I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
> No. Insurers are public companies and need to increase profits every quarter. Lowering costs harms this ability tremendously.
And selling their insurance at higher prices than their competitors harms their ability to sell their insurance to customers. Hopefully, you or your employer are shopping around, and not just for health insurance.
If they are making editorial/values based judgement on who they allow to process payments on their platform then it seems they cannot be immune under the common carrier defense and are liable for being sued for refusing to do business with lawful entities, no?
Welcome to the age of zombie copyright holding companies.
National Geographic also went out of business last year, in that they now employ zero writers (Disney is the majority owner).
Warner Brothers Discovery Corp is performing a similar wind-down of the operations they own (they cut $3B from production budgets last year), and is hoping to apply the same thing to Paramount's holdings after their proposed acquisition is approved.
In particular, CNN and CBS will be owned by the resulting company, and there will be plenty more journalists to fire at the resulting conglomerate (WBD laid off a bunch of reporters at CNN last year as part of a pivot to cater to the Fox News audience).
The above is an obvious-in-hindsight side effect of having copyrights that basically never expire. Maybe after they've all burned themselves to ash (and stop bribing congress) we'll be able to repeal the Sonny Bono / Micky Mouse Protection Act.
I both agree and disagree with you here. The expectation of the podcasting business to be full of great opportunities and monetary gain was (probably) misguided, but 25% market share in an established market in just a couple of years when there were big players holding a majority share is still a huge feat.
Will it pay off? Probably not. But is 25% a big share? Yes.
Question: Are state employee pensions considered income earned in the state the employee worked while earning it? Or can they move out of state and avoid state income taxes? Should they be able to?
> First, I would not have let the Apple relationship slide so far down.
I don't like Meta, but this is an unfair assessment. Meta saw Google's deal and likely tried to pay these fees. They've been trying desperately for years - they knew this was possible and saw the writing on the well.
They tried launching their own phone product and learned firsthand how difficult to impossible it was to compete in that space. And unlike with Microsoft, this was an existential issue for Meta. That's largely what Metaverse itself is.
Apple has 100% of the leverage and is building their own ad product, so they likely turned Meta down with zero recourse.
Apple has too much power.
With one flip of a switch, Apple wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars. The entire business of a company. This is monopoly.
Apple captured half of American computing and taxes everything that can possibly be done. Subscriptions, social networking, dating, movies, you name it.
At no point in American history has a company had this much power.
Meta is trying to build the next platform so that they can be the ones to control it. These sorts of total platform monopolization plays are bad for technology, smaller businesses (even 10B market cap ones), and innovation. The DOJ needs to step in and do its job.
All governments want cashless economies. They make it easier to track money, collect taxes, keep an eyes on the populace, etc. India did it by invalidating all large-denomination bills. China did it by limiting ATM withdrawals. United States is doing it in the most American way possible. Literal highway robbery!
Whether HuffPost was popular in India is besides the point.
To provide some contrast, the same govt amended a law originally designed to prohibit foreign funding of political parties and changed it to allow funding from local companies which have more than 50% foreign ownership.
So basically political parties can indirectly accept foreign funds through above loophole which the ruling party itself created but news organizations cannot.
“ the controlling Bharatiya Janata Party government passed a retroactive amendment through a 2016 Finance Bill that excludes from the definition of “foreign sourced” contributions from local companies even though a foreign company owns more than half their shares, provided certain direct investment requirements are met”
If so, I wonder if I created a false memory based on the whole "skip avocado toast" meme, or something.