Some folks in front of me had a mifi hotspot light on fire at the airport while in line to board. I saw the smoke and thought they were trying to get one last vape in, and told them it was bold of them. They said they didn't vape, after which I said their backpack was smoking. Gate lady made them throw it in the (blastproof, I guess) trash can. They eventually got to board but had to toss the backpack.
That said they got to keep the contents. They sat across from us where we got to breathe in residual lithium smoke the whole flight, and allegiant still wanted to charge us for water.
The behavior of ultra low cost airlines is often inexcusable, but understandable, and why I don't fly them. Their employees are usually not allowed to make "good reason" exceptions because exceptions are nebulous and passengers may argue why the next time isn't a "good reason" and airlines want that money. It's like a flying cruise ship; the fare gets you a chair and nothing else because the everything else is where the profit comes from.
(This business model is why we are seeing a rise in junk fees and "surcharges". Airlines and cable companies and hotels got away with it for so long with no major pushback that everyone else feels emboldened in light of this economic slowdown.)
I watched someone pretend to fall asleep after getting their bottle of water. Then pretended to be asleep until they landed. They got off the plan with a free bottle of water.
I can compare it in a way when Rage Against the Machine signed with a major label conscious that the tradeoff was worth it.
>"Evil Empire" entered the Billboard charts at No. 1, which reflects the broad audience the band has built. "I personally never thought that we'd ever sell a single record," Morello recalls, but it looks as if signing with Epic has worked. "True, we are a major-label band," he concedes. "But we're using the mechanism of the record label to spread revolutionary propaganda." [1]
... one which they also made a nice little profit of. $150M in the non-voting stock they bought in 1997 turned into $550M in 2003 when they sold most of it.
On the face of it that sounds like a burn on Microsoft, wisely found by studying the finances, but... by the nature of Apple being the best performing stock in the world for multiple years isn't the same true for most companies, that they could've made more money investing in Apple than in themselves?
Heck, maybe investing hundreds of millions in Apple today would, in X years, be worth more money than spending marketing money / development budgets for new features for their own products; or worth more than investing in OpenAI and related products - but it's not exactly something anyone would suggest Microsoft should do (in terms of just becoming a shareholder, of course there could be collaborations without changing this point).
Technically yes, but not really. It’s specifically valid to observe with regards to Microsoft because Microsoft did in actual fact hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Apple stock for a decent stretch of time. Most companies did not.
Microsoft chose to sell their Apple stock in 2003. This was entirely their choice. They didn't have to. They could have sold it in 2005 and made an additional billion dollars. They could have sold it in 2007 and made another ten billion dollars. They could have sold it today and made a hundred billion dollars.
Microsoft never gave them any lifeline. Microsoft was caught shipping stolen Apple Quicktime code and quietly settled with Apple to the tune of $150mil and shipping Apple versions of Office/IE.
"the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
MS buying Apple stock involved a pretty complicated deal that also involved settling a number of court disputes between the two companies, Apple agreeing to ship Internet Explorer for Mac (rather than Netscape) and MS agreeing to ship Office for at least 5 more years.
At the time and subsequently it was absolutely seen as a lifeline.
For example:
> Providing the biggest sign of hope yet for ailing Apple Computer, Microsoft today announced it was forging a new era of cooperation with its longtime rival that includes an investment of $150 million. [snip] News of the alliance sent Apple's stock up $7 a share, or 35 percent
Yes and/but there was real concern then that they'd stop supporting it which would have killed Mac use in corporate environments where specific version of office compatibility was a huge issue (As anyone who remembers the Office 2.0 vs Office 6 update on Windows will remember).
Unclear why people are disagreeing with this. It's outlined in the DoJ "finding of fact":
> Recognizing the importance of Mac Office to Apple's survival, Microsoft threatened to cancel the product unless Apple compromised on a number of outstanding issues between the companies. One of these issues was the extent to which Apple distributed and promoted Internet Explorer, as opposed to Navigator, with the Mac OS.
> At the end of June 1997, the Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office, Ben Waldman, sent a message to Gates and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Maffei. The message reflected Waldman's understanding that Microsoft was threatening to cancel Mac Office:
> The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously
[snip]
> Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . . ."
Ah it was Word 2.0 vs Word 6.0 (which was roughly Office 3.0 vs Office 4.0)
Word 2.0 shipped on a lot of Windows NT computers with Office 3.0 and these were the days when there weren't forced updates and you had to pay so it hung around for ages.
When Microsoft invested a paltry $250M in Apple, Apple had already secured a line of credit of $4 Billion.
On top of that, Apple turned around a spent $100 million the same quarter to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. Apple lost way more than $150 million before they became profitable.
When your funds get low just open your hot and cold wallet apps and type in how much to transfer, wasabi takes care of the rest.
It's easier than merely logging into my bank. Or paypal (which unintentionally locked me out for over a year after a broken tos update that I couldn't accept).
People have had hot and cold wallets forever, they just call them wallets and banks. It is the same workflow, except without:
Driving, operating hours, showing ID (oops my (hot) wallet got stolen/left at home. Now I can't withdraw from my bank until that's sorted.), the horrible password requirements, barely usable websites, and spyware apps that may or may not work on rooted/libre operating systems.
It's the legacy banking system that is fundamentally broken.
Yet many merchants are the victims of chargeback fraud, and many others have had funds frozen with no recourse. A paypal glitch left me unable to access my funds despite spending far too much time and energy trying to resolve it.
How many employees does trust wallet have? How funded are they? I am completely unsurprised that this happened to web3 trash. This is more of an indictment of the vc funded 'move fast and break things' attitude that pervades this site and 'web3' than it is of the greater cryptocurrency community.
> The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure.
Seriously though, the purpose of those regulations is to prevent upstarts from making simple, cheap, reliable vehicles and to protect the incumbents. Gotta have a big bank account and a lot of lawyers to redesign and crash test a handful of vehicles every few years.
Modern hybrids still don't match (or barely match) the gas mileage of old, small, lightweight cars despite being substantially more complex, less recyclable, less repairable, and using substantially more (and more exotic) materials in production.
Ouroboros regulations only exist to justify their own continued existence. Cars get bigger? More regulations on smaller (less safe) cars, making cars bigger. Rinse and repeat.
That is a big win for the much larger, safer, and more luxurious 2021 Civic. The 1980 one was tiny and not something you wanted to be in in a crash.
Also, the EPA ratings have changed between now and then getting stricter and closer to actual mileage. That 1980 vehicle would get much lower mileage ratings now than it did then.
Politics, too.