pushing happy rainbows - "any time I was struggling, any time depression and anxiety overwhelmed me" -- it's about how difficult depression makes it to see a way through the shitty periods.
The entire premise of this argument is flawed. Cost of capital (or even of shipping) likely has nothing to do with the decision:
- the value of an extra 25 days of product development for one of the most successful consumer products in the world exceeds shipping costs by orders of magnitude
- $20M is completely negligible on $58B revenue. 0.03% or so. It would be insane to wait 25 days over that.
Another resource that has existed for a while is the "Integrated Public Use Microdata Series". Though I don't think they have an API, they do provide a vast amount of data and have tools for online analysis.
IPUMS is often used by the researchers (including myself) who would download the entire dataset and do regressions on it, which might be one reason why they haven’t bothered to create an API.
Though not necessarily their goal, a side of this story you don't mention is income via royalties. I have worked with multiple Bell labs alumnus who are financially very secure in part because of their work there.
As much as software patents irk common sense, the notion of IP protection really does seem reasonable here. There are people who do research for reasons beyond personal profit. They actually do deserve licensing fees.
> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding.
Cheating at solitaire? Of course you can go through the motions, but for the money (even public) education costs, that seems like quite a waste of opportunity.
Half a century later the change isn't from assembly to an actually useful level of abstraction. The bullshit-o-meter is damped further when half the document shows code examples that would be much more difficult in assembly.
