mmcconnell1618

If you do a lot of video calls, you can also consider how to light yourself so that you show up well on camera. The traditional three-point lighting setup is a good place to start. A key light which is the brightest, main light source, a fill light which is from the opposite side to soften shadows and a backlight to help you stand out from backgrounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_lighting

Virtual video sound is rarely full duplex meaning the first person to speak blocks others and you have these really awkward pauses and latency that interrupt natural communication. Then, add in the lack of body language cues that are difficult to see over video and the pace of communication becomes slower. Ideas don't easily bounce around a team because the technology creates a one-person-at-a-time framework.

This museum, just outside of DC, is worth the visit if you enjoy encryption and learning about code breaking. They even have a pair of enigma machines that let you encode a message on one and decode on the other. It is small but packed with some unique artifacts including some of the earliest super computers.

The comment about "running legacy applications in the cloud was not any cheaper" stood out to me. Just moving the same legacy design into the cloud is not the optimal way to gain cost and availability improvements.

If you have ever seen a data center from Azure, GCP or AWS, you will realize how difficult it will be for any company to compete in the long run. Those companies develop new generations of data center infrastructure with power efficiency improvements every single year. They negotiate network and power contracts at a scale that exceeds any typical Fortune 500 company. I'm skeptical that running your own data center will end up a cost saver in the long run.

As an approved medical device I wonder if you can buy airpods with a HSA now?

Open office plans have data that shows it costs less than individual offices but it is sold as "fostering communication" and "team culture." The cost per office is easier to count than the lost productivity of a distracted programmer.

RTO has similar data. If we require a highly distributed workforce to be in a specific physical location x amount of time, y percentage will resign and we don't have to pay severance or announce layoffs. That's easy to calculate vs. the lost productivity of individuals or the impact of losing top performers and lowering the bar.

The dynamic, airline-style, pricing model that Amtrak adopted took away one of their significant advantages. It used to be that you could roll up to Union Station in DC and pay a reasonable price for "the next train to NYC." You didn't need to think too hard about schedules and it offered flexible transit without TSA security. Now, you have to plan months in advance or pay tons for last minute. If I'm planning months in advance, I'll choose air travel for the same or less money.

Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.

Large companies consolidate industries and have the asymmetric advantage of more resources than individuals. They can leverage AI and other economic models to extract more and more from individuals. As we saw recently with Justice Department case against RealPage, the large companies can collude without officially colluding through better information access.

The end result is that there is less slack in the economic system. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for individuals to leverage inefficiencies. It means there is less room to be human. Less room to make mistakes.

It wasn't always this way. Milton Friedman introduced the idea in the 1970s that businesses could ignore their workers and communities because if they focused on profit, that would benefit everyone. Shareholder Theory elevates the stockholders above all others and leads to stock buybacks and optimizing for wealth extraction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

I think a key here is that the employee was a Software Development Manager. This makes it more likely that they had the ability to install arbitrary software and likely had elevated local privileges on their work machine. Non-software development employees at Disney probably have more restrictions.

It sounds like this employee should have known better than to install a game, and a random mod for the game on a work machine.

You can't really tell the scale of the craters because each time you get closer, more craters appear. I can imagine that even with stereoscopic eyes, a human could easily misjudge distance and scale too. We're not used to operating in such a barren environment.

Do you differentiate between a full time recruiter employed by the hiring company and 3rd party recruiting firms? A recruiter on the payroll can be a useful first screen and usually has good knowledge about what the company is seeking.

Physical stores to make it easier for people to sell on eBay were a thing for many years. Most people didn't know how to take a decent photo or post a listing or just didn't want to deal with it. Those stores never had enough margin to cover the amount of labor involved.

Japan makes incredible bidet toilets that got some traction during the pandemic. The jokes write themselves but a smart toilet that had health tracking features liked to the rest of the Apple fitness eco-system could be interesting.

The security camera, door lock, and thermostat space has room for improvement. The annual subscription model for cameras combined with their privacy gaps opens a space for Apple. My car unlocks when I walk up to it. Shouldn't my house do the same?

Kitchen appliances have gone done in quality to the point that they are replaced every few years when the linear motors fail. I don't know if there is enough margin for Apple but knowing what food is cycling through the kitchen would be another interesting health input.

3D printer, laser cutter, replicator machine that manufactures physical goods in your house.

Automatic pool/hot tub system that keeps chemical levels balanced and orders supplies as needed.

Urban gardening pods that allow anyone to grow healthy food at home.

