It's not just the culture of not giving a fuck, it's the culture of passing the buck.

If the old Demotivator of "none of us are as dumb as all of us" is true, it's dealing with Indian outsourcing organisations. Whenever something goes wrong, and it goes wrong frequently enough that it's a well oiled procedure, you'll never be able to pin the responsibility on anyone. First they'll all start blaming other teams, then big meetings are called where everyone who can be involved is (more people speaking means less gets said), Teflon coated deflections which end up with dragging another person in to deflect and blame someone else until the meeting runs well beyond time which is used by people to leave before any tasks can be given to them, let alone any responsibility. Above all else they avoid any actionable items from being created, insisting that there must be another meeting and that everyone must agree before anything can be done.

Any attempt to use an American or Australian style of "cutting through the bull" is treated as if you've just murdered their nan and bummed their dog. Which inevitably leads to complaints about you being "rude" which is another means of deflecting responsibility.

This, I'm old enough to remember when payphones were commonplace. First they had rubber cords connecting the handsets, as these were cut regularly they started using braided cords, then steel braided cords (like a high end brake line) then finally steel coil sleeves... and scrotes would still go out with bolt cutters on occasion. All that did was ensure that those who wanted to casually damage a payphone needed to put in more of an effort to do so than a pair of scissors. It reduced vandalism but didn't stop it.

When Australia's public telco was privatised in the late 90s, one of the first things they stopped caring about (I mean after customer service, their staff and actual telephony service) was the payphones they were supposed to maintain. In the early 00s they argued that mobile phones had become ubiquitous enough that they didn't need maintain the public telephone infrastructure. As this was the same government who privatised them it was bought without question.

In the context of beautiful women, sure the "by the gods" bit should be "go out and meet actual women".

This will require some activity on their part, like bathing which might be a hurdle.

You've seen X since Musk took over?

It's gone from a barely contained cesspit under Dorsey to a hive of hatred and scum under Musk. If anything he's demonstrated that firing 80% of the staff results in a massive decrease in product quality.

You tell that turd who's boss.

I don't disagree with you, but I think that happened after, rather than before.

Craigslist is an American site which I've never seen anywhere else, but every country had their own version, Gumtree in Australia for example.

Also it's more of an example than the sole cause. Cragislist replaced the classifieds but papers also had a lot more in them back in the 90s. TV guides, stocks, et al. which all went online meaning news was about all they had left which lead to the likes of Murdoch buying them up as propaganda peices... Which of course has lead to a lot of people like me, middle aged and not having bought a paper in decades.

One lead to the other, but Craigslist (which I've never even heard of outside the US) wasn't the sole cause.

Newspapers used to be, for those of us old enough to remember, a lot more than just news. In fact it wasn't hard for the Saturday or Sunday paper to be less than half news stories. You'd have the classifieds, the job section, the TV guide, the Lifestyle sections (travel, fashion, et al.) Business and economics, the stock markets... so on and so forth. All of these functions were slowly taken over by the Internet.

Stocks went online so if you were getting them from the paper you were horribly out of date. The TV guide went into the TV itself, then online. Lifestyle was taken over by specialist websites, same with business and economics. The job boards all went online as well and of course, so did the classifieds. It quickly got to the point that if you were looking in the paper for a job, used car or what's on TV it was not just out of date but the least convenient way of doing it. Responses dropped so people stopped advertising, thus became largely populated by scammers (both purchasers and sellers) and eventually reached a point where papers just gave up on the whole idea.

What youngster's dont remember is that classifieds used to be a lot more than just "John is Dead, Truck for sale" kind of posts. Local and national retailers used to use them for advertisement, next to the add for an old Holden Commodore you'd see the large Holden dealers advertising new ones. Before the advent of large retailers like NewEgg you'd used to browse the paper for comparing prices on computer parts (we're going all the way back to the 90s here kiddies) but then everyone got their own websites and having a prominent ad in the weekend paper became less important because if people wanted to look up your prices, they didn't wait until Saturday (where I lived in the 90s stores had to shut at 12:30 on the dot on Saturdays and 5:30 on weekdays).

If you don't remember any of this, I'm happy for you, it really was the part of the 90s that sucked. I mean the music was better but most other things have improved significantly in the last few decades.

