And as far as "listening to customers" goes, I think that Apple actually has a better track record of that than most. People hated scroll-bar direction-changes. Apple said "You can now have it either way".
Yeah, except that we hated it internally long before the public hated it, yet it didn't become an option until people screamed publicly. Apple's culture often behaves like a cult of personalities, where people blindly continue down the path chosen by a decision-maker even when dozens of people think they're wrong. IMO, the failure to accept internal criticism and adapt is Apple's biggest flaw, and if anything will be its downfall, it will be that.
I like bashing on Apple as much as the next guy, but how often does everyone else trip on their cables that removing the MagSafe charger equates to the almost mandatory need to replace the laptop before it's useful life is over?
It only takes once. The cost of replacing a shattered screen is a sizable percentage of the cost of the laptop.
Unfortunately, unless they failed to document it, APFS currently lacks data checksumming, which is less than ideal when storing data on flash (particularly TLC flash). Here's hoping they fix that oversight in the final version.
MagSafe 2 would be adequate if it were in the middle of a cable instead of in a position to get knocked loose by your lap. And a MagSafe connection even a few inches into the cable would be just as good as a MagSafe connection on the device.
You readily admit that the MagSafe connector can be knocked free by your lap, yet you think moving it to the cable would be just as good? What exactly do you think would happen when you apply that same force to a connector that plugs in to the laptop?
Nothing. Connectors are designed to handle a certain amount of force in an upwards or downwards direction. Any connector that can't handle this is fundamentally flawed by design. The original MagSafe was much better at not disconnecting. Only MagSafe 2 is hopelessly inadequate (because the magnets are too small).
The purpose of MagSafe is not to prevent damage to the jack or the cable. The purpose is to ensure that when you trip over the cable, it doesn't pull the ultra-light laptop off the table, causing it to shatter when it hits the floor.
Putting it a few inches down the cable will move the disconnection point away from the laptop itself to a point where it won't be pressed against your leg, and thus where the MagSafe connector being as thick as the machine won't matter. But the breakaway force would still be roughly the same, and far smaller than the amount of force needed to pull the laptop off of the table. Thus, it would still serve its primary purpose.
Fair enough. I basically stopped using flash drives when I realized I could tether to my phone and upload single-file backups to my computer at home without having to fumble around with a USB device that's thicker than my laptop, but for folks who use flash drives regularly, not having any standard USB ports would be a pain.
The good news is that Sandisk makes a flash drive with USB on one end and USB-C on the other end. If that trend continues, this won't be a problem for very long.
If ONLY they made... adapters that could allow you to connect a standard pair of headphones via the USB or Lightning ports.
Yeah. I bought two of those for my Mac Mini at home—the first because I needed a second separately addressable analog audio output, and the second because the first one immolated itself internally after about a week.
The existence of cheap electronics as a workaround does not negate the pain that losing the headphone jack in my MBP would cause. Just saying.
First, the Mini and the Mac Pro are the worst selling machines in the lineup, even when they were brand new.
For the Mini, a big part of that is because they saddled it with a substandard two-core CPU in the last hardware revision, rather than the four-core that was available in the top-tier Mini prior to that. Previous generations made a popular server platform. These days, refurbished 2012 four-core Minis sell for at least as much as the current generation (and for a while, were considerably more expensive, with used 2012 models selling significantly above their original SRP).
Basically, Intel screwed up with Haswell by using a different pinout for two-core and four-core CPUs. Apple apparently concluded that it was better to ship something sooner rather than waiting for... I think Broadwell, which unified the pinout. (Or it might have been Skylake.) And they concluded that it wasn't worth designing two very different boards for the two SKUs of the same model. In retrospect, they probably should have made them all four-core.
The Mac Pro doesn't sell well because it is based on a four-year-old CPU microarchitecture (Ivy Bridge), has no real support for expandable storage (resulting in an ugly external RAID enclosure next to most of them), and costs as much as an automobile.
Basically, each of these models is a great example of Apple doing the exact opposite of what most of its customers wanted, and as a result, creating products that nobody wants to buy. And now, with their MacBook Pro, it looks like they're repeating the same mistakes, abandoning most of the features that power users depend on, and turning the former "Pro" machines into consumer-grade toys with just a little bit more storage and a little bit more battery life.
Meh. Most people who carry around USB devices can carry around a different cable just as easily. In the grand scheme of don't care, it's a lot less annoying than the headphone jack would have been.
