How much of Europe have they taken over?
And how many Jews have they killed?

What!!! NONE!! ZERO!!

WTF?

You do realize that this was also true of the actual Nazi party in the early 30s, right? When the party was founded it had only a handful of members, and even after rising to power (democratically I might add) there were plenty of people who played the 'well they haven't done anything evil yet, so let's just be friends with them' -card. Hell, even after they started annexing land areas from other countries, Chamberlain threw out the now (in)famous 'peace in our time' -remark, firmly believing that peaceful coexistence with the third reich was a solid plan.

Basically what you're arguing that since the current neonazis (both in Europe and the US) haven't been successful in gaining power or committed acts of genocide, they're not nazis, which is blatantly false and illogical. A person's political ideology is not determined by whether or not they're actually in a position to implement that ideology. If that was the case, then the vast majority of people would have no political ideology at all because most of us do not hold any political office and never will.

I hate to break it to you, but you're just another name calling SJW.

Calling people like Spencer who openly advocate for a whites only ethnostate a Nazi doesn't make anyone 'a name calling SJW', it makes them a realist.

and it's likely that this time Leave will win

Replying to myself to correct a critical typo: that should say 'not win'. because even though I did use the preview button, the lack of caffeine made me miss it. Luckily that should be clear from the context anyway. Sorry about that.

I really can't think of any good way to ask ignorant or stupid (or both ignorant and stupid) people to help resolve complicated issues. It's part of my sig. The decision has to be meaningful, not coerced and manipulated by the most clever propagandists.

Exactly. I believe the original Brexit vote will go down in political history as one of the biggest blunders of democracy, because it was insane from every possible angle.

Even if you believe that the average voter has enough understanding of the numerous nuances involved (trade, the Irish border question, how much the Union actually benefits the British economy etc, all which I find highly doubtful because people in general have a very poor understanding of how the Union works) having a vote on the matter when the alternative is unknown is outright moronic. The vote should never have been 'stay or leave' it should have been 'stay or leave with this kind of plan with these kinds of implications'. They should have first worked out which option outside of a Union membership is best for them knowing full-well which kind of options are available (the Norwegian Model, the swiss model and so on) and then put that on the vote if they wanted a vote. Doing it this way ia equivalent to having a vote such as: 'Do you want to lower taxes?" without any details on what the implications are and where the money would be cut from.

But see, the way I look at it as a non-British European is that the purpose of the vote itself was never actually about people making an informed choice. Farage, UKIP and their ilk have been salivating over 'Brexit' as the magical utopia of the future for decades now, so Cameron probably figured in the wake of the successful (from the POV of the government) Scottish independence referendum that now is to time to shut them down for good. By giving them the vote that he thought they'd easily win, he could then essentially say to Farage: 'The people have been heard, and they disagree with you, so STFU and move on." but because it was executed in such a horrible manner, Cameron basically handed the opposition the keys to victory. There's a good movie about the Brexit campaign by the name of 'Brexit: the uncivil war' that focuses on the way the Leave campaign built its marketing: targeted marketing via social media especially and hammering of a couple of key concepts: 'sovereignty', 'take back control', the famous 350 million a week for the NHS, etc. Fancy sounding phrases with no substance that don't really mean anything without an existing Brexit plan, and that are in large parts lies (the NHS claim, even the leave campaign admitted it was a lie) or mutually exclusive (maintaining free trade with the Union requires free movement of goods and people vs. 'border control', not to mention that no side really wants there to be a hard border in Ireland which they entirely skipped). The entire marketing could be summed up as: 'Brexit: have our cake and eat it too, the EU will have no choice but to let us do it because we are mighty rawr!"

