I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.

The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.

Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.

It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.

I saw this all coming from miles away. I don’t blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It’s a great deal, and I don’t blame anyone for using it… But I don’t see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.

I really hate the term ‘freedom’ now. It’s thrown around so much and it means basically nothing anymore. “Join this! Now with 20% more freedom!”. Freedom to/from what? It’s never stated, it’s just a vibe.

Ever since they killed third party apps, I stopped using it on my phone. Now whenever I have time to kill on my phone, I’m on Lemmy. My PC still has the old interface and such, so i still check it from time to time at home, but never on mobile. I’m on mobile for news far more than at my desktop.

It DOES have a higher fire fatality statistic than the Ford Pinto so…

Or you get even more nuanced and say unregulated free market is best only on the frontier of emerging new market sectors, and that areas we depend on should be heavily regulated, socialized, and run at cost for the public for free supported by tax dollars.

Have different systems for different things depending on which works best for what.

Even if it were thicker I’d still slap on a sacrificial glass screen protector atop it. I’ve dropped my phone only a handful of times, and so far have only ever broken the protector.

Just slap a shield on it, there’s your added thickness and better drop resistance all in one!

Would creating the cyber truck be considered as a suicide attempt?