The insiders don't consistently have opportunities to profit from their information. It's not every day that the war against Iran changes direction, and that whale has to wait for the next 180 degree turn to make their move.

Future exists to stabilize instantaneous commodity prices.

They also allow some insights on future demand, which can help you plan production of your commodity.

> a group of people impose a 1-3% tax on their population.

It seems the consensus is that a taxes are only bad if you have to pay the government. If it's a small set of companies that collectively own a virtual monopoly, it's because they earned it.

The big thing I remember from Windows back then were contextual menus (Windows 95 vs MacOS 8), the Start menu and Explorer (Not sure why the Mac never developed one - apps were easier to find, I guess) with a folder tree on the left, which Finder lacked (but you could always have two windows with different views). In general, the user experience with Macs was smoother than with Windows, with the move to PowerPC being a huge improvement in performance over the 68040 models.

As pointed out elsewhere, NeXT broke a lot of new ground at that time, thanks in part to its Unix underpinnings. Also Adobe brought great font management to both PCs and Mac before both embraced TrueType. Next had sub pixel anti-aliasing from the start.

The use of recessed surfaces for displaying information and the rectangular buttons were very NeXT-like, but more compact because it needed to work at VGA resolutions, but I don't think they managed to capture the essence of their framework which is, impressively, still alive in every Mac sold.

I wonder how hard it would be to get NeXT source from the 1990's and compile it on macOS 26.

I don't really remember many Windows 95 firsts. One I remember is the ability to switch users without logging off. MacOS famously copied that (with a 3D cube look).

I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then.

Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.

A long time ago I did that to make Canonical's Launchpad easier to read - mostly making tables look nicer and so on. I was really nice. I saw similar initiatives at Workday as well - browser plugins that added extra functionality to the development instances of the application.