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Comment Re:More evidence we made the right decision (Score 1) 175

This is why when people say the market decides they are wrong. If you can't sway a companies positions or politics by refusing to shop there then there is no way the market decides anything.

The problem with the above is that you are mistaking "yourself" for "the market."

"Everyone isn't doing what I want them to, obviously 'the market' is broken."

Comment Re:Easy enough to counter in principal (Score 1) 61

This kills me. Instead of a "simple" (I realize that e.g. a google search is not all that simple) database query, we have an LLM that does the query for you, then analyzes it, and redisplays the output (making it thousands of times more computationally expensive) but now you are suggesting that the chatbot control a VM or similar and perform the steps as if it were a human, adding millions of times more overhead. It's mind boggling.

Comment Re:Wasn't this how the last of us began? (Score 1) 49

Isn't cordyceps the fungal family that zombifies ants and other insects? Why anyone would want to promote something that maintains physical contact between living cordyceps and humans is beyond my comprehension.

Conspiracy theory: the "anyone" doing the promoting is already affected by the product they're hawking and it's trying to spread.

Comment Re:test drive? (Score 1) 249

You have to be talking about Europe or something, because most people buying new cars in the US are buying off the lot. Dealers order vehicles with option packages most likely to appeal to a broad set of customers or designed to maximize their sales. Some people do order the exact vehicle they want, of course, but they're the minority.

Comment Re:Elon said (Score 2) 89

Come on, I'm not in any way a fan of Musk, but he appears to have (at least until recently) let the adults run things at SpaceX while he just takes the credit for it, and when Falcon 9 was first flying, his entire net worth was "hundreds of millions" rather than having "hundreds of billions in disposable income."

Oher rich people have played with rockets, too. He's, shockingly, mostly succeeded, and while his actual personal achievements here are far closer to Al Gore's infamous claim about the internet (his real efforts in funding and commercialization while in the senate, not the sound bite we love to mock) than what Musk wants everyone to believe, the whole "other rich people playing with rockets" bit suggests that no, you probably couldn't have done as well or better with his resources.

Comment Re:The evidence (Score 1) 49

"Mostly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here:

"The seven convicted eBay employees and contractors include Baugh, who was sentenced to 57 months in prison in September 2022; David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison in September 2022; Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, who was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October 2022; Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement in July 2021; Stephanie Stockwell and Veronica Zea, a former Manager of Global Intelligence and a contract intelligence analyst, respectively, who were each sentenced to one year in home confinement in October and November 2022. Brian Gilbert, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing."

So three out of seven got home confinement, but one of them had it come after the completion of a prison sentence. One of the remaining two was "a contract intelligence analyst" which is hardly an executive. The last is "a manager of global intelligence" who reported to someone who got prison time ("senior manager of global intelligence) so I would also say "not an executive."

WRT to the CEO, I agree he got off easy and should have been prosecuted, for, at the very least, destruction of evidence. It appears his response to being notified of a litigation hold because there was an ongoing criminal probe was to... delete everything.

Oddly, the wikipedia page disagrees with the lengths of various sentences but does tend to support that "home confinement" was not really how executives were handled. It also mentions Ebay's internal investigation (which was conducted by an outside party) found that he neither directed that knew criminal acts would follow. While I am suspicious of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing," the outside firm suggests this was above board. One would hazard to guess that the destroyed evidence may very well have shown that he did, but here we are.

By the way, your sig is amusing as heck.

Comment Re:And Nothing of Value was Included... (Score 1) 47

I got Google Play Music for my family back when that was a thing. It was the same price as Spotify, had the same catalog, and included any music on Youtube as well. The fact that it included ad free Youtube was just a bonus. These days that has morphed into Youtube Premium, and I still pay for it. I am mostly there for the music, but the ad free Youtube is not terrible.

The interesting thing is that it is pretty clear that most people just watch the ads. Youtube had $60 billion in yearly revenue last year. More than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers combined. Roughly $20 billion of that is credited to Youtube Premium which is bigger than any of its Hollywood competitors.

There's a reason that Peacock is being included with Youtube Premium and not the other way around. Youtube is worth something. Peacock, not so much.

Comment Re:Predictable. (Score 1) 47

Things have changed dramatically since the heyday when everyone had a cable subscription. I used to work for SlingTV (and then Dish), and I had a front row seat as the whole industry imploded. Every year the television networks and movie studios would sit down and renegotiate their contracts. Despite the fact that viewership was always down at least 10% year over year they always wanted price increases. If the cable providers pushed back (as Dish often did) they would lose access to channels, invariably during football season when it mattered most.

You see, as technology started allowing people to purchase their entertainment piecemeal it soon became clear what parts they were willing to pay for, and which parts they weren't willing to pay for. Hollywood thought that people paid for cable subscriptions to watch their scripted television. It turns out that, for most people anyway, the part of television that they were willing to pay for was live sports.

That's why Disney won't sell you ESPN unless you bundle it with everything else that they sell, and that's also why Disney is suing SlingTV for reselling access on a daily basis. SlingTV's "sports pass" allows you to pay for just the games that you want at a ridiculous price. Disney should be stoked, but instead it has sued because it wants to force sports fans to continue to pay for their other channels.

Almost no one is watching traditional scripted television these days. The few hits that the networks do have tends to be reality TV stuff like "Dancing with the Stars," where the audience can watch people compete in real time. Youtube (not YoutubeTV) has at least half again as many viewers as their next highest competitor (Netflix), at any time during the day, on traditional 10 foot devices (your living room TV). That's not counting people watching Youtube on their phones or their computers. Youtube is killing scripted content on living room televisions, during prime time. During the day its an order of magnitude worse.

Take a look at nielsen.com and take a look for yourself. It's absolutely grim. Look at the shows that are doing relatively well, they are all either sports or sports commentary. That's literally the only reason that anyone watches anything besides YouTube and Netflix.

Apple spent over $20 billion building up a content catalog. At their height they were spending nearly $5 billion a year making shows. They made some great shows and got rave reviews. Amazon spends $1 billion a year for the rights to Thursday night football. That is arguably the worst football game of the week. However, Prime generally gets as many viewers for a single game as Apple has total subscribers, including all of the free subscriptions that Apple gives away. It's not just Apple that is shifting away from scripted television either. Take a look at any of the streaming sites (including Netflix) and you will see that all of their recent moves have been to try and compete for the sports market. That's definitely what YouTube is doing by bundling Peacock.

Hollywood is currently circling the drain. Everyone is up for sale right now. No one is watching scripted television. They certainly aren't paying for it.

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