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Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

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Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#261

Post by Razengan »

cameronbrown wrote: post #250
Razengan wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Growth is that continuing. For how long? Until when? What is the endgame?

Until everyone on Earth is satisfied with their quality of life. Growth doesn't necessarily mean doing more, sometimes you can achieve growth by doing less. This will become a bigger focus in future.

> Until everyone on Earth is satisfied with their quality of life.

And then what? How will you maintain that?

And how much of other species' habitats would we ruin to achieve that in the first place?

People may never be satisfied with their lives as long as they perceive inequality (real or imagined).

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#262

Post by lotsofpulp »

scarface74 wrote: post #134
dylan604 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HBO also demands a higher fee than something like HGTV or A&E. The one that kills me is ESPN. It is the most expensive channel for a cable operator to carry, and it is also known as a must carry.

HBO is completely different than ESPN. You can choose to pay for HBO. You can’t choose to exclude ESPN.

ESPN (and consequently sports teams and their players) are about to find out how less valuable they are I think. There are so many options for entertainment that I doubt they will be able to command the wide audience they used to.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#263

Post by Razengan »

mjburgess wrote: post #246
Razengan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you care about global poverty, disease, famine etc. then you care about growth. I care about diseases being allowed to spread more than they should in the name of growth. This pandemic happened precisely because of greed and the “growth” fetish. Poverty is skyrocketing now precisely because we didn't bother to stop to set up safeguards in our neverending lust for growth. I care about our privacy being forcibly p…

A word cloud of nonesense ideological boogeymen connected by free-association. In two years time when the death rate on C19 is reported at as-flu levels and the world is in a global depression with massive excess poverty, death, and abuse you'll be ranting then too -- just connecting these to "neoliberal conspiracies" as now. Rather, this will be caused by precise the lack of concern for the economy.

> A word cloud of nonesense

The same could be easily said about your comments here, comparing "redistribution of wealth" to genocide.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#264

Post by cameronbrown »

Razengan wrote: post #261
cameronbrown wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until everyone on Earth is satisfied with their quality of life. Growth doesn't necessarily mean doing more, sometimes you can achieve growth by doing less. This will become a bigger focus in future.

> Until everyone on Earth is satisfied with their quality of life. And then what? How will you maintain that? And how much of other species' habitats would we ruin to achieve that in the first place? People may never be satisfied with their lives as long as they perceive inequality (real or imagined).

Put it this way, if economic growth no longer happens, then we aren't growing as a species either. Are any of us prepared for the ramifications of humanity's peak?

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#265

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

nolok wrote: post #186
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #157

Im enjoying Hulu/Netflix/Prime Video while I can. My kid has grown up in a household without commercials and where you get points for who can hit “skip” the fastest when one does pop up. Commercials were always annoying but when you aren’t used to seeing them then it really hits home that your seeing the exact same commercial for floor wax sixteen times an hour and the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixtee…

> the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour. European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you w…

It used to be forbidden to advertise prescription medication in the US but they changed the rule sometime in the 80s.

The usual format is lots of images of happy people walking in parks and spending time with family while a narrator says the drug name a dozen times and what it treats, then reads off a long list of side effects and warnings “blah-blah should not be taken by pregnant women, women planning to become pregnant”, “blah-blah should not be taken by smokers or those with reduced immune function”, “blah-blah may cause liver and kidney failure”, “deaths have occurred while taking blah-blah”.

Personally that makes me want to go suck on a soup bone and hope for the best, but for the larger population the ads are apparently very effective and scores of people who see them will go pressure their doctors to prescribe them or shop around for a doctor that will prescribe them. (Drug store clinics will pretty much prescribe anything if you can articulate having symptoms it treats - conflict of interest is obvious)

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#266

Post by jasode »

Razengan wrote: post #256
jasode wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Shouldn't dividends make up for any slowdown in growth? If I buy a share in Netflix and instead of the share price rising I get instead a dividend payment, I'd be fine with that, right? Not really. To riff on the old saying, "money doesn't grow on trees" , we can also say "dividends don't grow on trees." Where do dividends come from ? From profits. But where do profits come from? In accounting lingo, we say profits…

> we notice that profits come from Company X's purposeful activities that are desired by customers that choose to spend money with Company X instead of Company Y. Many companies make money from activities that are not desired by customers.

>Many companies make money from activities that are not desired by customers.

I wasn't making some absolutist 100% statement about every company that ever existed. Sure, hated companies like cable company Comcast or Ticketmaster have profits. Netflix doesn't have that sort of monopoly power. Also, my comment about "desire" is relative desire between choices of spending money on different companies -- X vs Y.

Why did Netflix lose subscribers?[1] Because the video streaming customers desired something else.

Likewise, Blockbuster's old customers hated the late return fees. Blockbusters customers also desired the convenience of video streaming instead of driving to rent a physical DVD disc. Blockbuster lost so many customers that they went bankrupt.

Neither Blockbuster nor Netflix can irritate customers in the name of profits the same way Comcast can. A video DVD rental or video streaming's platform has way less customer lock-in or loyalty than a cable company's monopoly of physical coax lines into residential homes.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+lost+subscribers

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#267

Post by fdgwhite »

I worked in b2b publishing for a while. Magazines are just ad delivery systems so they need to sell ads. But ad buyers need to sell their product too and and their job is to buy ads. They can’t go back at the end of the year and tell their boss “look at all the money I saved by not advertising“.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#268

Post by umvi »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #200
nolok wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour. European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you w…

Every time I am visiting USA, I am flabbergasted at the medication ads on TV. Not just for off-the-counter stuff like paracetamol or anti-inflammation medication but actual freaking prescription only drugs. And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan…

Playing devil's advocate... doctors are neither omniscient nor perfect.

> Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have?

Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack of knowledge/experience, etc. Doctors are not exempt from this same phenomenon, in fact it may be amplified because there's just so much more knowledge you need to index and access compared to programming. Just as you don't know about every web framework in existence, doctors don't know about every medicine in existence.

"Ask your web designer to see if using Svelte is right for you."

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#269

Post by bigbob2 »

umvi wrote: post #268
drevil-v2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I am visiting USA, I am flabbergasted at the medication ads on TV. Not just for off-the-counter stuff like paracetamol or anti-inflammation medication but actual freaking prescription only drugs. And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan…

Playing devil's advocate... doctors are neither omniscient nor perfect. > Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack o…

> Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack of knowledge/experience, etc.

I don't understand. Are you saying you frequently have non-technical customers of your software business asking for specific languages, design patterns and frameworks which end up being the optimal choices? In my personal experience this has never been the case. Also somehow I feel like it would be even worse if they heard about them from TV instead of from a generic blog post somewhere.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#270

Post by xnyan »

RandomBacon wrote: post #237
xnyan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics and economics are inseparably connected.

Yes, but that doesn't mean they are the same. Capitalism is a way to describe market efficiency which is a good thing, but people are turning the word to mean a system where people hurt each other for profit. I agree people shouldn't hurt each other, but that doesn't mean we should redefine a word and abandon a system of marketplaces.

You see I disagree with your fundamental premise, capitalism is a means to amplify creation of money and wealth inequality which is a bad thing, but people sometimes use it for good to help each other.
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