Yes! He organized a barebones conference out of the Meetup office in New York. The premise was that all attendees would do a 10 minute talk on any subject (I think it was called 10conf?). Mikeal spoke about his pour-over coffee setup while using it to make coffee for everyone.
I really enjoyed time I spent with him and appreciated his kindness and leadership in the community. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones.
Memory unlocked! I remember his coffee obsession and him going to extra effort to make sure that his events actually had real coffee rather than the usual conference garbage that was popular at the time.
This was an aside at the end of the article, but what an interesting strategy:
I bought the stock for the same reason I buy stock in every hotel, airline, bank, and similar I use: in the unlikely event a not-particularly-high-stakes poker player has a routine customer service complaint, Investor Relations is available as an escalation strategy, over e.g. hotel staff who might be long-since inured to listening to complaints from people who lost money in a casino.
I'm sure this works if you're buying a couple thousand shares at a time but I don't think buying 10 shares of Southwest is going to make them listen to you any more or less when you have an issue on your flight.
It doesn't matter whether they actually value you any more. The point is that investor relations is staffed by competent people, as opposed to customer service which is staffed by incompetent people as an intentional matter of efficient human capital allocation. So you can get much more reliable help if you can present the right class signals, and if you are at least theoretically allowed to call that line.
Companies literally keep a big list of all the people who have shares and how many, in case they want to send out a dividend or something. If they think it is important to check it is easy to do once they have a name. Realistically the cost of checking is probably higher than just dealing with the issue at hand so they won't.
Stocks are generally held in the name of the broker (“street name”), not the individual. I’m not saying they can’t check but I wouldn’t bet on them calling up Schwab to verify you really own 10 shares of UAL.
>Companies literally keep a big list of all the people who have shares and how many, in case they want to send out a dividend or something. If they think it is important to check it is easy to do once they have a name.
I thought companies only knew the brokerage, and it was the brokerage who could tie it back to a specific person ?
They literally have no computer system that can tell them the difference between you and a hedge fund manager, and so an email to IR fairly reliably gets the white glove treatment. I used to send them on behalf of, cliched but accurately, Kansan pensioners to banks, in at least one case justified by “I am a shareholder because my IRA holds SPY, which holds your common. It was therefore with great displeasure that…”
(Obviously one can still email IR without actually owning a share, but I both prefer not lying and also enjoy the aesthetics of capitalism, which are extremely invested—ba dum bum—in seeing someone who owns one share as a shareholder.)
Anyhow: bored person, near top of org chart, with access to escalation group if that exists, who earns six figures and really wants you to come away from the experience satisfied. Exists in almost every publicly traded company in America.
That was a slightly unfortunate choice of example because my groggy Friday-afternoon mind assumed 'Kan-san' was some sort of polite and idiomatic term for 田舎 dwellers and wasted a few minutes trying to figure out what it was short for.
>They literally have no computer system that can tell them the difference between you and a hedge fund manager, and so an email to IR [...]
The "From" header on the email? It might be possible someone sending from a @gmail.com address is a hedgie, but if they want to announce their affiliation they'll use their company email.
Has nothing to do with legal differences. It's just a different customer service team you end up talking to. It's in the same class of tricks as knowing the precise set of prompts to give to get immediately to a human operator when you call the main line.
Have done this twice recently. Did not own shares in either company outside of likely ownership in 401ks or index funds. They don’t check. Ridiculously effective.
I wonder how this could apply to American health insurance companies, where the company is very open about how diametrically opposed the interests of their investors are to the interests of their insured. I can’t even figure out how I would phrase my displeasure as an investor that the dirtbags at Anthem are denying vital healthcare to their “customers.” I suspect they’d reply “You’re welcome!”
It sounds like this is already the case, somewhat. The article says:
> Ambetter was obligated by state law to provide one outside of its network if Ravi couldn’t find one in a “timely manner” — which, in Arizona, meant within 60 days.
Good catch, you're probably still out closer to 3 or 4k with a lens, but it's definitely obtainable.
I'm more disappointed my cheaper Canon isn't eligible. When I think about it, there's no reason every single streaming movie even needs to be in 4K. It's going to be compressed heavily anyway .
> When I think about it, there's no reason every single streaming movie even needs to be in 4K.
I agree. I'd rather have better audio and actors not whisper their lines, forcing you to either turn on CC or turn up the volume. I wouldn't want to purposefully stream in 4k anyway - I don't really have a reason.
The content I watch on YT is, IMO, much more interesting than the netflix shows anyway, and recorded with much less expensive gear.
Partly future-proofing, partly you want to have the best possible input data so that your output data, even when heavily compressed, can be the best it can be.
I laugh when I see these because I've witnessed the process that leads to them. It goes something like:
1. Relatively confusing UX is designed and built.
2. User testing or executive review concludes the UX is relatively confusing.
3. Product Manager says "We'll build a slideshow/interactive tutorial!" to solve the problem.
The process and end result is completely understandable. It's hard to rehash a design when you've already built it and gotten buy-in.
I want to spend as little time as possible with most tools (especially enterprise tools), and so often these interrupt my work.
It's understandable in some sense. But wow, the arrogance of designing and building something and then only doing user testing at the point where it's too late to do anything about it. I could even forgive it the first time, but this just happens over and over.
While this can definitely be true, I think it's OK that some experiences are geared towards power users.
E.g. Photoshop is very powerful & you can be very productive but the controls aren't intuitive as a learner.
Aeroplane cockpits are geared towards being easy to do all the complicated things need to fly a plane, rather than being geared towards being easy to learn for non-pilots.
I just have to say the the entire Hokusai exhibition currently on view at MFA Boston[0] is very very cool. Great Wave is on display (as shown on this site), but the dozens of other prints (From Hokusai, Hiroshige, and others) are just incredible.
But is it on view? Most museums only rarely exhibit it to avoid fading. That's why, according to TFA, 56 museums have it in their collections but only two have it on view.
7 in Boston! So far they have shown 2 different impressions since the exhibition started. I am tracking the Harvard one, no movement since the project started.
Doesn't the site say the Great Wave is on display in Farmington, CT? Next stop is Boston, but currently the Great Wave (not sure about rest of collection) seems to be in CT.
There isn't just one Great Wave, there are around 100 first generation impressions. Boston are showing one of their 7 at the moment, and Farmington are showing theirs. Most others are currently stored away for preservation.
Yes, it's my site :) I'm in England so it would be an expensive trip to anywhere in the USA. Impressions are currently on display at both Boston and Farmington.
State and local laws matter a lot. I moved to a tenant-friendly state (NY) from a tenant-unfriendly state (Texas). NY has much stronger protections for renters. Better eviction laws, access to housing court, and actual enforcement of housing laws.
