Monday’s CBS Evening News started a series on hospital closures. Tonight’s segment doesn’t appear to have been posted yet.
Which reminds me. I meant to post this report from the PBS News Hour when it aired a couple of weeks ago.
Category: Politics, Religion & Money
The Cause of the Effect?
Until watching last night’s 60 Minutes, I had never heard of Ray Epps. Even if I did hear his name, it didn’t register with me until now because he’s a MAGA mad hatter. Or at least he was. It’s no surprise that Trumpers are turning on each other. Of course they are.
While watching the Epps interview on my TiVo this morning, Fox News announced it was parting ways immediately with Tucker Carlson. Is there a connection? Epps said that Carlson is “obsessed with me. He’s going to any means possible to destroy my life.”
Could this be why, coming so soon after last week’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion, Carlson is out at Fox? If the story were about anyone else, this is the question Tucker would be asking on his (now-cancelled) show.
Update: CNN has announced that Don Lemon is leaving. Was there a trade between the networks? Are the two cable TV personalities switching teams? What’s the process for turning reckless speculation into conspiracy theories?
Fried by the Bank Man
The future of investing in the summer of ’22.
At least he was right about having a big impact globally.
Last summer I glanced at that magazine ad for half a second and, seeing the word “crypto,” ignored it. This was what the kid said at that time. Four months later he was out of business.
July 6 (Reuters) – Sam Bankman-Fried, head of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, said he and his company still have a “few billion” on hand to shore up struggling firms that could further destabilize the digital asset industry, but that the worst of the liquidity crunch has likely passed.
Gay Grooming in OZ
The first gay reference seen by uncountable numbers of children.
Bank Notes
Like you, I’m not using cash very often anymore. Today I wanted cash for lunch with a group of former colleagues. The bank’s ATM kiosk plays an excellent selection of music. In the past I have heard ELO and Cheap Trick. Today while making an ATM withdrawal, I was treated to the Troggs.
Netflix Cuts the DISCord
It’s official. As of September 29, Netflix will be a 100% streaming service, no longer renting discs by mail. This leaves what’s left of the physical media rental market to the Redbox kiosks.
The DVD division has shrunk over the years (it had $146 million in revenue in 2022, and $183 million in revenue in 2021, down from $239 million in 2020, and in Q1 of this year it took in $32 million, suggesting a further fall).
There was a local video rental business in a neighboring town that I used after moving here. The owner was a smart guy, and an excellent manager. Having no interest in video games himself, he made them a large part of his business nonetheless, and we rented more video games than DVD’s. The owner saw what was coming with Netflix and he sold the business in 2003.
The new owner was a “film person.” He wasn’t interested in video games either, but unlike the original owner he didn’t rent them. Then he removed the convenient drop-off box in the center of my town. This made late fees more likely, and after that stupid move he raised the late fees to a punitive level. The last straw for me was that the kids he hired to work behind the counter were obnoxious jerks. So I gave up, signing up for Netflix in early 2004.
When Blu-ray came along, I was surprised by how frequently they arrived from Netflix with damage that caused playback errors. Some of them were unplayable with scratches that would have had no effect on playback if they’d been on a DVD. This was surprising to me, after reading about the care that had gone into making the Blu-ray format even more durable than DVD. It certainly wasn’t. It’s been six years since I ended my Netflix disc subscription.
P.S. How’s that for a post title? Combining “cut the cord” with Discord, the video gamer hangout where that idiot kid leaked top secret government documents. They were made available to him by idiot intelligence officials who apparently learned nothing from the Edward Snowden case.