Disney's fortune is not in copyright, rather it's in trademarks and they'll defend their trademarks.

I don't think AI are going to eat their lunch the same as cheap animation out of Asia didn't eat their lunch. Disney has never been "photorealistic" and well, realism is really the opposite of what Disney sell, which is fantasy. What we're going to find is that, much like with cheap animation houses, you can produce decent animation but everything else suffers, no plot, no story, no character development... Yes Disney ripped off the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, et al. but were successful because they were able to write these things into enjoyable films.

Just because every tom, dick and harry can make an animation, doesn't mean any of them will be good. If anything the flood of crap will make known brands even more valuable... Much like cheap tyres out of Asia, LingLong Ditchfinders haven't made Bridgestone or Pirelli go out of business.

Is it AI though?

Occams Razor leads me to believe this is more of a classic case of an economy worsening and budgets tightening.

Sure, the snake oil salesmen are out trying to tout AI as a people replacement (for the avoidance of doubt, we all know it isn't) but all their looking at replacing are the people who they've already outsourced.

You're quite right that this will lead to understaffing, specifically more tasks being lumped onto smaller numbers of staff. The work needed to be done doesn't reduce or at least nowhere near as much as the staff that they've lost. By the time the tree of bad management decisions bear fruit, the managers have either moved on or become so entrenched that it will take a Herculean effort to remove (see: Alan Joyce and QANTAS). The irony is, the C-Levels tell us they get paid so much because of the responsibility they must bear... but when it comes to taking responsibility they're never the ones who do.

Oddly enough, buying OEM parts for my Nokia tablet was cheap... Same with my Mercedes... Often struggled to find cheaper than OEM for my Toyota too.

There's a difference between charging a little extra for stock keeping and logistics and deliberately overcharging to discourage repairing and to coerce people to buy an entirely new device. Apple is not doing the former and definitely doing the latter. Even Honda, who in the car world, are well known for high OEM prices aren't nearly as bad... Also for my Honda I could get the parts direct from NGK, et al. not to mention all the aftermarket bits.

Cried the person who insisted the Leopards Eating People Faces party wouldn't eat peoples faces as a leopard chewed down on their face.

The same people who cry "bring the fac'trees back to 'Murica" are the ones who will shortly be crying "why is everything so expensive". They are literally people who are incapable of putting two and two together.

And that group in Denmark, did they manage to get any, let alone all of said products made in the EU, let alone Denmnark? No, then what the fuck is your point?

I've lived in Australia before the age of grey importing, making it harder to buy from overseas didn't make Canon make cameras in Australia, didn't make Dell produce laptops in Australia, didn't make Warner Brothers make press DVDs in Australia, didn't make Nike make shoes in Australia... All it did was make everything more expensive to import, meaning that people could not buy as much with the discretionary income they had available. When grey importing became a thing in the late 00s, it became cheaper to buy from the US or UK and have it shipped to Oz than it was to get the equivalent product in Australia _IF_ you even could. A lot of companies decided it was too much trouble to import into Australia. Even shops got in on it, JB Hi-Fi famously started selling grey imported cameras, on which they were paying local taxes and local staff at their local stores... and it was still cheaper even with the cost of returns.

Making it more difficult to buy from overseas only hurts the people in your country. It doesn't improve things, it certainly doesn't force anyone to build factories... All it does is make things more expensive and less varied. If you want a more effective way of harming yourself, try making imports more difficult.

Piracy is mostly a customer service problem and is largely caused by trying to create artificial scarcity by locking up the product. People will buy if you make it easy, affordable and palatable. Forcing them into overpaying or using a strict DRM system that fails more often than it works only serves to drive customers to easier means of consumption.

McDonalds, people like McDonalds (I don't care if you've not eaten there since 1982 because cold/soggy/blah blah, bul-ah, no one likes you), would they sell as many products if they were the same but wrapped in Durian smelling paper? Or if they charged $40 per meal or if they made you fill out 10 forms and demanded you eat the burger in a specific way? No... Then why does the content industry demand this, simple, because if McDonalds gets uppity we've got Burger King or umpteen other places. When you have eliminated all competition, piracy becomes your competitor and you can't beat them on price, hence it is largely a customer service issue.

Exactly, the best justice system money can buy.

The Republican Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.