It's hard to know for sure, but it looks to me like neither side expected Leave to win. Cameron and his side did a horrible job countering the numerous lies and spin coming from the Leave side, while at the same time it's clear that Farage had no actual plan for them actually winning, because immediately after they won he bailed and left the entire Brexit-process to the hands of his political opponents and shuffled back to (ironically) his duties as a member of the European Parliament. Was it incompetence? Maybe. Was it him thinking he wouldn't win anyway and the campaign would just serve as a way for him to boost his party's popularity? Maybe. Was it a clever plot to destroy his political opposition by creating an idea of Brexit that's basically impossible to achieve and then throw the ticking time bomb to the conservatives and watch them take the damage? Maybe. A little from column A, some from B and C is my guess.

Whatever Farage's true motivations may be, it's clear that the majority of the blame rests with the conservative party, because they called for the vote, they totally failed in the orchestration and their handling of the result has been catastrophic. The optics of the whole thing are a flaming trainwreck, and only the circus being lead by Trump across the Atlantic has saved the conservatives from being the most ridiculed political party in the west.

The second referendum is going to be inevitable, and it's likely that this time Leave will win, because the popularity of Brexit has been constantly declining the longer the process has dragged on, as the British public has slowly started to realized they've been duped by conmen and political spin-artists, and the margins were thin to begin with. My guess is that the Britts will stay in the Union which will not remove the rift that the issue has caused: the leave side will make massive noise about 'not respecting the will of the people' (even if it's the case that the will has changed, people have a right to change their minds) and utilize that to gain more power together with the labor party, and at some point they may even try to have a third or a fourth vote.

This is best summed up by that famous Churchill quote:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

I mean crypto is tailor made to sell to hypers

Pretty much yeah, and Bitcoin accelerated it. I have a neighbor that lost some money in a 'crypto' scam that wasn't even actual crypto. It was a blatant mockup of a cyrpto-currency/ICO thing ran by a Bulgarian convicted white collar criminal, and I found this out in less than 10 minutes of Googling. It was setup as a basic pyramid where you made 'money' by getting other people involved, except it was even more obvious cause you didn't even make money, you were paid in the fake-coins. And there wasn't even any kind of mining involved, there was no 'crypto' involved, it was just basically a fancy UI/webstore for buying worthless tokens.

Like, everything about the operation was 100 % sketchy and obviously so to anyone who knows anything about scams, or cryptocurrencies, or just has some common sense. I mean FFS, the brochures he gave me to try and get me in on it where promising annual returns of over 100 %. Absolute madness. I tried telling rhe dude on several occasions that he's being had, but he had bought into the hype because obviously his BS-coin account running from some shack in Bulgaria said he had many magical coins, and the same account said they were worth a fortune, He didn't believe me, because he's "seen the success of Bitcoin with his own eyes."

That's the problem with trying to curtail these: people have read stories about how some dudes set up mining rigs back before the difficulty in mining was hard, made some coins and are now millionaires, and they desperately want to believe they're in on the next big thing. The scam in question finally collapsed last year and I think the woman running it was arrested. Soon after that my neighbor sold his car, so I'm guessing he'd been shoveling borrowed money into it. I feel a little bit bad for the guy 'cause he has kids and all, and might have destroyed all his savings, and a part of me feels like I should have done more to try and get him out of it, but generally speaking people who join cults don't realize they're in one before getting hurt.

I agree. Digital tickets are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. All it does is increase long lines because the scans simply don't work well (the screen isn't bright enough; oops I just locked my phone; etc.

In the last 10 years, I've gone to probably over 250 shows (mostly music gigs and festivals, but other stuff as well), and mostly using pdf tickets because they do solve a very real problem: paper tickets can get lost/damaged/stolen. There've been a few times prior to e-tickets that forgot the ticket home or somewhere and had to go back to get it screwing up my schedule. Or had to wait for a friend outside the venue 'cause I was the guy with physical tickets.

The phone however is always with me, and even if for some reason I forgot it I could easily access the tickets from a friend's device .And it's easy to send a friend their tickers if they're not coming in with you at the same time.

People these days start to be pretty accustomed to turning their phones' brightness up, so I haven't noticed that much slowing. I maybe printed 1-2 tickets last year. I'm not saying print tickets are bad, I'm just saying I like the (current) electronic ones and don't see a need for something like this.

