Not sure where your 6% figure comes from, but you can easily find the 2023 Annual Report which states the following:
> Adjusted operating profit margin (adjusted operating profit expressed as a percentage of revenues) increased to 16.1% in 2023, compared with 15.1% in 2022.
You might also look into the NYT's recent history of stock buybacks while denying raises to their lowest-paid employees. The money is there.
There are a host of other real expenses that need to be paid that "adjusted operating profit" doesn't account for. I'd be really surprised if total net profit was more than 50-65% of that.
To emphasize: that point I can totally agree with. While I don't know the details of all the reasons this union is striking, I can certainly imagine lots of good, plausible reasons, and stock buybacks (if they are egregious) would be at the top of the list.
I was just pushing back against using "big tech comp packages" as some sort of baseline for what unions should be pushing for. It is completely unrealistic and people who say stuff like this hurt their own cause by not living in reality.
Watch for public statements from the union. A striking unit will generally inform the general public if they are looking for any show of support. No need to assume that a boycott is desired!
unhoused people were never prospective clients of the real estate industry, but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.
your arrogance is surpassed only by your foolishness.
Their point is that those landlords now have something they invested in where they aren't getting the returns they expected...but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.
> Except, now I sell my house. And I come to you and tell you that I'm homeless. Are you going to give me permanent, free housing too?
yes. it probably won't be as nice as something you, a wealthy person, could afford to buy, and it probably won't be exactly where you want to live, but everyone could be guaranteed safe and stable housing without complicated means testing.
> you've just recreated Section 8.
Section 8 disqualifies people for all kinds of "character" issues associated with drug use, mental illness, etc. That's a big reason there are so many homeless on the street. I am against means testing, but even that system could be a lot better than it is now.
You were complaining about being inaccurately quoted in press releases. Press releases are written by comms dept within a business, so if you have a complaint with how they're written, that's something to take up with your internal teams, not with external journalists.
It should probably read corporate journalists are not journalists. To be one a journalist one must serve the truth but to remain employed by corporation means you have to accept some truths that aren't and reject others thar are.
>Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee.
I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out.
I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album.
It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels.
Spotify is worth it alone for the discovery to me now, and I grew up with my weirdo foobar music player and etc.
I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library.
Downsides I've experienced - not many:
- quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something.
Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either.
- Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights?
- That might actually be all of them.
Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir.
I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.
I've been thinking about replacing the hard drive and battery in mine for the past few years. The wheel-based iPods really did have the best UI for music in any device I've ever owned. If you're familiar with it, you can navigate with extraordinary ease.
Years ago, I replaced the 20GB drive in mine with a 30GB drive, because I was having issues. It was pretty easy with my 4th-gen iPod. Turns out that the issues were actually in the USB interface, not the drive itself. So I struggled to get the drive re-filled, and haven't changed the data on it in...probably 7 or 8 years.
TimesOpen is an engineer-driven blog. Its previous incarnation was self-hosted on a WordPress stack (separate from our main CMS), but for various reasons it was decided to re-platform.
There were many discussions before settling on Medium and alternatives were considered (such as dogfooding our own CMS). We have a lot of work in-flight to modernize and simplify our publishing stack, and the timing wasn't right to rely on internal tools to publish a new blog.
I understand and agree with your stance on the sense of entitlement that some people have regarding software purchases, but I feel like you might have missed one of the finer points being made here. My response somewhat assumes that you either do not own recent Nintendo consoles, or at a minimum, are a very casual user of their platforms and are not aware of some of the shenanigans they've been up to due to negligence or incompetence in the digital space.
Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions.
So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles.
To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is.
All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.
I wonder how much value the bean counters at Nvidia attributed to "having a useful software ecosystem" when weighed up against "shortsighted moneygrab for licensing dollars".
> Adjusted operating profit margin (adjusted operating profit expressed as a percentage of revenues) increased to 16.1% in 2023, compared with 15.1% in 2022.
You might also look into the NYT's recent history of stock buybacks while denying raises to their lowest-paid employees. The money is there.