What a wonderful article. I think that there are two sides to this coin: the nature of the debt and the nature of the repayment. Even the smallest and most well mannered debt is a problem if there is no path to repayment. And even large, nasty debt is ok as long as the people borrowing have done their homework and have a solid plan to repay. So this article did a great job of profiling the debt but it didn’t go into enough detail about the borrowers. If interest rates have been so low, and the borrowers have been somewhat lucid, even this large debt can be paid off without any crisis?
The 5S is getting iOS12, and according to people running the beta it runs better on iOS12 than 11.
The phone was released in September 2013.
How many Android devices from 2013 are getting Pie, and running well under it? I'm guessing it's about "none whatsoever": Google can't be arsed to support its own device for more than 3 years (the 2 years old Pixel is the oldest Google-branded device getting Pie), and other manufacturers are way worse.
What version of Android is it running? You probably mean the apps from the Play Store keep getting upgrades. I know for a fact that Samsung tablets from 2013 are not getting new Android updates — haven’t got them in a long time. I know this because I have one in my family. IIRC, the last time it was upgraded was back in 2015 (or maybe 2014, not sure).
This is cherry picking the most long-lasting supported iPhone and comparing it against the least supported Android phone. Google has guaranteed a minimum of 3 years support now.
Plenty of iPhones had only 3 years of support, and same with Android phones. At least do an apples to apples comparison (pun intended).
According to this, from the 3GS to the 5C, most had 4 years (or very close) of support. Two models approached 5 years (4y, 10m and 4y, 11m).
Everything from the 5S forward is still supported, and the 5S has 4 years and 11 months of support now.
If you failed math, you might include the iPhone X in your numbers and its 10 months of support would bring the average down. However, that's 10 months of support so far, it's not end-of-lifed yet.
The 5C is an outlier amongst the earlier models, but it makes sense. It was the same hardware as 5 but a different case, and released a year later. So the 1 less year of support is reasonable (if it were supported another year, the 5 would have been as well).
For grins:
The first 7 iPhone models had an average support period of 47 months.
If you include the next 7 models (all still supported) it brings the average down to just shy of 39 months.
If you consider that each of those 7 will get another 12 months of support from today, minimum: This time next year (excluding this year's models) they will have received almost 45 months of support, on average.
iOS 10 and 11 were definitely guilty of making older devices slower, but Apple effectively admitted that was a mistake since one of iOS 12's big selling points is that it improves performance for older devices. iOS 12 supports all the same devices as iOS 11, nothing was left behind.
People from my parents generation are ignorant about the body. My dad treated his body like a rented car and he died for it. I’m pretty sure that anybody with any level of biological education and sensibility will not be troubled too much by this problem.
I knew a girl from a bad part of la. She was Latino. One time she complained to me how the cops harass her friends when they walk around the neighborhood. I asked her what kind of clothes her friends wear, and she obviously replied that they wear saggy pants and black hoodies and so on. I said that if I were in their situation, I would dress in clothes that are impossible to get you mistaken for a drug dealer or a gang banger — simple jeans and a tucked in shirt with a collar. That would be my plan if I were in their situation and I wanted the cops to stop. She just scrunched her eyebrows and said that “we don’t have to change they way we dress!” Well you don’t have to go to college or start your own business or wear any clothes at all but unfortunately you are subject to the economy and the world and you can’t have a nice life and never do anything at all to deliberately secure that end. Sorry.
At 16, she could have chosen to do a million things that would have messed up her life. Kids can choose to hurt themselves in many ways. We can’t “not allow” kids to do jumps on their dirt bikes or venture into danger in other ways. Once they are given freedom from constant adult supervision, they have to act in self interest. You think that being 16 somehow absolves them from the responsibility of surviving. That’s ridiculous and unnatural.
No, we should precisely look to let kids "down easy" from their errors, rather than ban activities that can lead to those errors, for the very same ends that you're advocating. When too many possible mistakes have big irreversible penalties, everyone becomes much more risk averse, and the society becomes boring and rigid. See: helicopter parenting.
Helicopter parenting basically augments the kids decision making. The parent guides them through everything. When the consequences are real, even permanent sometimes, and the it’s up to the kids to do the right thing, and they know it, and they’ve been educated properly on it, then you get a person who is healthy. They develop risk assessment and management and use it in their adult life where, surprise, you have to make essentially life or death decisions every day. You can rack up 30k on your credit card in a single swipe and, for a lot of people, that would be a kind of death. Almost every decision we make has irreversible consequences. The earlier kids learn to deal with that, the better. As long as they are educated and prepared in some way.
