Covered this week; How McDonald’s Monopoly Game was a scam for 12 years running… Amidst declining sales, what does the Mac mean to Apple? Death to the Bullshit Web… Uber and Lyft battle in NYC… The oldest building in every US State… How hackers, founders and freaks built Silicon Valley… From the brink of bankruptcy to the world’s most valuable public company in just under two decades…
(Editor’s Note; I’ve been away for awhile… off doing other stuff I suppose would be my only excuse… but now I’m back… so there you go.)
July 30, 2018
The trial for these crimes began September 10, 2001… the day before the 9/11 attack on America of that year, which is most likely why you may not have known it took place at all… but here’s the story of Uncle Jerry, Simon Marketing, FBI Agent Richard Dent, McDonalds, Inc… and the whole litany of characters behind the crimes that kept prize money and merchandise out of the hands of legitimate winners, instead going to an ever increasing web of co-conspirators for well over a decade as the McDonald’s Monopoly game was co-opted… this could certainly be the most interesting story you read this week…
July 31, 2018
“Between dropping sales and controversial products, what does the Mac means to Apple in 2018? Yes, it’s the company’s first flagship product, but it’s also an increasingly small portion of its business. Pretty much everything that Apple sells, from streaming music and wireless headphones to the Apple Watch and HomePod, is designed with iOS in mind. The days of the Mac serving as your “digital hub,” as Steve Jobs famously put it way back in 2001, are long gone.”
August 1, 2018
“There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.” Bandwidth continues to get faster, yet so many web pages take forever to load…
August 2, 2018
“While New York City has always been one of the most regulated markets for Uber and Lyft in the U.S., it’s Uber’s largest U.S. market by far. So any battle in New York City is a critical one for both companies. And as both Uber and Lyft plan to go public in the next two years, a 12-month pause on growth here could be particularly undesirable.”
August 3, 2018
This is cool… usually I shy away from “list” links… but this one contains the entire list on one page and it’s a pretty quick read considering…
“The United States is a comparatively young country, but one with a rich and diverse history. From the ancient villages of New Mexico’s Pueblo people and the early Spanish settlers in Florida, to the Russian traders of Alaska and 19th-century missionaries in Utah, each of the 50 states has its own story to tell.”
August 4, 2018
Writer Adam Fisher talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his new oral history, “Valley of Genius: The uncensored history of Silicon Valley, as told to me by the hackers, founders, and freaks who made it boom.” Fisher interviewed some of tech’s biggest names for the book, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, but he discovered that “the most interesting, unfiltered, real stories” often came from people who were never in the spotlight.
August 5, 2018
“Apple’s ascent from the brink of bankruptcy to the world’s most valuable public company has been a business tour de force, marked by rapid innovation, a series of smash-hit products and the creation of a sophisticated, globe-spanning supply chain that keeps costs down while producing enormous volumes of cutting-edge devices.”
