I pay for a single netflix sub, crunchyroll, and a vpn service.

After netflix announced ads i’ve been more and more considering dumping them and just focusing on that vpn service. I have paid for years and years of streaming services but I can’t possibly comprehend how prices need to go up again and again, almost always by double digit percentage points. The cost of storage and bandwidth goes down over time, servers get cheaper over time… there’s hardly any first party new media that is worth watching so i’m struggling to understand why i’m paying more.

The most bizarre thing to me though are people who pay for live TV… why in the world would you ever do that in 2024 with all the better options out there?

SEO, the methodology of ruining Google’s algorithm and enshittifying everything for marketing gains.

He doesn’t need to own 25% of tesla’s shares to be given 25% of voting power. It’s very common for different classes of shares for a company to exist that have entirely different voting rights.

Laws are to protect the haves from the have-nots.

I think it’s pretty amazing when people just run with the dogma that empowers billionaires.

Every creator hopes they’ll be the next taylor swift and that they’ll retain control of their art for those life + 70 years and make enough to create their own little dynasty.

The reality is that long duration copyright is almost exclusively a tool of the already wealthy, not a tool for the not-yet-wealthy. As technology improves it will be easier and easier for wealth to control the system and deny the little guy’s copyright on grounds that you used something from their vast portfolio of copyright/patent/trademark/ipmonopolyrulelegalbullshit. Already civil legal disputes are largely a function of who has the most money.

I don’t have the solution that helps artists earn a living, but it doesn’t seem like copyright is doing them many favors as-is unless they are retired rockstars who have already earned in excess of the typical middle class lifetime earnings by the time they hit 35, or way earlier.

Ubereats lets you set the tip after the delivery. afaik the others don’t.

Should be illegal to prompt a tip before services are rendered, including at those POS machines that ask you up front to tip even a small amount.

Even if your drives are all SSD you’re never going to have so many writes that it dies unless you download a full catalog of 8k content daily then nuke it and start over… for a few years

Already cancelled my prime account when this was announced months and months and months ago.

You’re already getting recurring subscription fees from me, so you’re getting paid even if I don’t use your services for any period of time. Stop fucking around and playing games, adding ads is double dipping. I’ll just stop the recurring transactions and find services elsewhere.

I pinky promise to watermark my ai works!!!

Come on. If I use an ai tool to generate something and incorporate it to a released product… how is that any different than googling for an idea and incorporating it into my released product? Why is a search aggregator: a thing that takes all the information you allow it to off of a site and presents it to the public ANY different? You’re using an algorithm to get an output that you desire based on an input.

Given technological progress and efficiency improvements I would argue that 2023 is the year the gpu ran backwards. We’ve been in a rut since 2020… and arguably since the 2018 crypto explosion.

I would like to propose an alternative solution: Force broadband providers to offer low cost service to families that need it. Don’t subsidize it, just force it.

Internet connections cost next to nothing to maintain. The telecoms can afford it.

This is one of those things where I don’t really agree with the law on.

Shoplifters come back again and again and many try to screw with checkout people with coupon scams or simply know where in the store to go to hide the things they want to steal.

Verkada (a company that supplies cameras and the software to use them) has this kind of functionality built-in. All it does is let you setup alerts for people who are persons of interest. It’s not perfect but anyone paying attention can tell that the person on camera being alerted is the same as the POI or not. It doesn’t eliminate the human interactions needed to actually prevent shoplifting, but it does let you know who to focus on when they come in.

Normal store employees don’t get access to things like camera systems. Security / loss prevention employees are typically the ones with access and who would see a notification and then watch for someone to put things in a purse or pocket and try to walk out of the store.

So all they’re saying is “do not scrutinize this known thief unless you yourself remember them” which is pretty absurd. If someone doesn’t steal there isn’t a problem, and if there is the footage will back up the innocence (or guilt!) I don’t even know how this became a case.

