Speaking as a parent of young children, I don't see any point in going back to YouTube. It's been blocked in our household basically since our oldest was six, and I don't see any way they could ever lure us back into that ecosystem.
Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.
If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"
I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?
For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.
They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.
I'm guessing they left right around the time of Elsagate. Youtube Kids (a separate "kid friendly" version of YouTube) was almost entirely bizarre permutations of software-assembled videos. I hear it still is, but most of my friends banned unsupervised youtube for their young kids around this time.
That is foolish. YouTube has some of the best educational content ever made. I suppose you could use yt-dlp to download all of 3Blue1Brown or other excellent educational channels.
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.
The majority of the "kids" content is just random slop with zero educational or even entertainment value. We noticed our three year olds were less prone to acting up when we took it away - now they'll typically watch Curious George and Paddington on Netflix or the various free to air kids shows on TV.
I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games.
TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
You could make it so that if someone called the gambling hotline then they automatically are suspended from betting at all sports books for a year or something. Idk if this is the perfect policy but it took me about 5 minutes to come up with it.
I think banning or severely limiting advertising similar to cigarettes would be a good start. Stop having sports broadcasts be so intertwined with gambling, seeing odds on the screen when watching sports is gross.
Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large executive bonuses and stomp their workforce is not a good recipe long-term
Are there any examples where a company was purchased via a leveraged buyout and the company went on to be more profitable afterwards? Because the only examples I know of resulted in the purchased company going bankrupt fairly quickly.
First of all, investment banks are awash in capital thanks to 14 years of ZIRP and massive profitability. They don't like keeping cash on hand, so that means they dole it out into investments, some of which will flop.
Second, banks are the primary creditor in these deals, meaning they get paid first. They don't do these deals without ensuring that the company has enough saleable assets to ensure they get their pound of flesh. Lots of companies have billions in pension-earmarked reserves they don't have to pay out on if they declare bankruptcy. Guess who gets first dibs on that cash.
Third, they can shift the risk by selling their interest in these companies to another party. They are not stuck with it forever.
Image you have a goose that lays golden eggs. You could just keep selling the eggs every year but somebody comes up to you and offers you 2 billion dollars now and the public market values your golden egg business at 1.5 billion dollars so it seems fair.
It turns out that if you kill the goose there's a cache of 3 billion dollars worth of eggs within it.
The goose is gone and everybody made money off of it's demise.
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PE (not always) is effective at finding under-valued companies and ensuring that they record the value on the PE's books.
Because it sometimes works. But it also sometimes destroys the companies.
But the “works” here is to just make PE richer in the short term, not to actually improve the company in the long term. That short term thinking leads to many impractical decisions that have caused bankruptcies
Because the goal is short term profit, not long term business success. It makes absolutely no difference if the company survives the process or not, what matters is that the PE firms extract their money from the process.
I think if you actually reflect on the matter you would realize that PE firms need to be able to sell the business in order to make money, and that they do in fact sell the business for a profit in the majority of cases. The extremely rare cases of yore where you could buy a business for less than the value of its assets and simply sell off the assets and leave the carcass for bankruptcy are long gone.
leverage increases the disparity of returns (so some companies are definitely out of business because the of the leverage put on them) but by far the vast majority of LBO’s are at least moderately successful.
Many sports teams come to mind. Pretty much any F1 team that exists is now worth a lot more on paper than it was purchased for. A few EPL teams come to mind too.
[1]
“ The Glazer family’s acquisition of Manchester United remains controversial to this day.
Their £790m takeover in the summer of 2005 came by way of a leveraged buyout: when a significant amount of borrowed money is used to fund the acquisition of a company, with the debt secured against that company itself.”
I don't think you're right. During its last fiscal year on the stock market, Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million.
We don't have exact insights to X.com's books, but we have credible reports from the Financial Times that they produced over a billion dollars in ebitda in 2024. This is completely possible with a 50% revenue drop. They laid off 80% of the company, something like 6,000 people.
Beautiful turnaround if those figures are reliable, but like Munger calls them, EBITDA tends to bullshit metrics derived by cobbling up bullshit to hide that a company is losing cash.
Just like Figma booking $700M in 2023 profits which was only possible because of the $1b Adobe breakup fee. Proceeded to lose $732m on $749m in revenues the very next year.
A big part of why Twitter needed to cut expenses drastically after the buyout was that it suddenly had an extra >1$ billion of yearly debt repayments to handle.
Did not helped they alienated paying customers (as in companies selling ads) at around the day 2 by literally ignoring them and not providing the service.
IIRC Musk wanted to get an LBO, but wasn't able to find anyone willing to loan the money.
Keep in mind that a LBO is actually a good deal for the bank, because if the purchased company goes bankrupt, the bank can recoup their investment by liquidating the company.
However, that only works if there are assets to liquidate. This can include physical assets, valuable IPs, or favorable lease agreements. In other words, anything that someone else would want to purchase.
Twitter, being a website, doesn't have a whole lot of assets they could sell. Which meant that other collateral was required for Musk to secure financing.
