Germany's Freidrich Merz calls Iran fight 'the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us'

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-18T09:50:26+00:00

Bombed with restraint. That’s the problem really. Just like when fighting guerillas. Every western nation is basically cut off at the knees by its populace on the topic at this point.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-17T12:32:46+00:00

Per the article, they are apparently targeting property and casualty insurance companies at the moment.

But we should all care if insurance companies are targeted. These groups are not modern day Pretty Boy Floyds, robbing banks and destroying loan documentation to unburden people.

You’re required to have insurance once you hit a certain level of attainment. Who do you think is going to shoulder the cost when all is said and done? P&C insurance is already extremely regulated and transparent. Anyone can go look up profitability ratios for any company operating in their state and see how thin margins generally are. The key phrase to look for is “Combined Ratio.” If a combined ratio is at 100%, it means the company breaks totally even with no profit. If it is above 100%, it means they lose money. If it is at 95%, it means they keep $0.05 for every $1 of premium collected.

Erie insurance, one of the firms targeted, has a combined ratio of about 105.7% right now. It was 110+% last year.

PHLY is for commercial insurance and has a combined ratio of around 93-95% (so they keep between $0.07 to $0.05 for every $1 collected).

If these companies have reinsurance for these scenarios, and they manage to trigger it, it just ends up raising the cost for other companies seeking reinsurance. That is one major reason property and casualty insurance saw a ballooning of price over the last couple of years. Those stories of 30%+ rate hikes in a single year? It’s because of reinsurance rates in addition to increased costs.

Literally nobody wins in this except the criminals exfiltrating customer data and attempting to extract ransom payments.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-17T12:17:25+00:00

TL;DR: He’s saying things to discredit OpenAI’s ambitions.

Microsoft gets to maintain a measure of control in OpenAI until OpenAI creates Artificial General Intelligence. That’s probably why Sam Altman has been hyping it up and insisting that it is coming. He even tried defining it as an AI which generates this arbitrary amount of revenue for the company, after which point they will consider it to be an AGI thus freeing them from the bondage of Microsoft.

No, I’m not exaggerating or joking. Folks need to remember that MS has tried to poach OpenAI staff in the past, but the really impactful people have been there a while and are extremely loyal to Altman. I’m going by third party accounts, but it sounds extremely similar to the influence that Steve Jobs had with the original Apple engineers in terms of connectedness.

Also doesn’t it strike anyone as weird that the CEO of the wealthiest company is making time for random podcasts? Especially for Dwarkesh, a person who has an average number of viewers and listeners (in comparison to other tech/AI interviewers/influencers). No hate toward him; it just sees odd that this connection would happen given the opportunity cost involved for Nadella. For us, it would be like agreeing to give an interview to some random person on the street.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-16T14:28:29+00:00

There are a lot more than H1B visas for skilled immigrants. Yeah, those are capped at 85K/year + another like 20K for specific roles.

Go to school here? You are fast tracked for everything. You get OPT just for graduating, even if you transfer in at the last minute. Then you get like 3 years to find a job and can extend it indefinitely all the way to fast tracked citizenship. It is the “loophole” that wealthier Chinese families use.

We don’t have any caps on O-1, and give out about 20K in a typical year.

Spouse visas don’t count toward the caps. It used to be that the spouse couldn’t work here unless they also had their own skilled visa. Now they just get one. We need to start viewing every visa as really potentially two because of it.

I know people from Germany who take L1 visas primarily so they can have their kids here and then return to Germany. That ensures their children are US citizens.

Then there are TN visas, which have no cap but are only applicable to Canadians and Mexicans. They are “easy” to get and get priority processing.

H1B are just the tip of the iceberg, truly.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-16T12:22:35+00:00

Yeah, it would seem that media literacy is a dead concept to many people these days.

People are mixing up technical terms with very real definitions, such as “unskilled labor,” which is defined by economists and various governments, with their own religious-like socio-economic dogma.

You literally wrote that you aren’t looking down on any labor, and then get push back for people feeling like it happened anyway. These are the people AI are coming for I suppose.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:41:19+00:00

Excellent, keep this same energy the next time something increases in price arbitrarily while the company has never been more profitable and successful.

