How were they preventing people from using 3rd party support?

Yeah. I've wondered that myself. One of those should really go away, and since they're trying to boost Disney+ by putting all the Hulu content on it, I think it's clear which should go.

But there may be licensing and contractual reasons not to. There may be some rider on Hulu from back when it was a joint venture, or from when Disney bought or bought out the others. If not, they probably still won't want to discard Disney+, because they're Disney. They won't want to get rid of Hulu, because that's the one people like.

Well, since that was a term invented and self-applied by the far left, it's a hard to define clump of negative feelings that lead to idiotic decisions.

Self-loathing, racism, sexism, and inverted jingoism dressed up as caring about things that can't be changed because they already happened.
A political movement directed at ending Democracy and establishing a Socialist Dictatorship, but the people responsible don't let on to that in public very often.
What we used to call White Liberal Guilt - A way for racist white liberals who think minorities are too stupid to make it without the help of a white lady, to assuage their guilt for those racist feelings while still actively promoting them.
Smug superiority based on self-loathing. Perverse, that.

I'm sure someone could provide a kinder definition, which won't make much sense or hold up under scrutiny, but will be loaded with grandiose verbiage about fixing the past without a time machine.

Little bitch regulators just can't help it.

"Stop trying to extend your authority over our citizens", doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

"Discard convenient features because we have a bug up our ass", does.

Well, that's an unkind assumption. Why can't Waffle Iron start, or already run, a successful business? "Waffle's Industrial Ironing" could try and take on Cintas. Or, "Waffle's Iron Smelting and Foundry". Or just a generically named MSP with the great tagline, "Let Waffle iron out your IT!"

Seriously though, every business exists because someone didn't listen to what you said.

Look at the name, it's all there.

She never existed, that's just what Altman named his Fidget Spinner one drunken night.

Was it to protect middlemen, or was it more like eliminating the "de minimis" rule in the US? That was about shipping costs, where a loophole essentially subsidized shipping cheap items from China, as they would be exempt from postage fees internal shippers face.

So far as your domestic economy is concerned, middlemen may be beneficial, as some of what you spend stays at home and circulates instead of all of it leaving. I haven't put much thought into that though; it only just occurred to me and may be dumb.

I reject the assertion that I must have social science credentials in order to form a valid opinion (though I recognize now that you're being tongue-in-cheek). That said, I majored in Poli Sci, minored in Economics and Philosophy (should have triple majored, would only have taken another semester), focusing generally on political theory and international relations (for which I did some work on a masters). I have even read some Foucault. I think the genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish was valuable and informative as historical analysis, but of little predictive or prescriptive use. Where it went from there was, as you pointed out, of no actual scientific or academic use at all.

PoliSci is split between quantitative and qualitative wings (while also serving as pre-law). The former largely focuses on statistical analysis and at least approaches the scientific method, the latter I avoided as nonsense. The real problem is that you need to perform experiments to verify theories, and performing controlled experiments on a polity would neither be feasible nor ethical.

Economics is very much data-driven and is very nearly a hard science. But, like PoliSci, experimentation is a problem. Small scale experiments have uncovered a lot about human nature (like losses having 2x the impact of gains, economics students are more selfish than others), but macro-level experiments are pretty damn risky, and you can't control enough variables for the results to be meaningful.

Psychology could and should be a hard medical science. Experimental psychology already is (though I'm sure some would disagree). But, as CT spread its poison throughout the academy, psychology as a field seems to have abandoned the rigor it had been developing. Now it rewrites diagnostic criteria to suit political whims. Though their process for establishing diagnostics was never all that great.

My favorite part of CT is that it would fall apart if ever turned on itself, or the Marxist political systems towards which it seeks to push people. One of my favorite parts of Marxism is that it claims to be something impossible without a time machine - scientific history (no Karl, that's not how the Hegelian Dialectic works). That these two things represent the foundation and dominant principles of Sociology are enough, in my ever-so-humble opinion, to shutter the departments. Push them and their power-obsession out and let the Academy find balance again.

So, I guess in the end, we're largely in agreement.

Yup. The internet must not have taken their stepdaughters to the Atlanta Aquarium and neighboring Coke Museum.

There are way more flavors of Coke than I expected.

So you do at least know they are there. There are thousands of each strewn across Europe, earning billions feeding Europeans with American food.

You're Swiss, right? There are about 200 McDonalds in Switzerland, and growing. A fraction of the number in France, Germany or the UK. And it's nowhere near being one of the best places we have to eat. It's the lowest common denominator of fast food.

You should just come visit the US. You'll love the food, everyone does.

Yeah, something I know now but didn't on Wednesday. Or maybe I just forgot, who can say.

But yeah, it was amazing. I don't think anyone can seriously deny that it revolutionized gaming and continued to do so for decades. Hell, the control scheme is still the standard. Almost every game that has quick save maps it to F5, and WASD emerged from Quake tournaments.

What's the charge for?

So, you're trying to say you've gone off your meds?

As in "millennials preferred marketing experiences"? That would work with my assumption that they just wanted to do things they could post photos of. Self-marketing.