The problem is that this mentality encourages them to constantly spend every penny to pursue growth. If the company isn't growing, it's failing. As growth cannot continue forever, this means the company has to "fail" at some point.

Dividends are healthier for companies, because they give an option other than constant growth for you to measure their success by. Which means that instead of constantly taking risks to pursue this impossible infinite growth they can instead invest in shoring up their current holdings, making for a more stable company.

I think the big issue is that many companies have stopped paying out dividends, so investors only see profit if the stock goes up. Stock price could stagnate and you'd be happy as long as you were still getting dividends. But with companies who have stock price driven value, it forces the company to constantly expand - which as you said requires constant growth, which is not sustainable.

Well, how about we just look at what they're paying for popular shows that move from the broadcast networks and use those as comparison points. Streaming services are paying billions for Friends and Seinfeld episodes, so it should be easy enough to compare viewership numbers on those and what they're paying, and compare that to viewership numbers on the streaming-first shows and give them a similar compensation.

The difference is that the pay rates are calculated differently for those industries. Basically, the residuals have long been considered part of their compensation in the entertainment industries, so the up-front pay is lower. Now the residuals are being cut out, but the up-front pay isn't being increased - and the studios are instead just keeping all that extra cash for themselves.

Think of it this way: The residuals are part of the benefits package. You take a lower-paying job because the benefits package is better, so while you get less cash up-front than at the other job, the better benefits makes it come out about the same. But suddenly the benefits package goes away - while on paper your pay didn't change, in reality the loss of benefits significantly changes your actual compensation for the work.

It's not 100% cut and dried like that, but it does make a difference. If service A has 10 shows I want to watch, but service B has 20 shows, I should always pick B, right? But what if 5 of those 10 shows on service A are shows that I am really, really into for some reason, but the 20 shows on service B I'm lukewarm about? Now it's service A I'm going for.

I think the broken thing here is that any mandated episode count causes problems. Some shows are better with shorter seasons, and some need longer ones to tell the same story. But even that is all artificial - in any show that is meant to go multiple seasons, the season breaks are nothing more than where a book decides to end before starting the next book.

In the case of Babylon 5, the seasons were crafted to have certain plots and story arcs play out over full seasons, and others play out over half seasons (to line up with the mid-season hiatuses.) This structure would not have worked nearly as well with only 6-10 episodes per season, and needed to be around 20 episodes per season for the pacing to work out properly.

Other shows, like TNG, could have easily been 6 episode seasons since there were seldom any long-running plot arcs. For that show, does it really matter if it had been 7 seasons of 26(-ish) episodes per season, or would it have been fine if they instead released it as 30 different 6-episode "seasons" (with multiple seasons released per year)? Honestly, I think TNG would have been better as a bunch of mini-seasons, as it may have encouraged them to have a little more structure in their storytelling and tried to do more and longer multi-episode arcs (were there any that went longer than 3 consecutive episodes?)

I think a lot of shows don't need these huge seasons, as it leads to less cohesive writing and far more filler. Shorter seasons just work better a lot of times, especially since many places that have this as their primary structure don't limit shows to a one season per year model.

Yes, there is no secondary distribution on these. There will be no reruns on other channels. In the case of something like Stranger Things, Netflix owns it, and they have no reason to let anyone else ever show it. Putting it on old-school broadcast TV goes against their "streaming is the only thing that matters" message, and letting another streaming service have it would be giving something to their direct competitors. And in both cases it sends the message that if you're patient you can get the show without going through Netflix, which is again not what they want. The only way you'll ever see another service/network get shows anymore is if they outright buy it from the current owners, or the current service closes down and the pieces are sold off.

The only secondary distribution you'll see these days is DVD/BluRay sales, and that's because it doesn't directly threaten their primary business model, and it makes a lot more money per show than their subscription model does.

Microsoft Access

I see that Little Bobby Tables is at it again.

Seriously. Use your own accounts, not the business's accounts. Move money through multiple accounts then withdraw the money. Convert it to BitCoin. The entire process was red flags all the way down - how the fuck are people this stupid?

Fuck, why stop at the best minds? Just let the US Govt. declare open cyberattack season on the Russians - nobody in the US will be prosecuted for any cyberattacks against the Russians. Let some of the ethical hackers who have always wanted to try a real hack give it a shot without risking jail time, and help the country (and the world) at the same time. The massive amount of script kiddies is going to make the signal to noise ratio so high that the real US cyber response will be more likely to slip through as well.

Get a free Google Voice phone number and use that. Only check it when you're expecting the text.

No, this is not a good reasoning for their ruling. They way the SC worded it, as long as you have a list you can't violate the law, regardless of how you acquired that list.

Part of the law is that a company can contact you if you gave them your number - if they had ruled that a company who in good faith believes you gave it to them mistakenly contacts you that it doesn't violate the law it would have worked just as well. This would have kept 2FA workable, but not made every robocaller who buys a list of numbers exempt.

Because in this situation, Senators are similar to Judges. I mean, sure, you can walk into court and use your free speech to tell the Judge to go fuck himself, but I think we can agree that it's not a good idea, and there will be consequences. The consequences in this case - Amazon pissing off Senators - is that they're going to be more thorough in their investigations of Amazon, and be less lenient in their punishments. And that's not just some sort of "revenge" on the part of the Senators, but the natural sense of justice people have when a perpetrator not only shows zero remorse, but gleefully flaunts that lack of remorse and practically dares them to do something about it.

Except the problem is that Senator is similar to Judge, in many ways. If you're in court you don't start taunting the Judge. If you're being investigated by Congress you don't start taunting the Senators.

And Amazon isn't just posting facts - there would be no problem if that were the case. The issue is that they're intentionally tweeting in a way to insult the Senators, to try provoke a response.