See, the problem with publicly traded corporations is, they've got to constantly not only be making as much money this year as they did the previous year, but they've got to increase shareholder value, which means, raising prices, or reducing the product to save costs, we have termed that last bit enshitification. I mean, they don't HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel, and those fuckers are raking in the big bucks, and really really like their 3rd vacation homes in Aspen, so you pay more, or you get less, and sometimes you pay more AND you get less. And the beat goes on.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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I don't see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.
That sir, is communism. And we all learned from 80s action movies that communism is bad.
In the real world, communism also suffered from the mandated growth problem, as well as a long list of other issues that some people still like to pretend solely exist under capitalism and some serious problems that are exclusive to this system. Yes, it is actually bad, with and without Cold War propaganda making it sound both worse and better than it actually was. It failed everywhere for a reason.
This doesn't mean that there aren't real issues with capitalism as well. So far, the best system we've come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets. Not perfect, but nothing is on this rock.
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I mean, they don't HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel
If the board doesn't maximize profit, the shareholders can sue them, so functionally they do have to.
Specifically, the Board and thus the CEO must maximize company VALUE not profit.
There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.
But in the 1970s you get a guy named Milton Friedman who comes along with the concept of shareholder value in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled "A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits".[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.
So there's been a lot of argument against it since esp as of late, but the economic hegemony still adheres to Friedman's economic principles.
There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.
Can you name some examples? I'm not very familiar with economics.
A bigger market share (or just market size if it's something new-fangled) at the expense of current profit, because that can turn into future profits. See most modern tech companies, which make a loss but still have value. For example, Uber just made a profit for the first time, and since they're everywhere that's a great position for a shareholder. People bought in in the past in hopes that this would eventually happen.
OP is a little off, BTW. US law - and it's probably the same elsewhere - says that the C-suite has to work in the interests of shareholders, who they represent as fiduciaries. It's just that there's only a few things a million APPL shareholders have in common, so in practice that interest is value and dividends. In a privately-owned company other things might factor in, for better or for worse.
IANAL
TBF small businesses do this too on average. There's some that don't, but then there's also some that straight up do crime, usually against employees.
To solve this, you either want a well-regulated market, or no market (however that would work).
Plenty of privately owned companies do the same things so I don’t think it can be chalked up to an issue with publicly traded companies.
The minor difference is private can choose what they want to do. public has a fuduciary duty to increase value
That's generally false. But even if it's true, all the boss has to do is argue that medium-term profits will be generated by whatever policy they want to adopt. Since nobody knows the future, they might be right, and they're legally rock solid.
In other words, the duty to increase value produces unfalsifiable policy claims. So it is meaningless.
public companies do not necessarily have a Fiduciary duty to the shareholders, let alone one to increase value. Any that they did have (based on the laws and how they are incorporated in a given jurisdiction) would also be applicable to a private company. Private companies also have shareholders, the shares are just not traded publicly.
You’re probably thinking of the theory of “Shareholder Primacy” but that is a theory not a legal reality, although some insist it is based on a questionable interpretation of the precedent set by dodge vs ford motor company.
Public companies can be run in what ever way the board/shareholders see fit.
They legally don't. It's just expected.
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lol - I love that I canned all my paid subs that were fucking me up the arse like this, and then used the savings to setup a half-decent Plex server for my family. Fuck those greedy cunts.
I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection
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Pretty much the only one i'm still happy with is crunchyroll. They don't fuck around despite being basically the only game in town.
Netflix I pay for begrudgingly but if they raise the price substantially or add mandatory ads EVER they are gonna be gone. I'm already pissed they are axing Kaos, like so many other good shows before it.
Already axed prime last year due to them adding ads, I don't even miss the expedited delivery because all the big box stores deliver for free, some even same day, at equivalent prices.
Disney recently boned me out of account sharing, so my plex server is getting pimped out. $1000 buy gets you substantial NAS storage for 6-7 years. That's ~$14/mo if you replace nothing for 6 years. By the time drives start dying the sizes double and you can expand your raid as they die off one by one.
