This is entirely the issue. I work with a couple different franchisors (the parent company). Franchisees are locked in as part of the agreement.

I wouldn't call it fleecing (at least, not across the board). The idea is that in exchange for a business-in-a-box, you agree to follow certain guidelines, and we all make money because the system as a whole is proven to work. But the business itself is still yours, and the franchise agreement contract is only as strict as the franchisor wants to make it.

I've seen them deal with both sides of this issue. On the one hand, they've had to get after franchisees for swapping out approved products for cheaper stuff that messes with the brand. On the other, I've seen them explicitly approve the use of third party solutions for stuff that either 1) Doesn't matter in the long run, or 2) just makes the lives of the franchisees better.

At least with the ones I've dealt with, the goal is to make a great experience for the end client. But then again, I'm only talking about franchises with ~200 franchise locations. At that level, a lot of the people in the system are still essentially human.

You don't say.

Corporations, who make money by carefully curating a viewpoint that's truthful, misleading, and which provides confirmation bias to their audience, are unhappy by a bunch of young bucks who provide a different set of true but misleading facts?

I am shocked! Shocked, I say!

Certainly, the distinction between more rigorous journalism and either selective aggregation or less rigorous work shouldn't be ignored, but all of this pales in comparison to the fact that every single news agency has their (whether written or unwritten) list of stories that they're not allowed to report on, because it doesn't align with the actual goal of making money.

More importantly, what are the actual circumstances surrounding that accident when it happens? We attach too much weight to the fact that the accident occurred, and not enough to the events surrounding it.

I know it's an uncomfortable topic, and we obviously don't want to be glib about anything that endangers or harms a human being, but we also can't be so cautious that we never allow any scenarios where risks exist.

I commend them for this. It's a risk, and as a result, we're far more likely to get some interesting results out of it. It also starts addressing the human passenger aspect - how does the system fail when a stupid passenger does something stupid without a safety driver present?

So, instead of an interpreted pseudo-query, now I have to deal with a search engine that thinks it can have a conversation with me? I don't want a single answer - I want to interpret the results myself (we're ignoring the fact that the search engine has already tried to do it's own relevance calculations).

Let's just have Eliza do it. "Please, tell me more about what's the weather tomorrow."

I admit that this is a single data point with very specific circumstances, but I'd love to only pay $100/month.

For work, I require fast internet. My family moved to a new home that is great for everything except internet. Charter refused to even consider it, and the DSL provider is crap, so now I have a 5 year contract for ~$400/month for the fiber that Lumen/CenturyLink installed (incidentally, they're also the DSL provider).

My employer subsidizes it, and it's definitely the result of choices I've made, but it's a completely unnecessary hassle when I can see the Charter box across the street...they just indicated that they're not expanding to my side of the street at this time.

For that price, I get 100/100. On the plus side, there's an SLA and I get a credit if it goes down.

Admittedly, this is 20 years ago now, but I spent a number of years at Trane Co / American Standard. At the time, there was a lot of praise for the Jack Welch model, and there were rumors of the same thing occurring.

We regularly saw significant layoffs around the holiday season, and while a decent chunk of that was in the production facilities (associated with cyclical production), that was also the time you'd see cuts in the offices.

The terminology used that I heard was not "hire-to-fire", it was "sacrificial lambs".

At my company, Agile leadership means that whatever shiny thing the boss sees becomes the new highest priority. His thought processes are a wonder to behold.

We go from "Not a feature that our customers care about" to "My ideas are unquestionably true - I'm a businessman" in the span of not more than an hour.

Even less time if there is a YouTube video involved. Bonus points if it's a video from a failed company doing related work. In that case, it's still the boss's idea, and we're innovating by trying to do the exact same thing and hoping we also don't fail.

Don't get me wrong, there are aspects of this that give me the jibblies.

However, this is what the old Star Trek universal translator leads to - the idea that you don't even notice what the "base" language is, and it really isn't relevant as long as the message and intent is conveyed.

Once the tech can start doing things effectively in realtime, I can see a State of the Union address seamlessly in my native language. Who needs Univision vs. the BBC - great content producers can just make great content for all markets at once.

Not to diminish their plight, but we here on Slashdot regularly have to wade through metaphorical rivers of muck, and we get paid nothing.

We are also requested to fill out ever more demeaning and pointless surveys.

Having just looked it up, I stand corrected. My internal definition for vivisection was too limited...and the contemporary anti-vivisection movement goes orthogonal to both my original and my corrected definition.

Hooray internet.

Am I misunderstanding something about that statement, or not seeing some secondary meaning?

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that no one is in favor of vivisection.