This could be so easily abused…

Hey guys why do all my lights turn off and on when my neighbor uses a microwave?

The controversial claims stem in part from Donovan’s publication of the Facebook papers, a bombshell leak of 22,000 pages of Facebook’s internal documents by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who used to work at the company.

Is anyone surprised at all?

Fun fact: for all intents and purposes when a rich person sets up a charity that they own and control fully they are pinky-promising they will use the funds for charitable purposes. When they contribute funds to it they reduce their income tax burden.

When you no longer need income to survive as you have billions and billions and billions of wealth you can just stop paying income tax by giving your “income” of that year to the charity you own and control. You can later conduct business dealings by “donating” to organizations in a quid pro quo manner. You skirt income tax and determine 100% of where your money is spent. As a bonus you can “work” for your charity and expense all of your travel, lodgings and day to day reasonable expenses in the name of your charity because of the good work you are doing. Isn’t that great?

e.g. “my charity will spend 100m building houses in ghana for the needy and i’ll hire your construction company to do it. In return you will build me a mansion here and donate it to the founation I control and I will live there while maintaining the charity” shit like this happens all the time.

Imo this is the problem with modern foundations and charitable organizations. The people who donate the most are typically the owners of the foundation. Don’t forget that you can donate 10m to your buddies’ charities and they can donate 10m to yours… so it looks like you’re not just playing with your own money too. Layers and layers of obfuscation!

With enough money you can funnel all kinds of nonprofit funds into for-profit goods and services “for the people”

With all that power, influence and money sheltered from taxes it should be no surprise that when someone comes around and is going to publish data you don’t want to be seen which would impact your vast network of wealth you talk to your buddies who control the org she works for and try and quietly eliminate her position to minimize the damage.

I’ve seen the same thing first hand with people in senior leadership roles at big companies.

Not a lot of upsides to whistleblow this stuff.

I wish your method would get the results you want. I know way too many people who sit through ads for energy to play mobile games. I know way too many people who will sit through freevee or still pay over a hundred bucks a month for cable tv, somehow. It’ll never change.

Coming soon is all the streaming video companies with advertisements on paid subs. Netflix has removed the cheap tier from new subs and replaced it with an ad tier. Amazon is planning on removing no-ad content from amazon prime next year. Pretty much every streaming company except apple has an ad tier or is planning one soon.

Advertisement is pervasive and honestly a huge problem. It should be prohibited from a huge swath of services, especially healthcare, but also as an optional thing on basically every platform. I truly believe ads make everything worse.

Ubisoft has been anti-consumer for a long, long time.

Easy solution: homing rockets that seek out the strongest signal using that band. Whitelist the sources that are official and proper.

GPS is passive so the rockets won’t go for the plane… it’ll go for the transmission tower.

Use less destructive devices if you’d rather risk sending humans to do the job.

It’s supposed to be a nonprofit benefiting humanity, not a pay day for owners or workers. The board isn’t making money off of it.

Giving microsoft control is a bad idea. (duh?)

Giving a single person control is a bad idea, per sam altman.

From a US perspective: It’s more like more farm subsidies for big farm owning companies. More funding for pet projects that goes into the hands of business owners that own the criminals that have been in power for years.

In the US we could have so much more money as a society if we just had single payer healthcare. It’s our biggest expense from a federal budget perspective and from an individual perspective.

Healthcare here is a 4 trillion dollar industry where almost all the profits go into the hands of a select few who own all the supply companies that suck the profits out of “nonprofit” hospitals, retirement homes and all manner of healthcare related businesses. The whole thing thrives on the opaqueness of it all.

Plus I haven’t even mentioned pharma. The fact that we don’t have collective bargaining agreements for drug prices is fucking insane. The billions earned from 300 million doses of the vaccine and suddenly the prices go from $20 a dose (which was still overpriced by a factor of 10) to $120+ a dose is fucking absurd.