In all your life, have you ever gotten an email from someone in the middle of a trip saying that your pre-arranged hotel stay is cancelled, and you need to leave the room ASAP? That's not something anybody would ever expect to get legitimately.

Moreover, something like this would be *massively* disruptive to the person's vacation, possibly literally forcing them to live out of their cars, depending on when it happened and how busy the hotels were at the time. Even if you didn't ignore it, if your only option was to leave — especially if you had already paid for the room — you'd be more than just furious. You'd be filing a lawsuit against everyone involved.

No, it absolutely is on Marriott. Either the booking is prepaid, in which case you have paid for the room, and it isn't your fault that Sonder screwed you, or the booking is not prepaid, in which case you're paying Marriott, and it doesn't matter that Sonder screwed Marriott.

I am therefore assuming it is the former, which means you've pre-paid for the room, and you are legitimately entitled to service. Them breaking their contract with Sonder might excuse them for preventing future bookings, or even cancelling bookings beyond a certain date if they are not prepaid, and providing a way for the customer to pay directly, but it does NOT relieve them of responsibility for honoring any existing prepaid bookings, nor any active bookings that are already in progress.

In all likelihood, a judge would conclude that the people staying in the room are a party to an implied contract the moment they entered into the agreement with Sonder, and that Marriott is REQUIRED to honor those bookings under the principle of promissory estoppel. The liability for failing to meet those obligations would absolutely *DWARF* any possible savings from being able to rent the room to someone else. Think "million dollar pain and suffering claim" here. And because Sonder is not the one who kicked those people out of their hotel rooms, that liability falls on either the individual hotels, who would then sue the hotel chain to recover those losses, or directly on the hotel chain, whose only option would be to try to sue the defunct Sonder to recover the cost of those payouts.

Moreover, anyone who experienced this would not care in the slightest whether Sonder and Marriott had a falling out. They would only care that their vacation was ruined because a hotel room that *THEY PAID FOR* was suddenly yanked out from under them, kicking them out into the street. So those people will never trust a Marriott hotel again as long as they live, and they will tell all of their friends not to trust Marriott. This level of breach of trust is how companies die.

What Marriott did is so far from okay, whether you mean ethically, morally, or legally, that IMO, heads should roll at the C-suite level within the next week over it.

Why? Those companies get a discount for bookings. They pass those savings on in different ways. Some use reward points. Others give a discount up front. Why would you deliberately pay more for a hotel booking than you have to?

Like I said, Marriott had an implied contract with you, the person staying in the room, and that became binding on them when you checked into the hotel at the absolute latest, if not the moment you paid for the stay or any portion thereof. What they did is not only unethical, but also blatantly illegal, and whatever executives authorized or were in any way aware of the termination of the contract in this way should be fired for it, if not outright jailed.

It's sad that people think that such flagrant abuse of individuals by giant corporations is okay. It isn't. It is illegal, it is immoral, it is unethical, and it cannot be tolerated in a decent society.

My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.

• Modern sheet music is usually printed on 9" x 12" paper. This is the equivalent of a 15-inch iPad, if Apple actually made such a thing.
• The largest iPad Pro, at 13 inches, is about the size of an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, give or take. That means in many cases, it is only 92% as big as the original, which makes it noticeably more difficult to read music than at full size.
• The largest non-pro iPad, at 11 inches, is only 82% as big as a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper in its smallest dimension, or 74% as big as the original. That's a *lot* smaller.

So even the largest iPad Pro is smaller than I'd like, and is a noticeable compromise, but any standard iPad would be considerably worse.

Also, half the music I play on organ is some poorly scanned public domain music off of IMSLP, and that stuff is hard enough to read even at full page size, even after laser eye surgery. The last thing I would want is a screen that makes things smaller than 8.5" x 11" paper. So from my perspective, anything smaller than the largest iPad Pro model really is a non-starter, and if Apple made a 15-inch tablet, that would be even better.

And I'm guessing you still did not spring for the iPad Pro.

If only they didn't keep sending away people who weren't gang members based on false accusations and thinly veiled racism.

The problem is that an iPad Pro is mostly only useful as a portable streaming device, but costs as much as a laptop ($1300). Meanwhile, you can get an Android tablet of similar size for under $200, which is about what one would reasonably expect to pay for a portable streaming device that is going to get mistreated by your kids and eventually broken.

The product just doesn't make sense at its price point.

