Since I came to live in America I have been constantly shocked by how much different contractors are trying to screw you up. The spread in quotes can easily be as much as 5 times from the (already expensive) cheapest to the most expensive ones, with what I am guessing is the majority of contractors high balling and trying to score easy money. I dread the upcoming weeks of negotiations every time I need to get anything fixed around the house.

Yes, this is the right way to solve it. Forcing DST on everyone in winter without adjusting school starting times is a horrible and selfish idea.

It's like Google is running its own business incubator. I wonder how Google practices and success rates compare to VC funding for startups. What is the distribution of lifetime of VC funded startups before the money supply gets cut off compared to Google projects?

I often wonder if it's less Google running a business incubator and more a combined retention and PR program. Running these projects helps them retain talent, and it helps them create a lot of talk about stuff they are doing that isn't tracking your every move and invading your privacy.

Still would be interesting to know whether it's more likely for a Google project to survive than it is for a startup.

Apple some time ago recognized that they won't be able to compete on software with other BigTech giants so they are building an environment where certain software advancements are crippled. User activity data will be important to tune algorithms for maximum utility and by restricting access to user data for others, Apple wants to give itself the best shot to stay in the game.

In the long run this will be a net loss for the Apple customers whose experiences will likely suffer compared to Android and other players. Already in my subjective opinion Android on Pixel phones provides a much richer and engaging environment than iOS and the difference will only become even more pronounced.

Now it's a race. Will Apple superior hardware and privacy focus draw the majority of users before Google and others deliver clearly better software experiences, or whether the difference in software smarts will cause users to gravitate away from the walled garden of iOS and towards more permissive ecosystems.

> Apple some time ago recognized that they won't be able to compete on software with other BigTech giants so they are building an environment where certain software advancements are crippled. User activity data will be important to tune algorithms for maximum utility and by restricting access to user data for others, Apple wants to give itself the best shot to stay in the game.

That seems off to me. Apple isn't crippling anything, they're giving their users the choice of opting in/out of tracking. If, as you say, choosing not being tracked makes the users' experiences so bad, they can simply opt-in and all will be good again. What am I missing?

Getting users to opt-in will be very hard given the current partially justifiable negative vibe, so that will likely not happen at scale unless opting in results in a clearly better experience. However, if the majority of users jump into the Apple ecosystem before those clearly better experiences are materialized, there will be few remaining alternatives for Apple users to compare to and change their mind regarding tracking. Consequently there will also be little incentive to improve the software using user data.

Lots of negativity in the comments here, but I personally will love to have a way of interacting with the phone even when my fingers are wet or dirty.