Re. The last paragraph, that's what confuses me the most about all of this. LG has virtually held a monopoly of the entire OLED TV market for the past ~15 years, selling (arguably) one of the TVs on the market and being the only thing I've recommended people buy in about as long. They could have done literally nothing but update the hardware every other year with a newer SoC, HDMI version, etc. and done just fine. Now, I don't think I could see myself buying or even recommending any LG products going forward.

There *has* to be some complex math involved. It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.

  > There *has* to be some complex math involved.

My partner, who has a doctorate in economics, and I end up talking about this a lot because I agree that doing nothing, as a monopoly, is the winning move for consumers. Related I ask why we have an economy set up where you're rewarded for climbing to the top but are punished for being at the top [0].

Their explanations are typically around markets being myopic and that low competition fucks things up even more. But we do make small decisions and they add up. I think many of the problems in the world today come from the accumulation of many small decisions, which is why they're hard to address. Obviously some people have more power than others, and more frequently have high power, but we should still look for our opportunities and not abdicate when and where we do have power. It is important for us to push back when we can. The top always wants to convince us that we have no power and we try to convince ourselves that's true because we believe that if we have power that makes us culpable, but I don't think that's true.

[0] my goto example is AWS. It's easy to find articles about how Azure or GCloud are "doing better" but AWS still has more total customers. But AWS is being "punished" for being at the top because it is just harder to grow percentage wise when you have a larger base amount (note, it isn't a zero sum game)

> It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.

Seems pretty logical, no?

How do we sell more TVs? Be a cheaper and or better choice. If we're already doing well technically, sell customer data to discount the TV and appear more attractive.

If this is ethical / how much disclosure you'd need to give to customers so they can make this informed choice is a whole other discussion...

  > Seems pretty logical, no?

Not really, it's incredibly myopic. Would you really risk your brand, that took decades to build, by acting hostile to your customers? It only "makes sense" to do when you no longer care about your brand or you are only interested in the short term

> short term

Yeah, welcome to every executive suite since the 80s. How was it under that rock for the last 40 years?

>It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.

And it feels like an inflationary behavior: people need marketing because the product doesn't sell itself because it is neglected in favor of data collection and marketing that is needed because GOTO 1.

Maybe the incentive are at the individual level, not the company level. How do you justify your salary/bonus as the TV product team manager by making the same product year in year out? If you have KPI's for new features or cost savings you are going run out of options eventually.

For a corporation there's always more money to be made, until it makes all the money in the world.

You seem to be making the assumption that this is all a zero sum game.

I have to point out the irony that this is a technology based site, focused on software. You know, a sector that isn't nearly as tied to physical resources as other sectors. It's the whole reason our industry exploded, because you can make software and ship it an infinite number of times, allowing you to scale like no other sector can.

But my point is that the economy is a positive sum game. There's always more money to be made through more innovation.

When you treat things as zero sum you make all these bad decisions and focus on the wrong type of growth. It makes you focus on capturing the existing market rather than push to create markets that previously never existed. (Of course there's a bad way to do the latter too. You can make markets against people's will, as we also see today...)

But once you've innovated that first bit, you're in a mature industry, do you do the hard thing and innovate again or do you just stay there slowly becoming irrelevant, or do you optimise what you have and figure out more income sources from the same innovation for even more money?

Take a look at any mature software product, do they try to innovate more, or do they figure out how to put more advertisements into it?

The answer isn't an "or" it is an "and".

But in a {mono,oligo}polistic setting companies typically get lazy.

  > Take a look at any mature software product

For most companies that have cornered the market, the latter. But it seems you're implying that if they haven't cornered the market then they aren't mature.

THe phrase is “leaving money on the table”

Pure naked greed, something to be celebrated in our Ferengi style capitalist system.

I just bought a house and this was the conclusion I came to. A cheap PoE-capable multigig switch and a single Omada access point cost about the same as a cheap WiFi 7-capable router would have. I did opt to run the Omada Controller software on a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a hardware controller (to save a few bucks); maybe if I had a lot more hardware it'd make sense but for my one AP it's more than capable. So far I'm quite pleased, it gives me the peace-of-mind knowing that WiFi upgrades are effectively plug-and-play - plug in the AP, adopt it in the controller, add it to the site, and the existing network is already being broadcast - no more router reconfiguration every few years!

How often are you still receiving physical cheques that mobile deposit is an essential feature? I could probably count on one hand the number of cheques I've deposited or written in the past ~15 years, nor can I say I've been so desperate to access said money that I feel the need to deposit the cheque within moments of receiving it.

Checks are still common in the good ole USA.

Common? maybe for seniors. I probably handle a physical check once a year.

My health insurance company sends reimbursement as paper cheques in the mail, so I get multiple cheques per year. Some landlords still aren't recieving rent any other way than by cash or cheque. Happy for your chequeless existence tho!

Until i moved a few years ago i paid every month's rent with a paper check for 12 straight years as that's what my landlord demanded

At least 3 times a month. I have a rental property and my tenant prefers to mail a check instead of paying extra to pay electronically. My spouse gets paid by check for dumb reasons I won't get into. I sometimes get dividends from my insurance company via check. And then several family members still prefer to use checks to pay each other back instead of Venmo or other electronic services.

I blame it on the fact that the US doesn't have a free electronic bank transfer system like the rest of the developed world.

> Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration.

I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.

I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.

> Anyone will hopefully lend you a phone if you're in a pinch

I honestly wouldn't count on it, at least not where I'm from, not anymore anyways. IME, having been in that situation (and knowing the numbers I need to call) it's rare for someone to let a stranger use their personal device for something as mundane as a phone call due to risk of theft, scams, or other criminal behaviour, not just on the part of the person borrowing the phone, but the person on the other end being contacted from an unknown number. While the chances of something like that realistically happening are incredibly low, it's a surprisingly easy social engineering method that's got people wary of trusting others to handle effectively their entire life in one device. A lot of businesses don't even let customers make personal phone calls from their landline for the same reason.

Yeah with AI voice cloning I'd definitely be default suspicious now but at this stage I know close friends and relatives well enough to be able to ask one question to establish identity

And honestly, that's my biggest gripe. Identical search terms on different systems, or even the same system in different physical locations, almost always return different results from one-another. Telling someone to "Google it" stopped being a reliable way to share information.

The author's complaint(s) stem from the ads that "just keeps downloading" which in approximately five minutes downloaded "almost half a gigabyte" worth of information.

This is a prime example of why many people use adblockers, it's not just to make the majority of the web actually usable, but it prevents excessive data transfers that we never asked for. For what it's worth, the same article is just a hair over 8MB when ads are blocked and a hair over 9MB when you scroll down (loading the thumbnails for the other articles).

8 MB for an article about setting up an RSS reader is still ridiculous. Should be <1MB, the text itself is probably a few K, so all the rest is graphics and bullshit JS bundles.

I feel like an easier solution to having six different email addresses is to use Gmail aliases - I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias along the lines of '+service_name'. If any alias starts to receive spam you can setup rules to automatically delete everything that comes in with that. You also get the added benefit of significantly easier and more accurate search.

I don't think y'all understand why I have separate Google accounts.

I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy.

In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example.

This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate.

I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.)

I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)

Your dates are a little off - Rayman Legends released in 2013 and saw a remaster in 2017. Rayman Mini was released in 2019, but it's not exactly a main-franchise title...