And we also now have some events requiring people to put their phones in "lockdown" cases so they can't record the concert, take photos, etc. So you don't want me to bring my phone, but I *have* to bring my phone to get in. WTF?

This I don't really get, it's not really done here in northern Europe. I mean, I've been to a couple of larger stand-up shows that have prohibited recording, for obvious reasons (the new jokes/material is the thing people are paying for) but the way it's always been handled is that prior to the show people are told if they're caught recording, they will be thrown out. I've never seen any problems with this approach.

One that places two thing: Love and Life. I think peer pressure could work to pressure our society in a more peaceful direction in art

Thing is people have been complaining about violence in media and video games for as long as they have existed. It's true that the amount of violent media has skyrocketed, but what the complainers always seem to miss is that simultaneously the amount of actual violence and violent crime is pretty much steadily declining throughout the industrialized world. The most popular series at the moment (Game of Thrones) is one where people are maimed, slaughtered, raped and burned regularly and it's watched across the world, and yet the amount of actual violence and violent conflicts is still dropping. Contrats this to the first half of the last century: nearly no violent media, nothing close to GoT (imagine the outcry in the 30s or 40s if you had a show as graphic as GoT) and yet 2 of the most brutal and bloody conflicts in the history of the species and a high number of murders and killings,

It's almost as if people being exposed to graphical violence helps them to understand the immorality of it and sympathize more with other people, making them more empathetic and loving of their fellow man.

We need games that are based around something other than violence.

What, you mean games like Rocket league, Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, the entire Sims series, the entire sports-game genre etc...? And this is not even going into the mobile/social media gaming space where nonviolent games are more common than violent ones.

There's plenty of games out there that are in no sense violent, and they have a wide player base. It's just that violence is something that's built into us as mammals and apes, and thus we're fascinated by it, which is why the most popular games, just like the most popular series and movies tend to involve violence as a story telling device. The most famous myths and stories from the past are also filled in violence. The Bible is soaked in blood page after page, done by both humans and god (who supposedly commits genocide and a number of other extremely violent deeds) and yet the book is held by hundreds of millions to be sacred, and the genocidal God to be the embodiment and manifestation of love, that kills people and threatens them with eternal torture because he 'loves' them and so on. Violence, war and death has always been one of the core themes of art.

“All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.” - -

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”

-Cormack McCarthy, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in The West (an extremely violent book, but one of my absolute favorite American novels as a European, and probably the best western I've ever read, I can highly recommend it, there's an extremely good audio book version available as well)

and the other half of stories are about how fossil fuel is entrenched and powerful and needs radical government action to purge it from the planet.

It's not that fossil fuels need radical action to get rid of them. We're talking about perishing resources after all, so even if nothing is done, sooner or later fossil fuels will be replaced by other sources just because of the price, as evidenced by this story for example. The problem is however that in the meanwhile the costs of using fossil fuels are massively externalized. In the absence of any kind of carbon tax, the true cost of burning oil and coal is massively cheaper than it should be, because the damage to the ecosystem and the resulting increase in infrastructure costs (increased weather phenomena and their costs to societies) as well as prices of goods (food becoming more expensive as agricultural productivity plummets etc) is not reflected in the prices of goods and services produced with these energy sources, making them more competitive than they should be.

There's basically no good reason for any advanced nation to be burning coal anymore. Even China is rapidly transitioning away from it because they have massive issues with air pollution in all of their major cities and they understand that coal is not sustainable or really even that cheap when you factor in the long-term costs. My nation (Finland) is planning to phase out coal by 2030. However, with proper incentives this could have been done way sooner. And same applies to all products. One of the reasons Norway has the highest adoption rate of EVs is that if you buy an EV in Norway it's basically (almost) tax-free and you're not subject to road tolls. That, combined with high price of gas has driven people naturally.