> However, that only works if there are assets to liquidate
Ownership of the company itself can be sold, but this only works if there's someone who believes the company was overvalued. Unfortunately for Musk, Twitter's market cap dropped by tens of billions between the time he locked-in his offer and the deal's effective date. It's hard to find banks to fund your LBO when you're paying significantly more than what the market believes the company is worth.
It would be fantastic if EA went away. They've been such a blight on the entire industry, killed off or destroyed so many good franchises, developers, and studios.
Does EA 202X stomp their workforce? I had a vague idea that this was largely a thing of the past.
The wiki article linked cites a lot of abuse, but all of it is nearly 2 decades old. My understanding was that it course corrected, and is one of the better gaming firms to work for ATM.
Jason Schreier (sp?) is probably the journalist with the best track record on covering EA and it’s generally been rotten all the way down. His recent book Play Nice focuses on just Blizzard but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does one on EA someday because they are in a league of their own when it comes to toxic workplace practices
From a cursory search, he dunks on mismanagement in EA fairly regularly, but I'm not finding a lot of evidence of him reporting on worker abuse. (Layoffs in a failing sub-studio are shitty, but aren't that. Vision whiplash is shitty, but is also not that. Management mandates to implement features that you know will tank your game are shitty, but are also not that.)
I'll defer to people who claim to work there now (avanderveen in the other replies). If you want my perspective, your parenthetical is describing worker abuse. Severance-avoidant layoffs and crunch are shitty and _are_ worker abuse -- in my opinion.
I was hoping the launch of early access skate. would be received poorly, it was due to the beloved franchise being made into a Fortnite-like money grabbing scheme, would cause them to run backwards and fix it releasing an actual skate series game with some live service features but a solid focus on the original franchise. However that hope is dwindling.
EA won the most hated company award because video game players are dramatic. Charging $5 for a launch DLC is a drop in the bucket compared to the ways that some larger more critical companies can affect your life.
EA has been a target of scorn for a while because of a laundry list of issues (including pay-to-win schemes, loot boxes, treatment of employees, etc.) which is long enough to warrant its own dedicated wikipedia page.
TBQH Valve/Steam is a major factor in this gambling in games scene but gamers love them. So I don't think this is the real reason gamers have a problem with EA.
My defence with Valve is that at least on their stuff you most of time get stored credit. With the rest it is same, but it is actually drown the drain.
For me, it's their support for linux and their easy return policy for games that don't end up working. Gaben could light an orphanage on fire and I'd forgive him.
Not so, but if you're to pick one company over all the others as being the most deserving of your ire, EA seems like a rather strange choice compared to, say, Nestlé [1], Chiquita [2], The Coca-Cola Company [3] or Shell [4]. One might even wonder if there isn't something wrong with your priorities.
Well that's all well and good, but the ignorant masses who called EA the most evil company did so for basically the same reasons that you'd critique those other companies. Big corporations that put out productions designed to do nothing but take money from (often poor) people at the expense of their health.
To me, the constant criticism of gamers over the issue reads like shilling for that pathetic open letter EA put out in response. Classic deflection from a toxic entity.
Sure, their “crimes” are minor compared to RealPage raising rents on everyone but it wasn’t because gamers were dramatic. It was most hated because it was so in your face.
Nah, EA's history is laden with terrible decisions, killing creative teams, neglecting good project's marketing and killing them in the process because they had another internal game in the same genre and the like. It's a fucking cesspit of a company.
And they sit on a lot of good franchises and they literally do nothing with them.
> Video game players are hilariously, pitiably dramatic.
I'm a gamer and I 100% agree with you.
The simple fact is, AAA game prices have been stuck at $60-70 for 30 years. Despite $60 in 1995 being worth ~$127 today, games are still $60. They haven't kept up with inflation. Games are relatively cheap while development costs for AAA are ridiculously high.
A typical SNES game had 10-30 people working on it and would have it done in 1.5-3 years. AAA games will have typically 1,000-3,000 and could take 3-7 years, so we're talking 100-200 times the development cost.
Now, compare the best-selling SNES games [0] to the overall best-selling games [1]. Modern AAA games barely reach 10x the unit sales as old SNES games.
I agree, but just want to add that part of this was offset by CDs being cheaper than cartridges. When the two overlapped with the N64 and PS1, N64 games were about $10-20 more expensive. Turok and Doom 64 for example were originally $75-80, and MGS & FF7 were on the higher side at $50. Digital delivery has probably had a roughly similar effect.
Are you sure you got your info right? I'd not be surprised if they've been stuck at $60 after adjusting for inflation, i.e. costing around $30 in 1995.
100%. Easily verified by doing Google image searches for "SNES game ad". Most games were in the $50-70 range (Note that you'll see some images with prices up to $95, but that's Canadian dollars). It was only as the SNES generation was ending that you started seeing some games around $30-40.
