Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
I think there is value in having only one lossy encoding step on the way to my ears. And with all of the 4k video being streamed these days, lossless music bit rates are rather pedestrian, so I'm just not that concerned about the resources argument
Must depend on your block lists, I get a 98% using AdGuard on iOS. I'm using easy list, easy privacy, fanboy annoyances and social filters, and hagezi's light dns filter. I'm a big fan of ublock but I don't see much issue with AdGuard for now.
I know this trope has been beaten to death elsewhere too, but it certainly seems like we haven't seen much really 'new' for like 20 years (as far as popular media that is)
Peppa pig has little to no value though, whereas many people find Bluey wholesome and touching and sometimes really poignant. To each their own, but at least Bluey tries to encourage creativity and play and fun beyond jumping up and down in muddy puddles. The short episode length can be a natural disengage checkpoint with Bluey too, as long as auto play is turned off.
I know I’m the odd one out, but I really don’t find Bluey that wholesome (with the exception of two episodes - the rain one and the Bingo sleeping/space one, which I do think are fantastic). The others are very frenetic - it feels like a pure hit of sugar in television form. It also often shows a lot of bad behaviour that kids can interpret as funny (the cousin running away with the phone after being told, the old lady buying the scooter).
Peppa might be “empty” but I don’t worry that it’s inadvertently steering him in the wrong direction. The Peppa books are also far, far better than the Bluey books.
I think the pace is because a lot of the episodes revolve around play and games - and any sort of play with children does tend to be a bit frenetic. There’s a good number of episodes that aren’t that, including the two you mentioned, but it would be a bit strange for a show about play and imagination to not be a bit frenetic.
> It also often shows a lot of bad behaviour that kids can interpret as funny (the cousin running away with the phone after being told, the old lady buying the scooter).
There’s bad behavior that is funny, sure, but almost all of those episodes demonstrate the consequences of it even if in a humorous fashion: Muffin is constantly facing consequences for her actions, for example. I think that’s an ok trade off.
Not challenging you, but I'm curious what source you have for this stat? I'd be interested in a good source for profit margins for many products, and also in the process behind those numbers.
Most large companies are required to disclose profit margins to their investors and shareholders. In Germany, unternehmensregister.de has such info. But in this case, I got the 5% directly from Brother: https://global.brother/en/investor/highlights/finance
I find this dubious. Google is not known for respecting privacy, and large corporations in general are not known for voluntarily passing on trillion dollar markets on moral grounds. Is there perhaps an alternative explanation that isn't as far fetched?
> They refused to censor the search engine to China’s liking.
Google had no problem with censoring the search results in China. They exited the country after it began hacking into their data centers.
> Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.
Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Google have a history of censorship in western countries, as evidenced by the scrubbing of all C19 alternative information which didn’t align with TPTB narratives.
Only after they were hacked by China, before that they had no problems with censorship. They also had a plan to return. Doubt there were any principles in play when making decisions on their China operarions
Anecdotal, but I went 2000 -> 7 -> 10, skipping XP, Vista, and 8. Given that cadence, will hopefully be skipping 11 as well and waiting for whatever is next.
Seems like they're trying to balance out the other end of the equation by punishing labor through very high interest rates. My personal pet theory is that the fed wanted to raise rates enough so that the static interest rates on student loan debt didn't look so absurd when student loan payments came back online. Otherwise people would be demanding student loan debt relief. That ~7% doesn't seem so silly now, it's about inline with mortgage rates. But when mortgages were approaching 2%, that same 7% looked usurious.
