Honestly if he really is ill, I very much wouldn’t put it past them to off him themselves and blame the “radical left” in order to kick off the civil war they keep trying for.

The next few years would end up being “weekend at Bernie’s, Trump edition”

I much prefer owned media over subscriptions, but this is perhaps one area where they’re actually good. A bad business decision that drives away customers can have a pretty immediate and visible impact on revenue. It’s not “hey nobody bought our latest release, blame racism/sexism/wokeness” or whatever other whipping-boy they choose to bury their heads in the sand with, it’s “we did a thing and within days to a month people were leaving us.”

In many cases, this drives them to actually pay attention to customer reactions. We’ve seen the same with Disney in regards to Kimmel and I wouldn’t be surprised to see recent changes to Gamepass have a similar impact. I hate to say it, but subscriptions like this really do allow customers to vote with their wallets.

Which is also why many are probably going to try to lock more customers in to longer terms, add gimmicks, and generally make it harder to unsubscribe. Kinda like phone companies. We’ll likely end up with a “streaming sign-up/connection fee” and offers like “**free Frozen tablet with a two year Disney+ subscription”

** regular price $599, applied as a discount from your regular bill over 24mo

Yeah but there’s different stages of crazy. There’s “micro-managing credit-stealing dick boss” level, and then there’s “help foreign enemies hack the government while throwing Nazi salutes” level.

Initially, he looked to be on a similar level up Jobs or many other narcissistic upper-management types in a gadget-cult, which - sadly - is not so uncommon and that many people accept

Yeah I’ve had more than a few things where the ONLY thing that shows is the ad, and then the content roll fails and/or it just keeps looping ads with no content

I’ve never heard being elected official as a criteria for the term, the dictionary definition of assassination is

“the premeditated act of killing someone suddenly or secretively, especially a prominent person.”

And there have been plenty of non-electoral assassinations, including those by (or of) mob figures, journalists, and many others.

In that case the easiest thing is not to buy a Samsung or any other “smart” fridge

Good marketing absolutely works on nerds. We will literally share cool ads (funny world best) with each other in the same way with memes, which is part of “viral marketing”.

At the same time though, those lame ads using low-grade, overused memes (usually the comic ones) trying to be edgy pretty much make me want to pass on a product. Crappy AI-gen ads are even worse.

But next time I go to Japan, I absolutely still want to try a Sakaeru gummy because THAT marketing campaign was just brilliant and entertaining

( https://youtu.be/LQsMp4Oo6xM )

I’ve also seen a few cool tech things in ads that I’ve looked into. Generally nothing I’ll grab right away but they often end up in a list of things that I potentially buy later when I’ve some free cash or the need. Aliexpress is pretty good with this as it tends to suggest neat tech things that are a cheap to add and fill that “free shipping” gap.

What DOESN’T work is cheap/lame broadside marketing with little to no product details. I don’t want a video as an ad - especially not one from an influencer who has no clue but looks pretty - but I’m happy to look up an actual product demo that includes key features/points.

Honestly though, the best thing is if the product demonstratibly works. This is especially true for FOSS-based products that have stuff I can try for free at home (personal use) or ones where the main product is usable for limited seats etc and has a commercial/premium license with value-add like AD/SAML group integrations or SSO/MFA.

That said, any asshole who cold-calls me pretending an existing business relationship to setup a marketing meeting is going on “the list”, and vendor “demos” that are just marketing slides aren’t far off on that either