This is where the right and left need to work together and realize they both have a point: the right is correct in saying that the market can in fact be leveraged to solve climate related problems and the left is right in saying it will not efficiently and rapidly do this in its current state, which is important because we do not have a lot of time to change course before certain feedback-loops kick in and the change starts to become very difficult to slow down or control. But the market also has feeback-loops and tipping points that can be utilized. Just like with the Norway/EV example, take something like meat production which is one of the leading sources of emissions. Whether you like meat or not, the fact is that the current production methods are massively inefficient (close to 80 % of all farm land is used for meat production, despite meat producing only around ~20 % of calories globally, and this is not factoring in all the other resource costs like water and fuel needed to run the industry) and need to change. Once the price of alternative sources of meat (either 'fake' meat-like products like the impossible burger, or actual meat produced in a vat with higher efficiency) drops down to the same level or below that of actual meat, many people are going to shift over no for environmental reasons but simply as a cost-saving measure which will drastically increase demand and drive further innovation and R & D, bringing the cost down even more.

Basically the market works well if the prices are actually reflective of the true cost of goods, which at the moment they are not. Since rapid action is preferable if we want to minimize damage and cost to upcoming generations and drive technological progress, I'm personally all for gradually increasing the price of say meat via taxes (these can be implemented so that the poorest part of society gets some kickbacks so their overall tax-burden and purchasing power does not diminish, Canada is essentially doing this) and then using the increased revenue to both fund important research into carbon neutral/carbon negative technologies, as well as maintaining and increasing carbon sinks via stuff like reforestation projects and carbon capture technologies (China just opened up their first carbon capture facility btw).

It doesn't matter if you're from Europe, the US or China, we're all on this same rock, and our interests are aligned: it benefits none of us if the climate destabilizes further, because the damage will equally impact everyone, and at that point playing the blame game of 'well why didn't the US/China/pick your preferred bad guy do more decades ago' will help no-one. There are billions and billions of dollars and euros to be made in green and clean tech, and the US and Europe are well equipped to be the leaders of this massive industry if we stop pointing fingers at each other and China and get to work together. It also means high amounts of new investment and high paying jobs for people.

Climate change needs to be looked at as a massive economic opportunity for western tech and research. The west has lead the industrial and technological revolutions that have created the problem, and I firmly believe we're smart enough to lead the revolution to curtail the damage, re-orient our supply chains to be more efficient, ecologically sustainable and, like the good capitalists that we are, make a lot of money while we're doing so.

Oh, I thought it was the other way round, A380 was a fl and dreamliner won, with Airbus having nothing to counter.
Why didn't they produce more dreamliners instead, are they more expensive?

The Dreamliner and the A380 are wide-body (= twin-aisle) planes meant for long-haul routes between continents with high demand, whereas the 737 and the A320Neo are narrow-body planes meant for shorter routes within continents. A single Dreamliner costs around double compared to the 737 MAX 8, not to mention it's more expensive to operate.

So yeah, they're more expensive and they serve an entirely different role, which is why the Dreamliner, while good in its role, is not an economically sound counter for the A320Neo.

They've demonstrated they don't know how their own plane works. The one they convinced the FAA to let them self-certify.

The thing is the 737 is somewhat of a Frankenstein's monster at this point. The plane-line itself is over 50 years old, and what Boeing should have done at this point is just redesign a new plane from the ground up. But since updating the 737 has the upside of not requiring airlines to retrain/certify their pilots who're accustomed to fly the previous 737 models, this saves the airlines money and makes them more likely to buy the plane.

In 2010, Airbus launched its A320Neo line, which crushed the existing 737 in fuel-efficiency. In 2011, Boeing basically had to decide between long-term and short-term gains, and since the shareholders were angry over them bleeding money to Airbus, the design of the 737 MAX was fast-tracked, with emphasis on 2 things: fuel-efficiency and being as close as possible to the old planes so that no pilot retraining would be needed. Since achieving better fuel efficiency meant bigger engines, a problem arose: the wings on the 737 are so close to the ground (a feature, not a bug, this was initially done on purpose in the 1960s to make maintenance easier at airports that were in less developed countries) the engines had to be moved up and forwards to make them fit, which affects aerodynamics and the handling of the plane. Aware of this fact, the MCAS system was put in as a quick fix to 'patch' this problem, but since the plane was marketed and was supposed to behave exactly like the old 737s thanks to this system, Boeing intentionally chose not to make a lot of noise about the aerodynamics changes or the MCAS. After all, that would have ran the risk of the FAA and their equivalents in other countries requiring more extensive pilot training which would negate the selling point of 'it's the same old plane, just more efficient, give us your money!".

