This is *exactly* how I feel about the upcoming elections. How can some of these races be close (looking at you, Georgia and Arizona)?

Big day in financial markets yesterday. Elon Musk bought Twitter for $40 billion. I sold a one bedroom condo for slightly less than that. Why does he get all the headlines?

I just don’t get the Twitter acquisition. Perhaps, just perhaps, Musk can drive its value up via operational efficiencies and some less complicated content moderation. But so what? Musk typically spends his time on transformational, disruptive technology plays, and I just don’t see that with Twitter. Worst case, he made an off-the-cuff public offer/bet of $40B and the SEC is holding him to it. He’s worth $211B, so he can afford it. But what a waste.

We voted by mail yesterday. It was easy except for all the weird judiciary positions one could vote on with basically no information. We did our best – when in doubt, we defaulted to D. In doing so I realized we’ll be gone for the big Nov 8 election, wherein we get to see who wins Senate races, Guv races, and who controls Congress for a while. We’ll be somewhere north of the Arctic circle on that day, floating around in a COVID concentration device.

Speaking of devices, we bought Kathryn a new iPhone 14 this week, and it was *painful*. Apple says they will transfer all your data from the old phone to the new one, but they do a shitty job of it. The guy they had “assisting” us didn’t know what he was doing. When I suggested a direct phone-phone transfer using Bluetooth and NFC (what apple calls Quickstart), he didn’t know what I was talking about. He sort of knew how to do a backup/restore from iCloud, and that’s all.

Plus, we made an appointment to spend the least time possible in the store, and that was useless. Turns out appointments are no different than walkins -we just got in an electronic queue (that we couldn’t see) and waited behind folks who just showed up. I let the kid serving us know that Apple’s idea of an appointment is different than mine.

Long story short, we declined to spend an hour plus in the store with Apple ham-handedly transferring data, and went home and restored her data to her new phone via the backup I had made earlier that day. In ten minutes. Apple customer service used to be great. Now they try, and they are exceedingly polite, but they’re not very useful.