Sure, Steve wasn't an actual founder like Allen or Gates, but mostly he was because of when he started and his role as business manager.

At some point in any company's growth, the founder becomes more of a liability than an asset, or they at least hit the limit on their ability to grow the company often through perpetuating values/ideas that have become obsolete.

In the case of Natella, he kind of had it easy in some ways. Microsoft had an enviable market position and largely just needed to jettison some of the old thinking.

Pointless changes to the UI, which seem to be driven by some need to keep graphic artists engaged pursuing weird stylistic trends disconnected from the purpose of UIs (when they're not UIs designed for dark purposes, at least) are annoying but this has been a constant with MS. I remember the screams when the XP UI came out and was compared unfavorably to the NT 4.0 UI. I think only the adoption of the NT UI by NT Server was about the only time it wasn't widely panned.

Forced updates are bad, but honestly, they used to be MUCH worse, with "service packs" unleashing a bunch of unwanted changes, new bugs and incompatibilities. At least now they seem to be smaller and less likely to unleash catastrophic damage. And I'd argue they've actually improved the security posture of Windows to some degree since MS seems to be a bit better at it.

There's supposedly a bad feedback mechanism with these merchant fees. Card issuers want to have the best bennies for their cards, but they fund them with merchant fees. Merchants end up raising prices to deal with the people who buy things at a price 3% less cut into their profits. So people not making credit card purchases are basically funding the whole thing because they're paying the increased prices merchants charge to offset losses on credit purchases.

I find it weird that Goldman got suckered on anything financial.

Goldman is one of those smartest-guy-in-the-room companies that usually sets things up to where they make money regardless of the outcome.

I find it hard to believe they went into a financial services deal with anyone that wasn't structured so that they always made money. I wonder if they were willing to give up points on the front end in order to make it up on the back end selling some new consumer lending expertise to other companies looking for an alternative private card arrangement or maybe just data mining all the iPhone owners credit card transactions.

On the other hand, Apple is so controlling that maybe only Goldman was convinced they were smart enough to outmaneuver Apple and everyone gave Apple a pass on their poor partnership terms.

Condo/house style rooms from major hotel chains are rare as hen's teeth, and if you find a two-bedroom suite with a kitchenette, it's likely to be priced in the stratosphere if its even available.

Some resort areas have literal rental condos (like at a ski resort), but without using a third party service they're tough to come by in non-resort areas.

Some of the extended stay type hotels come kind of close -- I stayed at one recently, but its too open floor plan even if its just one couple staying there. The bed is just in some weird nook, no door or any way to close it off from the common area.

I think part of AirBnB's success is that they're meeting an unmet need for housing outside of hotels one-size-fits-all hotel rooms.

On paper I think the Ukrainians were the only ones who benefitted because it rendered Russian gas harder to come by during a conflict where there was a lot of apprehension about anti-Russian cohesion crumbling over energy supplies. If "needing" gas is your go-to for waffling on Russia, you're going to have to try harder if Nordstream was literally broken.

You could even argue Ukraine had the best plausible deniability, too, as they lacked the naval assets to pursue this and had a reasonable excuse of being balls-to-wall fighting Russian infantry, not trying to pull of some kind of subsea sabotage operation way outside their neighborhood.

I'd even argue that failing to knock out 100% of Nordstream capacity was an operational failure given the kind expected low-resource effort the Ukrainians could have put together on their own, which was probably a false-/mis-flagged "borrowed" fishing or utility vessel with AIS disabled, good enough sonar to find the pipeline and some kind of home-brew depth charges to blow it up.

I'd further argue that the only complicity might have been Poland, who are nearly as virulently anti-Russian as the Ukrainians and could have provided a convenient means of getting rid of the vessel and repatriating the operators.

Russia seems to have little reason to blow it up, and while you could argue the US benefits, it seems less likely that the Biden administration would want to risk the coalition looking like they were forcing a no Russian gas policy via sabotage.

I'm sure working at a high level at Apple is incredibly stressful in many ways. I'm sure she's been very well compensated and after 20 years, why not quit the rat race?

Just based on some bad web reporting, she doesn't sound like the kind of personality that wants to brawl for corporate leadership.

It's tough to retain audiences when shows have 18-24 months between seasons. There has to be a better way to produce this kind of content that puts a new season out on a consistent and timely pace. I'm sure there's all kinds of explanations, cost, talent availability, elaborate location shooting, FX, etc, but at some point look at TV from the 70s or 80s when they put out 20-some episodes of a show on an annual basis. Many had a ton of outdoor location shots, car chases, and so on, not just in-studio stuff.

As for Westworld, IMHO the biggest problem with Westworld is that they were seriously stretching it to turn the two original films (Westworld, Futureworld) into 50-some hours of programming (the original, 5 planned seasons). They got away with a deep-dive into machine consciousness in season 1, but this wasn't a sustainable narrative structure.

The urge to be "deep" and the limited amount of fundamental narrative in "robots rebel in park, robots escape park, humans conspire to use robots to take over world, robots conspire to take over world themselves" resulted in too many overelaborate side plots.

Lisa Joy said this was always meant for 5 seasons, but I question how much actual narrative they had seriously designed when they started. It makes me wonder if producers/networks shouldn't demand more from the writers up front, like a really well developed story arc for the entire series and not let them create new seasons on the fly.

