Unless you're talking about enameled cast iron (Le Creuset, Staub), then acidic ingredients like tomatoes will remove the seasoning from your pan. It shouldn't hurt your sauce, but re-seasoning your gear is a pain in the ass.
Well yeah, if the rest of your company regularly does something fun together, and you can't be bothered 1 time in 20, then you're probably not a good cultural fit.
Like it or not, a workplace is a community. And the norms of communities will differ. There's no need to shit on places that work differently than you're used to.
Just don't work at those kinds of places.
What's more, it doesn't make any sense to assume that your views are the same as "99%" of people without any evidence.
I don't think anybody was expecting a hagiography; Jobs has too many failures and flaws for any biographer to write that book. But just because Isaacson captured how Steve Jobs could be both terrible and compelling doesn't mean Isaacson succeeded. He didn't. He missed the point entirely about why people want to read about Jobs. We didn't buy the book to learn about Jobs' strained relations with his children or what he remembers about ex-girlfriends from 30 years ago. We bought it to find out how he managed to be the right guy in the right place at the right time, time and time again, realigning entire industries to his interests.
Isaacson had a chance to uncover what made Steve Jobs tick. To understand how Jobs made the company that made the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and put giant footprints on the PC, music, filmmaking, and telecom industries. Instead we got armchair psychology and a rehash of "he's demanding to the point of being unbearable but he usually makes good calls." Why could Steve Jobs create Apple and not anybody else? He's not the only visionary in Silicon Valley and certainly not the only asshole. So why, with unprecedented access to Jobs and everyone he's worked with, could Isaacson not tell us anything new?
Maybe if you think Jobs wasn't anything special, just a fortunate narcissist, you'd be satisfied with the book. Obviously he'd be nothing without people, like Woz, Hertzfield, Tribble, Tevanian, Ive, Catmull, Lasseter, and many others who did incredible work that he could never do himself. But even that perspective leaves the question of why so many geniuses did their best work when they worked with Jobs.
Isaacson doesn't even address how Jobs learned how to run companies. I'd argue that the pivotal moment for this occurs during the NeXT days, covered by Isaacson only superficially. But NeXT is clearly the turning point of Jobs' career. Everything he did up till and including NeXT ended in flames. But after, it's success after success. How then did he finally manage to not alienate everybody and go down in a blaze of glory? How did he hang onto his team from NeXT use them to remake Apple? Not to mention Isaacson failed to understand that how NeXT's system became the foundation of everything important Apple has done since (OS X and iOS are both direct descendants of NeXT's OS).
Nor do we learn about how he worked with any of his trusted lieutenants besides Ive, like Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Phil Schiller, or Scott Forstall. We don't even get a sense of why they stuck by him or bought into his vision. We get some insight into the Woz relationship, but still not why they succeeded when others failed.
Isaacson had the chance to tell the story of a remarkable life in business, but he demurred. Judged against the life it chronicles, Isaacson's book is a failure.
Tell that to Samsung and HTC. Microsoft's patent position was strong enough that it managed to force each of them to pay Microsoft a license fee for every Android device they sell.
Fact is Android is anything but free, except it's Microsoft, not Google, who's collecting on every incremental Android sale.
VentureBeat made a valid point that an earlier version of the Senate's financial reform bill created a big problem for venture-funded startups, by requiring an SEC filing and associated 120 day waiting period for all companies seeking funding. http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/26/angel-investing-chris-dodd...
However, this language was removed during the floor amendment process, but Arrington doesn't mention that small example of the state acting sensibly (the Senate, no less--which is arguably the most dysfunctional institution in the whole apparatus.) http://www.techjournalsouth.com/2010/05/senate-approves-fina...