Most McDonalds locations, they are franchised by individual franchisees. A franchisee can own multiple restaurants, but many don't because the buy-in is so insanely expensive.

What the tool here is doing is comparing pricing in your area compared with franchisees near you and across the country to estimate a price sensitivity of your customers, then suggest higher prices. So if you are charging $2 for a hash brown and a nearby different franchisee is charging $2.89 and people are largely still buying it, it can "suggest" you raise the hash brown price to $2.49 or $2.59 or $2.89.

The legal argument falls on what RealPage is arguing about YieldStar, that the tool provides advice, the franchisees aren't officially all agreeing to set prices, and it's "just a suggestion", when in reality the end goal of the tool is to help franchisees understand the maximum price the market can bear by collaborating via a dataset McDonalds owns. The legal argument is that the franchisees are not sitting down together to price fix, they are all "talking to a guy named Bob" (the points of sale reporting the sales and menu item prices per location to McD corporate in this tool) and the "guy named bob is merely suggesting prices" (Bob knows information that would not be trivial to gather and provides a recommendation).

McDonalds wants to make it attractive to be a franchisee so they're providing this tool to help franchisee profits. They're attempting to abandon liability by putting in the fine print it's just a suggestion bro, if you get sued it isn't our fault.

God bless corporate America!

OpenAI isn't doing an IPO because the finances are bad, US Bond yields are >5%, Oracle's 5 year CDS is above 200bps as overall concerns about AI debt mount...

This entire pretext of "oh god it's so dangerous we can't release it" goes at least back to 2019 where OpenAI refused to release GPT-2 under the hype of it being too dangerous (and yet GPT-3 was released a couple years later). Anthropic did the same thing with Mythos (where everyone got access a couple months later).

What it is is that the model improvements are not explosive enough to justify the insane amount of money OpenAI is burning, so you have to seek an alternate reason for a lack of meaningful progress on newer models. They were pleading for the government to do it so it would be a regulatory moat giving the incumbents an absolutely ironclad reason to not have people question said lack of progress, so with the current US administration being unwilling to do so, they're now doing a voluntary pause to seem socially responsible, and the reason for the pause isn't that the new model isn't that much better, it's oh my god, it's so much better, you wouldn't believe it, once we put some rails to safeguard and limit this thing it's going to be AGI and replace all white collar workers within 18 months (for real, the umpteenth time this prediction has been made). Believe us bro.

Sam Altman may also have a bridge to sell you, you should ask...

The phone transmits the image and required information much quicker than the TSA's travel document checker (using an E-Seek ID scanner) can validate the physical security features of your physical license.

I am confident none of my local restaurants would take it.

You'd be surprised. Local restaurants have actually gotten quite a bit better at Apple Pay support as many of them have switched to PoS solutions like Toast or Clover, or if they don't run fancy points of sale, many of them swapped standalone card processing terminals (divorced from POS, swipe/dip/tap card and manually key charge amount) during COVID (because people were so concerned about touch transmitting the virus) to ones that did support tap (including a couple of restaurants that were cash-only near me until COVID and then took tap payments once COVID hit.)

The in-network exemptions (issuer-is-network) were exclusively carved out for Senator Durbin, as Discover Financial Services (a part of Cap1) is an Illinois company that employs 6,000+ people in the state. Discover getting a debit interchange carveout made them more competitive.

The problem is now that it exists, other large banks are looking at a swipe fee advantage now that Cap1 acquired Discover and that Dick Durbin is now on the verge of retirement unlikely to buck his prior law, the other large banks are realizing under the current administration, such a move of a megabank acquiring major debit networks is likely to escape unscathed from regulators...

The Ellison family are friends of the administration, hence the Paramount/Skydance merger being allowed through when it's clearly anticompetitive. Oracle gov deals getting trimmed in any meaningful sense was never in the cards.

I love how nowadays whenever you want to "right size" an organization, you can just say the cuts were due to AI, and usually the stock price doesn't react too negatively. Eventually the market sees the true story.

Oracle's stock is now down 14% in the last year as the S&P is 25% higher. Same article, free cash flow is -$1.87B, having burned $23.7B USD in the last year. They have $43B in debt and equity and are desperate for more - potentially raising just as much in the next year.

So why the layoffs, really? Beyond "AI layoffs are good and generally don't make the stock decline."

