Corporations: hey guys, let’s unionize so the government doesn’t exploit us.
Employees: hey, can we als…
Corporations: NO.
Collective action for we, not for thee.
Can’t wait for this bullshit to get denied because writers/actors are already striking.
Well it’s not employees want the corporations to have unionized, but they just have less power to do anything about it
I didn’t say the employees wanted corporations to unionize or not. The joke was corporations interrupting employees asking if they can also unionize.
I didn’t imply you wanted it
every pirate related theme song getting increasingly louder in the background
I just bought 16 TB to expand my media server :)
You must have a lot of Linux ISO backups. Doing your part to preserve open source software history.
I have a feeling part of their plan is to sink all the pirate ships.
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If watching One Piece has taught me anything, it’s that if you try and kill a pirate all that happens is you make better pirates.
They’re like spiders
I was going to say a Hydra or bacteria, but sure, spiders.
Nintendo has been putting anti-piracy protection in all of their consoles since the NES in the 80’s. Every single one was cracked eventually. Oh, but surely they must be getting better? Nope, the Switch was cracked less than a year from release.
And Nintendo controls the hardware in this situation. Streaming services do not.
The only way to do that, is to kill humanity.
Yo-ho, all together, hoist the colors high. Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die!
Yar har, fiddle de dee Being a pirate is alright to be Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free You are a pirate!
It sounds terrible but I still love it
ALESTORM INTENSIFIES
Just call it what it is: bribing power
Pretty sure it’s more or less a cartel at this point.
Collusion*
streamers are currently being forced to reckon with their profitability — or lack thereof.
Netflix’s 2023 2nd quarter revenue: 8.1 billion dollars BTW
Brace yourself for a tidal wave of corporate apologists rushing to point out that “revenue isn’t profit!,!”
The number you’re looking for is $1.49 billion in net income for Q2 2023.
See? Clearly not profitable, need more ads
What’s that? You want to share your four-screens-at-a-time account with three other people outside your house?
Fuck you, pay us more.
Profit is the portion of revenue that is stolen from workers and given to shareholders. Profit is bad. Revenue is good.
Unless you use that revenue to do stock buybacks, then it’s not considered profit but you still get to steal it from the workers. That way you can cry about unprofitability while all your shareholders and c suites crank up the exploitation of workers and consumers chasing “profitability” until the business collapses.
Which is crazy, right? If a stock sale allows an investment in a business, a stock buyback should be a paying off of that debt, freeing more revenue in the future to be used explicitly to pay workers who generate that revenue. How the fuck that is justified in instead enriching the value of other investments still held by other investors shows the selective use of the analogy by corporate interests and that the whole house of cards is just bullshit.
For the most part, it’s not given to the shareholders, either. Dividends are pretty rare these days (which is when stocks largely went from being an ownership investment to - mostly - a form of gambling)
Anybody can look these numbers up. I’m not sitting on some secret Bloomberg terminal LOL
…but it’s not. And I really think people either don’t understand that or they are intentionally misrepresenting the situation.
Being level-headed and fact-driven isn’t “corporate apologist”, it’s how you maintain integrity and don’t derail your own movement by being dishonest about shit that doesn’t even matter.
It’s like when Trump lies about his golf games. No one cares about his golf games but it makes you realize that if he’s willing to blatantly and badly lie about something so trivial, he’s probably also lying about absolutely everything else about him that might even remotely appear negative.
Plenty of people understand it, and some of them understand that profit is so malleable that it’s not really a useful measure of a company’s financial health. What really matters is how much they make over their essential production operational expenses. They can tailor their non essential expenses to seem as profitable or unprofitable as they want and use stock valuation tricks like buybacks to make money for shareholders regardless.
What does it matter if the company is profitable or unprofitable on paper when certain people can make lots of money off it either way? Twitter was “unprofitable” it’s entire life but somehow I bet the executives still got their bonuses, I doubt the shareholders were dissatisfied with their stock valuations or the buybacks, and it sure didn’t stop them from acquiring other companies.
Thank you for putting this more eloquently than I could. I must admit, I was losing my cool with people being irrational about this.
I don’t know if people are ignoring expense scaling and stock buybacks or purposely choosing to hide it.