Those of us working in IT have seen this logic at work before: systems need to be updated to meet new demands, but as a cost-saving measure what is often done is that instead of designing a new system that actually serves the new requirements, the old system from the mid-90s that's held together by duct tape patches is patched and 'fixed' further, and at some point the legacy code underneath all of it just catches fire, and companies end up paying way more time and money fixing the fire than they would have if they just did the right thing and switched over to a newer system altogether.

It's good to keep in mind though that the fault is not just Boeing's alone. American airlines, that used to have an exclusive deal to only use Boeing planes, announced an order for 130 A320Neos in the summer of 2011, and at the same time told their investors that 'American also intends to order 100 of Boeing's expected new evolution of the 737NG with a new engine that would offer even more significant fuel-efficiency gains over today's models." The reason the quote said 'expected' is because that release was pushed out before the 737 MAX was even announced. American basically told the public about being willing to purchase a non-existing plane while they were simultaneously buying the competitor's products. That's basically them saying 'give us a better model of the ancient plane, or we'll switch over." And Boeing took the bait, the 737 MAX was announced in july 2011 and flew 5 years later. Fact is, the whole plane is a hacked together panic move that should have never seen production in its current shape. But thanks to the greed of both Boeing and certain airlines as well as the failure of proper oversight, here we are.

If people are interested in a bit more extensive history of the 737 situation, you can check a video titled The economics that made Boeing build the 737 Max' by the Youtube channel Wendover productions (that does a lot of solid videos on logistics, and especially aviation) which I used as the basis for this comment.

Studies have actually shown that 6 hours is about the upper limit of creative work you can get out of most people. Not to say there aren't exceptional people out there who can do more, but for the average individual doing tasks that actually requyire thinking (as opposed to just being a cog at a production line which is where the 8 hour work-day originates), productivity plummets, and stress increases. In fact when youy start working for more than 50 hours a week, the chances of burning out start to climb up fast.

I've personally had to spend time fixing statistical reports created by people in a hurry that were practically useless because the data was missing stuff it was supposed to include. The people in question are not incompetent, in fact at other times they've done the same task extremely well but I could see that they were under a lot of pressure and that caused them to be sloppy (I since spent time automating the whole process to cut down on manual work and errors). For the same reason I avoid taking up large tasks close to the end of a work day. If you ever start something with the mindset of 'I'm just going to do this one thing quickly and then head home', you're most likely better off just leaving it for tomorrow or if you absolutely have to do it today, go home and do it from there with more time and after some relaxing.

This is why the concept of 'crunch' in IT especially is so counter-productive: game companies especially are notorious for 'constant cruch' because the update cycle in free-to-play games is intense to keep new content coming in and the players engaged. Quoting a recent Kotaku article on the subject:

Today, a new report from Polygon detailed how the developers of Fortnite, a game that technically is never finished, can suffer through crunch to keep the blockbuster battle royale game’s constant flow of content going.

“We’re always in crunch,” a source told Polygon. “Crunch never ends in a live service game like that. You’re always building more content and more stuff.”

