Headworx

TSLA has been one of the most "emotional" stocks in 2022. Rising for no reason to absolutely irrational  levels and then dropping like a stone. What is interesting is what were the drivers for that behavior. The fall is probably much easier to explain: it is back to reality. Recession is on the horizon and as a car maker Tesla does not have any inherent advantage. The autonomous driving software does not work (not a surprise, as this is one of the most challenging problems to solve) and the rest - batteries, electric drive trains, software subsystems are equivalent to many other EVs. To be honest (without diving deep into the details), it is a car like may other cars. Some like it, some don't, but in the end there is nothing special about it. In other words, the competition has caught up and now it is a matter of individual taste, and even more importantly, even a decision to own a car at all. The rise was driven entirely by hype and led to the 2022 peak of irrational exu

The legacy - originally Japanese - photo camera business has been increasingly challenged by smart phones. This is obvious now to almost everyone and it is hard not to admit the SLR, and even the mirrorless cameras, have become a niche of a niche of a niche. Of course this was inevitable, as many (most?) people are just fine with the photo quality offered by today's phones. And the problem is the overall user experience - from taking a photo to having it corrected and archived or shared with others. Nothing has changed there for the last 20 years. Clumsy cables, memory card readers, unintuitive software. I remember it took me many hours of tutorial videos to understand the concept and the basic features of Adobe Lightroom. On the other hand anyone can start using Apple Photos or Google Photos without any learning nor training. My curiosity has pushed me recently into making time lapse video clips. It is a pain using a DLSR. You need to manually calculate all exposure parameters tha

I have found myself in a pretty unusual situation - between a hammer an a hard place. It started with a super ordinary transaction at Best Buy, purchasing an Apple gift card. The gift card did not work, saying "the code is invalid". I reached out to Apple support and after going through the usual checks "have you typed in the code correctly?" a human support person pick the issue up and quickly explained to me that "this gift card was cancelled at the place of purchase". And that the only option was to contact the Best Buy store. I tried Best Buy's online chat but the agent was of not much help either. He was apologetic, but the conclusion was to ride back to the store and "the customer service will help you". So I did. Actually the store manager happened to be the customer service person, so without being forwarded like a hot potato, he quickly produced the "POS transaction fingerprint" (a log file spanning 6 pages when printed) an