Not just cable TV is dying, but broadcast television and radio too.

Why should I put up with high ad loads while I consume linear content. It used to be that ad loads were lower decades ago, but then almost everyone has no choice but broadcast television and radio. Now, with fewer eyeballs watching radio and TV, the ad loads had to go up because broadcast ratings count eyeballs.

Broadcast radio and TV operated by corporations with deep pockets are going to wilt away. Most manufacturers of high power radio and TV transmitters will exit the market. What might be left are low power community radio and TV stations. The rest will be on the Internet.

Once outside the paywall, it no longer can generate revenue.

Content is not like shelter, healthcare, or sustenance. people will do without if control is tightened to the point where no one can watch the content.

The fact that it is non-essential for supporting life means that there is a limit on how much revenue can be generated. At some point you reach a diminishing point of return on the curve where it is no longer profitable to go after the consumers pirating the content.

As the economy deteriorates over the next few years, more consumers are going to ask "Why am it paying do much for this", this is going to cause subscriber counts to drop. Expect enhanced enforcement from the producers and distributors, but at some point they'll just be wasting their money.

Yes, and in the EU the fired employees will probably get treated better than in the US. In the US management would try to fire them for Gross Misconduct which means that you don't get any unemployment insurance, and if they had a non-compete clause in there employment documents, it would remain in force until it expires.

This is why there needs to be another channel to do account activations outside of tracking software such as Jira. The Director of HR should have gone to the Director of IT, and the director of IT should have delegated the task to someone who they trust to take care of the account deletions outside of any tracking software.

The IT person who didn't implement a security policy which would have prevented access to the confidential data. And if the sacked engineers who used slack deactivations, the HR person who preemptively removed the affected employees from slack before the layoffs were conducted and the people escorted out.

is generally only a thing in the United States. It's an alien concept in the rest of the world outside the USA. It's a lot harder to fire people for no reason in the rest of the world.

The whole employment-at-will thing was a big driver of H-1B visas. Bosses don't like the employment laws in the rest of the world they crave the power to fire someone for any reason or no reason whatsoever. So they import bodies to the USA so they are subjected to the shitty employment laws the United States has.

Of course, there still little enforcement of employment laws in India, so expect sweatshop environments to make up for the lack of employment-at-will.

Admiral Needa

has been ongoing in my neighborhood since 2022. There is a lot of cable up there just coiled up on the poles doing nothing.

With 5G fixed wireless internet available from 2 providers in my area, the progress of AT&T's overbuild has been nonexistent for almost 4 years.

With 5G fixed wireless internet being available at around $50 to $65 dollars a month, there hasn't been significant price increases from Cox. AT&T may be looking at this and they could decide to abandon all the fiber in place since they can't get much more than what Cox is and the fixed wireless providers are charging.

Of course, there will be a few users who want higher speeds and less packet manipulation by the ISP so that some servers can be run. Those users will pay more for better service. The problem with fixed 5G is that they faff around with HTTP requests so that they come from a different IP address and this confuses some of the services I use. However, most people browsing the web will not confront this issue.

Plaintiffs: The gaming companies
Defendant: Google

Has a hornet's next been kicked?

From Cort Doctorow's article on Reverse Centaurs:

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible

If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if it that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.

You may have to change jobs to get rid of those awful funds. The whole 401K thing is a closed garden racket.

Ever wonder why you can't invest in an IRA when your employer offers a 401K?

Ever wonder why the annual contribution limits for IRA's are much lower than 401K's?

Ever wonder why the owner of a small business can invest more in a "Sole Proprietor" IRA or SEP then an employee can if they work for a company who doesn't offer a 401K?

These rules are there because special interests were able to lobby for them.

Time to find a new plumber.
Once PE buys a home improvement contractor, they change the terms in the contract to extract all the value for themselves and leave nothing on the table for the consumer.

Read the contract before committing to any new business. The contract will almost tell you that a business is PE owned. It will have shitty terms for you and indemnify them.

This includes things like auto repair shops, dentists, veterinarians, home improvement contractors.

PE has been seeping into these businesses by buying out the owners.

A good way to tell if a company is PE-owned if they won't tell you is to look at their consumer contract.

Firms owned by PE extract as much from the customer as they legally can and leave no value on the table. Their contracts are full of binding arbitration, evergreening (automatic renewal) clauses, and short warranty periods.

The materials used by PE-owned businesses are sub-par as they cut their material costs to the bone. This explains the short warranty periods.

Watch out for the US income taxes, and FATCA. The USA taxes worldwide income no matter where you live on the planet. Some countries have tax treaties to mitigate double taxation, while others don't. Expect your taxes and investment account holdings to become very complicated if you live outside the USA as a US citizen. Also, you might have trouble opening a bank account in a foreign country due to FATCA. Finally, don't renounce your US citizenship if you have a lot of assets. Your asset gains will become immediately realizable, and you will be facing a huge tax bill.

Also most EU countries are going to have a much higher tax burden then the USA. This is due to a number of things like universal healthcare, better consumer and employee protections, higher quality food, and better transportation options. If these things are worth it to you, then fine, but these costs still have to be paid by the citizenry.