+1 for the Culture series, personally my favorite sci-fi books
I stg every time UFO Reddit gets worked up, it ultimately has the most mundane explanation which everyone forgets as soon as the next thing comes up.
Cryptocurrencies: higher transaction fees, slower transaction times, and zero consumer protections compared to just using a credit card.
On the other hand, crypto is also terrible for the environment.
Republicans love to forget that as governor, Reagan was very pro gun control when black people started arming themselves.
Imagine if after Doom, no one else was allowed to make another FPS, yet alone a space shooter.
Just wait until the adults are people who grew up with the YouTube algorithm
The difference between the left and the right is that many Republican voters will vote for a candidate based on a single issue, while many Democrat voters will not vote for a candidate based on a single issue.
I’m genuinely not sure if there is a set of policies the left can offer which will adequately appeal to their entire base. I think the best case is another 2008 Obama who didn’t actually campaign on much hard policy other than just idealistic “hope”, which meant that a lot of voters could see what they wanted in him.
Meanwhile Republicans will continue to destroy the country while throwing out scraps like marginally lower taxes (but much lower for the rich).
Seriously, if third parties actually cared then they would contest local elections and try to gain senate/house seats which could force democrats and republicans to work with them to pass legislation.
But when third parties only show up once every four years in the single biggest election it shows that either they’re trying to play spoiler or just doing a quick cash grab.
Everyone loves to bag on boomers, but they’re actually more left leaning than they’re given credit for (more so now after Covid killed a lot of antivax seniors). Gen X is the MAGA stronghold.
Is there any past comment or behavior that would suggest Trump wouldn’t run for a third term, if given the chance?
Well he definitely said that in 2020, and if someone had had the foresight to ask him in 2016 he probably would have said it then as well, so I’m going to go ahead and be a little skeptical here.
The concept is fine, and I’m not begrudging people who use it. But purely from a financial perspective it’s not worth anywhere close to what Cuban sold it for ($5.7 billion in 1999 for a single company that had effectively no revenue by comparison). From my other comment - the biggest US internet radio company has a market cap of $250 million today and that number has pretty much only gone down.
I actually hadn’t heard of iheartradio before, but after checking it out, it seems like as you mentioned it’s as much a podcasting/music streaming site as it is a radio network. And even then, it looks like it’s the biggest “internet radio” company in the US with a market cap of $250 million. Mark Cuban’s internet radio company was sold for $5.7 billion in 1999… which would be over $10 billion today. So I’m standing by my original statement that he absolutely fleeced Yahoo.
Semantically it might not be a literal scam, but at best it was a bad faith transaction given that he literally bet on his company failing as soon as he sold it.
And internet radio might still exist today, but from a business perspective it’s basically a non-factor in terms of revenue when compared to any other form of music streaming or podcast distribution network. And more importantly, internet radio today can be created directly by each given station, e.g. Sirius can make their own website to host their shows. Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com was supposed to be a centralized hub for all radio stations. But why would any station host there if they can just make their own website and cut out the middleman?
All of this is to say that Cuban is either a poor businessman, a shady one, or both. And I don’t think it bodes well for the would-be consumers of his new pharmaceutical company.
His dotcom-era company was a “radio on the internet” website (this was actually parodied in HBO’s Silicon Valley). As you’ve probably noticed, no one listens to radio on the internet because the entire point of radio is that it can be accessed by anyone with a radio signal, which is much easier to obtain than an internet connection and more importantly is free.
He then sold this doomed company to Yahoo. But not only that, he actually shorted the Yahoo stock that he received in compensation because he knew that his company was vaporware and as a result he got paid twice (once for the sale and then later because Yahoo shares tanked when they had to entirely write off his acquired company, among other dumb investments they made).
My single biggest Reddit pet peeve was how they would idolize people who absolutely did not deserve it (see also: old Elon Musk). And lately they’ve been giving Mark Cuban the same treatment. I’m sad to see it happen on Lemmy as well.
Mark Cuban made his billions by quite literally scamming Yahoo. Like say what you will about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but at least they made products that people actually use. Then he followed the Trump path of making a shitty reality TV show which grossly inflated his business acumen. And now people are treating him as a saint for pedaling a new company that’s supposed to fix the pharma industry. First of all, he’s not doing this out of charity - it’s 100% strictly a business venture. And second, you know what would fix drug prices? Single payer healthcare. Like there are literally dozens of other countries that sell these same drugs for nothing because they have nationalized healthcare.