Speaking with 12 current and former Epic employees, Polygon reports that they “regularly worked in excess of 70-hour weeks, with some reporting 100-hour weeks,” the article reads. “Contract staff in Epic’s quality assurance and customer service departments spoke of a stressful and hostile working environment in which working overtime—while officially voluntary—was an expected service to the company.” One source said they worked seven days a week for 12 hours each day throughout several months. Others detailed to Polygon the impact that such long hours were having on their lives. - -

Kotaku has reported how employees at AAA studios like Rockstar and BioWare foster a crunch culture that takes a heavy toll on their home lives, mental health and relationships. Sometimes, these trying periods simply result in layoffs after the game is released. Other times they lead to talent burnout, prompting developers to leave for less stressful industries. As the gaming industry tends more aggressively toward designing games as a service—adding content on an ongoing basis instead of releasing in full—the risk of studios overworking their developers to keep up is not to be ignored.

(here's a link to the Polygon report for those interested)

Now look at that as a european project manager and my eyes roll. I mean the strategy is clear: you take in young and aspiring coders, you create and atmosphere where people are pressured to work overtime constantly (lest you're not a 'team player' and can expect to get fired/not have your contract continued), then you work them until they burn out and quit or become so tired and stressed that they're useless and you fire them, and you replace the with new disposable manpower. That's absolutely horrible management, that's basically only possible for 2 main reasons:

1. Unions (especially in the tech industry) in the US are so non-existent that the state of employee rights is essentially dismal compared to many other western nations
AND
2. There's a near-endless supply of new workers in the US that can be ground to paste by these billion dollar companies. If we went through competent labor as fast here in Finland, we'd essentially be out of workers soon because there'd be no-one to hire. Word spreads fast in the Finnish tech-field, and people avoid places with toxic work environments like the plague. I have a good friend who not too long ago turned down a job offer that would have increased his pay because he knew a guy who knew a guy that used to work at the firm, and after talking with him he said simply that the 'extra money is not worth the extra shit.'

The irony here is that the companies in their endless greed have lost any capability for long-term planning. Sure you theoretically save money by having a smaller work-force and working them to near or past their breaking points, but in the long-term this affects the quality of the product. I don't even want to imagine the quality of the code that some fresh grunt is putting out at hour 90 of a 7 day work-week. By having more people and a more sensible work-load for each, the quality goes up and you have to spend considerably less time fixing shit that breaks because teams are communicating badly, code review is done hastily (if at all) and so on.

Doing it this way is stupid for everyone and actual studies back that up. Which is not to say that occasionally stuff doesn't come up that requires one to pull a long day, but those should be the exceptions, not the rule. The times I've worked more than 10 hours a day in the past 4 years can be counted with the fingers of my both hands, and I expect the same of the people I work with. I'd consider myself bad at my job if I had to constantly keep overworking people, because that's a sign of incompetent resource management, which is a huge part of any project manager's role. I mean FFS, there's a reason even the massively greedy industrial robber-barrons of the late 1800s and early 1900s eventually settled for three 8 hours shifts instead of two 12-hour shifts: they understood (eventually) that even when the task is something as simple as working at an assembly line 'constant crunch' results in lowered quality and hence lower profit, and that's with work that's extremely simple and monotonous. Yet we now have people that think they can get people to do vastly more intellectually challenging tasks for 10-15 hours at a time and get good results, Those guys are, in my professional opinion, idiots.

Besides gaming (which I have dedicated hardware for with superior games), there isnt much of anything a $1000+ flagship phone can do that this one cannot.

And that's the real reason for phone sales slowing down. Fact of the matter is most people use their phones for messaging, reading the news/the net in general, social media, some simple time-waster games here and there and the occasional photo. Now, since even the cameras on the lower end phones have become pretty decent, there really is no reason for anyone to spend more than 400-500 (and even that's expensive, but may still be worth it for some people if they really need/care about certain features) on a new phone, my personal budget is usually around half that.

So the marketing guys have wrapped up their sleeves and got to work: they're trying to push new features out and convince people that they really really need a phone with not 1, not 2, but 3 cameras on the backside, or a screen that reads fingerprints, or a folding touch-screen, or whatever new shiny feature. Marketing has always been primarily about creating needs that you then answer, and this is what companies like Apple have excelled at. However most consumers are starting to catch on to the fact that from a practical standpoint there's little to no difference between a a phone that costs 300 and a phone that costs 900, so their job is getting more and more difficult.

