They've done the calculation. They'll lose X income because of subscribers who leave, and they'll get Y extra income from the ones who remain. If X < Y then implement policy.

Companies increasingly no longer even care about income.

They care about what boosts investor confidence.

So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.

The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.

30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.

It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".

It's simpler than that. To a public company, the product is the stock price, and the customers are investors.

Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.

I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.

It's not meant to be idealistic at all. There very much should be a whole lot more that goes into the decision to raise prices or introduce ads or whatever that might upset your customers.

Certainly there are people who shouldn't gamble, but that doesn't mean gambling should be illegal. For a lot of people it's harmless fun.

I think it’s worth reflecting on the baseline paradigm of our political system. Which is: we are perfectly fine taxing one group of people (the working non-retired) at very substantial levels so that a different group of people (the retired) can not work for 20 years at the end of their lives. Given that our backdrop is such an incredible impingement of the liberty of some for the benefit of others, I think it’s completely reasonable to likewise impinge on the freedom of people who can gamble responsibly to save people who are prone to gambling addiction from destroying their lives.

I disagree with the framing of your comment. For one thing, you get an old age pension for the extra taxes you pay when you work.

What do I get for restrictions on my liberties in this case?

Then restrict it to just programs that help the poor. Still an enormous share of the federal budget and, thus, a huge impingement on the liberty of people who are not poor.

> What do I get for restrictions on my liberties in this case?

A neighbor who is less likely to beat his wife because he gambled all the rent money on baseball

If you don’t see yourself as part of a system, a neighborhood, a community… I don’t think there’s an answer here that will resonate with you.

Oh, I do. But I see myself as part of a voluntary system.

A functioning society

Gambling is legal where I live and society functions just fine.

The industry can't survive on people who see it as harmless fun, that's the problem.

So is Russian roulette 83% of the time.

This is all just smoke. Hegseth is not going to be impeached.

Massie is upset because the Jews have been using their orbital mind lasers on the illuminati again.

Flares. They fired flares at a Danish helicopter.

It's possible the conflict will get bigger, but I doubt it. I think what's happening right now is all about internal Russian politics. The Russians will lose in Ukraine without a big influx of new troops, something that's very unpopular. By provoking his neighbors in a few highly publicized incidents, Putin can play into existing Russian paranoia about invasion from the west, which will allow him to conscript another half million men.

But new troops don't help him if the need for troops gets correspondingly larger. My suspicion is after Putin gets his troops most of the talk about a wider war will die down, and all those new resources will be dedicated to Ukraine.

And yet the Europeans have built one defense system after another in that time. I get why countries want to have their own defense industries. If I were running a country I would too. But the extent to which more of those systems haven't been deployed has more to do with mis-aligned budget priorities between countries and old fashioned jobs politics. Only the largest European countries can go it alone in major weapon systems development, and the joint projects tend to founder on discussions over what gets built where. FCAS/SCAF is a perfect illustration of this.

From the US perspective, what's frustrating is extent to which European powers, particularly the largest and potentially most powerful, have allowed their readiness to decline. I remember a particular surprise readiness exercise a few years back in which the Germans were able to get no more than a dozen tanks moving within the first 48 hours. The rest were broken, undergoing maintenance, or had been cannibalized for spare parts. At the time Germany had, on paper anyway, about 300 active tanks.

It's not the sexy stuff like new missile systems and strike fighters that have been neglected. It's the boring parts that really matter like an efficient reserve system, logistics, spare parts, boots, training facilities, ammunition, fuel depots, etc.

Nobody wants to spend a lot of money maintaining a military in peacetime, but an effective peacetime military is insurance: When you don't need it you don't need it, but when you need it you really, really need it. Your country's strategic situation can change really quickly.

There's no active war in the Far East, at least for the US. Of course you bring mobile assets to where the fighting is right now.

That's the theory. I never ran across a project that used stored procedures which didn't have a code base split between stored procedures and whatever server language, with no rhyme or reason for what goes where. It's just a maintenance headache.

Piercing the corporate veil is difficult to do in practice unless they've gotten very sloppy.

If they see people doing exactly what was described to avoid fines I think they will amend the law to explicitly allow piercing the veil. Just like for directors

I don't know why Trump's existence is evidence the US does not have a "real" democracy. As a group, we voted for him, and he went to the Oval Office. That's democracy.

There are certainly governments outlawing political opponents in the first world, but that's not the US.

When the same guy wins when he gets the popular vote, and wins when he doesn't, that may technically be "democracy" in the sense that a vote occurred and votes were counted, but it clearly isn't fair (and it isn't, it isn't designed to be. If it were fair, the people might do something crazy like vote in a populist demagogue...)

And yes, I would say that regarding the other side too.

That's just the way the US system is set up. You can't win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states.

Yes, it was set up that way to keep slave-owning states in the union, which one assumes should no longer be an issue.

I don't think you should be able to win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states necessarily, but I definitely don't think you should be able to win the presidency by only doing well in a couple of swing states.

No, it wasn't to keep slave owning states in the union. You're confusing the 3/5th compromise with the electoral college. The reason we have 50 little elections instead of one big one is to keep the largest states from dictating policy to everyone else.

Whenever you have voting you have swing votes. That's just Democracy. If it wasn't swing states it would be swing voters nationwide.

That's normal stuff for anyone producing a vehicle, isn't it?