nuggins

Oh hi Mark,

A few questions:

One common concern that has kept people from pledging is whether or not this phone will still be at the bleeding edge of technology in a year, when it is released. If this campaign is successful, how do we know other larger companies won't adopt these technologies in that time, and at a lower price-point (especially factoring in the potential earnings lost from tying up hundreds of dollars for a year)? Also, at what point before the release date will you nail down the product specifications?

One of the selling points of the Edge is that it will revolutionize mobile computing. A big advantage of mobile computing for many is that it can be done while commuting, where one would not have access to a docking station, or any sort of peripherals. Here, laptops and tablets are quite useful. In what situations would one see a significant benefit in using the Edge for computing?

Canada is notably absent from the list of regions in which you will "conduct interoperability testing" for the Edge. Especially because Canadian telecom is so notoriously monopolistic, do I need to worry about whether or not the Edge will work in Canada, especially if I'm not in a metropolitan region?

I think the majority of people who ruin their phone screens do so by dropping and cracking them rather than scratching them. Crystals tend not to be ductile - especially thin sheets. A sapphire screen may be more scratch-resistant than gorilla glass, but won't it fracture easily?

Price controls are generally a bad idea. The housing market doesn't produce the kind of failures where we need to resort to price controls, as opposed to a market like healthcare. Rather, housing market failures are mostly driven by bad policy, like underzoning and poor taxation schemes.

Housing is essential, like food and water, but whether or not a good is essential does not dictate how effectively a market can be used to allocate it. Using that very example, the food market is extremely competitive - customers have a ton of options for food, many of which are affordable. In a well-(de)regulated housing market, people would have a ton of options for where to live, since supply wouldn't be so severely hampered.

Housing costs are right where the market dictates they should be.

This is emphatically false - housing markets are affected by distortionary policies, like underzoning and taxation of property value rather than land value. These policies lead to rampant speculation and underutilization of high-value land, which then lead to a reduction in housing supply.