And as much as I think removing the HDMI port is annoying, the truth is that I already have to carry around a retractable HDMI cable, so carrying an adapter for the relatively rare situations where I use the HDMI cable isn't that annoying either.
What is annoying, if true, is the removal of the SD card slot. Yes, Apple's SD card slot is many years out of date and should have been updated at least half a decade ago to support UHS-II, but Apple's inclusion of an SD card slot, slow as it is, has been a significant driving force in pushing camera companies to move to SD instead of CF, and has resulted in standardization that otherwise would not have happened.
Without that anchor, the industry is very likely to devolve into the wild west of card formats again. In five years, some consumer-level cameras will use CFast, others will use UHS-II SD, and others will use XQD. I wouldn't be surprised to see three or four other formats by the time all is said and done.
If true, this is a crippling blow for standards. And I really have to ask what makes this laptop "pro" at that point. It sounds like the only meaningful difference between it and the standard MacBook will be a second USB port. They're apparently dropping all the other distinguishing features that made it worth hundreds of dollars more—the HDMI port, the SD card slot, MagSafe... and the only thing replacing all that lost hardware functionality is a set of soft-reconfigurable action buttons at the top of the keyboard. Whee.
Actually, it would be really easy to keep. You just make a six-inch USB-C-to-MagSafe adapter and plug your existing MagSafe or MagSafe 2 cable into that adapter. As an added bonus, the too-weak magnet used in MagSafe 2 would be adequate if it were in the middle of a cable instead of in a position to get knocked loose by your lap. And a MagSafe connection even a few inches into the cable would be just as good as a MagSafe connection on the device.
Unfortunately, thanks to Apple's over-patenting, the only company that can legally make such an adapter is Apple, so if they don't, the average cost of owning a Mac just tripled.
That's nothing. There's one gas station that I pulled into while running low on fuel that advertised one price, and when I looked more closely, it was a dollar more per gallon for using a credit card. I drove on and risked running out of gas just to avoid rewarding them for such egregious abuse.
If the same bill privatized social security and transferred your previous contributions into a 401k as-is, people might be more tolerant. I know that's not likely to be a popular idea among Democrats, but in conjunction with a BI, it might work.
Actually, it's usually high packet loss and upstream saturation that causes the latency. LTE has sub-100 millisecond latency, and even 3g typically is under half a second. Yes, by networking standards, that's huge, but not unusable. What causes cellular communication to be horrible is when you get into multi-second latency because three-quarters of your packets never make it to the tower, either because of over-the-air congestion, saturated upstream pipes, or multipath interference, all of which are caused by having orders of magnitude fewer towers than we actually need.
It's closer than you might think. If you have a wife and two kids, that's $40,000... That's only a little under a median household income. Perhaps kids pay out less, but that raises the amount available for adults.
You almost certainly wouldn't give $10k to every person. You'd give slightly less to couples filing jointly, and much less for dependent children, because housing prices don't grow linearly with the number of people. When you go from a single person living alone to a married couple with two kids, you still need only one kitchen, one bathroom (minimally), one living room, etc. You just need more bedrooms. So the cost for the second person (the husband/wife) is less than the cost for the first, and the cost for the remaining two is much less (particularly when you factor in hand-me-down clothing, assuming they aren't twins).
Also, the amount paid out is related to income. If you implemented a $10,000 UBI, plus a 25% universal flat tax, you would only receive the full $10,000 if you had $0 earned income. If you're earning $40,000, your net UBI/tax is $0. With $80,000 earned income you'd have $10,000 net tax. So you're not paying out $10,000 to every citizen.
That would tend to discourage people from taking low-wage jobs. There really needs to be some sort of floor below which income isn't taxed even with a BI—say the first $10k or so. I mean, you can say all you want to that folks will still work for extra income, but how much work are folks going to be willing to do for $5.44 an hour (75% of minimum wage)?
Cost of Living: BI does not consider the variances in cost of living.
Maybe your idea of it doesn't but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't.
Now you have humans being trafficked to CA to live in mass shanty towns to generate massive amounts of cash to be sent back to Detroit.
What could possibly convince a person who is being given so many thousands of dollars by the government to give that money to someone else in exchange for substandard housing? It certainly can't be because they're afraid of being reported to INS, because if that were the case, they wouldn't be eligible for a basic income. So the only people who could possibly fall victim to that are people who are hiding a criminal past and are being extorted, i.e. a tiny enough population that the problem you're proposing wouldn't be very practical.
