The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar

I'm starting to see this as an advantage because it forces me to get up and do something - actually move, even if not very far.

Working at home since March I've also returned to much more frequently listening on CD (I have a modestly large CD collection, with maybe 500 - 600 albums, accrued gradually and over many years, much of it second hand). A big advantage (apart from sound quality vs. streaming)? Most albums fall into the 40 - 60 minute range so I have to get up and move around to change the music at least that often, rather than sitting essentially motionless for hours on end at my desk or on the sofa.

Plex doesn't even require an NAS. I run mine off an old laptop. 100gb of storage is plenty if you have a DVD or are willing to burn one, since you don't need to keep stuff you don't watch in your library if it's backed up to optical media.

It always takes me forever to find out anything in the GUI and I can never find out how to do the simple things I want - that is - put bunch of files into one end and watch them on smart TV on the other end.

It's quite common to see people drop $20 for their favorite Creator to read out their comments. It's fun and provides that direct/live link that fans crave.

This provides a unique monetization channel that's not available to regular businesses while helping Creators circumvent the pervasive "why should I give you $10/month if Spotify is $10/month" narrative.

When they have enough customers (C) such that X/C < Y, the price (Y) for all customers drops so that Y = X/C.

Obviously, as they gain more customers they may need to increase X to pay for resources or staff which would increase the price.

I might normally want to read, over the course of a month, 10-15 articles from each of 15 different paywalled magazines or newspapers. Which is more than the 2-5 free articles typically allowed past their paywalls, but little enough (especially compared to 15 or more competitors) to justify $15-25+ a month per source. Maybe if I was a Wall Street trader the WSJ and Bloomberg are no-brainer expenses, but right now I wouldn't get enough value from them to justify their sky-high subscription costs, but I would like to read a decent handful of articles a month. A few publishers, like NYT or WP, have picked up on this market, and regularly discount to capture various price points, but lots have held onto a 'big subscription or none' model.

What I really want is an (expensive) subscription to something like Spotify Premium across publishers. I'd happily fund the pool to the tune of $50-100 a month, if it could get me access to my top 15-25 paywalls. Everyone gets some, some get close to standard subscription rates, but it'd just enable me not to have to worry about whether I've used up my free articles for the month at each origin. And it'd also let me contribute to lots of magazines and things I do appreciate, just not $25/mo appreciation.

Maybe you could simulate subscriptions based on the token being active in a browser or not. E.g. someone can read a paywalled article if they have at least $10 a month distributed such a way (in proportion to attention).

You're talking about $52 a month. For easily 20+ hours of entertainment (or time savings in terms of Amazon Prime). In terms of quality of life, it's much more impactful than say upgrading from a Subaru to a Mercedes. Despite costing an order of magnitude less.

I know Relay.fm and Radiotopia are both set up for that, presumably there are others.

Substance abuse is a well-known problem. Same apparently applies to digital entertainment of certain kinds.

I know this is a fairly left-wing perspective, but I feel that the implicit agreement - which I totally agree exists - isn't necessary. There doesn't need to be a buyer and a seller. Once that is taken away, where is the incentive for sinistrum?

I think this doesn't go without saying... People have always entertained themselves in various ways, like having rituals, singing together, playing, fixing stuff (clothes, stuff around the house), creating things like tools and clothes etc. But these tended to be more active "hobbies".

I'm taking issue with the template/implicit model whereby work sucks your energy out, and then you need to regenerate by sitting in front of some media device and consume some subscription content or some media item that has a title, author etc. As if unstructured time were scary. That you just go for a walk without having a podcast in your ears. That you just cook dinner without the TV on. That you eat without watching Youtube. It somehow feels non-productive and "cheating".

I don't think these are the best way to unwind or regenerate for the next day, as opposed to actually letting your brain just be without "content" being fed into it. Also a lot of content, like news and podcasts just work us up instead of relaxing and "entertaining", unless you consider "outrage" entertainment.

It’s like heroin addiction, after first it feels great, but later on the rush is gone, the great feeling is gone and all that’s left is the desperate need for another hit to not feel like hell.

Uhm, in the US it's pretty easy to find boutique candy stores with a very wide variety. Even in grocery stores, the candy isle has quite a bit to choose from.

Don't conflate what's presented in the checkout rack, for impulse purchases, with the wider variety of what's available.

Once you try proper chocolate (I recommend Winans', http://www.winanscoralville.com/), a grocery-store candy bar becomes inedible. I don't want them in my mouth. Its that different.

Central Asia has pretty much only Mars products.

Say, during COVID, I think many people suddenly discovered that they do not need as much consumption as they thought they did. Replacing going out or shopping with a walk in the park was a pleasant change for some. And yet instead of learning something from the experience, people are pressured to return to their old consumption habits as if it is some sort of civic duty, because it is "good for the economy". It is the equivalent of breaking windows and fixing them up again to create an economic boom - it is bad for the economy and the people and is just a transfer of resources to a specific trade.

This sounds horrific to me. Why would we want to avoid bad stuff "for the economy"? Is the economy some kind of god we have to serve by the ritual of media consumption?

This view is only one step away from telling me I'm foregoing my patriotic duties by choosing to just make tea and sit in quiet or talk to people without going to the movies or doing something "structured".

> "gives people more time to watch movies"

Why do you immediately accociate to movies and productivity? How about give them more time to talk to their neighbors or their family or to contemplate their life or whatever else?

This is a complete countersense toward the etymology of "economy" and I would even say toward its only possible natural goal.

The concept of economy is about reaching goals with the least effort. And the selection of those goals can certainly not be "the economy", that would be circular, an attempt to optimize arbitrary conventions that is completely meaningless.

So having a good economy is certainly not possible by the furious consumption of unneeded things.

I couldn't care less about "the economy" if its goal has shifted toward the selection of our new masters. And that state of mind about "the economy" will certainly not favor neighbourhood stores but more probably megacorps and their (often very few) owners.

Haha, this might be an economic "spherical cow". Realistically, we can't be consuming/creating all the time. People need downtime (you can't argue time spent sleeping is bad for the economy when people cease functioning when they get sleep-deprived enough).

So switching to something 10-100 times more expensive that doesn't actually perform any better in any of the areas you care about? Yea that does sound like a lot of enterprise software I've seen.

I think some IE version upgrade killed it and we had to spend over a million to get an enterprise replacement that everyone hated

What? I'm pretty sure kids are highly marketed. Toys, breakfast cereal, video games, etc... there are regulations and in the case of vices, outright restrictions... but at least in Europe and North America, advertising to children is very common... much to the chagrin of parents who are currently being spammed by their kids for a Rocket League season pass because they were spammed by the ads on the Xbox.

Walmart or something similar is probably hiring? If so, then it's about greed, not survival.