paultimate14 @ paultimate14 @lemmy.world

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A much slower pace, but Jack Welch immediately comes to mind. Tons of short-term decisions that made the numbers go up but had disastrous long-term consequences not just for GE, but all of America. Lawsuits for everything from illegally dumping chemicals into rivers to discriminatory lending. GE used to be a shining pinnacle of manufacturing and innovation: now it's a weird scribbly logo on the cheapest appliances you can find. He championed outsourcing and intra-company competition, practices that spread and went on to destroy other companies.

Or you could point to Ed Lambert buying and merging Sears and KMart in 2005. Sears especially was egregious. It started as a mail-order catalog designed to make high-end goods affordable to the middle class. It provided good wages and benefits, good quality products, and innovated the retail environment. The idea was that by paying gold wages he would end up creating more customers, and there are tons of examples of Sears employees in the 50's who had Searss-mad houses filled with Sears-made products. It wasn't all great (kind of getting close to a company town, also heavily reliant on cars and suburban sprawl). But a lot of what we think of as the sterotypicall "American Dream" was driven by Sears.

By the early 2000's when Lambert bought it, it definitely wasn't as dominant as it used to be- it had lost some market share to Wal-Mart and other competitors, and the mail-order catalog business was waning and kind of replaced by TV shopping channels. But it still had a sound logistical network. Online shopping was just getting off the ground, Amazon was still just for books, eBay was incredibly sketchy. There were people at the time who wondered if Sears could just transition their catalog business model to he Internet and become dominant again. Instead, Lampert cut costs. Closed stores, outsourced what he could, cut wages and benefits, reduced quality, sold off brands. Old Craftsman tools are still covered today for their quality and durability, while the modern tools are rusting in landfills. They were in prime position to be what Amazon is today, but chose to squander it instead.

Musk might be setting a speed running record with Twitter though.

Ah damn, thanks for the correction. It seems like every few years the industry changes.

Heck even Patreon was a good way to support artists for a while, but it seems like they might be starting to succumb to the enshittification of venture capital. Bandcamp has been sold twice in the last 2 years.

If you want artists to get paid, you need to pay them more directly.

The highest margin for most is probably merch purchased at venues, including physical media. After that it's probably the merch store on the artist's website. They make money off of ticket sales for shows too, but there's a lot of middle-men and actual costs to shows so there's a wide variance in profit margin. Even local acts at bars: sometimes it's a pay-to-play scheme where the band could be losing money, sometimes they're making a few hundred bucks for a night.

Streaming on Spotify or an ad-sponsored platform like YouTube is going to give small fractions of a penny per-stream to the artist. There's plenty of artists out there who have opened their books and shown they make more from releasing music as pay-what-you-want than from Spotify.

Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think they ever will.

It's probably not going to be a whole city at once. It's going to be a building here, a building there, barely escalating beyond local news unless it's a famous building (Mar-A-Lago?). There's going to be more and worse hurricanes, but climate deniers will point out how they weren't as bad as Katrina or Maria or Sandy. Insurers have already started leaving those areas, changing policies, and/or hiking rates.

The big exception will be if another New Orleans levy breaks. But people will blame the very idea of that city existing below sea level as being an inherently bad idea (which.... I don't think is entirely wrong) and use that to deflect away from the influence of climate change.

People still denying climate change today are either financially invested in doing so, or will need a ridiculous and dramatic event to convince them. Something like you would see in a disaster movie, like a 300ft tall Tsunami.

https://steamdb.info/app/1675200/

I saw that blip but figured it was just some sort of weirdness in the data. It says it was sold at $319.99 but at "No Discount". So... Maybe? Seems weird that they would then put it at 10% again afterwards, but idk.

It looks like this year they've had a 10% discount off the cheapest model. So that's ~$40 off. I think it's worth waiting the 9 days for the Halloween sale to see. If not, I'd be very surprised if it's not on sale for Autumn. I would be surprised if any of these sales have a deeper discount than any of this year's earlier sales though.

If you plan on replacing the SSD, those will probably go on sale around Black Friday. It would kind of be a pain to settle in with the Deck and get everything set up and installed how you like just to replace the SSD a month later.

Can confirm: I've been loving my Xperia since I got it a few months ago.

The other con you didn't mention is availability. I'm in the Eastern US, drove around to several different stores and couldn't find anywhere that carried it. Eventually had to order online and have it shipped, which I normally don't like to do for something this expensive.

You're just mad you got ripped off 25 years ago lol

As an EP that wouldn't have been $20 lol.

Isn't that kind of the point of EP's though? They're ~half the length and should be cheaper to compensate for that.

Maybe if you tried to sell at FYE. But a local flea market? You could totally get $10-$15 depending on what it was and how much it cost initially.

Bruh I'm looking over at my shelf of CD's from the time.

But let's look at the best selling albums that came out in 1999, the year referenced in the meme.

1. Backstreet Boys - Millennium - 12 tracks
2. Britney Spears - Baby One More Time - 11 tracks (or more, depending on the version)
3. Santana - Supernatural - 13 tracks
4. Celine Dion - All the Way... A Decade of Song - 16 tracks (kind of weird as it's a compilation)
5. Ricky Martin - Ricky Martin - 14 Tracks
6. Blink-182 - Enema of the State - 12 tracks
7. RHCP - Calofornication - 15 tracks
8. Christina Aguilera - Christina Aguilera - 12 tracks (I think? I'm only finding re-releases that include more bonus tracks now)
9. Creed - Human Clay - 11 tracks
10. Dido - No Angel - 12 tracks

Maybe back in the day you mistakenly bought singles instead of albums?

But you owned it. So you could sell the CD and recoup almost all of your money.

They are typically 45-60 minutes. Which could be 1 long song, or 20+ short songs.

Gonna get automatically re-installed with every single Winfows update for all of eternity.

How do you figure that 2 of the top 6 merging won't shift the market in a big way?

Also, total gaming revenue wouldn't be a good way to compare it because that includes revenue streams that's are unrelated to Activision/Blizzard. Microsoft is hardly even competing with Nintendo at all considering they don't have a handheld device. And Microsoft releases way more games on PC than Nintendo or even Sony, which further reduces the relevance of hardware sales.

It's the developing and publishing industries specifically that are going to be impacted by this, because that's what Activision/Blizzard does.

The impact to hardware sales will be indirect: I would guess a pretty small number amount of people might switch to Xbox or buy an Xbox in addition to a PlayStation just for version exclusives, but probably not a huge amount as long as Microsoft keeps COD on PlayStation.

3rd place in... What? I'm trying to search around to see what you're referring to here, but I can't find anything.

By total market cap, Microsoft already blows these companies out of the water. By just videogame divisions, Sony and Nintendo are way farther ahead because of hardware sales, but that doesn't really make sense to include in the conversation about acquiring a publisher. I can't find any solid numbers either way isolating publishing, other than that the top 5 in recent years seems to be Tencent, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Activision/Blizzard (with EA hanging around too). Seems like any of those two merging is going to be bad for everyone other than shareholders.

This looks like it exactly matches the comforter from a hotel I stayed at recently. It was a "Tru by Hilton"

I'm not even talking about the date format, I'm talking about the date.

I didn't even mention date formats. It's only 10/10 using the Gregorian calendar. There's still the Islamic, Indian, Chinese Hebrew, and other calendars in use around the world.