Writing off debts happens very often -- sometimes spinoffs are created for the sole purpose of concentrating debts into a singular entity for the explicit purpose of that otherwise-unknown entity to declare bankruptcy! This is part of the games corporations are legally permitted to do to allow an ongoing concern to not wholly disappear due to some bad bets.

The ONLY action in this Apple Card news that is extraordinary is how JPM recognized the charge (aka wrote off their part of the acquired debts) during the same financial quarter the deal is announced even though the bulk of the migration is taking place over the next two years -- for the card issuance to happen in about 2 years' time.

Just to repeat: writing off debts is common... recognizing those write-offs before public announcement of any deal is, however, quite unusual.

Credit approval rules/processes were securitized by Apple Corp itself (as it's their own branded credit card, after all) which was mostly for Apple hardware purchases with sticker prices and payment plans larger than typical daily consumer spending habits -- How often do YOU plunk down $2000+ on a brand-new credit card promotion for new computer hardware?

There have been stories about this delinquency rate but Goldman Sachs wasn't truly losing any money (Apple paid them back when purchases were from Apple Stores after all) except for GS' own fraud detection measures which might have been insufficient.

The end result? GS could not convert their consumer credit portfolio (across other brands also) into enough stable profit. They left the Apple Card product a financial mess and even provided a $1 Billion USD discount on the acquisition price -- to ease the pain of an actual well-oiled consumer credit company to incorporate the Apple Card business into their existing processes.

BTW none of this is 'unusual' or 'extraordinary' in the consumer credit space. All sorts of brands have been changing hands, and sometimes companies (like Discover) also gets acquired by larger fin firms.

The class action is being brought BY employees (or employees-adjacent) streaming subscribers... all legal fees paid by Paramount/Skydance law firms.

This is common dirty business tactics by the hostile takeover firms in hopes of torpedoing the already-agreed-upon M&A deal involving their business interests (in this case, WBD). Just watch any episodes of Suits (that TV drama about corporate law firms) and you'll quickly understand that there's no bar too low for corporate hostilities. (The show is dramatized but not wholly fictional!)

MCD = McDonald's Corporation stock ticker symbol.
KO = Coca-Cola Company's stock ticker symbol.

And it's about the PR brouhaha of these companies' AI Sloppy adverts... in case you couldn't connect the dots.

First off, your entire reply is too much an understatement of the lack of intellect demonstrated throughout the ranks of selfish brown-nosers.

Secondly, my favorite famous-person quote is by the late comedian George Carlin:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

You touch upon the layers of the 4K technology stack! There's more than just single-frame dimensions!

There's frame dimensions, frames-per-second (FPS), color gamut, and other data (including audio channels of their own specs) within the throughput afforded with 4K/8K.

And as with anything technological, real-world performance is roughly 50% advertised (theoretical) technical max. So for best 1080p/HD experience, I rely on 4K cable. And for my 4K? I use 8K HDMI cables.

Overall, even fewer people would recognize a difference upgrading from 4K to 8K -- especially when 720p-1080p/HD *content* is "good enough" for most content, although native 4K content is ideal for larger-dimensioned viewing ("big screen" TVs).

The 8K specs are in the same realm as the 3D-TV revolution; mostly a fad due to the limited availability of content that truly showcases its distinctive value proposition.

With Comcast and its media empire, ranging from NBC broadcast to Universal Studios to major sports teams to Xfinity ISP to cable TV to various digital/print publications to DreamWorks and other major movie studios and beyond (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more), it is the epitome of a propaganda machine.

As the old saying goes, Whoever controls the media, controls the mind. https://quoteinvestigator.com/...

So anyone who remains within the bubble of that media empire is brainwashed into whatever narrative the powers-that-be determine the narrative to lean.

In response to point (a) -- Positive investments into the labor force are good for business (both in political and economic terms). The fundamentality is that your target consumer is derived from your workforce itself; if they're not employed, then they're without income upon which to spend on your consumer good.

In response to points (b) and (c) -- 100% agreed. Knee-jerk businesspeople are not insightful (no matter how eloquent their sales pitches may be) due to their ignorance to the actual factors and interconnected gears driving supplier costs. Sometimes the supplier simply demands higher prices due to the buyers not committing to longer-term buying contracts (see OpenAI + Nvidia/AMD for recent examples of mutual support).

In response to point (d) -- Their decisions were spurred during an insightful period in the 1990s' globalization expansion about nurturing the domestic economies before boosting foreign economies; for these guys and the domestic nature of their customers (it's rare for commodities to have global marketplace dominance), it against points back to my response to point (a) above: if your neighborhood is unemployed and cannot afford your product, then what makes you think other equally-unemployed neighborhoods could afford your product?!

