Each port can accept or give power (at various voltages) potentially or act as data sink/source (determined on connection), or have alt modes.
Such device would be either quite "fun" to use, unless it had type C ports marked with dedicated functionality, so you'd have to be careful what device you plug to what port.
AFAIK there's no protocol to control other ports via PD from the port you'd connect to the "main" device (like your laptop). So the behavior would be all pretty random, or the ports would have to be fixed in function.
My completely unfounded on anything guess is that it might have to do with breaking the chain of "trust" between the different connectors on negotiating how much power an actual downstream device can handle.
Is it? I guess it's nice that I can charge my phone with my laptop charger, but it has the same issue as usb-c data where everything physically fits but are incompatible. eg. having to worry about whether a aftermarket charger provides enough voltage/current to charge your laptop.
Well, I tried, and I could charge my Thinkpad using a 5V/2A phone charger and an A->C cable. Very slowly of course, but it worked. If I was somewhere and I had forgotten my laptop charger, I could worry about whether a phone charger will work, but without USB-C, I could be sure that it won't work.
You can also charge your phone from your laptop and vice versa. Or one phone from other phone. Or just link two phones with a wired data connection with no power exchange.
There's a lot more flexibility than there was prior to USB-C.
Revolutionary? It's a hot mess. Some usb will charge my phone very slowly, maybe at 3w. Some will charge what I call 'medium', at around 15w, and some at 30w. And the charger that came with it is its own special usb-c thing that isn't standards compliant. I noticed that cord doesn't even attempt to charge my Stadia controller. Sure, they all do plugin and most do charge. But have fun guessing which ones charge at which speed.
Why do you think that case is relevant to this discussion? The only issue that has been resolved in that case so far is a question about standing. The actual anti-trust questions are still unresolved.
I don't need to be a lawyer to see that a case which determined that users can sue Apple because Apple is the direct seller, and in the dissent said developers would have an even better standing to sue Apple leads us to where we are. It's precedent.
Surely you remember the original iPhone announcement: being able to call people was only a very minor point in that presentation even then. I would bet money that the iPhone 12 announcement will not have anybody demonstrating the phone capabilities at all.
You should go back and rewatch that original iPhone announcement. Phone calls were a major highlight. They did a live, on-stage conference call between Jobs, Ive, and Schiller. Jobs phoned in the infamous thousand latte order to Starbucks. Features like Visual Voicemail were heavily promoted.
I brought it up precisely for that phone call. You must remember what prompted it, right? Jobs didn’t go into his phone book and dial the number–he looked it up from maps. And that is precisely how people use iPhone today: they do a bunch of other things and also call sometimes. To be honest, I take more phone calls from my Mac than my iPhone.
Well, yeah. The presentation showed emergent new ways to place calls. Not sure how this contradicts the original point that iPhone was an evolution of the cell phone.
Just look at the chart on page 20 of this Fed paper (the Fed was created on 1913, the fiat dollar became the global reserve currency in the 70s after years of debasement to pay for the cold war, vietnam, etc.)
Perhaps the better chart is on page 21 (Figure 16), where as compared to all the other countries surveyed the U.S. is at the far low end of housing price inflation. In fact, unless I'm missing something it comes in dead last among all 14 countries at the end of the sample period, 2012.
The US as a whole has low housing prices. But that is including all the homes in Nebraska and other places most HN readers don't want to live in. The home prices in the ~10 cities people on HN actually want to live in are much higher and not affordable for most people. And the good jobs are only in the expensive places, unless you're a doctor or something like that.
See section 4.3 Urban and rural prices move together. Urban prices may be unaffordable, but the data suggests they haven't inflated faster than rural. Perhaps urban/rural is too coarse a distinction to reflect the effects in major coastal cities, but the return to coastal cities didn't begin until the 1990s. Price inflation indeed accelerates in the 1990s in the U.S., but excepting Japan[1] it accelerates in all the other countries even faster; likewise for the 2000s.
[1] Presumably still reeling from its 1980s property crash.
See my reply to jeffreyrogers: WWII reconstruction can't explain the 1990s and 2000s, which are far removed from that era, with the possible exception of German Reunification. The trends are consistent and robust across various periods.
Perhaps the other countries are more supply constrained than the U.S., especially post reconstruction. But that also refutes the insinuation that U.S. monetary policy is responsible for price inflation, and makes less credible the fears of some younger Americans that the bottom will fall out irreversibly the moment they make a home purchase.
OR...you could let nature run its curse and have those debts refinanced at real interest rates that reflected the actual production in the economy, or defaulted and have those assets and resources liberated, thus correcting the distortions which were product of the FED and the government in the first place.
Well, it all depends on what you think the purpose of an economic system is. Perhaps you'd just let the mortgage market blow up, if your only concern on this Earth was to know exactly what the market price of an asset was. But you'll have to explain to me how you think the distortions are the product of Federal Reserve and government policy, since I am not following whatever you're alluding to. The distortions I see are inherent and inevitable products of the economic system we currently have, not the product of any specific policy. In fact, these distortions seem to be the product of an absence of an adequate policy to alleviate them.
Because the US is the biggest debtor in the history of humanity and is supporting (in a symbiotic relationship) all those countries you listed who are also at risk of collapsing.
