When you go down the rabbit hole a debate starting from scratch again:

45 minutes to re-install the OS.

Another couple of hours to get all of the common programs you use downloaded and installed.

A full month or more of customizing everything to your preferences and downloading the programs you rarely use.

I once hired a college student for a summer job off his cover letter. Just called him up and said the job is yours if you want it.

I posted a short description of the job on the university job page. I got inundated with long lengthy creative writing letters talking about everything but the job I was posting from hundreds of students.

He went through the requirements on the short job posting and answered each one with a short sentence and paragraph in between.

I can work weekends.

I can lift 50lbs.

I can work outdoors.

I can start at 7am and work till 4pm.

I can drive a manual transmission.

My supervisor started talking to him on his first day and stole him for 75% of the summer. I had to hire another student… Still a bit sore over that one.

When iPhone launched it was targeted at the general public.

Blackberry had successfully dominated the businesses. In apps, texting, e-mailing etc they were light-years ahead of everyone else at the time. Ther had a bit of a learning curve to figure out but it got the job done. Many of the things that the iPhone became famous for were blackberry inventions. They were also highly customizable with tons of options where you could tweak all sorts of stuff aka pretty complicated.

So Apple went after the consumer market where they had a major fan base built up from the iPod. The thing about the iPod that set it apart from other MP3 was it was extremely simple to use. Like your 50 year old MBA boss could use it simple (if someone loaded the MP3’s for him) and no customization.

So the phone they made was about the same size as an iPod, and extremely simply to use. No customization because that created complexity. It was all tightly controlled.

Pretty soon it became the dominant phone in the market because as the current president shows, too many americans are fucking stupid. It remains the dominant phone because too many americans are fucking stupid.

It’s a much more complex phone today but don’t worry, most americans don’t know how to use all the features anyway because they are too fucking stupid.

Before the IPO, close to 100% of old.reddit likely contributed. For submitting, the old.reddit interface had better options for the experienced user. It was faster and easier to submit complex longer comments and posts.

The interface isn’t that great for reading comments/post. The third party phone apps did it better.

Besides you had to have a tiny bit of experience with the platform to know how to find that setting. Not something most casual readers who hit the site via a search engine would know to do.

Since the IPO it’s likely mostly few old-timers checking the niche subs. Probably very little engagement. Honestly, it’s likely still around because of some critical tool for moderators or bots that would be extremely expensive to upgrade. Definitely not because they care about the user.

I have done it a few times over the years but never on my main driver. Until last month… I bought a new laptop for my business and immediately installed Linux on the entire drive. I never initialized the win 11 that came with it.

So far I have had a few hiccups with getting some things working. I have also yet to find a basic WYSIWYG editor for my very basic HTML business webpage on Linux. So I am keeping my 6 year old laptop with win10 up and going on my desk for now.

If what I want to buy is under $200 and locked up, I usually go to another store to buy the item. I am not waiting for an employee to show up and unlock $200 item.

It often only takes a few months of huge losses in sales for the shelves to all be unlocked at a store.

3 years and almost 2,000 comments.

Also didn’t make the list.

Those are pretty decent results.

When I went to college my net worth was $0.

10 years later after college my net worth was -$45,000.

My wife is a teacher to teenagers (high school). She gets called mom on a regular basis. Especially when she wakes one of them up from a little classroom nap. It happens often enough the kids don’t even give each other a hard time.

Now when they call her grandma… She doesn’t find that endearing.

Corporations lying on their books to decieve investors? Shocking!!!

That only happens on days that end in Y.

I bought a machine right before 7 launched to replace my XP machine. Vista SP2 was solid by then. I ran it for over a year because it was extremely stable.

I waited a bit over a year to install 7 on the machine when it’s SP1 came out.

FYI the bottom right in the picture is a real sunflower call Sun Gold.

https://www.applewoodseed.com/product/sunflower-dwarf-sungold/

Of course only comes in yellow.

Brings me back to how we sung a song in grade school. Edit out Ears with Balls and you get:

Do your balls hang low?

Do they wobble to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot?

Can you tie them in a bow?

Can you swing them over your shoulder like a regimental soldier?

Do your balls hang low?

Reality is often absurd and not what you expect.

Just how much time have you spent in marketing to be such and expert on the subject?

There is a finite amount of manipulation techniques used by marketers and others to manipulate human behavior. These have been fine tuned to the nth degree to target susceptible individuals over the centuries. However they only work on susceptible individuals.

Individuals that differ from the targeted norm can resistant to the manipulation. This can be a instinctive response or a trained one via education. This is why in totalitarian government regimes, there is always a few individuals who don’t fall for the shit.

Oops my last sentence got cut off

The vast majority of ads don’t work. Statistically there is a high probability of a subset of individuals where they don’t work at all. So shitting on anyone who claims they don’t work for them, only shows your own susceptibility to unsupported claims.

Human behavior is a wide distribution of genetic and cultural influences. Any broad claims like “everyone is susceptable to advertizing” is unsupportable.

Ads are designed to trigger a change in a person’s behavior in the target audience. If you are not the target audience or the ad is poorly calibrated it causes annoyance.

Most advertizing offers very little ROI to the business. This is why online advertisers are so aggressive on how they measure “engagement”. Given that ad revenue is the the primary driver of online and TV, the industry massively overemphasizes their effectiveness. Most advertising campaigns are only marginally effective if at all.

There is always an ad that will work on you but it’s not common. It’s likely less than 0.01% the massive amount of ads you are exposed to. But hey if you see 100 ads per day and one ad every 100 days works. It can be worth it to the company.

My wife (146cm) can confirm that opinion (I am 190cm).

Shifting the bonus compensation to long-term performance instead of “this year or even this quarter” is surprisingly very difficult. People are trained to game the system. It’s how sales forces operate in most companies.

It doesn’t matter what system you implement, somebody is constantly attempting to figure out how to maximize their profit at the cost of everyone else.

The more money involved, the more convoluted the games are.

Hmmm… This brings up an interesting question for the physics nerds out there.

The desired termination of the CEO is the sudden stop at the end of the flight.

When using a catapult or trebuchet, excessive force exerted during launch would terminate the CEO immediately. This would deprive the CEO of his last luxury flight. .

What the the maximum distance a catapult or trebuchet can throw the CEO while achieving this result? Assume the CEO weighs 100kg’s and is 165cm tall.

So you need two cement trucks.