Copernican @ Copernican @lemmy.world

Posts

14

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567

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm for this. Don't vote for war mongers when you or your kids or grandkids could be drafted for war.

How is Lemmy so anti corporate, but bends over backwards to defend steam as an immaculate corporation. I love steam, and 90% of my game purchases or from their store. 5% are from stores that let me redeem steam keys.

I think their market position should have some scrutiny.

Well I think Karl Marx agrees on some way. But when you are BFFs with Engels and enjoy Fox Hunts as a pass time, are you eating the rich or just saying everyone should eat like the rich?

The Atlantic ran a great cover story on this propaganda war the west is facing. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/

It's interesting how the propaganda and fake news takes a few hops in other continents before being pushed into Western media.

I think any 3rd party that can be used by Russia and China to harm candidates for US office will receive funding, favorable news from state media, etc. from Russia and China whether those 3rd party candidates know it or not.

But you could say it pushed the limits. It required the Ram Expansion Pak. I think only 3 or 4 N64 games required that. It was packed with weird game modes like counter op. The far sight gun as a weird experiment to see through walls. It really pushed the limits and tried to do a lot. TimeSplitters was a great spiritual successor to the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark series that continued the tradition.

I got more of a Mirrors Edge vibe than Perfect Dark watching that trailer.

I love the comments in these discussions that are like "Fuck hedge funds, fuck investing, fuck the stock market, fuck 401ks. Bring back pensions." And then I have to explain that pensions are investing in the stock market and actually own like 20% of common traded mid and large size company stock. Apparently folks want the benefit of being in the stock market without the personal responsibility to do it themselves, but in the process get to hide their guilt of personally investing in the market themselves. But that's okay, and that's why I think we probably should have mandatory minimum retirement savings and investment programs.

I think the personal responsibility experiment of 401k's is proving to be a failure. Yes, responsible people with sufficient incomes are somewhat at fault for not using the available retirement vehicles. But if individuals can't be trusted to tend to their own future, we should probably be mandating retirement savings. And with that increasing minimum wage and considering UBI's to make it reasonable for people save and have money in retirement.

But thanks for the sympathy for the downvote brigade. Merely suggesting personal responsibility seems to bring on the hate in lemm personal finance discussions. I have coworkers and friend's with 6 figure incomes, top 75% of USA household incomes. They hardly use their 401k's and use Roth IRAs when they have the means to be maxing those out.

I am very sympathetic to this. When I had a friend go through cancer, it made me realize a lot of important things about life. In the middle of that list, but critical in that list of things is paying for supplemental disability insurance. It was like a few hundred dollars a year that is the difference retaining an additional 20% of your salary in disability if needed. I am probably more likely to near term need supplemental disability insurance vs life insurance, and if I'm still alive and thriving and on disability that's probably a bigger financial drain on my family that sudden untimely death.

This really comes down to who has and hasn't saved. If you are a millennial that regularly saves into a retirement account you are probably looking good because the market has been good. But not a lot of millennials save for retirement which is the problem. Some of that is low wage, but some of that is bad spending habits.

Housing on the other hand is totally fucked for millennials regardless of what you are saving. If you got a starter home you are unable to sell and upgrade with decent rates. If you are first time buyer there is no inventory for starter homes because folks can't afford to leave them even if they want to.

It's basically just British terminology for layoffs with a severance package.

Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn't have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.

Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don't think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.

But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.

Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn't always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren't easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it's basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don't own it all, but that's fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.

I don't think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn't get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB's for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it's not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.

Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.

Weird choice of quotes and headlines:

From the OP article:

"He has been “uncharacteristically vocal” about his support during press calls for his new film, Unfrosted, The New York Times reported."

From the NYT link in the quote:

"As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely"

But when you go to the link to the NY Times article that references Mr. Seinfeld as being recently vocal about his support of Israel, one of the concluding comments in the article is:

Surely, Mr. Seinfeld sees it differently. His public comments have largely avoided geopolitical specifics, dwelling little on the choices of the Netanyahu government or prospective conditions for a cease-fire.

And he can still sound hesitant even in recent discussions about the Jewishness of “Seinfeld” — which an NBC executive once described as “too New York, too Jewish.”

Nothing about this makes me think Seinfield is a a strong supported of the war. Support for Israel after the attack can be a lot of things and does not mean pro Netanyahu war machine.

Doom was a top down 2d shooter that just happened to be rendered in first person 3d.

Niagara is what I moved to from Nova. Less widget focused layout, but any app is literally 2 presses and one swipe away from the home screen.

Taiwan can't get recognized despite its government being a founding member of the UN and folks surprised it's contentious for Palestine to be recognized?