Anywho, Plex servers (and other FOSS alternatives now) usually have no problems transcoding and serving multiple 1080p and 4k streams concurrently. Plus you can download media for offline play within the respective server's app on all kinds of devices, and for plex the server owner doesn't need to license guests. That being said, non-plex options are what i'd go with because they are as good or better without any license cost. I just use plex because I bought a lifetime sub before the alternatives were mature. It's nice having a library that only grows, never shrinks. No temporary licenses or content runs so I can have a massive backlog and not worry if I don't get around to it for years. Just a lot of wins, no downsides that I know of.
Crunchyroll has its own bullshit too tbh. It just happens to be that the industry is worse than their bs, so Crunchyrolls shenanigans is really just the anime industry.
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Hmm, it appears if we squeeze tighter, more blood will come out. Surely there is no natural limit to this principle.
Friendly reminder that the high seas are always an option. Download stremio, install the torrentio addon, and you are good to go.
Only use torrents if you know what you're doing. In the developed world, this usually ends with a very expensive letter in your mailbox.
You can get a VPN or seedbox to avoid those letters. They are a lot cheaper than a single streaming service.
Using a VPN solved this problem for me. If you don't want to pay for a VPN, then use OpenVPN Connect.
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I guess Canada must be undeveloped, cause I've never seen one of those "expensive letters" in my mailbox
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I love that they think upping prices will keep people around to pay those prices?
About once a year, we get a Netflix subscription for about two months. Catch up on everything we want to watch, then cancel it.
After 6 months, Netflix forgets about you. Does that mean we count as a new subscriber every year? How many people like us are inflating their new subscriber number?
Obviously Netfilx wants to tell the stock holders how many “new subscribers” they have every quarter. Nobody stopped to think what those numbers actually mean.
Quality down, prices up. How long is this trend going to last?
Until it stops increasing profits.
Beatings continue until morale improves
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Netflix's content has gotten so much worse too. I don't think there are many people left that have a subscription for more than one or two shows. And this seems to be a trend across all the different apps. Makes me glad I set up automatic torrenting for everything I'm interested in, and all it costs me is $5/month for Proton VPN
I don't know about you but content has gotten better for me.
Ranma 1/2, Squid Games, Super Mario Bros Movie, new season of Arcane. I felt like every 1-2 months, there was always something interesting.
Also note that I don't pay for Netflix. I do own stock.
BUY MORE NETFLIX SUBSCRIPTIONS..
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They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. They burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn't sustainable.
The company is under pressure to show investors what will power growth in the years ahead, as its already massive reach makes finding new subscribers more difficult.
LOL i think the only potential "new subscribers" remaining are the people who never had and never will have a netflix sub. at this point one of the many reasons i'll never sign up is because fuck shareholders in general
Just idea that they expect growth where there is none is strange. This business are at the limit and have no way to grow faster than economic situation of many people around the world gets better.
Sad part is fir them it is better to destroy service trying to increase growth in meaningless ways, than to just find a way to keep the business that is working.
Idea of infinite growth is ruining us.
The for profit model was probably created by idiots. Just because something like the market and economy are complex doesn’t mean it was put together by smart people.
Capitalism is cannibalism. Cannibalism of resources, of your job, of your society.
Idiots put the system together and idiots are holding it together.
Yeah, but I've yet to see a detailed alternate proposal. When people talk about anarchism it gets really handwavy really fast, and the other kind of socialism has history of being vapourware.
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The Pirate Bay will always be with us.
It’s not me, Netflix, it’s you.
Don't be a pleb. Sail the high seas!
I was celebrating the signup / binge / cancel pipeline, but now I’m realising: a next step they could use to prevent that would be putting caps on your watch time, like “you only get 20h of content a month” or something.
Wouldn’t be a surprise to see this. I’m callin it now lol
They’ll call it a “fair use policy” and the exact limits are secret
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I was shocked about the amount of content when I browsed BBC's Iplayer service. They even have films. If you want to save some well known movies and are in the UK, you could exhaust their selection before even having to put your hand in your pocket to splash out on extra privatised content.
*if you're paying for a TV license
The death spiral continues
AllDebrid is still €3 a month so 🤷♂️
lifted subscription fees
So they're not charging anything?
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