On a tangent, and nothing to do with you, but I don’t like how these streaming companies are being called “streamers”. Streamers are those people streaming on twitch, not a company like Netflix damnit.
To be clear, revenue does not equal profit.
Net income doesn’t equal profitability either. Companies scale their costs, including stock buybacks, based on revenue. https://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/stock_buyback
The slow march back to cable is unstoppable.
Pirate everything. Share everything.
Piracy is an access problem, not a consumer problem.
dismantle capitalism. I bet in like 24 years some disruptor is going to come along and buy up rights to the shit thats on peacock Hulu etc now and offer 9 bucks a month to stream it to you. rinse repeat. fuck this corpo nightmare.
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Not going to happen with Disney. They are lobbying to increase it even more than 100 years.
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thats a sensible solution actually. doubtful that the studios would ever go along with it, given how reluctant the studios are to pay writers a fair share.
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I mean that’s not even a little correct.
Streaming allows you to watch videos on demand, and allows you to choose from a littany of providers, where you were previously limited to whoever laid cable in your neighborhood.
Welcome back to the high seas mateys!
🏴☠️
I even upgraded my pipe to fiber so I can share Plex with my friends and family. Built a machine with 16TBx6 RAID. Cost me a shit ton more than a year of all the streaming services but fuck them.
cost me a shit ton
Yes but now you have an elephantine Silicon Schlong
Already downloaded 4tb of movies and shows :)
Don’t forget to seed!
My average seed time is well over a year. Private trackers love me.
Was talking with a friend over lunch about this. I don’t mind paying for media, but the greed I’m seeing from the streaming services now makes me feel like the more ethical choice is to pirate content and just contribute directly to the arts where I can.
They’re getting to the point where they think that just because they have the platform and the licenses, they can soak their customers. Only a matter of time before the ad men move in. Anyway, fuck all that
Arr!
I never left ye lady-dressin’ barnacle. Leekin’ forward to sail with ye to meet those corporate scallogs for some happy fightin, lootin and rapin’
R
If I’ve learned anything about corporate lobbying groups it’s that they only exist to fuck you and ruin any legislation that attempts to protect you from them.
Eat shit SIA.
Corps form “unions” and use money gained by preferential treatment by government to create propaganda shitting on unions.
Funny that.
No wait, infuriating. That’s the word.
They cry about the “free market” and then run to the Government to ask for “protection”.
Wait, what? What corporations form labor unions designed to undermine labor unions? Are you calling a lobbying group a union? Are you using terminology creatively or is there something I hadn’t heard about? EDIT: I guess I never get to find out. :(
Sorry for the late reply, I’m not on all the time.
I was using it creatively which is why I used quotation marks. They act as a collective for their own benefit as a union does.
Cool! Thanks for the update.
Get rid of them. Socialize their service. Host all content at media.gov and take costs out of taxes. We could pay artists more, have 0 ads, all for like $15 per paycheck. Those taxes would fund grants for artists and cover platform costs. No ads. No corporations.
P.S. you already pay taxes on media through various 3 letter institutions and licensing. It’s not different from what we have other than eliminating the things we all dont like.
Watch the video. Benn Jordan has done a lot of the heavy lifting for us. This lobby exists to stop that from ever happening and nothing more. Fight them to the death.
$15, that sounds like so much…now let me refuel my truck up and buy another beer.
How do we socialise these globally important services? Let’s say the Americans socialised all of the services we use heavily every day here in Europe. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, etc etc.
How will that affect our access to these now internal US National Services? How will it affect our rights and ability to take those services to court - now taking the US State to court instead, when they do something bad?
How does that increase my rights as a consumer, rather than stifle them?
You’re forgetting that the USA doesn’t live in a bubble. Other countries exist. This is a global issue.
Well, we would have the content we own. We would pay to lease the content we don’t. If any non US residents want a media.gov account, they can pay for one out of pocket what Americans pay in taxes.
Problem solved.
It increases your rights as a consumer because it consolidates the location and entity at/to which you pay for that content. You get all the content in one place as opposed to via 12 different accounts.
I can only imagine the delicious conversations about what objectionable art other people are enjoying that ‘their’ tax dollars paid for. Sure, let’s do it.
