Thanks for the interest! I'll be handling the music myself, I'm a producer & multi-instrumentalist and two tracks for the game have already been composed.
The mistake wasn't just in the billing process (also, that's a HELL of a mistake), but in how awful your communication and customer service was to let it get this close to disaster (including a viral post).
I understand the way most businessmen have never had the acumen to prosper while giving customers their money's worth at the same time. For thousands of years, this is nothing new.
That has always been in spite of a number who can, and they are mostly the only leaders that gain real admiration.
As always, a lot more money can be made by not giving customers their money's worth, and as we have seen that's how some operations rake in the bucks under a greedy founder who's stingy as hell. Until the next generation comes along and finds there is actually a strong financial foundation. And all it takes is a slightly reduced lack of acumen and/or less greed and they can put all their effort into making every little thing from top to bottom be strongly in favor of the customer. In ways that shine, not just barely show or surface occasionally.
It's not that hard, just a full-time job for executives to do like everybody else. Any executive would be stupid not to take the opportunity, it's a no-brainer. The thorough revamp from top to bottom definitely has been accomplished many times and it's not asking for a miracle of any kind. Big companies too. It doesn't take nearly the rare amount of acumen to actually start giving customers a "good deal" financially. Just enough smarts to respectably pass for a "businessman" during a previous millennium.
Or they can be complete failures, compared to real talented businessmen & women, no matter how much money they make.
If I was a shareholder I would be hitting the ceiling.
Not sure if you're being witty, but for the unaware, the channel here is that of Tom Sachs, an extremely successful artist who uses the aesthetics of NASA (among other orgs) in order to sort of capture their essence. This is not from NASA.
I'm a little personally split on Tom Sachs as an artist, as he is constantly riding the line between appropriating the aesthetics of respectable institutions and actually emulating their positive qualities.
I don't disagree with your first point, that it's not still extremely useful despite its flaws. I absolutely use it to build project outlines, write code snippets, etc.
Your overall conclusion though seems a little free of context. Average people (i.e. my mom googling something) absolutely do not have the wherewithal to keep track of the various pros and cons of the underlying system that generates the magical giant blue box at the top of their search that has all the answers. They are being deliberately duped by the salesmen-in-chief of these giant companies, as are all of their investors.
You would have to be a shareholder (which you probably are if you have a 401k) and you would have to show that their decision to save and use private data has hurt their enterprise such that they would have been more profitable and/or grown more/faster had they not done so.
Can't help but notice that this is all deep red states. Why might that be? From above, this seems pretty bipartisan and what Lina Khan (MVP) has been working on for the last four years.
State AGs from the same party are more likely to work together on a suit. Big tech has almost exclusively donated to and supported democrats over the years, so AGs from that party have more political capital to lose.
