For a while now, researchers and psychologists have been noting the marked increase in loneliness and depression throughout the last few decades. While some have been quick to pin blame for this phenomenon on the increase in electronic communications and the decline of physical socialization, companies like eBay are helping to reverse that trend.
"Today, people look to sites like eBay and Amazon for their shopping needs," Jamie Iannone, newly appointed CEO of eBay announced in a press release. "The ease of buying and selling on these platforms is simply unparalleled and unprecedented. What we're seeing today in society is that everything has become very 'transactional'. People want an easy way to get what they want, and a seamless medium to do that. We see this in the job market,… — Read full post
If we told you that young people today are staring at their phones more than ever before, you probably wouldn't be surprised. Yet, it is particularly noteworthy as the number of incidents involving blindly and numbly staring at a phone continue to increase. In one extreme case quite recently, it even resulted in the death of a millennial! Eager to see how this was impacting the community, we scoped out to see if we could capture any other incidents caused by people staring at their phones.
Our reporter in Seminole County, FL, staked out in a county park to discreetly record passerby. Within ten minutes, he was able to record the entire incident of a teenager, numbly staring at his phone, accidentally walk into a tre… — Read full post
Ralph Devereaux, 39, of Berkeley, CA, has been confirmed dead by autopsy this morning. W. Hart, of Berkeley, CA, was there to witness the entire incident.
"To be upfront," Hart confided, "I don't feel sorry for the man. But, I did what I could to save him."
In an effort to recreate the incident, Hart gave us a play by play rundown of the last minutes of Devereaux's life.
Interview Transcript (10/10/2019):
HART: "I was waiting to call my friend at 1pm, so I was sitting on a bench next to a payphone downtown reading the newspaper, just minding my own business. And I really didn't notice that he was there, until he was - quite literally - on top of me. The dumb jerk just flat out walked into me sitting on the bench. At least, it was he that toppled… — Read full post
This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but it's still a bit interesting to actually see in an abstract what many top industry players have known for a long time: consumers love inconvenience — so much so, they are willing to pay more for it. A lot more.
How much more?
If you look at the entire technology landscape, you'll see an array of consumer products that are incredibly inconvenient, laughingly unreliable, and certainly guaranteed to fail. A common factor among all of them is that they are drastically overpriced in comparison with their more reliable siblings.
"Innovation in technology today basically consists of taking something good and making it worse," says Senator John Thune (R), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications… — Read full post