When I worked at Waymo, we had a ratio of about 10 cars to 1 remote human. I dunno if Cruise is being over-protective, if their tech is just that bad that they need more people than cars, or if the number is just incorrect.
Either way, it hardly matters. It's not like these things are commercially available for a long time yet, anyway. In the testing stages - which Cruise 100% is still in - you definitely want a sturdy team of humans capable of intervening for safety reasons.
As opposed to paying even $1/mo per channel I subscribe to, yes. Many creators have come out and said that their earnings reports show that higher-valued views come from Premium users, even though those viewers are not being served ads. It benefits them more than if I were to sit through every ad on their channel.
At the end of the day, Google's paying them more for my views than if I were an ad-viewing user. So for $20/mo (for family plan), that's much more financially viable for me than if I were to pay $1/mo to all 100+ creators I watch.
Taskmaster and WILTY are fantastic. These are some of my favorite "I want to watch something that I'll enjoy but don't need to actually care too much about" shows.
My subscription list is 100+. As much as I would love to support all of those creators directly, it's not a financially viable option for me. At least with my Premium subscription, they're getting something from my viewership, which is more than they'd get from me if I was adblocking their videos.
Assuming you live in any moderately-developed area, yeah this is kind of a useless service. But I can see this being very useful for people who need things delivered to remote or otherwise hard-to-access places where a delivery vehicle can't easily get to. Until the cost of maintaining a drone fleet drops substantially, I don't see it being more feasible than the standard delivery van service for most people, not for a while at least.
Don't play WoW, then. I'm not sure what the issue is. You don't like their pricing model, I get that. You don't have to, and you're allowed to not like it. I also don't like it, because I haven't the time or level of interest for the costs to be worthwhile for me.
The thing is, other people are allowed to like it. It's not a scam, though; you're getting what you're paying for. Just because it's not something you would pay for doesn't mean nobody else would or should. If you don't feel that the cost is worth your perceived value of the service, then don't buy it. But to suggest that the government should restrict them from being able to sustain their product (or even - GASP - make a profit from doing so) is absurd.
But the fact of the matter is that games like that cost money to create and maintain. If people are willing to pay for a base game, expansion, and a subscription fee in order to access it, then the creator should be allowed to charge for those things. It's not exploiting a vulnerable demographic like, for instance, payday loan sharks. We're talking about a purely recreational hobby. Hobbies generally cost money.
Considering you thought ‘don’t charge up-front for subscription games’ meant ‘destroy all subscription games,’ evidently fucking not.
I never said or suggested this, so your "reading comprehension" complaints are a little ironic now. I was trying to figure out what you were trying to say, which I still don't fully understand.
It seems like your argument is more "I don't like these types of games, so nobody else should". And it's fine to not like live service games; they're not for everybody. But for millions of people out there, that's the type of game they want to play, and are willing to pay for. You can make the argument that microtransactions or subscription fees are predatory, which is fine, but nobody's obligated to pay for those; people choose to because they want to play a live service game, which is a product an a service which is not free to develop or maintain.
There's nothing natural about chicken farms.