Leviathans

Saturday sunshine. Happy Sadie Hawkins Day.

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg has been reading Ray Bradbury. Spoiler: It doesn’t end well.

As large companies like GE and Johnson & Johnson grow and devour smaller companies, they can take advantage of economies of scale and become even bigger. Until, that is, that they grow so big that they become lumbering giants, threatened by smaller, more agile competitors. So then they just break up into smaller companies again. The cycle of life.

Apparently airplanes can get too big as well. The A380 – that airliner with a double decker row of windows that could accommodate 800 passengers – was a big deal when it was released. Massport even built special ramps for it. Then the pandemic hit and people stopped flying. Emirates, an early adopter of the big plane, is now decommissioning some of its A380s, stripping them down for parts. And Airbus, the manufacturer, will ship the last one this fall. That seemed quick.

The Taproot upgrade is coming to the Bitcoin network in the next 24 hours. It might be a big deal.

And Miles Monroe strikes again.

Steady hand on the tiller

Friday. Fall. A birthday for John Entwistle, John Lennon and Jackson Brown.

Can a marching band still play while wearing masks? Apparently yes.

Those stimulus negotiations that were ongoing until they were called off per a presidential tweet, now seem to be back on. Beep, beep, beep, back it up.

Long time business beat veteran Jay Fitzgerald sat down with the CEO of Seniorlink, which manages a platform for family-based home care.

Chris Stirewalt over at Fox News says that even Rasmussen has Trump down by 12 points. And skipping the debate, he writes, is a sign that the bottom has fallen out for the incumbent.

And when does an improvement of 0.2 billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent count as a big deal? Welcome to the Traveling Salesman problem.