As best I can tell, although I can't say why, the answer to this is apparently "Nothing".

The earthquake warning is basically Google just trying to be nice to Android customers. Everyone else can, well, die. Google researchers figured out that the phones that use Android have tiny accelerometers in the phone that detect the earth's motion and can do the job better than traditional detection devices. They are also giving Google the opportunity to warn people who may not be near a detection device or set up to get warnings from such detection devices. So they set up a warning system and it worked extremely well. 1276 alerts were accurate and 3 were false. The problem was that the Turkey and Syria earthquake was of a magnitude that Google never expected, so it didn't handle it well. They have since tweaked the algorithm and it's believed that if something similar happened again, it would work.

I wasn't able to find if Turkey even has a warning system at all. They may not.

Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank, thought it was a great idea and invested about $300 million in it 7 years ago. At some point he sold his shares back and left, but I'm sure they were sold at a big loss. Most of Son's VC investments have been terrible and a lot are stunning in that exactly as you post, it makes you wonder why anybody would invest in that kind of company. A very small number of his investments were massively successful, probably just by random luck. A few are OK enough. Most are terrible and wastes of money. He seems kind of smart and Softbank is a well run company overall, but I came to the conclusion that he has no idea what will and won't work so he is just randomly throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks, to use an American expression. I don't think there's any real plan to his investments, but from what I've read he does actually say no at times to investing in some companies. I can't imagine what made him think this idea was going to work with a business that could only possibly be profitable in very large towns.

I have a good friend I'm still in touch with from high school who lives with his family on Long Island, New York. This is in the New York City metro area. So he and his wife bought a house approximately 30 years ago and he was at the time bragging to me about how he didn't have air conditioning in it at all because it was "too expensive to pay for when you only need it for one week a year". He did eventually cave in and they have some type of air conditioning now.

Very short version here. Leo Apotheker was the CEO of HP at the time of the deal. He pushed hard, really hard, for this deal. He either via intimidation or orders or both made it clear that any attempt from within HP to stop this deal or look more closely at it would result in termination. The HP board did approve this deal. Apotheker was a sort of desperation CEO at HP, having almost a year ago replaced a guy who left over some ethics stuff about expenses. HP's stock plummeted during Apotheker's time as CEO and he was replaced about a month after the deal. Yes, there were huge warning signs at the time about Autonomy. Months before the deal went through, some investment analyst wrote a paper that basically said "Autonomy is cooking the books. Their revenues reports have to be made up because...." The same guy also wrote a report on Chinese coffee company Luckin Coffee and a few months after that report said that Luckin had to be making up their numbers, it came out that they were indeed making up their numbers. Luckin is now delisted from major US stock markets and trades as a risky over the counter (OTC) stock. After Apotheker left HP, HP employees were able to examine the purchase and the Autonomy books and discovered that their revenue reports were fraudulent. My guess is that Apotheker was desperate to get Autonomy as he viewed it as his last chance to save his job.

For those who don't know, at one point there were 6 major airlines in the USA that covered the US from coast to coast. There are only 3 now. Here's who gobbled up who:
Delta bought Northwest Airlines
United bought Continental Airlines
American bought US Airways
Southwest Airlines is a really big small airline because it only cover major US cities.

Of the above, by the time of the various mergers, US Airways was easily the most consumer hostile major US airline. Many of their fares didn't earn miles at all, as I found out to my horror when I booked a flight on them intended to earn miles with a partner airline on the flight. Their whole attitude was basically you can over pay for your ticket if you want miles or you can get nothing. They had a branded credit card and it was horrible, offering the lowest miles accrual rates in the industry. So it made perfect sense that American would buy them as American was easily the 2nd most customer hostile airline in the USA. I can tell you that American does not value their customers at all and if they have a way to squeeze more money out of a customer and make that customer's experience worse, they will do it. United has at times been some incompetent in dealing with customers although I think they do care about them. Delta did value their customers until recently. Now their CEO, much to my surprise, seems to be fully committed to screwing all of them over.

Delta's biggest problem in my opinion was that for many years they made it too easy to earn special status. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every Delta flight has at least half the passengers with some kind of special Delta status. Even I have a special status with Delta, although it is rock bottom dead last of all statuses, through a branded credit card. I read the other day that Delta is testing a new type of screw the customers business class ticket where the default business class ticket won't give you anything unless you want to pay for it. No assigned seating. No checked baggage. Are there really customers who want to pay thousands of dollars for a ticket without assigned seating and no checked bags? Delta seems to think so. Or they simply now want all business customers to pay extra for those. And this demand pricing for sure means that you as a Delta customer will always get the worst price they think they can make you pay if you want to fly with them. I fly United sometimes and in this race to the bottom where Delta and America seem determined to see who can piss off the most customers, I guess going forward I'll just start using United more if they end up staying out of this.

