CNBC story from 2016:

At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple.

Cook emphasized his company’s timing coming to market with new products to underscore the idea that it’s nearly impossible for a company to be the best, the first and to make the most of a given product. [...]

“It doesn’t bother us that we are second, third, fourth or fifth if we still have the best. We don’t feel embarrassed because it took us longer to get it right,” says Cook.

“For Apple, being the best is the most important and trumps the other two by far.”

This has been one of Apple’s guiding mantras for decades, and it has served the company very well. But it stops holding water when they promise to be first, but then aren’t first and aren’t the best.

If you only ever promise A, B, and C — and never mention X, Y, or Z — even when competitors ship their versions of X, Y, and Z first, your silence speaks for itself. Either you don’t think X, Y, and Z are important, or, you think it’s worth taking more time to get them right. But if you promise A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, and then only ship A, B, and C, you just look lost when competitors ship X, Y, and Z.

Oh, Enron, I thought—hoped and dreamed?—you were long, long gone, confined to the dustbin of history reserved for seriously fraudulent companies.

But apparently not.

More than two decades after Enron's bankruptcy in December 2001, the company is back. Well, at least an entity using the website Enron.com went public on Monday, announcing Enron's relaunch as "a company dedicated to solving the global energy crisis."

On social media, the company posted a simple message: "We're back. Can we talk?"

I mean, I'd rather not. But you may be wondering—especially if you're under the age of 40—why this is news. Moreover, why is Ars Technica's space editor writing about it? Well, gather round the campfire for a little bit of history, my friends.

What Enron was

A quarter of a century ago Enron was a titan of US industry. It was this amazing Houston success story that revolutionized the trading of energy as a commodity and did a lot of other cutting-edge things like trading bandwidth, delivering home video, and essentially seeking to own the Internet. It began to report incredible revenues in excess of $100 billion a year, and the company's chief executive, Ken Lay, was among the most prominent people in Houston, where I live.

Only it all turned out to be this huge fraud. It was bigger than the Theranos scandal, before Theranos existed. Wikipedia does a nice job of summarizing what went down: "Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud."

Yep, pretty much. It all unraveled quickly at the end of 2001.

Lay died of a heart attack while awaiting sentencing for being found guilty on multiple accounts of conspiracy and fraud. The firm's president, Jeffrey Skilling, was convicted of conspiracy, insider trading, securities and fraud. He served 12 years of a 24-year sentence before being released from prison in 2019. Chief financial officer Andrew Fastow received six years in prison after cooperating with federal authorities. One of the "big five" accounting firms, Arthur Andersen, was dissolved entirely for its part. It was all a big hullabaloo, and the Enron scandal became a cautionary tale.

Riding the rollercoaster down

At the time I was a 20-something reporter at the Houston Chronicle. I'd just gotten the beat I wanted—covering science—for a major daily newspaper. On the day the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the paper's city editor, Wendy Benjaminson, came up to me and said, "Berger, you're good with numbers, aren't you?" With that, she assigned me to drop the science beat and cover Enron's bankruptcy proceedings.

And so I did. I flew to New York City twice a month for hearings. It was an eerie time in the southern end of Manhattan, just weeks after the September 11 attack. The hearings themselves were dreadfully boring. I had never covered a court case and knew next to nothing about bankruptcy law.

There wasn't much to go on. The lawyers for Enron were arrogant jerks, and the $500-and-up  hourly rate they were charging the company did not include returning telephone calls from reporters. This experience consumed the better part of two years, but I achieved some pretty awesome status levels on Continental Airlines, at least.

Eventually, I came back to science writing and, about a decade ago, decided I wanted to cover space full-time and joined Ars in 2015. I had almost completely forgotten about Enron until the 'news' that Enron was relaunching itself.

So what’s really happening?

The company's new website is entirely bland, nothing but vague promises and values. A news release offers only a little bit more information, saying things like Enron has a "renewed commitment to integrity" and will focus on "solving the energy crisis."

Although there's nothing specific about it in the company's newly released information, it sounds like the relaunched Enron will create some token or coin to support energy sustainability.

I reached out to the company's press contact and asked for more information about this and whether the new Enron had bought the old Enron name. A quick reply came from Will Chabot, who said, "We'll have more to share soon and will be sure to keep you in the loop. Right now we have no additional comment beyond the press release." Despite the similarity of his name to chatbot, Chabot does, in fact, seem to be a real person.

Honestly, it's difficult to know what is going on here. In the website's terms of use, there is a comment that references the site as "protected parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only." Also, this isn't actually Enron's original domain. It still exists here. So maybe it's all a lark?

Nevertheless, if there is an effort to sell cryptocurrency here, well, I can say it does seem on brand for the crypto industry to associate with Enron. There was a ton of hype at that company, too.

As for solving the energy crisis, the crypto justification for energy is that when renewables overproduce, cryptocurrency mining can soak up the excess. At the same time, it can be shut down when the grid is near its limits. However, the reality is that the same can be said for batteries, and batteries actually improve the use of renewable energy. Most of the time, cryptocurrency creates an excess demand that’s filled using fossil fuel plants that would not be active if crypto didn’t exist.

Anyway, Enron is back, I guess—just in time for the holidays.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to announce the revised program on Thursday with the aim of putting it in place before Donald Trump takes office.

Intent on changing the U.S. food supply under the incoming Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. passed judgment on the president-elect’s culinary choices during a recent podcast interview.

CNN:

During recent remarks at a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser, Walz made a rough-and-ready case for [Harris] before would-be small-dollar donors.

“How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come?” Walz asked. “And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his ass, sent him on the road?”

I was hoping for Buttigieg or Shapiro, but that quote alone makes me like the cut of Walz’s jib. Also, Walz is the guy who got the whole “they’re weird” thing going.

Andy Allen:

Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps.

This is a “weather app” using the new Make Designs feature and the results are basically Apple’s Weather app (left). Tried three times, same results.

This is even more disgraceful than a human rip-off. Figma knows what they trained this thing on, and they know what it outputs. In the case of this utter, shameless, abject rip-off of Apple Weather, they’re even copying Weather’s semi-inscrutable (semi-scrutable?) daily temperature range bars.

“AI” didn’t do this. Figma did this. And they’re handing this feature to designers who trust Figma and are the ones who are going to be on the hook when they present a design that, unbeknownst to them, is a blatant rip-off of some existing app.

Maybe now that the Adobe deal fell through, Figma is looking to sell itself to Samsung?