Temple Square

At this point, it’s just a temper tantrum.

Democrats/scientists/experts/youth are the “annoying older brother” and anything they want is “stupid.”

Lead poisoning (gasoline) really ruined a generation.

Wait until they see “Smoke Hub” in Bakersfield, CA.

It’s literally the porn hub logo.

Yep. Disney+ (for now).

Netflix, HBO, and Hulu gradually cancelled over the last few years.

What’s stupid of them is that if they’d stayed around $8-10/mo each (ad-free), I probably would have stayed subscribed forever. Now they each get nothing.

I don’t mind Spotify increasing.

Inflation is real. And nobody wants to see the service turn into a Little Caesars “$5 Hot N Ready” pizza that erodes in quality, rather than gradually price increase with inflation.

The advantage we have with music streamers is that nearly ALL the content is on ALL the services. So, if one service goes bananas with pricing, we can jump ship to a cheaper one.

But TV is siloed into mini monopolies. The only source of capitalism competition they face is use choosing to do without. And frankly, if I’m gonna be forced-fed ads, I choose to do it on YouTube which costs me $0 and not $7.99 a month.

Netflix is gone. And as someone who leaves The Simpsons running 24/7 on Disney+, I’m frankly getting thiiiiiiiiiis close to dumping their asses, too!

But it’s not.

This isn’t intentional. Florida’s politicians want an educated, wealthy population and to fight a meaningless culture war with Disney and young people (to keep Boomers happy).

They are too dumb to see they can’t have their cake and eat it too! This will be one expensive culture war.

Quality universities create quality employees and quality (tax paying) companies. By the end of the decade, and the region will stagnate and you’ll see a “new” Republican going full panic mode to fix the damage (while somehow blaming it on Democrats).

In short: There is NO plan. They’re just THAT shortsighted! (Everything you see can be, once again, explained by simple Boomer overindulgence)

Now we can doomscroll Lemmy!

Yep. Would have gladly paid $10 a month for Gold had it included API access for RiF (only fair, since I’m skipping the ads).

But noooooooo. Reddit didn’t want my money, evidently. So, after 11 years of a VERY active account (made or commented on 10-15k posts over that time), I deleted and left.

It’s fine. Lemmy stretches that itch to “scroll” something. And I can use whatever damn app I want.

Or, as a market-based solution: TurboTax raised the price for small business returns to about the same as hiring and accountant. So, now I just hire an accountant.

GIF was ancient in the YTMND.com days. And nowadays, YTMND is like two decades old. Back when my life had hope.

I’d complain, except it hasn’t gone up in a decade.

Prices needs to go up a little bit every year to reflect CPI and inflation.

I agree. There should be some sort of a la carte service where you can pay a couple of bucks and use it for like a day.

I know this is a piracy community, but honestly I don’t mind paying for newspapers.com. I use it a lot just to read up on old articles and stuff and they seem to be doing a pretty good job adding new newspapers to the archive all the time.

For me piracy is great when the product is just outright overpriced because some corporate tools in New York or Los Gatos are trying to make their VC people happy.

I feel like Aaron Swartz exiting and later dying played a role. There was no longer his voice to check bad business behavior.

But the good news is, tech is a highly disruptable industry. Barrier to entry is accessible for regular people.

And that’s why we’re here.

Reddit doesn’t die because we left. They die in a few years when the Fediverse just works better than Reddit. And we fund that.

Speaking of, how do I kick in a few bucks to help out various Lemmy servers? Anyone know?