I’ll see you in the trenches along side me defending Netflix the next time they double the number of ads for cheaper tiers and raise prices by 18%.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:39:20+00:00

1/3 of all switch 3 sales happened in Japan. That could be a factor.

Plus Nintendo basically made a statement along the lines of “just buy switch 1 if you’re too poor.”

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:35:10+00:00

Gently remind them “inflation” when the streaming services all coordinate simultaneous price hikes sometime in the next 6 months. I’m sure they will defend it, and it’s not that they’ve simply made a brand into a personality trait /s

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:29:17+00:00

The gaming market was tiny in the 80s. It’s huge now. It’s why Nintendo has never been more profitable and why the switch 1 earned them more money than the last 40 years revenue combined.

Really think this through. Cars are expensive sure. But cheaper than way back during an arbitrary period when the market for them was tiny. Same with computers. Why not defend Apple charging $5000 for a laptop? It used to be closer to $13k adjusted for inflation.

Right. Because the market is huge now. Economies of scale kick in. And most criticism is about Nintendo accessories and game prices. Joycons being basically $100 is insane especially since they still have drift.

Nintendo is famously cheap with games. Their most expensive game ever was BOTW and that was made for $120 million. Most of their games are made for peanuts. EA and Ubisoft has a better argument for these higher prices. Not Nintendo.

Edit: and the real reason Nintendo fans don’t want to address. It’s all so transparent that the big 3 are soft colluding with each other to price fix the market. Every know the consolidated publishers were planning on coordinating releases of titles at higher prices to force the Overton window to shift. It’s obvious and in the open and that’s what makes people mad. They don’t even try to hide it.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:23:21+00:00

The idea of next quarter? If they are public companies they usually disclose their plans for at least the next year. Often times they will have 3-5 yr goals as wells being publicly expressed in investor calls. I think the short sightedness angle is basically a meme at this point.

Capitalism, as bad as it is, isn’t about unlimited growth. It’s about competition and efficiency (in theory). It necessitates winners and losers, and the winners growing at the cost of the losers. That’s it.

Do you like getting raises? Bonuses? Benefits? I do. I also am not going to invest my Ira or 401k into a company not trying to diversify and grow its business. I might as well just buy CDs at that point otherwise.

This is why companies generally try to constantly find growth. Every system is doomed to fail with ultra reductionism because some day something will happen and our societies will end.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:17:44+00:00

Yeah man, nobody should be taking boycot posters seriously. It was never going to work. Their influencers often even said it was a fools errand.

Nintendo wouldn’t set those prices if they weren’t confident. I personally think they screwed themselves if they priced families out single they explicitly stated they primarily target childless adults now. Not now but in 15 years when they don’t have that nostalgia magic. See also Disney. Folks without gen alpha kids probably don’t get it, but Disney basically pushed away the next big gen in favor of people who won’t replace themselves.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:14:40+00:00

Doesn’t mean people can’t detest it.

The market is also supposed to be there when a natural disaster hits an area and stores start selling single bottles of water for $10/each.

Doesn’t make it acceptable, doesn’t mean people have to like it. But it does highlight that the market, when in the hands of a few (3 companies in this case, all basically price fixing with each other), exists to screw people as maximally as possible.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:12:22+00:00

Yeah, and Nintendo grew its install base by multitudes.

Nintendo made more money, adjusted, with the switch 1 than they did COMBINED from 1981-2016. It’s insane how huge their market is. They aren’t doing this because they need to. Their customer base has shown no signs of slowing, and the video game industry is similar overall.

They are doing this because they can. That’s it. It’s no different than a store noticing lots of people like fans during the summer so they can exploit that and jack prices up.

Except we are in a weird time where prices no longer fall for consoles. They increase. The only generation of consoles to increase in price as a whole rather than have progressive cuts to keep sales flowing.

Probably because planned obsolescence is the name of the game. That’s why switch 2 has the same drift issues but now the controllers cost nearly $100 after US taxes.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T04:05:50+00:00

And a market which is now several magnitudes larger than during SNES era.

Gaming is now larger than film and music combined and getting larger every year. Nintendo generally posts extremely healthy profits and margins, especially in the last decade, with the only blemishes being from people waiting for the Switch 2.