Besides, any basic income would almost certainly have limits on what the money can be used for, kind of like food stamp debit cards do now. Automated systems could readily detect large-scale transfers of money to anyone other than a legitimate landlord and should flag those transactions as suspicious, reversing them when necessary. This is the sort of fraud that credit card companies are actually rather good at detecting.
2. Where does the cash come from? BI exceeds the total GDP today or you don't have BI. I don't care if you take all of Bill Gates money, Clinton's money, Zuckerberg's money, and any other rich person you can think of. It will not pay the bill, and surely can't sustain the bill.
This one is indeed a serious concern, and likely makes basic income a pipe dream. But for now, we'll assume a magical unicorn that sweats crude oil or something.:-)
3. It can not replace current Welfare systems and still requires those same programs.
This one just isn't true. The whole point of a basic income is that it would completely replace welfare, social security, food stamps, and disability in one fell swoop. Why would you keep those programs if a basic income provides them with similar amounts of money? And if it doesn't, how can it actually be considered a survivable basic income?
There is no assurances that they will use BI for food, utilities, housing, or any other purpose one claims BI is for.
Nor does that assurance exist for any other such program with the exception of food stamps, and it would be exceptionally easy to have a portion of the money be flagged as "food only" where it can only be taken out at grocery stores similar to the way EBT works today.
Intentional or not, that is how the system works. Get married, lose benefits. Get a job, lose benefits. Have a kid out of wedlock, gain benefits. Quit your job, gain benefits. We have not fixed what we have so there is no reason to believe that BI is some magic bullet that gets people to behave responsibly and for the betterment of themselves and society.
Actually, BI fixes much of that at a fundamental level by being a baseline income. You don't lose it by getting a job unless your job pays so much that your tax bracket effectively cancels it out. So out of your list, the only one that is still a problem under BI is that kids would get a reduced basic income until they are 18. The only practical alternative to that is forced sterilization, and I don't think anybody wants to go down that road. But BI, if done properly, could divide the kids' basic income among categories like housing, food, clothing, and miscellany, limiting the opportunities for parents to use kids as a way to earn extra income for their own purposes. Heck, you could even limit it to children's clothing until the kid reaches an age where wearing adult clothing would be plausible. That's all just simple software.
Or to paraphrase the famous quote, "If they cannot afford apartments in San Francisco, they should just move to their summer homes in the Hamptons...."
I think the phrase you're looking for is "completely out of touch".
This. GLONASS only went up globally in 2011. Any receiver made before that is pretty much guaranteed to not support it, and most receivers made for the first couple of years after that probably don't, either.
Downtown Campbell, assuming we're talking about California, is a suburb of a big city (San Jose area). The aGPS should work very well there, and so should standalone GPS; there aren't enough tall buildings to prevent a GPS lock, I don't think.
However, I have seen GPS receivers just plain refuse to lock to a signal. When this happens, nothing short of power cycling will bring them back. And another problem with GPS receivers is that if you aren't using one in a cell phone, they have to obtain ephemeris data from a satellite if they have been turned off too long, and in some cases, may have to download new almanac data as well. In the latter case, called a "cold start", if the GPS receiver only finds a single satellite, without any interference, it takes 12.5 minutes to retrieve the almanac data. (On a cell phone, with working cell service, it should take about two packets of data to download the almanac over the Internet, which is one big reason why cell phones can acquire a lock much more quickly than standalone receivers.)
So chances are, your GPS moved too far since the last time it was turned on, and stupidly stopped searching for satellites after it found one, then downloaded the almanac data from that one satellite, and encountered some packet loss while doing so, requiring two or more 12.5 minute cycles to get a complete copy.
And car manufacturers are scared to death that their navigation systems could be implicated in an accident, so they deliberately neuter them so that they can't be used while the vehicle is in motion. What this means is that with two people in the car, the passenger can't look for food at a nearby exit unless you first pull over and come to a complete stop.
Plus the real issue is that a car's metal frame acts as a Faraday cage, blocking the signal.
A full wavelength at the lowest GPS frequency is only 10 centimeters. So unless your windows are all smaller than that, no your car is not a Faraday cage at those frequencies.
Or at least I think the person in question was a WF customer (this was, after all, years ago, so my memory may be rusty). Either way, for sure, they are one of the predatory lenders that engage in that practice, so even if I'm wrong about that detail, the remainder of my post still applies.