And when the GOP holds enough power again we could finally have real US branded State TV! The Trump News Network will live, lol
Could they, instead, band together to offer a service that’s more user friendly than piracy? I suppose bribery is cheaper and easier.
They did, it was called Netflix.
Then the Netflix rates went up while everyone pulled and splintered content onto their own services and then started shuffling it around.
It would be such a wonderful thing wouldn’t it? Now where was I again about profits and squeezing the customers?
but muh maximum profits
Imagine not being able to force set the resolution and bitrate on your stream, even tho you pay for 4k. (Btw. Same goes for YT) Plex and jellyfin are just superior.
What do you mean same for YouTube? I can still set resolution? Is that changing?
What client do you use? I mostly use the iOS client and there they only give you the illusion of a choice: „higher quality“ and „lower quality“ maybe there are still clients which allow force set resolution/bitrate.
You need to select the advanced option for the resolution options (I use the official client currently)
A, lol, woops, I forgot that they re-added that. 🫣
What you’re asking for is a monopoly. It rarely is cheaper or easier. Sometimes, when heavily regulated, it could be. But history shows most of these are eventually privatized and deregulated and then we know what happens.
Don’t put words in my mouth. Industries get together and set standards and form partnerships all the fucking time. It’s as much a “monopoly” as this lobbying project is.
Lobbying should be fucking banned.
It is far more likely that remarks against lobbying will be banned, because someone would lobby for that.
It’s still a useful mechanic to be able to influence government policy in between elections. Not all lobbying is pushing for this dystopian stuff, this is just what ends up in the news.
In Canada anyone can review federal and provincial lobbying activity. Eg:
https://lobbycanada.gc.ca/app/secure/ocl/lrs/do/clntSmmrySrch?return=true&time=1695867498006
I’m guessing there is something like that for the US.
Every form of corruption is a useful mechanic to be able to influence government policy between elections.
Ya that’s kind of what I’m saying. I’m not thrilled about it.
Vote in representatives that will ban it.
In theory yes, but in practice extremely rich lobbyists will buy up enough votes to not ban it. Sorry, I mean “successfully lobby against it legally”.
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Spotify also recently raised their proces, but tbf they kinda had to with the inflation. The depressing thing is that creators are rewarded for borting. (See slightly Sociables “the dark side of spotify” vid for indepth)
but tbf they kinda had to with the inflation.
So, they used inflation as an excuse to charge people more money for an already-profitable product?
Wow.
Corporations keep talking about inflation as if the regular users aren’t already being screwed by it. “Here, since you have less disposable money, lets charge even more.”
My parents are paying for YouTube TV through their T-Mobile subscription 🤦♂️
Streaming has ultimately taught me how little I ‘need’ to watch since it trains you to really only seek out a couple things per service. I’ve also become very advertisment sensitive being blessed with tools to avoid that and companies honeymooning people for a while with fewer ads compared to what cable did.
Obviously, the dipshits are springing their ‘trap’ but I’m not bullish on the strategy of forcing consumers to suddenly tolerate a return of ads everywhere and always on entertainment. I just see folks running away again/further disconnecting from traditional media.
Yup. The high seas are looking more attractive every day.
And the tools to emulate the good parts of streaming with a home setup have never been better.
The search for something to watch and to evaluate what streaming service I should subscribe for the next 2 months or so has become so tedious and the overall quality so low that I’m simply giving up on them as a whole. The price increase and ads weren’t even necessary to drive me away. They only ensure I will not come back.
“Guillotine sales soar as citizens band together for lobbying power”
One can dream
Kind of lobbying I can get behind.
What’s the famous quote? Something about how a capitalist will sell you the rope from which you plan to hang them? Something like that?
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free.
Yo ho.
Any port any storm.
Batten down the hatches! KEEP THAT POWDER DRY!
It felt inevitable at some point this was going to happen after they got caught off guard by the strikes to make sure that it never happens again, but the fight is not over yet.
It’s more important than ever then for you guys to support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, fight for workers, and fight for unions.
Otherwise, they’ll just keep squeezing and squeezing, until there is nothing left.
Can’t support the WGA strike as it’s over.
Yay
