Walled gardens are never good for the customer. Anyone who says or thinks otherwise is too shortsighted to see how it always goes. They’re not building walled gardens to benefit consumers They’re building them to ABSUSE consumers. And the employees. And anyone else they can extract profits from.

Better idea: cut from the top. Like the CEO and president. That’ll save hundreds of millions of dollars a year. I mean, how much do you really need to pay someone to run a company into the ground? Bob the intern can do that in his spare time between coffee runs.

Yeah, and then you get the ‘Boeing’ phenomenon, wherein you’ve drained all the legacy talent and institutional knowledge out of your engineering teams, and suddenly your teams can’t design their way out of a wet paper sack, let alone test and validate their designs properly.

Considering how rampantly predatory, exploitative, and abusive the healthcare industry already is, gleefully holding your health hostage for ransom, can you imagine how much worse it’s going to be when those same people literally control the very air you breathe?

I didn’t say that was the *only* way they ‘think of the children.’ But it all shares a common theme -- pettily, vindictively, cruelly, etc.

Let us not forget: this is how Republicans and the NRA are ‘thinking about the children’ — both the ones killed by their complete disregard for sound public laws and firearms regulations and the ones who are punished for it.

Hopefully the spreading ‘right to repair’ laws getting onto the books will lead to ‘right to service’ laws that will include blocking exactly this kind of ‘proprietary component’ bullshit that HP and other manufacturers have been pulling. I bought the damn printer. It’s mine. Any and all obligations to the manufacturer…

Because billionaire ‘philanthropy’ is almost never philanthropic. And in fact, it’s emblematic of a rotten societal structure. Their philanthropy is akin to waiting for a thief to let you borrow your own phone to make a call. Because they only have their billions to support their ‘philanthropy’ through deliberate and…

The ‘keeping this shit quiet’ thing is *EXACTLY* playing the *STUDIO’S* game. Their attempt to create a layer of ignorance is specifically intended to keep people in the dark about their power over the studios. There’s only ONE REASON why they don’t want the WGA to talk about the offer, and it has everything to do…

Is this a question? Clearly the answer is Saints Row IV.

Why would you save Twitter? It was always a money pit, surviving on the illusion of profitability attracting investors dollars (gee, that sure sounds like a Ponzi scheme). In reality, Twitter was never a profitable business or business model. Musk’s incompetence as a leader simply exposed this truth for all to see.…

“...the parties would try for better discretion about the current offer’s details.”

Given that this kind of thing has happened many times before, and that it’s the dissemination of knowingly false information about an individual, spread with malicious intent, and causes demonstrable, real-world harm, I’m thinking it’s time to start treating acts like this for what they are — libel.

The thing is, it’s the ‘snowball effect’ that the execs (who aren’t idiots) are worried about. Any dip in profitability means that all those big investor dollars studios are constantly chasing start moving elsewhere for better ROIs. And that means their film budgets shrink, gross profits go down more, more investors…

Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech. The constitution is pretty clear that the US Government cannot get involved. The Constitution specifically forbids it. That means no courts, civil or criminal. They are both the part of US Government, and getting involved is abridging the freedom of speech.

For-profit healthcare — making money off your misery, and the more miserable you are, the better the margins are for the ‘investor’ class, who ‘coincidentally’ happen to be mostly wealthy white people...

When wealth and power is increasingly concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people, the only solution is to unionize and strike to take that wealth and power back. Because the people who have hoarded all that wealth and power have taken away any other options and have made it clear that they will not…

Enforcing such clauses would (or at least should) be a first-amendment violation, because only the government can enforce them, and doing so is the government interfering with free speech. That’s how racially discriminatory clauses in HOAs were outlawed back in the ~60s (iirc) — by making it impossible to enforce…

Don’t worry, Republicans will find another way to stop ‘other people’ from voting or having their votes counted. Because Republicans gonna Republican. It’s what they do.

There’s nothing to ‘clarify.’ He said what he meant. Exactly what he meant. And what he meant was ignorant propagandist drivel that serves nothing and no one but naked corporate greed. Because he’s an ignorant corporate-taint licker who couldn’t be bothered to educate himself about any of the issues in play.