Regardless of whether the underpaying allegations are true, Amazon keeping 60-75% of the sales price is absolutely egregious. People were absolutely up in arms about Apple's 30% app store cut a year ago.
What happened there? From the outside I thought it was pretty smooth and successful. Delivered what was promised and only a couple months late.
I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.
There's some really bizarre tribalism that develops in the Kickstarter/preorder realm. I back a fair number of board games and see the same thing there.
Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.
I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.
I think thats human nature to some extent. Some people really don't like being wrong/disapointed. Especially after spending money. So narrative to make it alright.
Someone once said "I was wrong about this. I've been wrong before. I just try not to dwell on it..". I'm wrong often too.
I recently left a major part supplier for a good portion of the heavy equipment industry and Deere was one of our biggest customers. They were truly despicable to work with.
On every bid we sent them the #1 requirement was Proprietary Fit. There had to be some sort of IP lockout (always disguised as a valuable design feature, but it never was) to prevent end users from procuring replacement parts anywhere else. In many cases it even made the parts significantly worse, as useless bumps or ridges were added to the industry standard to make them physically incompatible.
The old model was we build a part for $8 and sell it to the end user for $10. Under Deere's new model, we build the part for $8, sell it exclusively to Deere for $11, and they sell it to customer for $16.
My former employer was very complicit in this behavior, but Deere was by far the most aggressive about and a big enough player to squeeze all their suppliers.
Edit: They pay all kinds of lip service to how this is better for the customer ("reliable supply chain", "Deere-guaranteed quality", etc) but that's only in their public PR. Behind the scenes it is 100% about securing a long term revenue source - customers pay out the ass for a piece of equipment, then have to keep coming back to Deere for 50 years for replacement parts.
Worse still, you can't get schematics for John Deere in the US, but John Deere provided full schematics as a condition of access to the Chinese market.
My company makes products that have computer controllers, and lots and lots of code to run them. They are bending over backward to make them impossible to hack here in the States, but (so I am told) giving the source and the encryption keys directly to the Chinese government as a requirement of selling products into that market.
China didn't demand the schematics out of altruism - they did it so they can copy the product and release their own. It's standard operating procedure for doing business in that country.
The Chinese government has its own interst in forcing such concessions. Still, politics today doesn't really favor consumer rights at all. This bill is the minimum that should be done on the topic of copyright. Otherwise representatives feel very comfortable in the bowels of the industry in general, especially regarding to intellectual property. It makes strategic sense to defend it with a player like China, but it also has become about milking consumers.
Exactly the same situation with Apple, but it’s much more than bumps and ridges. It’s DRM for screens, digitizers, batteries, etc. It is genuine OEM but apple obviously prefers you to buy a new device.
That's pretty shocking. At the same time: this is a pretty strong case for market response, some other company should be able to get a significant price advantage out of this and make minced meat of JD in comparative advertising.
I recently left a job that I was 100% checked out of. It was a fine job before Covid but something about the switch to remote absolutely ruined it.
Things that used to take 2-3 hours to plan started taking 6 weeks as management insisted on being deeply involved. Instead of infrequent project check-ins, 18 hours a week was blocked off to management updates. Shortly before I put in my 2 weeks I had project update meeting where my status was something like Accomplishments: held status update meetings on 11/1, 11/3, 11/8, 11/12, 11/15, and 11/18.
That job broke me and I just stopped caring. The new one is much better.
Previous company went through a fairly disastrous change in management. I was the 5th person out the door on a team of 8. New manager was super "data driven" so productivity plummeted as we were inundated with piles of new processes - a 3 day lab test (no additional cost other than my labor) took me over 6 weeks to get management approval and sign offs for. But, we didn't have any "old data" (because the processes were all new) to prove that things had gotten much worse.
Wife has commented many times on the change in my personality, as I'm not ending most days furious and miserable.
Guess that's "Company Culture" for purposes of the poll.
I kinda thought all 3 of my offers during my recent job change were suspiciously close. Now I know why, as all 3 employers requested it. Fuck everything about this.
A few jobs are missing, but the most recent (and therefore most relevant) is correct.
It's a mixed bag and I'm not sure which side wins out.
On one hand, cleaning up plastic pollution is a fantastic thing. On the other, there is a tremendous amount of carbon currently locked up in plastics which is for all practical purposes inert. Releasing that into the atmosphere is yet one more thing that will accelerate climate change.
It also will require a massive shift in our material usage. Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is great. Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices, or your NES is not so ideal.
1.6% of petroleum products consumed in the US went to petrochemical feedstocks (which I'll take to be mostly plastic). Far more petroleum is just burned, and this doesn't even count coal. In terns of CO2, plastics are almost negligible.
> It also will require a massive shift in our material usage. Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is great. Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices, or your NES is not so ideal.
That's a great point, and one that may make material planners think twice about using plastics over other materials like metals, woods, or plasters in their projects.
Some woods like cedar are more resistant. Some kinds of ash are more or less susceptible to beetle damage. It all depends of the application and environment, just like plastics might in this scenario.
The scary one is medical devices. Plastics were a godsend, enabling the mass production of disposable medical equipment that effectively solved a lot of tricky sterilization problems. There are a lot of other things that plastics are the best option for, we would suffer a fairly major technological set back if we were suddenly faced with a plague of plastic eating microbes.
Yeah, it is kind of funny that plastic crap we make functions as a decent long-term carbon sink. Stable, resistant to degradationIf only we could properly bury it without it getting everywhere, including in our internal organs.
I have apocalyptic dreams of plastic-eating plagues swarming our civilization out of nowhere.
Most of the time flops have had too much material cut out to hit runtime requirements ("nobody will watch a 3 hour movie!"). Kingdom of Heaven, Batman v Superman, Watchmen, Alien3 all get better with restored material.
Blade Runner is interesting as there are 3 different versions, all about the same length but with some very different scenes. Theatrical also has a terrible voice over which was later removed.
The Shining is one that gets better when shortened - most feel that the 119 minute European version is better than the 144 minute US cut.
Apocalypse Now is interesting - Redux (193 minute) is a slog compared to theatrical (147); but Final (182) is probably the best version and a great example of the balance needed.
There's also the video 'How Star Wars was saved in the edit' which has a lot of good information on what editing can do. The video has kindof been co-opted by the internet as definitive proof that George Lucas is a talentless hack, but it's really not that much different than what happens on every other film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEHRNS-Scrs
Almost Famous is another example. I love the movie. But then I watched the director's cut which added 40 minutes more and it was very meh. The jokes weren't as crisp and there were scenes that didn't really add anything and just slowed down the pace.
