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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2024

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  • The branding is one aspect, they definitely publicize the food bank donations and it’s often one of the few things food manufacturers do that sounds good. The rest is just profit and employing mass contract labor at near minimum wage.

    If they threw out thousands of pounds of product it would look like a bad number if publicized… if they donate ten thousand pounds of tomatoes a couple days before they go bad they get to look like they donated ten thousand pounds of tomatoes in value, and then they get to write that off as a donation.

    I’m pretty sure when they do said “donations” they get to write off the retail value, whereas if they just wrote it off as a loss to the business it would only be the actual cost.





  • Realistically they will hire someone in the dominican republic or some other nation with fairly neutral english accents on a call center farm who end up getting paid way under US minimum wage.

    Tons of companies do this. Choice hotels, boost mobile… many many more.

    Alternatively those gig workers will get paid even less than DR wages and be from far worse countries. Those DR call center farms literally do not allow you to bring any personal belongings onto the floor, or take anything from the floor. Way too easy to steal financial information if you can write it down somewhere. Now imagine gig workers who work remotely and how they could handle financial data… doesn’t seem feasible but maybe they have the liability angle figured out.


  • It’s not that it’s gone, it’s that the platform continues to enshittify.

    It’s really hard to remove all their bloatware garbage, and features seem to get worse all the time. Subtitles had a big change and they really don’t do a good job of supporting them anymore, as an example. Had one show that no matter what I did the subtitles just wouldn’t work after updating to a modern version that had the modern ‘updated’ subtitle handling. I’ve continued to update but it’s still questionable.

    When I got it they never had ‘ad supported plex tv’, now they do and they promote it everywhere. All I want to do is keep supporting what they have, newer modern codecs, squash bugs, and act as a crappy dynamic dns so I can not setup a domain that goes to my home network connection which is a dynamic ip.

    What I don’t want is to have to go into settings to disable or hide all their garbage ad revenue supported services everywhere in my private media library I paid a lifetime license fee for. It didn’t have that advertisement when I bought it, they shouldn’t be adding it afterwards, and I shouldn’t have to keep updating my config just to stay on a version that supports evolving hardware.

    I tried Jellyfin but it’s even worse for subtitles which are unfortunately mandatory in my household.

    Edit: this literally just popped up in my lemmy feed. https://lemm.ee/post/63954487


  • Yep, two years before Borderlands delivered a much superior experience.

    At the time I had spent six years playing EverQuest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft in various capacities, and this was looking like an MMO borderlands like thing. Few MMOs had gone under so soon after release.

    Apparently the same devs are making a sequel, and I think i’ll make sure to pirate it unless they give it away to lifetime Hellgate London subscribers.

    Nowadays I know better than to trust any kind of weird offer like this announced before launch. They’d only do it if they knew they were going to win… or were so worried they were going to go under.






  • So we CAN afford these drugs to begin with, because employer sponsored health plans with minimal coverage cost around $14000 and have $6500++ copays (I don’t remember today’s limits for copays, but you have to pay those copays out of pocket before an insurance company covers drugs typically.) The actual drugs cost pennies to make but sell for hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands. The prices that are listed for these drugs at retail are not actually what the insurance pays for these drugs, we’re never going to see those figures, but they’re aligned to maximize profits from the industry. Pharmacy benefit managers also collude by using a third party service to recommend pricing.

    I’m too lazy to find good sources of material, but revenue in the US for pfizer is more in the US than the rest of the world combined. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267877/revenues-of-pfizer-in-submarkets-worldwide/ (I was able to view this without a subscription.)

    Last year they had about ~63600 million in revenue. ~38691 million last year was in the US alone.

    ~16057 for “developed markets” aka europe and wealthy nations ~8879 for “developing nations” e.g. africa, latin america, poor asian countries.

    So 38 billion in the us vs 63.6 billion total revenue.

    If you have to choose between keeping US revenue or keeping non-us global revenue, you’re gonna choose the US. It’s not even close.

    I’m guessing they can license their drug to some other business to sell internationally and get out of first party sales, but it’s possible they may have a legal mechanism to skirt this already since it’s typical for the US business to be a separate company than the holding company, and all the international businesses are separate companies under said holding company, it’s hard to say. I don’t have any inside information for today’s strategy.