Oracle is heavily overextended in the debt for building the datacenters AI companies use. Their credit rating is a triple B (still investment grade, but only two steps above junk status). If the AI boom crashes, Oracle is fucked. They're left holding the bag on all the datacenter debt while the AI companies purchase less. Meanwhile, they're already financially strained. So taking the layoffs now creates a major free cash flow. The $1.84B severance payment is peanuts compared to the $8B-$10B in free cash flow it frees up. Of course, the $8B-$10B is not going to cover the huge amounts of debt they have taken on and will continue to take on... and reports I've heard are the layoffs were so wide and blind Oracle is having to hire some of them back.

Expect it to get worse at Oracle, unless somehow instead of LLMs getting progressively barely better for way more spend they magically achieve AGI and humans are displaced from most white collar jobs (not going to happen anytime soon).

Asking honestly, what cancel-rebook sites is the OP talking about? If they're defunct due to changes in hotel cancellation policies, then name them historically.

This entire article stinks of hotel cancellation policy being more consumer hostile being excused as "we didn't want to make it worse for travelers but some really shitty underhanded people made us do it..." to launder the reputation of major hotel chains as good rather than taking maximum possible advantage of industry consolidation in the last decade.

Same way that hotel elite benefits for 3TA commissionable rates went to the way of the dodo as hotel chains consolidated... the hotel industry consolidated had the cards. Or is there going to be some other article explaining about how this was gamesmanship/taking advantage too?

Because Boeing kept wanting to push the 737.

When Bombardier designed the CSeries (now the Airbus A220 series) Boeing filed lawsuits over it it and said that the 737 competed with the CS100 even though the Cseries had far fewer seats and was much easier to achieve a better cost per passenger mile on routes which could not support enough people to nearly fill or fill the smallest 737 model.

"Why innovate when you can litigate?" in essence.

Bombardier ended up giving a majority to Airbus because they could deal with Boeing on the legal level and now airlines like Delta are buying them to replace 717s and economically fill routes that have more demand than a CRJ-900 or Embraer E-190 can fill, but not pax enough for an A319 or smaller 737 MAX 8 that fit ~140 passengers in a multiple class config. Pure hubris on Boeing's part when they could have designed a 717 successor...

Microsoft doesn't give a shit about Enterprises switching some employee computers to Macs anymore because they still have O365 and Azure AD (Entra ID whatever the hell they're calling it now). Hell, when Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer, he cut the QA:developer ratio from 2:1 employees to 1:1. Firing half the QA people, and leaving consumers/businesses not rich enough to afford using the Win10+ LTSB/LTSC as the equivalent of QA testers on the updates.

Mac enterprise users can still use MS cloud enterprise services such as O365, Sharepoint, OneDrive, Teams, Outlook the MS other Office apps, etc... Azure in general for enterprise cloud compute.

The desktop is no longer as glamorous as it was. Of course, through enterprise licensing, Microsoft will still milk that market for as much as it is worth. They're just not as concerned about maintaining dominance, or making the user experience worse on other platforms deliberately to maintain Windows marketshare.

No, no, you see, productive work only happens in an office building, and they'll rent a local office in India, so somehow that magically makes the Microsoft Teams call more productive or something.

The explanation is that they gave Zucc's glasses a private server to handle the requests. Then routed every single set of glasses in the building through it. And the "chef" on camera's request for it verbally triggered all of them, on a single server, that was only designed to handle Mark Zuckerberg's glasses request had hundreds of glasses respond and the thing crashed because of improper config. I think this is a privacy invasive product, but the explanation of how a live demo failed does scan. All devices listened for a wake word, then shit the bed when they effectively DDoSed the private server instance.

As a Macbook owner, the HDMI port is extremely useful. Tons of business conference rooms still have HDMI in the table. Eventually that will go away but I don't want massive inconveniences or a shitload of dongles all the time (and yes, I do have dongles for ethernet, displayport, generally more USB-A, but I generally don't need them.)

They want to layoff workers without the headlines that they've laid off X,XXX employees or paying severance.

That's it. That's the rationale. Any other explanation given is bullshit.

Pretending that Chrome its position fair and square is so absolutely insane it borders on lunacy.

Google used to pay freeware installers (Adobe Flash, Shockwave, Java, CCleaner, etc.) and the like up to $1 per install. If you didn't uncheck the box while installing these programs, then Chrome installed as the default browser importing all the important bits (passwords history etc). If you didn't install Chrome in that way, Google Search, YouTube, etc. all heavily promoted Chrome installations.

You can argue on whether or not what Google did was for the overall benefit of the web (and certainly it was better than IE being where it was), but it was most definitely not "fair and square". Now we have the opposite, artificially slows down Firefox to drive Firefox users to Chrome solely based on the user agent (meaning it's an artificial distinction and not based on any actual browser performance difference.)