@GregKable Mate I'll remember your dad at the GC race, engaged in a post-presser discussion with Alex, in Kable Itanglish. A Ganassi media bloke tried to drag him away; Alex stopped him, waved him off and said, "no, this is Mike, he is my friend". I'll raise a glass to both of them tonight
Alex Zanardi has left us. A giant of a man in all ways but stature, who lifted everyone up with his talent and took us on a thrill ride of a lifetime. He leaves us with smiles, tears and pineapples, and a glass raised to a life well lived. Grazie Alessandro
Now that gas prices have spiked 50% in Europe, the Japanese will be making a killing from the 40% of Australian gas they export .. after we export it to them.
Might be time to check in on how that Domestic Gas Reservation policy is going bc our energy bills are about to run
Five years out, when billions of coding agents exist, software development will be largely solved. The traditional moat of “we have better engineers” disappears. Products will be copied, improved, and open-sourced almost instantly. Defensibility will shift away from code itself, toward distribution, data, brand, and community.
Just admit you've made a choice @McLarenF1
No amount of pressure, or any other reason @SkySportsF1 try to create, makes Oscar half a second slower than Lando
Literally the only thing that makes him suddenly half a second slower is in your control.
#F1#MexicoGP
It’s true. The original reason for ending prices in .99 was not psychological, it was to make sure employees weren't stealing... and it starts with the cash register itself:
In the 1870s, a saloon owner in Dayton was fed up with his bartenders pocketing cash and was desperate for a solution. While traveling by steamboat, he noted the mechanical counter that tracked how many times the ship’s propeller turned. He realized the same principle could track cash transactions... every sale increments a count, just like every propeller revolution. That insight led to his invention: "Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier."
Over time, they added a drawer and a bell and it became known as a Cash Register... and the name of the company became "National Cash Register" which you probably know as NCR, the company that still exists today (recently split into 2, worth a combined $4.5B)
Every time a clerk rang up a sale, the drawer opened and the bell chimed. That sound told the owner money was (or wasn’t) going into the till. Merchants discovered that if they priced items at 49¢ or 99¢, the clerk had to open the drawer to make change, forcing the bell to ring and the sale to be recorded. Around this time in the late 1800s, prices began ending this way.
The notion that $.99 feels cheaper than $1.00 didn’t come until much later. Marketing psychology picked up on it 50 years later, when professors started using terms like “left-digit anchoring” and consumer behavior reframed .99 pricing as a sales tactic rather than just an anti-theft device.
NCR gave us more than cash registers... the company built modern sales culture and was a huge talent magnet, like the Salesforce and Ramp of its day.
They created a formal sales school in 1887 to sell cash registers, complete with scripts, objection manuals, territories, quotas, and pep talks. They called it the “West Point of American business,” because it was known to be a talent magnet, producing executives who spread these practices across corporate America.
In 1912, NCR was indicted for antitrust violations. Their star salesman was Thomas J. Watson, who was convicted and then fired from NCR.
He took NCR’s sales playbook to a small company called the "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company" and became its CEO. He took the NCR sales model into beast mode - expanding internationally and changing the name of the company to "International Business Machines" (IBM) to reflect that.
A bunch of NCR disciples ended up at other prominent places, like Kettering at GM.
Kind of wild that after 155 years they are still selling cash registers.
anyway long way of saying to the haters in the comments that this poster is correct.
Marc Marquez has said that it makes no sense to start repairing the Ricardo Tormo circuit, when many people are without a home in the surrounding areas of the Valencia region 🗣️
#MotoGP