Agreed. A few years back, I helped bail someone else who kept getting farther and farther behind because of their "payday loans" which had what is IMO usurious interest. I was appalled that they were allowed to do that, and even more appalled that they were allowed to continue to issue such loans over and over, effectively turning what might be tolerable short-term into an ongoing loan at a triple-digit APR.
IMO, the company leadership should be in jail, customer assets should be returned to customers, any loans should be sold off, and the company should be shuttered and its assets sold, with the proceeds distributed to its customers.
I would write the manual in English, and then use Google translate to convert it into the new employee's native language...
I would write the manual in Latin, mixing in Hiragana translations of technical terms that have no Latin equivalent. The onus is on the reader to convert into a form that he or she can understand. It's not my fault that the reader can't understand Latin and Japanese.
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Yeah, except that we hated it internally long before the public hated it, yet it didn't become an option until people screamed publicly. Apple's culture often behaves like a cult of personalities, where people blindly continue down the path chosen by a decision-maker even when dozens of people think they're wrong. IMO, the failure to accept internal criticism and adapt is Apple's biggest flaw, and if anything will be its downfall, it will be that.
It only takes once. The cost of replacing a shattered screen is a sizable percentage of the cost of the laptop.
Unfortunately, unless they failed to document it, APFS currently lacks data checksumming, which is less than ideal when storing data on flash (particularly TLC flash). Here's hoping they fix that oversight in the final version.
MagSafe 2 would be adequate if it were in the middle of a cable instead of in a position to get knocked loose by your lap. And a MagSafe connection even a few inches into the cable would be just as good as a MagSafe connection on the device.
You readily admit that the MagSafe connector can be knocked free by your lap, yet you think moving it to the cable would be just as good? What exactly do you think would happen when you apply that same force to a connector that plugs in to the laptop?
Nothing. Connectors are designed to handle a certain amount of force in an upwards or downwards direction. Any connector that can't handle this is fundamentally flawed by design. The original MagSafe was much better at not disconnecting. Only MagSafe 2 is hopelessly inadequate (because the magnets are too small).
The purpose of MagSafe is not to prevent damage to the jack or the cable. The purpose is to ensure that when you trip over the cable, it doesn't pull the ultra-light laptop off the table, causing it to shatter when it hits the floor.
Putting it a few inches down the cable will move the disconnection point away from the laptop itself to a point where it won't be pressed against your leg, and thus where the MagSafe connector being as thick as the machine won't matter. But the breakaway force would still be roughly the same, and far smaller than the amount of force needed to pull the laptop off of the table. Thus, it would still serve its primary purpose.
Fair enough. I basically stopped using flash drives when I realized I could tether to my phone and upload single-file backups to my computer at home without having to fumble around with a USB device that's thicker than my laptop, but for folks who use flash drives regularly, not having any standard USB ports would be a pain.
The good news is that Sandisk makes a flash drive with USB on one end and USB-C on the other end. If that trend continues, this won't be a problem for very long.
With the way Apple is designing products these days, someone really ought to dig him up, strap magnets to him, and power half the Bay Area.
Yeah. I bought two of those for my Mac Mini at home—the first because I needed a second separately addressable analog audio output, and the second because the first one immolated itself internally after about a week.
The existence of cheap electronics as a workaround does not negate the pain that losing the headphone jack in my MBP would cause. Just saying.
For the Mini, a big part of that is because they saddled it with a substandard two-core CPU in the last hardware revision, rather than the four-core that was available in the top-tier Mini prior to that. Previous generations made a popular server platform. These days, refurbished 2012 four-core Minis sell for at least as much as the current generation (and for a while, were considerably more expensive, with used 2012 models selling significantly above their original SRP).
Basically, Intel screwed up with Haswell by using a different pinout for two-core and four-core CPUs. Apple apparently concluded that it was better to ship something sooner rather than waiting for... I think Broadwell, which unified the pinout. (Or it might have been Skylake.) And they concluded that it wasn't worth designing two very different boards for the two SKUs of the same model. In retrospect, they probably should have made them all four-core.
The Mac Pro doesn't sell well because it is based on a four-year-old CPU microarchitecture (Ivy Bridge), has no real support for expandable storage (resulting in an ugly external RAID enclosure next to most of them), and costs as much as an automobile.
