P.O.S.S.E.
“Not only were Vice’s executives being paid handsomely to drive the company into the ground, they issued themselves massive ‘retention’ bonuses right before the bankruptcy filing – a filing which, conveniently, allowed them to avoid paying severance to regular employees spelled out in their union contracts”
https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/end-of-an-era-sports-illustrated-vice-product/
“To hit the graphical fidelity of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth required an exponentially larger team, where engineers and artists have specialized roles and couldn’t just get their hands on everything the way Kitase could in the 1990s.
“Now, if I want something to be created, I need to document my thoughts and ideas, communicate what I’m envisioning to someone who has the skills,” Kitase said”
“In 2017 the Trump tax cuts slashed the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and reined in taxation for foreign profits. The ITEP report looked at the first five years the law was in effect. It concluded that in that time, most profitable corporations paid “considerably less” than 21% because of loopholes and special breaks the law either left in place or introduced.
From 2018 through 2022, 342 companies in the study paid an average effective income tax rate of just 14.1%. Nearly a quarter of those companies—87 of them—paid effective tax rates of under 10%. Fifty-five of them (16% of the 342 companies), including T-Mobile, DISH Network, Netflix, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors, and Nike, paid effective tax rates of less than 5%.
Twenty-three corporations, all of them profitable, paid no federal tax over the five year period”
“Readers of a certain age might sensibly ask what “cyber” means. Consider it a way to gesture broadly at technology used almost exclusively by people who both do not understand technology and feel some amount of pride in that. Teams at large retailers, believing online commerce was doomed to be a tiny sideline like catalogs and only worth tens of billions of dollars, were involved in naming Cyber Monday. The other place you’re likely to hear it frequently is American national security circles, which exist in a superposition of understanding that technology can certainly be used to kill people and break things while also believing that it’s not a real way to kill people and break things if it is the sort of technology built by people who look like pre-juice Steve Rogers”
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/financial-systems-take-a-holiday/
“My guess is that so many of the letter-writers are effective altruists and vegans themselves that they see it as an impeccable testament to his character, and don’t realize others don’t necessarily assign it the same moral value. That, or they realize that “vegan” is a convenient way to signal “white, wealthy, and well-connected” without having to say it. Probably both”
“Surely a world where sensible, small companies produce enough revenue to keep their fellow travelers consistently employed is possible. Seize the means of production, not by guillotine, but by building better systems than the empty suits and learning how to do sales.
I’ve had it up to fucking here watching people live in fear of inexorable death machines deciding that they need to juice their profits because they spent all the money on Deloitte”
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-authenticity-and-whats-worth-doing/
“Andrew Fray, a lead programmer at UK studio Roll7, makers of OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome, shared what they called the PS2 manifesto on social media earlier this month: “7-13 hours of content. Combine a few old ideas in a new way, or have one big new idea. No complicated character upgrade trees. Limited online, little post-launch support. 2 ish years, 30 game devs. Thanks for your money, on to the next one.” This attitude gave us so many weird classics 20 years ago, games that are difficult to imagine existing now, from Ico to Gitaroo Man. None of them were multimillion sellers but, crucially, they didn’t have to be”
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/28/pushing-buttons-playstation-job-losses
“the Alabama Supreme Court decided in a wrongful death suit resulting from the accidental destruction of embryos that were part of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, in which doctors artificially fertilize eggs outside the womb and then transfer them into a person, that fertilized human eggs have the same status as children. Chief Justice Tom Parker declared in a concurring opinion that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-21-2024
“If you count hybrids, BYD has been outselling Tesla for quite some time, nearly doubling Tesla’s total in the first half of 2023. But it’s not quite right to position BYD and Tesla as rivals in the model of Ford and General Motors. If anything, they’re more like Microsoft and Apple — opposing futures for electric vehicles that are likely to keep bouncing up against each other for decades”
“To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn’t just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued”