The car insurance industry operates more or less sanely, though. And I have no problem with the government mandating that owners of a potentially quite dangerous, non-mandatory commercial product be enrolled in insurance so people aren’t utterly ruined when accidents inevitably happen.

I don’t want to get into a dick-measuring contest, but rest assured I’m not just some idiot off the street who thinks Shawshank Redemption is the greatest movie ever made. The snobbish condescension isn’t really needed or warranted.

Yeah, that’s a fair argument for the service, as long as they rotate enough as-yet-unseen stuff to justify the subscription.

There are a lot of good arguments for Medicare for All—like that no one should suffer or even die because they can’t afford healthcare, for example—and the fact that Wall Street is so deathly afraid of it is yet another. The fact that they are starting to get nervous is good news.

Awesome. You have a reason to subscribe. I didn’t say that there wasn’t an appeal to anybody at all. I said that it wasn’t an effective appeal to the typical Criterion fan. I think that your reason for subscribing is totally valid. I’m not sure it constitutes a solid business model, though.

Well, and the part that I find so toxic (I shudder to use this word, but it seems apt) about the attitude is how it displays this obsession with Davidson—and presumably this is supposed to hold for the average dude—demonstrating worthiness for female attention entirely through material means. And then we turn around…

There are any number of gratifying, if unsurprising, tidbits coming out of Robert Mueller’s massive report already. One I’d rank close to the top of the pile so far: Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitting to Mueller’s investigators what we’ve always known—that she just gets up there and lies and lies and…

Yeah, for me, I just don’t see the appeal. Maybe they’re thinking that it gives people a way to watch the films, and that if they like particular ones, they’ll go ahead and buy the physical releases, when maybe they’d have held off otherwise? I’m just trying to think of how this appeals to the typical Criterion fan,…

Yeah, it’s a lot better as an addition to an existing streaming service. One of the reasons I got Hulu years ago was because of the inclusion of Criterion, but that was nixed shortly after I signed up. It makes a package deal a lot more enticing, but all on its own? I could see kind of pricing it out and taking an “if…

Twenty years ago (or more) I suggested we all stop buying insurance. ANY insurance - a full on boycott of car, home, health, life whatever - until they cleaned up their act and did their jobs.

Maybe we can get tattoos that scream No out-of-network providers are allowed to touch me.

it does make sense, though, considering that capitalism is an accumulationeconomy. Expand or go out of business. short term profits at the expense of everything else.

This is an insanely apt description of the current situation. I cannot fathom that Americans polled are just, like, “Yep - I think the system is totally cool”. The delusion is confounding.

People have Stockholm syndrome for their health insurance plans because it is their lifeline. They are hanging of a cliff holding on to a vine and rather than imagining being somewhere other than the cliff all they can focus on is not losing the vine.

Isn’t it obvious? A person with an unusable insurance plan is - on paper - an insured person, which makes the grim statistics on uninsured individuals look more palatable.

The problem with a Criterion streaming service is that it’s always going to be the sort of thing where, once you’ve seen the movies (and you’re unlikely to be interested in all of them), there isn’t really enough content to bother maintaining a subscription. Most people who are interested in Criterion are cinephiles,…

No, it isn’t. But I’m not really surprised that this is treated as praiseworthy in work-obsesssd American culture. This guy seems cool and good, but he really should have listened to his subscribers when they told him to take breaks. If the dude had collapsed and died during one of those marathon streams, this piece…

It’s an interesting story, for sure, but I’m not convinced that this guy’s “achievement” is something to be lauded. He should have actually listened to the subscribers in his chat telling him to take breaks, rather than just being touched by their concern for him. He no doubt faced health problems with greater…

Yeah. It seemed like, the more in thrall to establishment or “machine”-style politics you were, the more you were taken in by Hamilton during the height of its popularity. The inside-baseball nature of its success on the stage was a perfect echo of the political values of its fans.

How is it a “lifehack” to take something this simple and turn it into such a huge deal?