Report revenues, operating costs, margins, EBITDA, the usual suspects. Those are the numbers needed to assess the health of the company.

Number of subscribers is a nice anecdote, but it doesn't really matter. If the subscriber base materially suffers, it will show up in the revenues.

April 1 came and went. It's April 18 now.

Of course the VTOL development division can be a completely discrete entity from the commercial jet manufacturing side of the business. They may have no real overlap. They might have different cultures, with this R&D wing being much more healthy. They might be wildly capable of pulling this off.

What needs to be acknowledged - and repaired - is the perception that currently weighs down the company. "Just trust us" requires capital that they put in a big pile and set on fire.

The cheating husband is back at the door with a box of chocolates, a couple of tickets to Cancun, a big smile, and good intentions. But there is still work to be done before he gets to move back in.

I don't hold on to much. I'm not somebody who generally gets nostalgic. Well, that's not completely true... I'm over 50 so everything old is great and most things new are terrible... But "Llama" is one of those rare terms that I'm surprised to see come up as a product label. After all, I remember clearly when the Llama had it's ass whipped.

Yes, you could. If you decide that your criteria for having won doesn't factor in things like your own survival as an organization, or the safety of the folks around you, but only that your enemy is damaged, you could decide that you won. Case in point... Hamas. One can easily make the case that Hamas has won, even if they (as a discrete, identifiable group) cease to exist. They've torpedoed changes in the region that were in progress that were to Israel's benefit, the world's support for Israel has been severely compromised, and the forces of other nations with similar views are slowly being mobilized. No matter what happens, Hamas "won". The only outstanding issues don't change that... they just help shape the events of the next year or two.

Maybe we can eliminate pilot (or even soldier) risk altogether, and move conventional war strictly into the economic realm. Whomever has more of the best toys to smash together wins. Of course that means that if a country is at a disadvantage it's in their best interests to move the fight into the unconventional sphere... attacks on civilians through all sorts of unpalatable methods... the aggressive pursuit of nuclear parity/superority/relevance... bioweapons... terrorism.. The Geneva conventions and other norms all boil down to "be civil and fight fair". As the technology gap grows, fewer and fewer opponents will choose to do either of those things.

So, whatever else you may intend with this move, all you're really doing is ensuring that all questionable communications are relocated to another device. This will prevent exactly no malfeasance. It won't stop insider training. In fact, you're closing off the only real possible enforcement available to you - catching people misusing the devices in front of them.

What is the end game?

And it was around several thousand years before that. Religion might want to claim it, but marriage for political reasons like maintaining power and alliances is older than Christianity, and well described before its precursors.

You might be using the word "construct" incorrectly. Better to say that religion is a proponent of marriage, or that it incorporates it.

Why is Google's monopoly a thing we should use to judge Apple? What's important is whether or not Apple has a monopoly. And not only is iOS not the world's largest platform, Samsung recently passed Apple as the world's largest provider of devices.

We should not be mandating equivalence. That's not necessary for things to compete. As a matter of fact, market differentiators are where competition should happen.

It's covered a lot above, I'm sure. But sometimes people take the demand for originality a little far. If something is going to resonate with people, it has to have some portion of the human experience in it. That makes a screenplay an easy target for being called derivative. I once heard somebody describe the Lord of the Rings as a really complicated Fed-Ex quest. They weren't wrong.

Some people want the wider ecosystem, and for their phones to be treated essentially like desktop computers - the wild west, with endless possibilities. And that's fine. That's not what Apple is selling. Apple is selling a controlled environment - a massively capable device that is decidedly NOT a desktop wanna-be. The fact that the hardware could do it isn't actually relevant. Ferrari isn't selling dump trucks, even if their cars have four wheels and a trunk.

For the vast - VAST - majority of users, this means sweet bugger all. No impact. No benefit. Some minor contingent of nerds will care... but they mostly went android anyway. But this isn't about the users. Not really. There's no new capability being introduced here.

Now, for developers... that's more complicated. Will anybody experience the intended benefits? Maybe? I'm skeptical. I'll bet some that try will discover that the costs to implement this side-loading from their own infrastructure outweigh the sales. But that's just a swag.

But the second somebody comes calling for warranty support because a third-party app is misbehaving, I would expect the default to be for Apple to say "no", and to either start the per-hour charging meter running, or to insist on a factory reset before servicing it.

The last two movies I saw in the theatre were poor experiences for me, thanks to... people. People should understand that even if your ringer is off, a multitude of glowing small rectangles in the darkness is a problem. That an audible text notification is also in poor taste. That shutting the fuck up is good form.

Given that I will not ever again spend so much as one thin dime on comic book franchise movies, the modern theatre experience holds little value for me. My home setup is terrific, and the popcorn is better. Movies are worse. People are worse. Prices are nuts. I cannot think of a single reason why I would ever go to a theatre again.

Dark Matter is one proposed answer. Nobody's pretending it's a settled question. BUT... I appreciate your response, even if it's a tangent from the actual topic of distrusting people "because" they're actually educated on a subject. Thank you for a tactful, reasoned reply.

My apologies for the tone of my own response. Perhaps my growing distaste for almost all of the online community is a tad unreasonable.

Just keep prompting "TL;DR" until you're happy.

"Some are engineered to break in certain ways"

Highly doubtful. There are lots of angles to planned obsolescence... part availability... non-serviceable parts... driver discontinuance... O/S support retirement... even the discontinuation of consumables. But engineering consumer electronics products to actually break after a predetermined period - presumably after the warranty and not before - is hard. For fly-by-night chinese rebadge brands, the cost to engineer it would be more than the product is worth, and for name brands there's precious little up-side, and a bad down-side if proof ever came to light.

You can say they were shitty designs or crap materials, and that can be true. But it's not planned or engineered failure. There's a difference. Intent matters.