Car manufacturers have ISO standards for symbols/icons on controls: https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/68409/6480e873c14b4e56...

One of the pain points that CarPlay and Android Auto solve for is that any car I rent or buy has the same media controls and all of my presets. When I travel for work, I try to always pick a rental vehicle that is compatible with my phone in order to reduce cognitive load of learning a new vehicle's unique controls.

The backlash to the Oxy abuse in the US has caused doctors to swing to the other direction where they don't want to prescribe stronger pain killers or narcotics to anyone for fear of being labeled as a drug dealer. The consequences are that many people turn to other markets where fake pills laced with fentanyl are lurking. I have several friends with real chronic pain issues and they are treated like drug seekers by their physicians and have to "justify" every single pill request like they are children. I can totally see why even adults would seek alternative options.

I wonder if Apple has been secretly acquiring land or negotiating leases for a charging network. That would be a significant chunk of infrastructure to add to their services segment. Apple One -> Now includes charging your vehicle at no additional cost.

I've always considered JetBlue to be a value leader vs. low cost leader. They have nicer seats, in seat entertainment in all classes and have a pricing/refund/exchange policy that is more customer friendly than competitors. Spirit is just going for low cost. Southwest is in between where they want low cost but you have to fight for a seat and might needs to have 2 or 3 stops to cross the country depending on where you start.

I assume you're talking about JetBlue's Mint product which is all business class for some cross country flights and a few international. Again, I think they are trying to provide the best value for business class compared to the larger carriers.

Is this relevant to the Fermi paradox? If 1% of observed systems are estimated to still be in resonance, that means that 99% are not and have had some kind of significant event to knock them out of resonance.

Amazon typically offers cash bonuses during the first 2 years that bring total comp up to a similar amount in the years where 40% of stock vests. They manage towards a target compensation number. The stock vest schedule just changes the mix of cash vs. stock.

At up to 10,000 feet I imagine the pressurization system could keep pace with the differential from the missing windows. If they had gone much higher, it might not have been able to keep pace. If the cabin loses pressure at higher altitude, the procedure is to descend to 10,000 feet or less where pressurization is not needed for passenger survival. In this case, the problem was detected around the time they were crossing above 10,000 feet.

This is a direct outgrowth of the Shareholder Primacy theory which is what many MBA students are taught. A business has many stakeholders and obligations and at some points in the past, employees and community were valued in balance with shareholders. Corporations provided pensions and acted for the good of the community in addition to making a profit for shareholders.

Once you embrace that your primary reason to exist is to enrich shareholders, everything lines up under the CFO. CEO pay packages are now typically weighted to incentivize the CEO to maximize shareholder value too because so much of their compensation is in stock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy#:~:text=Sh....

Virginia bought a segment of track from CSX back in 2021 to update and improve availability of passenger service up towards DC: https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/03/31/983044429/virginia-...

There are about 125 million households in the US. I'm making the assumption that most households are filing a single tax return even if there are two or more incomes. Statistica reports that about 60% of households owe Federal taxes. So the market size of tax filing households is about 75,000,000.

How many small dollar donations would it take to either rival the lobbying dollars of Intuit or create a fantastic free alternative?

I've witnessed this far too often in sales. First, a team lands a giant deal that is far above plan and celebrates with Club status and a trip to a tropical Island. The next year the algorithm decides they need to get that deal + 30% more out of the same customer. There is literally no new workload to sell and the team underperforms plan despite a massive run rate from the original deal.

It's interesting that in the context of a pirate map, X, marks the spot of the treasure to be found while in another context, X, means close the window or "incorrect." I wonder which one will be most accurate for Twitter's new branding?

I recently visited Disney Sea and found it very strange that food carts (10+ popcorn flavors each in different carts) never sold drinks. They were 1 item only. Popcorn or ice cream or nuts but only that 1 item. Drinks were only available at the very few vending machines or at full restaurants. I think they are missing a big upsell opportunity.

If you haven't tried to purchase a stock photo recently, it is incredibly difficult. I can order same day delivery of physical goods from Amazon much faster than trying to buy a single stock photo. All of the services are subscriptions now and they have dark UX patterns to convince you the only way to get the images is to sign up for an annual plan that will auto-renew.

In comparison, typing a prompt into a generative AI is a superior user experience. I'm willing to pay a photographer, they just don't make it easy.

In Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock, a character has trained raptors to take down drones and he crafted 3D printed sleeves to protect their claws from damage during attacks: https://www.nealstephenson.com/termination-shock.html