Jen MacIntyre:

"Almost as disturbing as the 100% probability that wherever you see them next, be it a bus, oncology screening waiting room, or hell, even between songs at an elementary school concert, they will be watching a TikTok about how to earn passive income with compost at full volume."

"Sometimes with headphones visibly displayed around their neck," Kenther added with a shiver. "It's terrifying." [...]

"The reality is, you can spot a serial killer using a number of traits -- reclusiveness, meticulousness, violent outbursts," detective Bob Qundy of the RCMP's Serious Crimes Branch. "But any psychological profiler worth his salt will tell you the easiest way is to hang out at a neighbourhood restaurant at the dinner hour and listen for the guy sitting alone at the bar watching an episode of Scrubs right off YouTube.

"Just remember," Qundy added, "Although all sociopaths blast from their phones, not all people who blast from their phones are sociopaths. It's important to remember that some of them are psychopaths -- there's a difference."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States. [...] The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology. [...]

Here is Apple’s full statement to 9to5Mac:

A Presidential Review Period is in progress regarding an order from the U.S. International Trade Commission on a technical intellectual property dispute pertaining to Apple Watch devices containing the Blood Oxygen feature. While the review period will not end until December 25, Apple is preemptively taking steps to comply should the ruling stand. This includes pausing sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 from Apple.com starting December 21, and from Apple retail locations after December 24.

Apple’s teams work tirelessly to create products and services that empower users with industry-leading health, wellness, and safety features. Apple strongly disagrees with the order and is pursuing a range of legal and technical options to ensure that Apple Watch is available to customers.

Should the order stand, Apple will continue to take all measures to return Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 to customers in the U.S. as soon as possible.

There’s some room here to finish holiday gift sales, but color me surprised that this dispute has gone to the deadline like this. Apple will continue selling Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches outside the U.S., but here, the only model that will remain available is the SE.

Curious strategy from Apple to put this news out in a statement originally given only to one publication. My guess, and it’s just a wild guess, is that they’re playing chicken with the Biden administration, hoping President Biden will issue a veto on this ITC import ban. President Obama issued a similar veto back in 2013 that would have been banned the import of the iPhone 4 and some iPad models. The Biden administration, I’m guessing, was hoping that Apple would just write a check to Masimo to settle this dispute, and doesn’t want to be seen putting its thumb on the scale favoring a “big tech” company, all of which are considered villainous to some degree on the left.

Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis, reporting for The New York Times:

Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. eroded quickly on Wednesday, after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?

Their lawyerly replies to that question and others during a four-hour hearing drew incredulous responses. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates. [...]

Much of the criticism landed heavily on Ms. Magill because of an extended back-and-forth with Representative Stefanik. Ms. Stefanik said that in campus protests, students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them. Ms. Stefanik asked Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?”

Ms. Magill replied, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

Ms. Stefanik pressed the issue: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”

Ms. Magill, a lawyer who joined Penn last year with a pledge to promote campus free speech, replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”

Ms. Stefanik responded: “So the answer is yes.”

Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”

Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”

The reckoning has come for the bizarro-world political climate that’s taken hold at these universities in the last decade or two. This patently offensive equivocation — when the correct answer was obviously an unambiguous “Yes” — makes sense in the context of the insular far-left worldview where the oppressed are viewed as inherently just, but comes across as absurd to everyone living in the real world. All three of these elite university presidents are obviously utterly tone-deaf and detached from the real world.

You can only pretend to live in a bubble for so long. Then the bill comes due.

Joseph Simonson in The Washington Free Beacon, “NYU Law Students Say Classmate Losing Job Offer Over Pro-Hamas Statement Is ‘Violence’”:

New York University law students are rallying behind a student who lost a spot at a white-shoe law firm for defending Hamas, saying the firm’s decision to rescind their offer constitutes “violence.”

The Chicago-based Winston & Strawn withdrew its offer of employment to Ryna Workman after the nonbinary NYU student issued a statement claiming “Israel bears full responsibility” for the terrorist attacks that have left more than 1,300 dead, including at least 30 Americans. The firm’s decision is just one instance of “systemic, concentrated violence” Workman has experienced since issuing her anti-Israel pronouncement, according to a letter of support obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The letter’s signatories, which include the Black Allied Law Students Association and the Women of Color Collective, accuses NYU of being complicit “in the abuses of the Israeli government,” and condemns “the broader NYU administration for not protecting Ryna as a student and important member of our community.”

Words have meaning. The far left has been mangling the definition of violence for years now, inverting the age old adage that sticks and stones can break your bones but words will never hurt you. Words can hurt, of course — deeply. But it’s a different kind of hurt than pain and carnage inflicted through violence. We’d be in a far better place if the only exchanges between Gaza and Israel were words, no matter how hateful those words be.

These students should be expelled from college, not placated. Misusing violence in this context — a terrorist attack that has killed 1,300 innocent Israelis, maimed many thousands more, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the resulting still-unfolding war — is outrageously offensive. Many of the dead can’t be identified. They’ve just been blown apart. That’s violence. Everyone knows what the word really means — “the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy”. These left-wing nuts are obtusely pretending the word means something else for reasons that might surprise even Orwell, the master of identifying the decline of language in the name of politics. When in doubt, mistrust those abusing language, obfuscating, resorting to euphemism, and redefining words.

For those of you short on time, these synopses from The Verge are great.

Angus Loten writing for The Wall Street Journal:

When Salesforce Inc. bought the messaging application Slack for $27.7 billion almost two years ago, it said the marriage would “transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.” Corporate technology buyers so far aren’t impressed, analysts said.

The acquisition sought to capture the fast-growing market for communications and collaboration software during the Covid-19 pandemic, as employers sent workers home and shifted to remote systems.

Today, companies in the market for customer-relationship management software — Salesforce’s signature product — don’t appear to be swayed one way or another by the addition of messaging and collaboration features, said Liz Herbert, a vice president and principal analyst at information-technology research firm Forrester Research Inc.

“We don’t really see, when it comes to Slack, any pent up demand from Salesforce’s base for a tool like that,” Ms. Herbert said. “It really hasn’t become something compelling,” she said.

I’ll go to the mat arguing that Slack is better-designed and better-implemented than Microsoft Teams. But to make a very broad analogy, I think Slack is to Teams today where Mac OS was to Windows in the mid-1990s: better designed, for sure, but not in a way that makes a difference to the corporate IT decision makers and bean counters who are making the call on which platform to use.

The key is not merely to be better, on some vectors. The key is to be better on the vectors that people with purchasing power care about. Missing this has been the death knell for many good products. One difference between the iPhone and Mac is that the iPhone came of age at the cusp of the “bring your own device to work era”, so factors that appealed to individuals (looks cool, fun to use) outweighed factors that might have swayed traditional corporate IT purchasers (low price, “standards”).