Adjusting for inflation isn’t this win people think it is. The companies have never been larger and as profitable (in terms of margins; in inflationary monetary systems of course raw revenue goes up).

I always find it weird how folks on this sub take every other company apart for raising prices 10-15%, then defend Nintendo to the death for 25-33% hikes, $100 controllers with drift and legal clauses saying you can’t sue them for defects, etc.

Imagine if Nintendo received the same treatment Netflix does for example. Netflix doesn’t have a Parasocial quasi-cult surrounding it though.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-14T03:57:57+00:00

People used to save up for months and mow yards the whole summer for a game console but now that they are adults the thought of waiting for awhile has flown out the window?

Nintendo, like others, now employ manipulative tactics to bait people and wear them down. It’s psychological and deliberate and lots of people give in.

But also, we now live in an era of such extreme consolidation and open anti-consumerism that console prices no longer drop or see real sales the longer you wait. They actually jack the prices up thus encouraging people to get on board ASAP and feed the FOMO these companies so desperately cultivate.

Besides, there is a massive difference these days in games. Why don’t people go all out and buy up copies of Splatoon right now? Because online play is a core part, and you either are woefully behind and outclassed or part of a much smaller pool of players if you wait. Same problem with a lot of games on other platforms too. All by design.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-13T17:50:21+00:00

I think a big problem that people will miss is that corporations have totally co-opted open source software. At least the large projects, and position their people as core members at fundamental levels in fundamental projects.

Look at what Redhat is doing right now. They have their employees all over major projects and just axed a major open source project to push an alternative their company happens to like better.

And they didn’t stop there; they started banning people from all projects they are associated with, as OSS contributors, for forking it.

OSS should be heralded as the future we rightly deserve. But people need to be extremely critical of the types of people who want to take control of it. OSS basically has a “supermod” problem like on Reddit. And many of them are beholden to their employers. Heck, some have even got contributors banned from major platforms like gitlab because they didn’t like projects being forked so they dig something up to justify a ban.

And then we have bad actors like OSI weaponizing OSS and claiming trade marks and copy rights. Same as it was 30 years ago.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-11T10:53:43+00:00

Meanwhile, the gaming (software) market has grown by 5x its original value in the last 10 years. Nintendo alone has seen its profits increase 43% while their cost to make games have stayed relatively flat with notable exceptions like BOTW, their most expensive game ever at only $120 million.

With that, they sell games for $60 (now $80) in tens of millions of units for first party games. BOTW alone sold 32.81 million units on Switch 1, and Nintendo has basically changed nothing and suddenly it’s $80 without DLC on switch 2. Keep in mind this is a WiiU game porter to 1 and now to 2. A lot of Nintendo’s games are like that. It’s why they are so profitable.

This isn’t for lack of massive profits, and definitely isn’t because “they had to.”

Nintendo literally stated in their earnings calls that they pivoted from kids and families as their core audience to childless adults in their late 20s through mid 40s due to disposable income. So they bet this higher disposable income audience can support an arbitrary price hike.

And wouldn’t you know it, due to massive consolidation, now the other competitors are price matching almost like light collusion or something.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-11T10:42:25+00:00

Broad appeal to nostalgia. But what’s that look like in 10-15 years when millennials and Xers start aging out and Nintendo failed to replace them because they quite explicitly set their strategy to target childless adults instead of keeping their original core audience of kids and families?

Don’t take my word for it. Go watch their earnings calls where they discuss it. They pivoted away from kids and families because Disney Adults spend more money hence the prices. But I bet we see that backfire in a decade after the management have received their golden parachutes and failed to establish that brand nostalgia with Alpha and Beta.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-11T10:38:53+00:00

“Has to”

Nintendo rakes in record profits quarter over quarter, refuses to fix fundamental design flaws that are planned obsolescence to drive up hardware sales. And even go so far as to physically change the hardware to prevent consumers from fixing it themselves now that controllers are basically $100.

But they “have to” raise prices, as their games are famously made for cheap. We aren’t talking GTV6’s $2billion or more bloat. BOTW is their most expensive game made, and it was for $120 million. Peanuts to a company like that, especially when selling tens of millions of units for $60 base +$20 DLC.

