During the 08 financial crisis, Mitsubishi wrote a $9 billion CHECK to close an investment in Morgan Stanley over a holiday weekend. The concern was that MS's stock would nosedive if the deal wasn't done before the market opened. The check was apparently enough to legally close the deal on a weekend when it wasn't possible to wire funds.
"I’m not surprised, but this makes me feel incredibly sad. I built my first PC using parts from there. I’m going to miss it."
Yeah, same here. I'm not sure if the first PC I built was from Fry's parts but the second+ definitely were. I used to love going there in the late 90s-early 2000s – they put a lot of effort into demo areas/displays back then and the selection was unbeatable, especially for components and things that Best Buy wouldn't (and doesn't) even bother with. I get that paying retail rents to stock $2 patch cables doesn't work these days but I will miss it.
I would have paid a lot of money for that back in the pre-CSS days, assuming it worked well. Was it purely image-based or could it recognize when an area could be rendered without using an image (like a single color zone/etc.)?
Been reading Matt's work since the Dealbreaker days and agree 100%. It's rare to see someone pull off being genuinely funny when (knowledgeably!) writing about financial and legal mechanics.
Matt once wrote about something I was working on. His analysis was way more on-point and technically accurate than that of any other article I read about it. I wanted to email him at the time but like you wasn't exactly in a position to talk to a journalist.
100%. Coda was especially useful if you weren't running your server stack on your local dev machine. Hit "Publish" and all your changed files are pushed up automatically. So much better than hunting through an FTP client every time you make a small edit.
PSA being down is interesting. I might have thought there would be greater demand for storage units as people clear stuff out of their houses to make room for home offices/gyms/etc.
That said, all the people who've lost jobs or hours are probably not looking to pay $100s/month for an auxiliary junk room.
I used to have a terminal and still work with some of Bloomberg's data products. A big part of their value proposition isn't so much the functionality of the terminal (though it's really extensive, and they keep adding stuff over time) but the breadth of data you can get through it. Not all of it is easily available and/or indexed elsewhere – I've heard Bloomberg literally has teams of people that hand-enter some of the more esoteric stuff. They also do things like create/maintain their own synthetic bond indexes fed from proprietary valuation models. Would take a ton of time/money to EEE all that.
And yeah, it's actually pretty extensible. There's a mechanism to create apps for the terminal, though I never really used those. Bloomberg will also sell you a programmatically-accessible data feed of pretty much anything they have, although those can cost well into six figures annually.
Parking is really expensive in a lot of cities. Easily $40/night+ if you're leaving a car at your hotel, plus you have to pay to park while sightseeing/etc.
There's even a picture of the check on MS's Twitter: https://twitter.com/morganstanley/status/1315673245291614208...