... which is irrelevant to the demonstrated and shocking incompetence of being unable to deliver either to the #1 or #2 inbox for businesses in the EU?
I totally agree, and it's basically theft that Apple simply doesn't have a standing offer to outbid anyone else for a security hole.
That said, we all get the same time on this earth. Spending your time helping various governments hurt or kill people fighting for democracy or similar is... a choice.
I don't think democracy is the panacea you seem to think it is, but that's another issue. Certainly, cracking software for governments and the police is no less legitimate an existence and occupation as, say, working for an NGO.
It's not really ecommerce. it's PE parasites selling the brand equity.
The article doesn't really mention: Authentic Brands Group, an asset-light PE org, bought it in 2021; a company called Outdoor 5 LLC now licenses Eddie Bauer's e-commerce and wholesale operations; and we're well deep into enshittification. You can find widespread complaints of bad product quality. Note that ABG wasn't the first PE company to own them, but they seem to have accelerated the enshittification / are doing a bust-out: turning them into a bottom-dollar contract manufacturer scam before people broadly realize the brand name no longer merits the quality reputation it has/had.
These brands are being bought by PE because their business models are under attack by low-cost competitors on one side, and e-commerce on the other. They no longer have a way of differentiating themselves and winning customers, so they become less valuable, and Private Equity investors buy them out at a 'salvage value'. PE often pursues risky strategies in an attempt to make the brand profitable again, and these strategies often fail. Stories like EB's are not ones of PE buying and destroying otherwise successful companies.
It's very popular on here to attack PE--which I'm not going to especially defend. But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner. One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do.
> One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do
Yes. One of the genuine services (in an economics sense) PE provides is to do the dirty reputation-ruining cash-grab tricks that original founder/owners don't have the stomach for.
> But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner.
The problem is that PE also has a nasty habit of coming into a business that is marginally profitable but not spectacularly so, saddling it with giant amount of debt to vacuum up the cash flow, and killing the business.
There is nothing wrong with a sustainably profitable business. Investors, however, want returns from the lottery ticket that they fund.
Yup. They'll borrow huge sums on the credit and good basis of the company, and then "charge it" all to themselves as "management fees", vacuum it dry, and dump the company.
If you are a large business, you likely have multiple lines of credit already establish, potentially into the hundreds of millions or more range. Those are backed by the organizations credit and assets, and aren't likely to be yanked just because the organization has a new owner.
Private Equity has been buying up vets in the UK and jacking up prices massively, causing all sorts of knock-on negative consequences. Vets in the UK were not failing before.
Unfortunately our competition authorities are toothless. Their proposed remedy is that vets will have to publish prices on their websites from now on. Woohoo.
But my question is, how long has this been going on for? I'm in my late 40s. I remember as a kid thinking Schwinn bicycles were the "cheapo" brand. My father, however... would would be in his 90s now... remembered them as a top tier brand.
I have this theory that the reason a lot of prices on goods we've loved our whole lives don't keep up with inflation is because brand loyalty has SUCH power that it's worth it for people to buy and enshittify those brands -- so that they can sell them to us as we age at the prices we are used to paying for them.
They make newer "luxury" brands to sell to younger people who are still deciding what a "reasonable" price to pay for something is.
1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;
2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;
3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;
4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.
> A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method.
This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.
How reasonable is this expectation? All you do by intituting these draconian 'wont someone please think of the children' ID laws is make it marginally more difficult to access mainstream services where there's not much crazy bad stuff anyway. The rest of the internet is the wild west, and good luck controlling that.
The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.
Yeah, this is just long-form linkedin slop. He's thought-leadering to get you to get his (no-doubt slop-written) guides and do leadgen for his forthcoming saas.
No matter what it's a tax on your engineering team to keep it together. But the most brittle parts are always right at the seams. It's not as hard to sew together components when you can cut the cloth down to fit together. Who knows how it'll shake out.
They're not trying to transfer ownership. They're trying to scam people out of the earnest money before a title search (ie ownership verification) happens.
Titles are very decentralized; they are likely modestly-competently managed at the county level, of which there up to 254 per state (Texas).
And identity theft is also very easy in the US. It happened to an old in my family. The state dmv happily mailed a replacement license to a completely different state without so much as checking with the person whose license it is. Just for the asking. It's absurd.
The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop
Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
That kinda makes sense (and thank you!), but I think the comprehensive incompetence is thus:
1 - fails
2 - w/ no useful feedback to user;
3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either
Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.
I eat Bob's Red Mill steel cut oats for breakfast every day; 1/2c dry is about 88g. That's a pretty decent meal. 3.5x that is probably most of what you eat that day.
Yeah, the article showed that the high-dose intervention (modeled after von Noorden's famous century-old 'oat cure') is most effective. A large bowl of oatmeal (100g) all 3 meals for 2 days, 6 large bowls total.
6 weeks of 'oatmeal for breakfast every day' was less effective than 2 days of 'stuff yourself with oatmeal'.
It's quite a bit of volume, but it's "only" about 1000 Calories if it doesn't have any oils/sugar added.
I'd guess the easiest way to get it down would be to just blend the oats into water without cooking so you have something that you can just drink like water.
They had a control group who also went on a reduced calorie deficit but without oats and found that the oats eating group had a much higher decrease of cholesterol, it's in the article.
3/4 cup is about 315 ml, or another 315 g, for just over 400g cooked weight. The linked article does not make clear whether or not the 300g is dry or cooked weight.
The original paper describes two protocols, short-term and long-term (2-day and 6-week respectively) of 100g dry oats and 80g dry oats prepared for each meal. That's a generous but not outrageous serving size, and the former comes out to 300g oats per day over three meals.
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