"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come."
Which means that a much sadder day is coming, sooner than any of us would like. Steve Jobs is the Edison of the modern age. Edison turned electricity into a part of every household, and defined it. Steve turned computing and the Internet into ubiquitous personal accessories, and defined them (within that mode as ubiquitous accessories).
Neither Apple, nor our world, will be the same without him in it.
UPDATE: Steve's best quotes.
Very interesting presentation from South by Southwest (SxSW) 2011. He's pretty candid about the longer-term threats embedded in a data-as-a-platform world, but also very interesting rewarding the opportunities for creating businesses out of data streams. For me, it's been worth multiple playings, even though it's almost an hour (but it works fine as background audio).
Beyond tech, I quite liked his general point about "It wasn't that the future [predicted in the 1960s/70s] wasn't magical, it was just sooner and stranger than we think." The crack about "I flew here on an airplane, courtesy of the Wright Brothers, and customer service, courtesy of Darth Vader" is also a keeper.
But the rest is equally worth your attention. Feel free to discuss among yourselves.
Three federal agencies announced agreements with the nation's largest mortgage servicers Wednesday that aim to stem shoddy foreclosure practices. But the plans do not immediately impose financial penalties on the companies or force them to reduce the mortgage debt for troubled borrowers.Look, it's simple. When the regulators work for the regulated - or at least plan to do so in their next career cycle - public choice theory makes it unlikely that those of us on the outside are going to get much out of the arrangement.
The deals require the mortgage servicers to identify and compensate borrowers who suffered financial harm, but the details have not yet been decided. The companies must also provide a single point of contact for struggling borrowers, many of whom complain of getting the runaround when they try to get help. Servicers also would not be able to foreclose on borrowers after granting them a loan modification.
On tipping - and breast sizeStunned, I tell you.
Yes, it does make a difference, at least according to a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The larger the breasts, the bigger the gratuity.
Parks has been targeted for removal by the DWP's union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18, and its affiliate IBEW 11, as well as the city's police union and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and SEIU Local 721.
The cash-rich unions representing thousands of city workers have organized a massive independent expenditure campaign, pouring more than $650,000 in contributions into electing Hogan-Rowles.
Ohio's attorney general threw a wrench into the banking industry's push to quickly restart foreclosures by fixing faulty paperwork, and pressed them to modify mortgage loans.
George Soros, a major funder of progressive causes, criticized President Obama today for giving in to deficit hawks amid an economic recession. "To cut government spending at a time of large-scale unemployment would be to ignore the lessons of history," he said.Wouldn't it be nice to know what his currency positions are today vis a vis the dollar??
I think Marc has his finger on one of our society's bigger problems in his recent post "BP & Obama as Morlocks and Eloi."
Since Winds is partly about trying to do something constructive about such things, I offer Popular Science's "When Things Fall Apart," by a well inspector, as an initial 4th of July weekend contribution. See also the comments there, as some of them are useful contributions in their own right.
But what about the final thrust lower - the seeming air pocket? We know, thanks to our friends at CNBC who were fixated on this particular stock, that Proctor & Gamble tumbled by over -35% in the span of about 5 minutes. It's impossible to tell by looking at a chart of the stock, but when you look at the individual prints you can see that this was not a case in which two or three "erroneous" prints marked the tape down to $39 before the stock sprang back to $60. I've got 28 pages in front of me of P&G prints that occurred between $39 and $50 per share and between 2:46 p.m. and 2:51 p.m. At 36 prints per page, that means P&G traded over one thousand times at those "crazy" and "surely erroneous" levels. I'm sorry, but that isn't an error, THAT IS WHAT WE LIKE TO CALL TRADING.-
With the stock market gyrating frantically up and down, there's a lot of heavy breathing out there. If you're feeling anxious, I commend to you this video from about a year ago, to brighten your day:
Minyanville's characters may be animated, but it's a real financial site and the people involved here are likewise real.