In reality, this setup is a farce. Pop into any pharmacy and look at how crazy busy they are. Any contraindications or bad combinations are most likely flagged by the computer, not the pharmacist. Sure, maybe they know a few high profile conflicts between specific drugs and drug families, but there's no way they've memorized the entire Physician's Desk Reference. No pharmacist has the time to interact with doctors about the appropriateness of more than a handful of prescriptions and I'd wager those involve people who are really sick and taking a half-dozen different medications simultaneously, along with be elderly or some other risk category. What are they gonna do? Call the doctor, who waits patiently by the phone for a call from the pharmacist? Which is actually the same doctor cramming 30 patient visits in per day who might call back the next day.

I'd also guess that a lot of the excess prescriptions that got written started regionally -- like retired coal miners getting a lot of oxycodone, and it probably seemed *normal* because of the communities they served because so many people had similar occupations and health problems.

The real bad guy in all this were always the doctors. They've always known of the risks involved with opiate consumption, this is something dating back 150 years. "But the nice salesman from Purdue Pharma said it was safe!" is a bullshit answer.

They're only supposed to make sure the doctor writing the prescription has a valid DEA license. There's room for some minor sanity checks, like if the prescription says "1,000 Oxycodone and unlimited refills".

Doctors can write a prescription for any drug they want for any reason they want -- this is called off-label prescribing. There's no way a pharmacist just look at the medication being prescribed and have any idea whether its suitable because they don't know anything about the patient's condition or the doctor's medical reasoning in prescribing it.

And in a practical sense, have you ever actually been in a pharmacy lately? My local CVS has 1 pharmacist and 3 pharmacy techs and they're like crazy busy, all the time. They actually started closing the pharmacy (gate down, phones unanswered) for a half an hour because the staff were so busy they couldn't even stop to eat.

There's no way any pharmacist has the time to look at my prescription, think "maybe I should look into this", phone the doctor's office (and leave a message) and then wait for a return call and then get into some professional discussion about my health care situation.

I'd argue that our current drug dispensing system is broken because we have this artificial division between doctors and pharmacies. If I need a drug therapy, why doesn't my doctor just give me the drugs?

I've literally asked my doctor about side effects and they're like "I don't really know, ask the pharmacist". Because I guess pharmacists are supposed to be some kind of medical counsel, but that's not at all how it actually works. They're just highly educated drones who only occasionally use their knowledge to catch weird contraindications for people on large numbers of different drugs. And even then it's probably not their expertise in that case, but sophisticated software that flags drug interactions.

That's absurd. It's what we expect pharmacies to do -- fill whatever prescription they're given that follows the legal process for drug prescribing -- is the doctor the legitimate holder of a DEA license for the drug they're prescribing and is the drug in question being prescribed in some legitimate amount.

If you make pharmacies gatekeepers, then you get right wing religious nuts who won't fill birth control prescriptions, Scientologists who won't fill psychiatric medications and all other manner of weirdos with an axe to grind blocking whatever their particular enemy in the pharmacopeia is.

I'd wager that the kids of influential people get offered and pitch themselves for cushy jobs all the time.

The people that want to get at the actually influential people look at the money it costs to hire them as just part of the cost of gaining access to the influential person.

They probably reject or negotiate down a lot of the pitches from those kids, depending on the kid and their reputations.

I'd guess the kids generally reach for jobs a bit beyond their grasp and some get rejected because of their personal reputations.

I'd bet it drives the actually influential people fucking nuts most of the time. The people who pay off or hire their kids are probably not savory people who have already tried to get influence but been turned away and are trying for a back door route. And I'm sure they hate having their kids or other relatives going around quietly pitching their influence with the actually influential family members.

Its a reference standard for color. It lets designer pick a specific color and get predictable physical results in whatever their output medium is. A specific Pantone color has a set of metrics for displaying it electronically and a physical standard for what that color looks like as well. This allows ink manufacturers to define mixing formulas that produce a named Pantone color reliably.

Like if you wanted to print something with a specific green color consistently, you'd pick the Pantone based green in your design software. This allows the printer to either buy a specific ink which has been calibrated to produce that specific version of green which matches the Pantone standard. The ink manufacturers have done the R&D so that they know what specific ink blending is required to get that specific color of green, and it results in a recipe that printers can use so that they load up the press with that specific blend of ink.

Now that's spot color, it gets more complicated with process color (ie, dithering CYMK to produce a visual representation of the color spectrum for "full color" images). I think there's Pantone process colors, too, which help people maintain color consistency by using base color inks which produce consistent process color output, often with close matching of Pantone process colors and Pantone spot colors.

A lot of high end commercial printers can usually do press runs using more than 4 colors. Base CYMK for process color and then, if the job requires it, one or more spot colors for highly matched colors. Like if you were printing a promotional magazine for a sports team whose team colors were Purple and Gold. Chances are, the teams Purple and Gold are matched to Pantone spot colors. So the magazine would probably end up specifying the Pantone spot colors for solid color graphic elements that used those colors and then use Pantone process colors for the other full-color images. This gives you highly predictable, close tolerance versions of the team colors as well as color fidelity with process colors (photos, etc).

If you tear open a cereal box or look on the end flaps, you can often see the color targets they print. Usually you'll see CYMK and a couple of spot colors used.

Color printing is extremely complicated in the commercial world. It's not just a sort of general mix of CYMK like you'd get on a color printer or copier.

Affinity is quite good, but its missing some critical features and near as I've been able to find out they're likely to never show up as feature enhancement is all but dead.