Everything used to be domestically manufactured (with few exceptions) whilst limiting immediate corporate greed. But as with any wayward management tier bulked up with internal layers each pining for unearned payouts, many businesses chose offshoring. It's nice to see a case study illustrating how offshoring is not required; unfortunately it's a story that's falling on evermore deaf ears.

The 1990s already had this innovation -- it was called PointCast, it was available in Screensaver and eventually windowed modes (or maybe I ran it inside a windowed VM, idk, it's been almost 3 decades), and it streamed both static and animated content (including video streams from broadcasters)... and, yes, as a consequence, ads.

It's important to note that the ad-serving landscape in the 1990s was not as mature as the DoubleClick (now owned by Google) era of digital ad networks and real-time arbitrage with auctioning formats by competing global firms. In the 1990s, the tech stack was simpler and the ad network firms had individual relationships with advertisers and limited telemetry for their interactions.

But I digress. All to say that what's old is new again -- including video wallpapers, 3D browsers (VRML and the Metaverse), and even browser plug-ins (now called extensions) to enable additional functionality in UXs.

This comparative metaphor makes sense. But it seems the C++ EWG is hoping to contain bad code (put limits on the trunk's abilities) rather than creating a culture of good code (teaching drivers efficient usage of the trunk).

In the end, EWG doesn't want to nurture a culture of safe code; they want safe code to happen by accident. Wishful thinking indeed...

This implies the different approaches are like building a house with a safe and solid foundation, or patchworking a foundation with copious amounts of duct tape.

And in this vein, the C++ EWG prefers the duct tape approach... because laying new foundations in a well-regulated manner is hard, or rather, presents an "irreconcilable design disagreement...."

Taking a step back, the EWG (like all corporate programmers) are taking the path of least resistance ("what checks the box yet requires the least amount of effort, and has an off switch?").

A person earning $10MM on standard payroll would be subjected to these payroll taxes. THIS distinction is the whole point -- Should a worker (or CEO) take in only a $1 Salary, then they are subject to those payroll withholdings/burdens on that standard payroll amount.

Money-savvy executives gladly accept a $1 salary because the remainder of their overall compensation package is awarded as semi-regulated financial instruments potentially subject to capital gains taxes, or awarded in any other manner which sidesteps traditional/standard payroll systems.

The net result? The executive's $1 salary means they are paying less in taxes than the $30K laborer employed by the same company.

If any high-income earners are literally making their earnings strictly through standard payroll, then I would question the finance management savvy of that company's CFO! That's a LOT of liquidity walking out the door on an annual basis independent of the company's revenues. (Bonuses are not salaries or wages, so they don't compute the same way for either the employer or the employee.)

Your argument is rather shallow. There are trillion-dollar corporations that nominally pay less in corporate taxes than blue-collar workers earning $30K per year -- so reducing the argument to high-income earners necessarily pay more in taxes than lower-income earners is objectively false.

Finance-savvy higher-income earners often also hire personal finance advisors/managers and adopt money-management techniques which reverse their total tax burdens on an annualized basis; lower-income earners often cannot afford their preferred living expenses, increases in longer-term savings balances, or hire third-party personal finance advisors adept at reducing their annual tax burdens.

PS: Some money-management techniques are only available beyond certain income thresholds. Although some mandatory proportional income taxes (like social security withholdings from paychecks) are unavoidable in and of themselves, the overall burden can be reduced by setting up alternative compensation arrangements which do not qualify as "income" (thus not subject to paycheck withholdings) that private banks then provide the customer with a spending card (recognizing that the banks get repaid before any residuals may ultimately get deposited into the customer's own checking account).

PPS: These setups are fully legal, "old-school", and part of the financial industry backstory. "Ya gotta have money to make money," (and avoid tax burdens) as the saying goes...

KilledByGoogle seems to have been killed (or abandoned?) cuz there's no new entries for 2025 -- and this is hardly the first project to discontinue this year.

Such temperature/conditions swings are extremely rare in Seattle/PNW for sure, 100% -- but such dramatic fluctuations (aka "extreme weather") do occur more often in Seattle than places like SF or LA burning down due to natural causes (despite their respective wildfire seasons forevermore).

And that's the gist of Waymo's deployment; there's more variability/extremes in Denver and/or Seattle during any given year than those 5 other markets combined. (So I wouldn't argue about their usage of "extreme weather" compared to those markets; places like upper midwest [Chicago, Minneapolis] and northeast [NYC, Boston, Philly, DC] offer more extremes in any given year for sure, but Waymo is being gradual in their rollouts, and I appreciate that.)