Never heard of the Xerox Palo computer and I worked at Xerox for much of the 80s. Xerox made a lot of different machines (mostly but not exclusive in the D-Machine family) but if there was a Palo machine I’d be interested in seeing a photo.
Yup similar rates to PG&E although most of PG&Es customers don’t live in Silicon Valley.
Only Municipal power companies like in Sacramento, LA, Palo Alto & Santa Clara to name a few have rates that are 1/3 to 1/2 of PG&E rates. They pay a small grid interconnection fee to the other utilities but beyond that their cost structure is much lower and they don’t have to return dividends to stock holders.
Gas rates have a similar cost structure between municipal and public companies although for some reason there are fewer municipal gas companies at least for smaller cities.
In CA, in 2025, if you have PG&E it’s approx 55 cents/kwh at peak, non-peak rates are lower but the average ands up being close 50 cents. It’s close to the highest in the country.
No rates are high excluding the wildfires which has a separate surcharge to finance.
But PGE having to provide power to wilderness areas in genera costs all PG&E customers to bear the cost and it’s a cost that Municipal power companies in CA don’t have and their rates an 1/2 or even more than PG&Es.
Perhaps it is ‘undocumented’ and is used as proof of someone copying the source code some portion of the source code.
Another possibility is that is a special institution in the chip specifically for Apple that again was used as a copy write detection or protection scheme.
A little more complicated because in some settings drugs are covered by Medicare part B but generally not if administered yourself at home. Then yes it’s part D and the most out of pocket in Part D from 2025 going forward is $2K.
Also, they do negotiate for a very few drugs and the number is climbing. This was part of the IRA. However only drugs that are FDA approved for your issues are covered.
Before the IRA the government was not allowed to negotiate any drug prices by law which was/is crazy.
What, specifically, wasn’t HHS allowed to do? They weren’t purchasing the drugs.
Certainly the VA can and does negotiate prices for the drugs it buys (that’s one input to the HHS Medicare price-fixing formula), but it has a formulary and is buying drugs for its patients directly.
That’s because Medicare only covers drugs for approved FDA usage. It’s covered for diabetes but not weight loss. In general this is good policy. It is possible to challenge for some cases but generally that is the rule. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to both control costs and prevent harm.
If the drug manufacturers wanted it to be covered for weight loss there IS a process. File the correct paperwork with the FDA and do the rigorous studies that were don’t for the approved usage.
Over 65, outside drugs delivered in a clinic, hospital or doctors office you don’t get drug coverage UNLESS you pay for it through Part D Medicare, have a Medicare Advantage pan (the privatized version of Medicare that now 50% of the Medicare population has stupidly picked), or a retirement medical policy that acts like a Medicare supplemental policy that many government employees and some company’s offered their retirees.
That said it’s still a good deal and you can switch Part D policies year to year in case there are formulary issues. Plus with the IRA changes the max out of pocket is 2K which before you had no cap on—some new drugs are so crazy expensive that without this even the co-pay would wipe people out. That’s only recent fixed.
In our own case, my wife who 3 years ago our out of pocket for some daily cancer pills went from 15k in 2023, to 8K in 2024, to 2K this year as the IRA fully kicked in.
Musk firing people at random was not an exaggeration. My friend was head of all software at Tesla for the original car and much of the Model S development. Musk would routinely fire random folks in his department and he’d have to go to musk to get it undone. Often he had to put his job on the line threading to quit if he did not change his mind. Eventually musk took him up on it and my friend quit.
When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks (including me) to help add the internationalization infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be true.)
The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs.
What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking us about Apple.
None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because one of us (who I’ll kept nameless) alerted them about the meeting.
A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe, Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I think it was a court case) and employees between certain years at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant settlement.
I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could not cold call people at these companies to recruit.
As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser.
You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting.
I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari.
By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.
It was an insignificant settlement. This agreement was in place at the start of the mobile wars. Apple spent a lot of money suing its competitors instead of spending that money paying engineers to leave its competitors. Immediately following the ruling against the companies, salaries shot up industry-wide, by far more per year than each engineer got from the settlement for multiple years of illegal activity.
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