Basically, each of these models is a great example of Apple doing the exact opposite of what most of its customers wanted, and as a result, creating products that nobody wants to buy. And now, with their MacBook Pro, it looks like they're repeating the same mistakes, abandoning most of the features that power users depend on, and turning the former "Pro" machines into consumer-grade toys with just a little bit more storage and a little bit more battery life.
Meh. Most people who carry around USB devices can carry around a different cable just as easily. In the grand scheme of don't care, it's a lot less annoying than the headphone jack would have been.
And as much as I think removing the HDMI port is annoying, the truth is that I already have to carry around a retractable HDMI cable, so carrying an adapter for the relatively rare situations where I use the HDMI cable isn't that annoying either.
What is annoying, if true, is the removal of the SD card slot. Yes, Apple's SD card slot is many years out of date and should have been updated at least half a decade ago to support UHS-II, but Apple's inclusion of an SD card slot, slow as it is, has been a significant driving force in pushing camera companies to move to SD instead of CF, and has resulted in standardization that otherwise would not have happened.
Without that anchor, the industry is very likely to devolve into the wild west of card formats again. In five years, some consumer-level cameras will use CFast, others will use UHS-II SD, and others will use XQD. I wouldn't be surprised to see three or four other formats by the time all is said and done.
If true, this is a crippling blow for standards. And I really have to ask what makes this laptop "pro" at that point. It sounds like the only meaningful difference between it and the standard MacBook will be a second USB port. They're apparently dropping all the other distinguishing features that made it worth hundreds of dollars more—the HDMI port, the SD card slot, MagSafe... and the only thing replacing all that lost hardware functionality is a set of soft-reconfigurable action buttons at the top of the keyboard. Whee.
Actually, it would be really easy to keep. You just make a six-inch USB-C-to-MagSafe adapter and plug your existing MagSafe or MagSafe 2 cable into that adapter. As an added bonus, the too-weak magnet used in MagSafe 2 would be adequate if it were in the middle of a cable instead of in a position to get knocked loose by your lap. And a MagSafe connection even a few inches into the cable would be just as good as a MagSafe connection on the device.
Unfortunately, thanks to Apple's over-patenting, the only company that can legally make such an adapter is Apple, so if they don't, the average cost of owning a Mac just tripled.
That's nothing. There's one gas station that I pulled into while running low on fuel that advertised one price, and when I looked more closely, it was a dollar more per gallon for using a credit card. I drove on and risked running out of gas just to avoid rewarding them for such egregious abuse.
If the same bill privatized social security and transferred your previous contributions into a 401k as-is, people might be more tolerant. I know that's not likely to be a popular idea among Democrats, but in conjunction with a BI, it might work.
Actually, it's usually high packet loss and upstream saturation that causes the latency. LTE has sub-100 millisecond latency, and even 3g typically is under half a second. Yes, by networking standards, that's huge, but not unusable. What causes cellular communication to be horrible is when you get into multi-second latency because three-quarters of your packets never make it to the tower, either because of over-the-air congestion, saturated upstream pipes, or multipath interference, all of which are caused by having orders of magnitude fewer towers than we actually need.
You almost certainly wouldn't give $10k to every person. You'd give slightly less to couples filing jointly, and much less for dependent children, because housing prices don't grow linearly with the number of people. When you go from a single person living alone to a married couple with two kids, you still need only one kitchen, one bathroom (minimally), one living room, etc. You just need more bedrooms. So the cost for the second person (the husband/wife) is less than the cost for the first, and the cost for the remaining two is much less (particularly when you factor in hand-me-down clothing, assuming they aren't twins).
That would tend to discourage people from taking low-wage jobs. There really needs to be some sort of floor below which income isn't taxed even with a BI—say the first $10k or so. I mean, you can say all you want to that folks will still work for extra income, but how much work are folks going to be willing to do for $5.44 an hour (75% of minimum wage)?
Maybe your idea of it doesn't but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't.
What could possibly convince a person who is being given so many thousands of dollars by the government to give that money to someone else in exchange for substandard housing? It certainly can't be because they're afraid of being reported to INS, because if that were the case, they wouldn't be eligible for a basic income. So the only people who could possibly fall victim to that are people who are hiding a criminal past and are being extorted, i.e. a tiny enough population that the problem you're proposing wouldn't be very practical.
