The downgrade in huge profits has nothing to do with ad revenue nor syndication.

Instead, there are so many services buying, that it got easy to get bought. So a whole new slew of people joined the industry. In 1988, during the strike, the vote was 2,111 members for, 422 against settling.

For the 2007 strike, they had 12,000 members. (tripled over 2 decades)

For the current (2023) strike, they have over 20,000 members ( + a third over 16 years)

Yes, the profit has not gone up, but that would be fine if they had the same number of writers. Instead they multiple their work and members by about x9, while the profit went up by much less than x9.

The other problem is that the profit streams changed and their contracts did not. Not a fair thing to do to people.

They need fewer writers and fairer profit streams.

You gave some interesting points I did not think of, but are not aware of some of my points.

I do agree that I simplified things a lot and that rule breaking toxic employees are not good for the company. But I find that those people are a) more likely to be management and b) more likely to attend meetings than not. The truly hard working people tend to be both liked and reluctant to waste time at a meeting. Lets be honest, most meetings in an American company would be better at half the size or a red flagged "READ THIS" email.

Holidays for example, would better be served in a one on one meeting where the manager specifically tells you to take some time off rather than a meeting about the general issue.

In person meetings work better than remote ones, but one on one works better than an official meeting where attendance is taken. I was not talking about remote work at all, but rather taking the coder away from his desk to talk about how holidays are now mandatory because OTHER people (not him) were not taking it.

If you believe any single magic ingredient can increase your life by 10%, you are a fool. If you have a minimal knowledge of human history, modern medicine, evolution/God, mice life extension studies, human fallacious thought OR aging, you would realize this is ridiculous.

Single ingredients that help humans live longer are called vitamins and all the main ones have been discovered. We would have found a plant that makes it and developed a taste for them (Citrus plants have vitamin D which we need)/God would have given us the ability to make it.

Most mice live 18 months. 10% longer life = +2 months. They never have time to get the various aging related problems we get after 50 years of partying hard. Those drinks, tobacco, marijuana, steaks, bacon (yum bacon), sleepless nights, sex, etc. all take a toll on us that mice do not get. If drug x extends mice life by +2 months, it will not be a 10% increase for us, but a ONE month increase because of all the extra aging we do.

Aging is a complex process involving many different things, including telomeres, various buildups (in arteries, lymph tubes, etc), genetic damage, and many other factors. One chemical will not fix all of that.

You want to know how to live twice as long? Figure out a way to clone new organs that do not have any of those issues and transplant them into our bodies. No chemical could compete with that because we would be replacing the body parts rather than trying to fixing them.

First, that system sounds like something out of a distopia.
Second, I bet most kids use the same computer as their parents and can get into that app easily. Most parents probably just leave it open on their PC and expect the kids not to use their PC.

Old joke about a guy looking for keys under a street light. Cop comes over and helps. After a while, cop says "Where where you when you lost them?" guy points to a dark area 40 ft away and says "No way I could see them there, but at least there is a chance I could here."

Two ways a company can reward employees - those that do well on things they can easily measure (i.e. attendance) and those that actually help the company make a profit even if it is not obvious.

When you start rewarding people for that which can be measured easily rather than actually contributing, people spend less time contributing and more time getting a good measure.

Management et. al. want you to attend meetings because it helps THEM look good and possibly contribute to the company. It almost never helps the attendees contribute to the company more than if the management talked with the employees at the employees convenience.

Management does not have to make a company worse, but when they do not want to work as hard as you do, they become the joke that everyone makes fun of.

First, 18 is old. Louisiana gives out out drivers licenses at 15 with ANY adult approval. You can buy a gun via a private sale at age 17, and carry one at any age if you have a permission note from your parent.

Second, no way to enforce it - unless you are going to be arresting the children that violate it and click the box that says "over 18?" Are you 'protecting' the kid or attacking them?