I can tell you from personal experience that this is entirely correct. My last job was working for a Fortune 500 company with offices scattered all over the USA and in some foreign countries. A severance agreement that still has a bit to run prevents me from saying who they are. We had an office in a Los Angeles suburb. Special rules applied to those employees that didn't apply anywhere else in the company. For example, they were the only US employees allowed to carry over over more than 5 vacation days into a new year. As best I could tell, if they had a limit on carryover vacation days, it was 30 days. I lost a day of vacation at the end of a year because I miscalculated how many days I needed to burn before the end of the year and I accrued one more day than I expected, so I had 6 days to carry over instead of 5. I lost that 6th day on Jan. 1. Unfortunately we had so many people out during the last week of the year that once it became clear I was going to lose the day, there was no way I could take it off. No problem for our California employees who in the same situation would simply have carried over the 6th day.

I have a friend who works for a US company that has started hiring remote workers in Nepal because "people in India are too expensive". He has no idea what they will do when people in Nepal get "too expensive". His company basically froze hiring in India and while the current Indian workers aren't in any immediate danger of losing their jobs, he told me all of them got moved into contracting jobs that his company can end at any time. He was in low level management for a while and in his current job he is in a position to know that.

Like DEC and Sun Microsystems, Nokia is a lesson to future people on how not to run a business. The reasons for all of those companies to fail is different, but the bottom line is that the business around them changed quickly and they all had no answer for it.

Prior to iPhone coming out, I had Nokia phones. If you're a young person, you might be shocked at how phones were before the iPhone. There was no touch screen. You had to use the number pad to input letters. To spell "cat" you had to press 2 three times to skip A, skip B and get to C. Then press 2 once to get A. Then press 8 once to get T. I remember buying a pretty expensive Nokia phone that was state of the art but I bought it months before the iPhone came out. I remember being stunned at how much better the iPhone was with its touch screen and actual keyboard you could use. Nokia literally had no answer for this. None of their phones could do this. A few years earlier, Nokia had driven out almost all their competition. Ever heard of Ericsson? They were big at one time but they couldn't keep up with Nokia. Nokia crushed them. Nokia was all things to all people. You want an expensive state of the art phone? We can sell you that. You want a garbage quality cheap phone that only makes phone calls and can barely send and receive text message? Here at Nokia, we are the freaking kings of garbage phones! No market is so small and so terrible that we won't compete in it. Apple did not care about selling "phones that are only phones" in, say, Burkina Faso. They let Nokia have it. And then stole Nokia's share in more developed countries and it reached the point where all Nokia had left was the garbage phone market in the most undeveloped countries on earth.

So back in the days of the sub-prime mortgage bubble bursting, I read an online article from a guy who gets paid to write online articles about investing. He said that his dad told him "Son, when stupid money enters a market, it's time to leave that market." He said he realized that the property market and everything around it was going to burst when he went to a restaurant he liked to eat at and his favorite waitress gave him a card showing that she was now also a real estate agent on the side. Here's my question.

Hasn't even stupid money figured out that there's no money to be made in NFTs? I get why Emirates may want to take Bitcoin payments because it is theoretically possible that by doing so, they'll make more money over time if Bitcoin goes up in value. But I really don't get why they think anybody is going to want to buy their NFTs. I thought they were supposed to be one of the smart airlines, but here they are arriving at the NFT party years after it closed down.

Unfortunately, your first sentence is too vague, which somewhat detracts from what otherwise is really great post. It's already led one responder to misunderstand what you mean here.

What is meant by "hardware" is a VCR. Not a capture device. Yes, capture devices are plentiful. The last VCRs were made over a decade ago and eventually with a lot of archival use, the ones left will break down. There may still be some shops with old enough employees who have the ability to do repairs - if they can get the right parts. But this is a task that really should have been started years ago. I guess now is better than anytime in the future.

Judges are supposed to have clerks working for them. These are usually just out of law school graduates who have the ability to do exactly what you suggest - check the citations to make sure they actually exist and apply to the case on hand. Could be that the judge's clerk was too lazy to check and expected to get away with it. If the judge didn't have a clerk, then it's up to the judge to check.

I have lots of friends who are lawyers and they explain things to me about the legal system. The legal system is very hesitant about punishing lawyers for anything. So the $2,500 fine, which to us non-lawyers is a joke, is probably about as "tough" as they are going to get. Almost nobody gets disbarred or seriously punished no matter how bad they were.

While I think there is some truth to this, I read a compelling case for why he has gone to the Trump side of things. One of Elon's children from his first marriage is now a trans woman and it seems that Elon has sort of gone bat shit crazy in terms of dealing with this. Instead of trying to find some way to accept this, he went to Trump simply because he knew Trump would bash trans people (doing so was a very effective part of his 2024 TV advertising). I think it may honestly be that simple.

The last time I remember this actually happening was in the 2000s. I do sometimes buy CDs and I honestly can't remember the last time I bought one that seemed to have any copy protection on it. Unless you want to give specifics, I think you're talking about how things were a long time ago and assuming incorrectly that they never changed. I think pretty much everybody figured out quite a while ago that people who actually want to buy physical product aren't the enemy and treating them like potential thieves was counterproductive.

No.

You asked.