Spooky23
What Microsoft introduced touch surfaces, they came out of the train wreck of Longhorn and they were under the belief that they could push windows down to phones. Reality was that they pushed touch surfaces in a barbell distribution… ultra high end and ultra low end. Mostly low end as screen costs were super high.
With Apple, look at the pencil and the iPad. They’ve had a lot of fits and starts, but the Apple Pencil didn’t fundamentally change the iPad, but it did open the door for a very high value use cases for things like procreate.
I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".
But as I’m sure you’re more intimately familiar with, decisions are made and priorities set and folks like you are presented with sometimes unreasonable expectations to perform, or not. The police dept in question is clearly in the latter category.
I spent decades in public service. When the administration was into transparency, average time to response was <4 weeks, some within hours. When I retired, we turned off the system that tracked the requests.
Something that many people don’t appreciate is that plumbing wasn’t necessarily universal.
People with disposable income in NYC and other places would just go to a Chinese laundry. Folks without alot of money were in a variety of living arrangements that weren’t standardized in the same way things are today. It was very common into the 1970s for rural homes in upstate NY where I spent half my childhood to have outhouses and manual pumps.
As a 90s kid, the Dodge Omni was a common shitbox student car. I think they had like 8 key patterns lol.
My brother’s ignition key unlocked my friends’s trunk. There were a few people who could start other peoples cars. In one case, a soccer player “stole” a football players unlocked car as they looked identical and were parked near each other. In another as a prank we unlocked cars to roll them out of parking spots and physically lift them into unusual places.
The big money valley bros figured it out just before they embraced regressive conservatism for their politics. There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
Think of it as a tool to understand and explore risk. I’ve found all of these tools more useful as a I get older and the day I need to use the cash is closer.
Usually critics of these estimates say stuff like “the simulation includes scenarios like the Great Depression”.
They give you a range of results that illustrate things like sequence of return risk, which most people have difficulty understanding and incorporating into plans. Many people have an underlying “stonks go up” assumption that may not serve them well.
It’s not necessarily a statement about AI, it’s just finance and accounting.
One of the changes USPS made in recent years is that they are securing mail forwarding. That type of arrangement may not be possible.
My late wife was treated for metastatic melanoma at MSK. Their approach is to have clinical teams and a tumor board that are assigned patients with related cancers. They are seeing many patients and there’s a warm hand off between specialists. Your radiation oncologist, medical oncologist and surgery / neuro specialists are on a team and know each other and are often familiar with the cases. In my wife’s case the community oncologist was wonderful, but he was a sole practitioner for this particular cancer.
In the second opinion scenario, they get to use that experience and caseload to look at a case with some perspective. Your community oncologist likely works on a small team and may not have the luxury of time and exposure to trials, etc.
Think of it as a second set of eyes.
Even airport stores are at least half that crap in many cases.
CEO guy was in Mexico or something and lost his mind, and went on a 10 minute tantrum with the principal of the group the owned the company, who happened to be in my office eating brisket. It was a good laugh.
If you worked for a state government or defense contractor, you’d still be in the union.
That’s not an insult or a dig.
Because we don’t have universal healthcare, we have this weird scenario where long-term care is provided by Medicare for 90 days, tops, add further care requires that you private pay and then transition to Medicaid when your assets are depleted. Everyone’s costs go up, how’s the nursing homes have to continue, have to accept the lower Medicaid reimbursement.
On the other side of the equation, many people find themselves in a situation where they’re stuck in a house that’s too big, but they’re afraid of the capital gains tax they may owe.
I’m of the age where I’ve lost my parents, and most of my friends have parents who are struggling with health issues, and the other things that come with aging. I live in an urban neighborhood that has a lot of people aging in place… I find it tragic and sad because a lot of these folks find themselves in not great circumstances. because they feel forced to hang onto a property that they can’t maintain and is depreciating around them.
My experience is that European restaurants are cheaper and better. Especially in 2026 with the Trump inflation hellscape. Everything from McDonalds to local high end restaurants.
Certain commodities are even more shocking. You’ll get the best loaf of bread that you ever had. in France, Spain, or Italy for two euro. In most American cities, unless there happens to be a functional local bakery, you’re looking at a seven dollar defrosted loaf of bread at a supermarket that tastes like cardboard.
The problem with this form of taxation is that it slows down consumption and impacts poor and middle class people more.
What’s happening is income inequality manifesting on the market. The middle and upper middle of the market is seeing accelerated appreciation as incomes rise for the upper quartile. Some places see >10% annualized appreciation over the last 20 years.
The lower part of the market is very different, and are basically depreciating away. Property taxes are the most fair tax for the most part — you basically pay a prorated share of the levy based on the market value of your home. So if the poorer property is getting less valuable proportionally, your share of the tax pie increases. Some states share Medicaid expenses at the county level so there’s demand pressure for more tax levy.
The problem is old people generally cannot afford their homes, and are usually profoundly ignorant about everything except tax avoidance, even when tax avoidance hurts them. The tax knob is one that can be turned, which makes the problems worse. Senior exemptions, veterans exemptions, all increase the overall share for everyone else.
The new Republican platform is accelerating that — pushing property taxes to non-homestead property and driving up sales tax. In other words, it just a consumption tax, which pushes the tax burden to families and inflates retail costs, so grandma can sit in her big house and her kids get to inherit the place at the stepped up cost basis.
If they are in fact dropping it, that’s why. But… Apple often “finishes” the enterprise features with a point release.