@Citizen Of Earth

I'm afraid to click on the link because of the inevitable follow-on spam.

But, I would bet you a sushi dinner that this would be appreciated in Japan, where engineering meets kinky.

This was not formally part of CES but was a promotion at a vegas strip club to pull in the curious. Very bizarre.

And I saw a TV segment on hot new gadgets from CES -- most of which I wouldn't even want even if I had the money to burn.
For example a snuggle pillow that simulates breathing. Just a bit too creepy for my taste.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/09/somnox-s-robotic-pillow-is-designed-...

@WoodsDweller

Rarely have I seen a major trade show get completely panned. Rarely have I heard of so many broken/failed demonstrations.

Yes, there is always a lot of dreck at trade shows. Yes, startups are often run by idiots. (Mrs. Arendt worked for one once whose business plan was to "get acquired" before the buyer figured out the tech sucked.)

I think, now that the main Internet money flows are locked in (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter) the big money is moving on to major scams like Uber and Bitcoin. Why? Becasue how much revenue can any of these idiot applications/robots generate over the lifetime of the product or the company? Not much compared to the instant short-term gains to be had by trading Bitcoin futures against the Ralph Kramden's who think buying and holding one or two Bitcoins is the road to riches.

This CES may be to high-tech gadgets what Silverado was to movie Westerns - an expensive flop that killed off a beaten-to-death genre.

The startup/VC business model doesn't produce a string of winners - it produces a stream of "stuff" a small fraction of which is good. A long time ago when I worked at a startup they told us that 70% fail completely (some because they never produced a product, most because the product was shit), 20% manage to develop tech that is of interest to major companies that buy them out (you get a little money for your options, maybe it's even worth your time), and 10% actually make it to IPO and you get to cash in your options for big bucks (hello villa in Costa Rica).
When the market is flying high it's easier to get VC money, and the IPOs are bigger. More ideas get funded, which means more bad ideas get funded.
This is a distinction between science and technology. Science is a conservative field where you create a robust barrier to entry for new ideas, and by the time a new idea is broadly shared it has been thoroughly vetted. Technology takes the other approach, try anything you can think of and let it sink or swim in the marketplace.
Go to a trade show to take selfies with the booth babes and collect T-shirts. Don't expect the future to be on display. It might be, somewhere, but you probably will miss it.

@Alligator Ed

The man may have been a marketing genius, but he was also a obsessive headcase.

Jobs discussed the walls he had in mind for the offices: “He knew exactly what timber he wanted, but not just ‘I like oak’ or ‘I like maple.’ He knew it had to be quarter-­cut. It had to be cut in the winter, ideally in January, to have the least amount of sap and sugar content. We were all sitting there, architects with gray hair, going, ‘Holy shit!’”...

Jobs had always insisted that most of the site be covered with trees; he even took the step of finding the perfect tree expert to create his corporate Arden. He loved the foliage at the Dish and found one of the arborists responsible. David Muffly, a cheerful, bearded fellow with a Lebowski-ish demeanor, was in a client’s backyard in Menlo Park when he got the call to come to Jobs’ office to talk trees. He was massively impressed with the Apple CEO’s taste and knowledge. “He had a better sense than most arborists,” Muffly says. “He could tell visually which trees looked like they had good structure.” Jobs was adamant that the new campus house indigenous flora, and in particular he wanted fruit trees from the orchards he remembered from growing up in Northern California...

Jobs hated air-conditioning and especially loathed fans. (He vigilantly tried to keep them out of his computers.) But he also didn’t want people opening windows, so he insisted on natural ventilation, a building that breathes just like the people who work inside it.

One More Thing: Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership

And it is being criticized like crazy:

As Apple Park inches toward completion, its critics are getting louder, and what began with aesthetic judgments of the digital renderings—the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic called the Ring a “retrograde cocoon”—has lately turned to social and cultural critiques. That the campus is a snobby isolated preserve, at odds with the trendy urbanist school of corporate headquarters. (Amazon, Twitter, and Airbnb are all part of a movement that hopes to integrate tech employees into cities as opposed to having them commute via fuel-gobbling cars or numbing Wi-Fi-equipped buses. ) That the layout of the Ring is too rigid, and that unlike ­Google’s planned Mountain View headquarters (which that company has described as having “lightweight blocklike structures, which can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas”), Apple Park is not prepared to adapt to potential changes in how, where, and why people work. That there is no childcare center. “It’s an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the future,” says Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley.

Not to mention that it cost $5 Billion to build.

Everything that neoliberalism touches turns to shit as they suck all the profits out by scrimping on the actual product. Silicon Valley is about to become the new Detroit.

Apple is now a foremost neoliberal kingdom. Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave.

Bravo.