The West has long had an apocalypse fetish - there's even a book in the Bible with that title. People seem to have the need to believe that they're living in end times.

Well, these 2 are connected: christians (not all of them, but historically speaking a big chunk) have liked to think they're living in the end times because to them an apocalypse is just a precursor for the returning of their zombie-carpenter mangod and the eternal paradise that follows it, so for them it's a positive thing. I mean if you live in medieval times where the simplest disease can easily kill you and even the life of the privileged few is a tormented hellscape compared to even a 100 years ago let alone today, and ff the end of the world means getting to spend an eternity in paradise with all your friends and so on, why wouldn't you want that?

That being said, the fact that the christians have been hoping for the end of the world for close to 2000 years does not mean that it's actually a positive thing (because I for example do not happen to buy the story of said immortal carpenter) nor does it mean that climate change can be waived off as a non-issue because unlike the Bible, there's actually a lot of science and data going into these predictions.

For me personally, streaming has reduced the times I go to a theater. In my teens I went probably on average a couple times a month. Last year I saw maybe 3 movies in theaters. What's changed? In my opinion the prevalence of streaming has put movie studios in a bind: now that nearly everyone has access to near unlimited amounts of content from their couch, movies have become a much more risk-averse business. Making movies costs a lot and competition is fierce. This has led to studios focusing heavily on franchises and sequels and cinematic universes. There's a reason disney paid a fortune for the Star Wars IP (and already made their investment back): they know SW is a franchise with a huge pre-existing fanbase and they know they can keep pumping these movies out at a rate of about 1 a year and keep raking in the cash. Marvel. DC. Harry Potter franchise being hastily expanded beyond the original series. It's all about risk-management: the studios are asking themselves 'what can we invest XXX million bucks into and be fairly certain that we'll make money?'

This is not to say all that is bad. I enjoy a mindless action-flick or a superhero movie here or there. But this has made it so that the selection of movies available in theaters, at least here in Finland, is pretty narrow. My personal taste in movies is story and character/dialogue driven. If the plot and the writing is good enough, I don't care if the special effects budget has been small. Movies like Coherence and Primer are good examples of how to make thoughtful and entertaining scifi/mystery films with a very limited budget. However these kinds of movies don't make it to the cinemas any more, they're too risky. The movie going public has been conditioned into expecting a 'larger than life' experience on the big screen.

Every once in a while a movie with a wide mass-market appeal hits the theaters that even a cinephile nerd like me can call excellent. Mad Max: Fury Road is a good example of a such a film and in my opinion the best pure action film ever made (because it uses action to actually tell a story beautifully, instead of having tons of crap dialogue that just acts as dressing to get the characters into the next action set-piece, you could cut what little dialogue there is out of the film and it'd still be more world building and immersive than the whole of the Transformers franchise combined), but outside such movies I don't often find myself wanting to go to the theater, because for people like me, the streaming services simply offer a better selection.

So who is "they" in this context? Boeing or Lion Air/Ethiopian Airlines?
Who was scrimping and saving?
Hint: It wasn't Boeing...

Boeing certainly wasn't scrimping, they were being greedy by selling critical safety features for a few more bucks, and it's now backfired on and cost not only hundreds of lives but hundreds of millions and likely billions in lost sales and upcoming legal costs (Norwegian has already said they're suing for the costs that the grounding will cause them, others will surely follow).

The damage this kind of stuff will do to their brand is massive and it's already affected their sales, Garuda (an Indonesian airline) just cancelled their order of 48 planes. That alone will cost them over half a billion. And it gets worse: Only 381 planes have been delivered so far, less than 10 % of all existing orders. If more airlines start to follow suit as they probably will because the brand of the plane is now seriously damaged and people don't want to fly it (understandably) it might cause the entire plane to be unprofitable for them.

From both a business and product design standpoint they could not have made a more moronic decision, this is a godsend to their competitors, and I can bet you that the sales and marketing department of Airbus are currently ecstatic over this.