More the point, when it came time to find a tablet for use on my electronic organ, the iPad Pro wasn't even a serious consideration. To use it for that would have been a minimum of $1300 for one, and would have likely meant wanting to have two side by side, for a whopping $2600, and trying to figure out a way to control them both simultaneously would have also been infeasible.

Instead, I bought an Android tablet for $450 that is big enough to show two pages at once, controlled by BTLE buttons in the piston bar and USB foot switches mounted for easy knee control. The extent to which Android works better than iPad for that purpose was jaw-dropping.

And if and when I decide that I need a more portable tablet for reading sheet music and my choice is between a $1300 iPad Pro and a $199 13-inch Android tablet from Walmart, you can safely assume I will buy the latter as well. Why? Because it's a single-purpose device, and an iPad provides no obvious second purpose that isn't already fulfilled WAY better by my laptop. I can run 100% of the software that I need to run on my laptop. I can run 5% of the software that I need to run on an iPad.

The iPad Pro, as currently designed, is a waste of money for most users, and cannot fill any large enough niche for a majority of users to justify its price point, with the possible exception of people who use a computer only for browsing the web. And truthfully, most of them don't want to pay the price of a good laptop for something that's only a half-a**ed toy by comparison, but at least they *could*.

Yeah, Apple missed the mark. Very badly. And we've been saying it for more than a decade.

At this point, it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that they should have made limited use of all Mac apps possible on iPadOS, and also made it easy to write apps that mix UIKit and AppKit views arbitrarily, so that Mac apps can be converted to UIKit a piece at a time, adding gesture-based controls and floating button palettes and other approaches for making the app usable on iPadOS without a mouse, while still using the rendering code for their complex views and stuff, rather than forcing app developers to completely rewrite their user interfaces from scratch for iOS.

And at this point, it should be obvious to anyone with the slightest clue that not having support for 100% of Mac apps makes iPad Pro unusable as a laptop replacement for a majority of users. The folks who could switch mostly already have, but the problem is that the vast majority of users have a few apps that they run that don't work on iOS, and they are *different* apps, so you can't even point at a few dozen or even a few hundred apps and apply pressure on them to convert their apps and make major headway.

Open up iPad Pro or delete one digit from the price point. Those are the only two options that would make it a real contender in the market, IMO.

We do look elsewhere. There's just not anything else on the market that has any real potential, either.

iPad could have been the laptop killer. Instead, the iPad peaked back in 2013, and sales have been pretty steadily declining since then. The problem is in part that the only thing they are really good at is media consumption, and once people buy one, they don't ever need to replace it, because the new ones aren't meaningfully better for that purpose.

And when they do replace them, they often end up buying some cheap Android tablet to replace them, because the iPad isn't meaningfully better for that purpose than Android tablets costing a fraction as much.

Profitable? This could be expensive for Apple. Apple has given iPhone a sock. iPhone is FREEEEEEEEEEE!

Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.

Certainly true for highways, yes. There's also next to no good alternative to individual cars for highway driving, though. Amtrak is very, very limited, Greyhound is slow *and* very limited, airplanes are grossly fuel inefficient and are generally limited to relatively long distances, and that's about it.

Not sure why you think people would drive fewer miles. Most people in cars are trying to get to a specific place, not driving just to drive. Would people plan shorter trips? Maybe for some small percentage of leisure driving, but leisure driving is already a small percentage of driving, so that's a small reduction in fuel use for a small percentage of a small percentage of trips. That's hardly worth the negative impact on everything else.

That's not how stock grants work. That trillion dollars doesn't come from Tesla. It comes from the stock market through share dilution. The company can absolutely still be profitable no matter how much equity it chooses to give out.

Contemporary home-school does not look like it did decades ago.

We home-school and from what I can tell from the homeschooling community is that like us most of the kids participate in one or more co-ops that where groups of parents collaborate to deliver a course that are more hands on like science and music. Local YMCAs, gyms etc, offer classes during the day like Home School PE.

So homeschoolers get quite a lot of repeated and consistent interactions with other children. How 'diverse' those others are probably varies a lot by the size and makeup of where you live.

Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.

I would argue that having newer houses in your neighborhood is a sign that your neighbors probably aren't crackheads, so it should make your house look more attractive by comparison. The only time that might not be true is when the nicer house is also for sale at the same time yours is.

Also, those "mega-mansions" (which, based on having known a bunch of people who use phrases like that, are probably what we used to call a starter home back where I grew up) mean higher property taxes, which means better schools, which also increase the value of your property.