Agree 100%. The talk around gaming remains negative even these past few years as weve seen an insane and growing number of incredible games. This year has an embarrassment of riches in GOTY contenders. There is some very angry and dysfunctional subculture of ranting in the gaming forums that is totally disconnected from reality.
They actively seek out an $80 buggy game to hold up as an emblem of how broken all of gaming is even if there are 100 other amazing games. There’s tons of bad movies and TV and art too, but those cultures celebrate the good stuff instead and ignore the chaff. Gaming forums have some kind of perverse rage echo chamber that’s not representative of most gamers. It’s reminiscent of political discourse where a lot of people just want to “vent” really. The idea of “venting” as commonly understood doesn’t work in big social spaces, it only amplifies the bad stuff as everyone is surrounded by toxicity.
> Let's also not forget video games are discretionary spending, meaning they could charge $400 and it would still not be any more immoral than an expensive handbag. It would just mean that I'm not buying it, just like how I don't buy expensive handbags.
This is a problem in the video game community, where they feel that they have to buy new games, new hardware, etc. because their identity is built on being a "gamer" and they have to maintain that identity. That's why you see so much toxicity about cosmetics, microtransactions, raising prices, buggy games on launch - these people literally cannot help themselves from buying everything, so they feel like their only recourse is to complain (and in some cases, harass others) about it relentlessly.
> I spent that much at a bowling alley with 2 other people; once, for 2 hours of bowling and a soda
This has nothing to do with the pricing of video games - you could easily have spent 10-100x more, or 10-100x less on some other form of entertainment for the same period and same number of people, and it will have little bearing on the pricing of games.
> they could charge $400 and it would still not be any more immoral than an expensive handbag.
Charging $400 for games would change how a lot of people perceive the morality of playing cracked games for $0. Game companies aren't magnanimously charging $60 in 2025 because gamers are "dramatic" - they are doing so because that's how their bean counters are telling them to price their own games.
I play a lot of Paradox strategy games. There is a new game coming out that they sold a premium edition with three pre-sold DLC (for something like $20 additional) with a roadmap of a year of post-release development. Some people are outraged that something is planned to be developed and released 6 months after release because that is somehow keeping pay walling game that should have been in the base release. The prices of games are incredibly low. Seeing a movie in theaters costs $20 a ticket and theyll charge $8 for the soda, and gamers are outraged by a $10 dlc that cost $100k+ to develop.
The problem is that DLCs are annoying. They lead to fragmentation and in some ways lead to being unable to experience everything. And they leave you with the feeling that you are being milked.
In the 90s it was simple - you get the game, 12 months later you get the expansion, then comes the sequel. The problem with DLC is the same as with objects - there are too many of them and they are too small. And the ratio of game/dollar is not that good.
Are people pointing out that trump is marching us into autocracy and fascism 'dramatic' or just paying attention. Any communities gripes are just 'drama' if you don't know what they are talking about.
This is proving the point. This is an extremely dramatic reaction to someone pointing out that the cost of entertainment has lagged behind inflation, especially when you take into account increased budgets and cost per hour.
This would be more exciting if the current steam/itch situation didn't rest (at least partially) on their shoulders as payment processors. Other people in the threads have brought up the lack of regulation and market capture that Stripe enjoys so I won't rehash those points here.
I can't see this as a positive because of how Stripe has behaved in terms of preventing transactions in the past. Although Tempo is behaving more like a b2b model or fintech-specific orgs in this case, the shoe-drop is when they decide a particular bank, or fintech org, or product is not allowed to perform the transaction on their network after the market capture takes place.
I actually thought this was going to reference the (earlier) 2000 Spolsky post (point 8 from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...), which is itself dependent on the 15 minute per-person interruption cost (higher than 23m15s in aggregate time)
You're 100% right. This kind of prompt just alters the dice probabilities within the word bag. The OP here is ridiculous (as in 'worthy of ridicule') by means of ascribing intent to sentences with a different rhetorical flavor _that was prompted by the person putting in a prompt_.
I am now fully of the opinion that LLM proponents should turn off their monitor to reveal the consciousness within the AI
I think you had a kneejerk reaction from taking GP's comment too literally. Happens to the best of us. They're saying the LLM is simulating an anxious human and needlessly burning tokens ($$$) as a result, not that the LLM literally has anxiety and needs digital Xanax.
Early voting solves this. There are some voting booths open all week, then on the Saturday/Sunday the main vote happens and they all open. If you can't make the Sunday you pop in during the week.
Polling places aren't open during a plurality of hours in which people who work irregular hours can vote -- the Alabama example above affected me personally but generally is true in most of the southeastern United States. We don't get the day off, there isn't a means of transport unless you already live in a city that provides "rides to the polls," and lines are often long and slow to move.
I'm not saying that to deride your instinct here that a polling place being a private booth is kind of Cool™, just that providing accessibility (or, if I had my druthers, making voting _mandatory_ and giving everyone the day off to do it) sometimes requires we open the idea book and consider how we can make sure everyone who has the right to vote can do it.
Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.
If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"
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