Third, stop trying to let the parents off easy by having the government do the parenting. It does not effectively parent, it does not make the parents job easier, and all too often you have a strict shmuck in charge yelling at the permissive parents, who outnumber the strict shmuck's followers 2 to 1.

Not just the super high tech stuff.

I assure that any Stun gun advertising millions of volts is lying. If they offer 14 million, you will be lucky to get 14 thousand.

Most flashlights lie about the number of lumens. Anything more than 400 is likely bull.

Show a thermometer strip on a cooler? Decorative, not functional. Even if it is advertised for medical use. (Insulin coolers for diabetes)

Amazon is the equivalent of buying from a guy on the street with a table labelled "Definitely real, no fakes!"

Unless Amazon itself is selling it. Then it is totally real, advertised correctly - and they ripped off the idea from one of their clients who went from making 100k a year to 30k after they did it.

Is buy a cover so it doesn't break. Not the crap apple sells, but something from Supcase, or their competitors.

Thin = breakable and easily pushed.

Getting the stupid thin stuff is like getting those moronic wireless earbuds where on instantly get lost/seperated because their is no wire connecting them.

Elegant and pretty does not equal functional and worthwhile.

The reason NYC did this is to protect it's expensive hotel industry. They got hit hard by AirBnB, as people started buying condos solely for the purpose of renting them out. Boom, instant competition without any licensing or staff.

Worst of all, the neighbors pay for the discount that the Airbnb gets. They have to put up with the noise, parties, mess, late nights, etc. that some AirBnb's get.

That said, this law does look extreme. Nothing wrong with letting the average joe do this once a month for 4 days or so. As long as they ae not doing it every weekend, the issues should be minimal.

Laws where one side gets upset and demands action tend to be abusive, you really need a little give and take. Let them kill the worst abuses but keep a little bit extra. Also lets it be easier to regulate. If it is legal but limited, you get better statistical data than illegal.

The weed smoking had nothing to do with his criminal enterprise. It's the equivelant of saying "How this husband overthrew Isaac Newton" when talking about Albert Einstein.

Do not read articles written by people that think you are an idiot, as this guy did.

I don't know how many children are sexually exploited online, but it is clear and obvious to non-morons that if "1 in 5 children are sexually exploited online" is true, than they are using a very bad definition of 'sexually exploited online'.

Don't trust scammers that make up patently false statistics by using strange definitions.
 

Being tired, distracted and mad are all subcategories of "Overstimulated with excess data". Robots do worse when given too much data as well. They slow down, and make mistakes. It is easier to tell them to ignore excess data, but that is not perfect.

Humans sample their environments MORE than robots do. Constant noise, temp, sight, touch, scent, samplings. The robots are the one that take too much time and quantimize their data into x times per second. Humans DO not take 2-8 seconds to react, we react instantly to simple issues. We can take 2-8 seconds to react to more unexpected issues.

People constantly make the wrong beliefs about robots. Robots are not like in the movies, better than humans. Instead they are almost always worse than humans about everything EXCEPT the specific task they are designed to do. Some subtaks they may also be better at, but not all.

I do agree that the robots do not do non-programmed things, which is one of the major reasons they are already better drivers than humans.

The midterms did not have the problems and complaints the 2020 had. The problem was not 528's coverage, but that the midterm was far more boring.

Nate Silver is a hard line mathematician. He looks at the numbers. When people are lying about the numbers, he is very interesting proving them wrong. When the lies get boring, so does he.

I hope that wherever he lands, he continues to put out good data analysis. I suspect that in the next presidential election, it will get very interesting again. Unless Trump goes to jail before then, and all we get is Biden Vs. Trump-lite.

Robots make consistent mistakes, humans make random ones.
Consistent mistakes are fixable, random ones, less so.

Robots are better drivers not because they have better brains, but because they never make stupid mistakes.

Humans: start young, get old, get drunk, get tired, and get mad. We accept the first two, outlaw and punish the rest. Robots start inexperienced, blind, and ignorant of new activity. We FIX those and the robots do not repeat the problem.