Besides, any basic income would almost certainly have limits on what the money can be used for, kind of like food stamp debit cards do now. Automated systems could readily detect large-scale transfers of money to anyone other than a legitimate landlord and should flag those transactions as suspicious, reversing them when necessary. This is the sort of fraud that credit card companies are actually rather good at detecting.
This one is indeed a serious concern, and likely makes basic income a pipe dream. But for now, we'll assume a magical unicorn that sweats crude oil or something. :-)
This one just isn't true. The whole point of a basic income is that it would completely replace welfare, social security, food stamps, and disability in one fell swoop. Why would you keep those programs if a basic income provides them with similar amounts of money? And if it doesn't, how can it actually be considered a survivable basic income?
Nor does that assurance exist for any other such program with the exception of food stamps, and it would be exceptionally easy to have a portion of the money be flagged as "food only" where it can only be taken out at grocery stores similar to the way EBT works today.
Actually, BI fixes much of that at a fundamental level by being a baseline income. You don't lose it by getting a job unless your job pays so much that your tax bracket effectively cancels it out. So out of your list, the only one that is still a problem under BI is that kids would get a reduced basic income until they are 18. The only practical alternative to that is forced sterilization, and I don't think anybody wants to go down that road. But BI, if done properly, could divide the kids' basic income among categories like housing, food, clothing, and miscellany, limiting the opportunities for parents to use kids as a way to earn extra income for their own purposes. Heck, you could even limit it to children's clothing until the kid reaches an age where wearing adult clothing would be plausible. That's all just simple software.
I kind of feel like it will end up with a plant eating someone named Audrey.
Or to paraphrase the famous quote, "If they cannot afford apartments in San Francisco, they should just move to their summer homes in the Hamptons...."
I think the phrase you're looking for is "completely out of touch".
This. GLONASS only went up globally in 2011. Any receiver made before that is pretty much guaranteed to not support it, and most receivers made for the first couple of years after that probably don't, either.
Downtown Campbell, assuming we're talking about California, is a suburb of a big city (San Jose area). The aGPS should work very well there, and so should standalone GPS; there aren't enough tall buildings to prevent a GPS lock, I don't think.
However, I have seen GPS receivers just plain refuse to lock to a signal. When this happens, nothing short of power cycling will bring them back. And another problem with GPS receivers is that if you aren't using one in a cell phone, they have to obtain ephemeris data from a satellite if they have been turned off too long, and in some cases, may have to download new almanac data as well. In the latter case, called a "cold start", if the GPS receiver only finds a single satellite, without any interference, it takes 12.5 minutes to retrieve the almanac data. (On a cell phone, with working cell service, it should take about two packets of data to download the almanac over the Internet, which is one big reason why cell phones can acquire a lock much more quickly than standalone receivers.)
So chances are, your GPS moved too far since the last time it was turned on, and stupidly stopped searching for satellites after it found one, then downloaded the almanac data from that one satellite, and encountered some packet loss while doing so, requiring two or more 12.5 minute cycles to get a complete copy.
I'm pretty sure the correct answer is "Within thirty feet of the President at all times."
Human language is horribly imprecise. The correct answer to such questions depends highly on context.
And car manufacturers are scared to death that their navigation systems could be implicated in an accident, so they deliberately neuter them so that they can't be used while the vehicle is in motion. What this means is that with two people in the car, the passenger can't look for food at a nearby exit unless you first pull over and come to a complete stop.
A full wavelength at the lowest GPS frequency is only 10 centimeters. So unless your windows are all smaller than that, no your car is not a Faraday cage at those frequencies.
Or at least I think the person in question was a WF customer (this was, after all, years ago, so my memory may be rusty). Either way, for sure, they are one of the predatory lenders that engage in that practice, so even if I'm wrong about that detail, the remainder of my post still applies.
Agreed. A few years back, I helped bail someone else who kept getting farther and farther behind because of their "payday loans" which had what is IMO usurious interest. I was appalled that they were allowed to do that, and even more appalled that they were allowed to continue to issue such loans over and over, effectively turning what might be tolerable short-term into an ongoing loan at a triple-digit APR.
IMO, the company leadership should be in jail, customer assets should be returned to customers, any loans should be sold off, and the company should be shuttered and its assets sold, with the proceeds distributed to its customers.
I would write the manual in Latin, mixing in Hiragana translations of technical terms that have no Latin equivalent. The onus is on the reader to convert into a form that he or she can understand. It's not my fault that the reader can't understand Latin and Japanese.