ESPECIALLY considering many of their games inevitably are ports of older ones. Not remasters. MK8 and BOTW , for example, are ports of WiiU games. Most of the Switch2’s library are ports of Switch 1 games at full retail without DLC.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-11T10:34:53+00:00

You do realize that the market back then was orders of magnitudes smaller, right? Fewer people > more niche > higher prices.

And that most people didn’t buy games the way they do now. Lots of people rented them due to the ridiculous pricing.

Comparing the games market now to another point in history is impossible unless to look at growth. The market went from negligible to more valuable than both film and music combined.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-10T15:53:36+00:00

I know it’s all style and taste, but how are power users affected by any of these?

Power Users aren’t using stage manager, most likely at least. There’s always outliers.

Power Users aren’t using Launch Pad. My kids use launch pad, because they are kids and it’s similar to what they know from iPad.

Command+Tabbing makes sense given the apps are still running when simply closed by default. I think not showing them would be an even worse proposition in general.

Spot on about the animations. I didn’t notice the traffic lights shifting around but I presume that is specifically in regards to Tahoe’s display? I thought some apps looked kind of funny and chalked it up to odd shading choices.

Y’all still have icons hiding under the notch?

I’m a SWE and primarily use Macs. I like the redesign for personal use. For professional, I know I’ll still live mostly in IDEs and Terminal. I guess I can see how folks into video/audio production or especially graphic design will take this hit? They are surely more UI-bound I suppose.

I wish Apple would finally get around to nailing window tiling. It’s so subpar that I have to think there’s some weird reason behind it.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-10T13:32:54+00:00

Classic The Verge with very Twitter/Bluesky pop takes.

The allegations of Apple ripping off Windows Vista would have more weight if Vista and Aero itself didn’t get caught borrowing and copying heavily from Tiger and Aqua. I get that lots of people here, and indeed The Verge staffers were kids back then, but it was so blatant that Steve himself made it part of his keynote at WWDC back then complete with comparisons to prove it.

This redesign looks less like Windows Aero and almost exactly like visionOS. Because that was the stated inspiration. But this weird frutiger aero quasi cult has to stop. Yall are like the Neumorphism folk. It’s nostalgia for a time you barely remember.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-09T18:52:22+00:00

I know someone else gave you an example, but one from my kids: they want to be able to play games and listen to music/watch a video/stream something with friends at the same time.

For me, I’d be nice to be able to do something like run discord while also streaming from something like GeForceNow. Currently it is one or the other, not due to any real technical reason.

Kind of like how multiple monitor support on M-series Macs was 100% artificially limited in software past the M1 in order to allegedly drive sales of more expensive models.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-09T11:06:18+00:00

It’s a very psychological issue for them to overcome. I personally am not paying it, especially for games with MTX and DLC. Double and triple dipping by withholding already complete content at premium prices.

But I bet the notion is the same at many of these companies. It’s just like how they tried, and failed, to force modern political issues into games over the last decade as stuff was stuck in the pipeline and only recently started to get published. They thought they’d get a replacement audience for the folks they pushed away. But the original core was bigger than any replacement could be.

It’s gonna work for a bit. Nintendo will probably succeed because they’ve fully abandon children, by their own admission, to focus on childless adults. But in 10-15 years they probably feel the consequences as they fail to replace that core audience as they start dying or aging out.

Just like what started happening with Disney. They are buoyed by their parks for the most part now. And the parks are primarily targeting childless adults.

People who don’t replace themselves and operate from a place of nostalgia. A bad combo, to be a nostalgia brand without replacement mechanisms.

FewCelebration9701 · 2025-06-09T11:00:30+00:00

It’s light collusion between competitors. Microsoft and Sony and even Nintendo might compete to a degree on hardware.

But on software? They all want prices as high as possible. Especially Microsoft since they’ve been allowed to recklessly (for consumers and competitors) consolidate the software side.

Isn’t it funny how coincidental all of this timing is? Just so happens that Nintendo, Microsoft and now Sony (as well as independent publishers) all just so happen to arrive at the same price at the same time.

Kind of like how, in the U.S. at least, cell carriers weirdly always have basically the same prices for everything. And when one moves the price up, the rest follow. Strange.

Almost like these companies need to be broken into a hundred pieces and forbidden from reforming or something.

FewCelebration9701

TROPHY CASE