Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is a smug, self-righteous SOB. He is completely lacking in empathy for anyone not conforming to his view of how people should live their lives. This is a good commentary on the New York Times article I read last Saturday.
The unfettered and lucrative sucking up, lobbying, and currying of favor—and the attendant rewards—are all recast as harmless socializing.
A year ago I began subscribing to Disney+ to watch Peter Jackson’s Thanksgiving premier of The Beatles: Get Back. Lately I’ve been watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars in chronological story order. I was expecting that Disney+ would price itself closer to HBO Max after they had built up a subscriber base, so this notification wasn’t a surprise.
We wanted to let you know of an upcoming price change to your Disney+ subscription. Effective on December 13, 2022, your subscription will now be called the Disney+ Premium plan and will change in price to $10.99 per month. Your payment method on file will be charged unless you cancel your subscription before December 13, 2022.
We are committed to providing a variety of offerings and quality content to our subscribers. You now have the option to choose our new, lower-priced plan, Disney+ Basic (With Ads), or upgrade to one of our Disney Bundle plans.
Yeah, okay, so the price is going up a few bucks per month. But then, a week later, it was followed up by this message that is not okay with me.
Disney+ now requires additional information from the primary account holder, including your birthdate and what best describes your gender. To avoid any interruption to your streaming, please update your account with this information before December 8, 2022.
Note that once submitted, your birthdate cannot be changed without contacting the Help Center. Your gender can be changed at any time by navigating to your Profile Settings. If you’d prefer to keep your gender private, you may select “Prefer not to say.”
They’re threatening to interrupt service to paying customers if we don’t do as they say? Disney seems to have forgotten that customers are not employees.
If they want to know the primary account holder is over 18, that’s what they should be asking. Instead, they seem to be fishing for marketing data. I’m not going to play this game, and if I end up having to contact the help center I will lie about my birthdate, and tell them so.
Follow-up: I don’t know if “Seiko Eloise M” is an AI bot or an actual person. Via live chat she confirmed the requirement is for the primary account holder to be 18+, and she said it’s okay to lie about my age to provide that confirmation.
I completely understand your feedback about this. We care about your input and will be passing it along to the right teams here for further review.
No worries, Douglas you can lie on your birthdate as long as it is associated with 18 years old and older
Seiko Eloise M
6:27 PM
The birthdate I entered is May 25, 1977 — the release date of Star Wars.
Until last week I hadn’t heard of FTX. Or, if I had, it never registered. That’s because high-flying Crypto currency is no more real to me than Superboy’s high-flying pet, Krypto.
My interest in Crypto has been limited to reading articles about block-chain technology and the massive amounts of power and cooling required to run the server farms that are mining the virtual currencies.
I’ve made a point of not reading about the people involved with the business of Crypto, or the exchanges they run. So, in the same way I’d never heard of Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried was unknown to me until his financial empire likewise collapsed.
Why did so many people trust their money to a kid with no track record, operating in an unregulated market? For the same reason they trusted their money to a respected Wall Street veteran running a well-established firm in a regulated market. For the same reason they voted for someone who was not only clearly unqualified to be President, but unfit to hold public office.
They fell for a sales pitch from a con man. Although it has yet to be determined if Bankman-Fried has actually committed fraud, or if he’s just a bright kid who got in over his head and was desperately looking for a way out.
Parade has stopped publishing as a Sunday supplement and gone 100% online. A feature I have always looked forward to seeing in Parade is “What People Earn.”
There is a big ongoing push for pay transparency beyond the categories where it’s always existed — jobs that pay minimum wage to start, pay grades within unions, and what public employees are paid, unionized or not.
This comes after the Great Resignation, which was followed by Quiet-Quitting, and now there’s the inevitable Big Layoff. At a personal level, the guy who took over my job when I retired didn’t quiet-quit, he just plain quit. He submitted his resignation and declined an unprecedented counter-offer. His area of expertise — cloud computing — is in high demand.
I was never the quiet-quitting type, and neither is my replacement who has moved on to another opportunity. I would suggest that those who have been doing the quiet quitting, especially while working from home, are among those who are now caught up in the layoffs sweeping through the tech sector.
