Not really. That’s the sad part. They seemingly have a death sentence either way. They’ve tried to rehabilitate captive whales multiple times and it’s not been successful. If you dumped them in the wild they would essentially just starve to death.
Just evil, the whole situation.
I enjoy plex but the sync feature being missing isn’t saying much. It barely works on plex too. 😝
These kinds of conversations make me miss WASTE.
If they talk bad about other people, especially if you don’t know the would-be friend very well. If they’ll bad mouth other people to you they’re gonna bad mouth you to other people.
You keep moving the goal posts.
If you can’t see the difference between someone’s random opinion on the internet and someone paying actual money to oppress actual people - I don’t think we have much common ground to have a reasonable discussion.
One is a law that actually affects real people. One is a belief. What is hard to understand?!? These aren’t remotely the same thing.
If someone threatened to murder your family vs someone who paid someone to murder your family — which person is worse?
You’re not far off. Any license for collectibles certainly restricts the print run to ratios determined by the licensor. The person granting a license doesn’t want the person using the license to devalue it.
I think you may be conflating fakes with counterfeits. While technically not “fake” cards they were fraudulent counterfeits. I know it’s muddy as frequently fraud and forgery and fake and counterfeit are used somewhat interchangeably colloquially but they aren’t all the same thing.
Counterfeit was the term they used in the lawsuit so I reflected that, though it’s usually used to imply a believable forgery. Counterfeit is the correct term but I can see the confusion as usually counterfeits are a fake product pretending to be real. This is a “real” product that is not supposed to be sold.
Upper deck was not licensed to make cards for the US market. Even if they were - they are not allowed to just print whatever cards they wanted. The ratios, print runs, and distribution were predetermined by Konami per their license and contract.
So they were printing genuine productions of the cards - but without a license to do so. Then they began selling those behind Konami in a market they weren’t permitted to distribute in. Upper deck took all the profit from those sales. That’s multiple levels of fraud.
I’m honestly surprised UD somehow managed to survive the lawsuit. Konami had a slam dunk. They had to have paid Konami some ungodly amount of money to get out from under that, not to mention the personal legal liability of whatever executives were involved in scheming up that fraud.
Upper Deck was the king of sports trading cards and even though they were making hundreds of millions in the 80s, they got caught creating counterfeit versions of the most desirable cards to make even more money. Once they got caught there wasn’t much to be done as it wasn’t actually illegal for them to do so. It soured the collectors market for a long long time.
Circle back around to around 2000 and upper deck somehow got a license to print Yugioh cards in Europe. Only, they decided to start also making counterfeit cards of the 10 most desirable cards and made 50K of each of them and started seeding the collector market in the US by selling them in the states to make even MORE money. It wasn’t long before they got caught and then sued and settled out of court for some insane amount of money.
Somehow they’re still around and printing sports cards. It’s kind of mind boggling.
White noise. The white noise knocks me out almost immediately.
I love they have to sensationalize the title because if they said “raised prices by a dollar” most folks would wonder why it’s a headline.
He’s been playing up the idea of “the everything app” and X/x.com for decades. It’s actually what he wanted PayPal to be before they kicked him out. Theil is the one that refocused X.com and rebranded to make PayPal be what PayPal is today.
I’ve had the opposite experience. We pay way beyond the highest end in our industry, gobs of extra bonuses, full benefits, profit sharing, transparent salaries, nearly unlimited vacation, 4 day work weeks, work from home with all their tech provided, and we still struggle to get people to just do the work.
We’ve tried folks that are local and folks that are all over the country and it’s basically the same issues. You get really talented people initially but some folks you still have to drag kicking and screaming just to do the work consistently. It’s not even just the young folks.
I explicitly pay high because I don’t want to micro manage people to just do the work. I don’t want money to be the primary motivator. Sure we have bonuses but everyone gets them if we meet the goals. It’s a team effort.
I don’t take benefits that I don’t also give my team. It feels like we get one decent worker out of every 10 that make it through the 90 day probationary period without a lot of coaching on time management. The work isn’t even difficult - it’s just work that is very consistent and detail oriented. Even when you outline the success up front for them, you can watch it start to slip in the folks that aren’t going to make it after 4-6 weeks. We have touch points every two weeks during the probationary period and even when you try and steer the ship back on track they falter if you don’t stay on top them.
It’s like a lot of people just aren’t adapted or disciplined to work from home where there isn’t militant structure, especially when we have SO much flexibility. They say they want all the freedom and benefits we offer but won’t make whatever changes they need to sustain it.
Like literally have had people break down at their 90 days crying because they SAY they want everything we offer, best job they’ve ever had, blah blah blah — but won’t just allocate the goddamned time to their daily hours and do the work. Some don’t even know why they don’t do it.
We had one guy who said it was like winning the mega millions but it was like the situation where the person doesn’t know how to manage the money and they spend their entire fortune in less than a year and are broke and worse off afterwards.
The folks who are successful at the job most have been with us for many years. A few have even left and come back.
I can see why some companies want people to work in an office, it would probably make the company much more successful and profitable. I personally hate that though. I’d rather not have a company that have to have a 9-5 office. I want to have the freedom and work flexibility to enjoy work life balance — and I want all of this for the team too. Some people just don’t want it enough for themselves I guess even when you hand it to them on a silver platter.
We just keep sifting to find the gems.
It’s maddening.
What kind of antiperspirant are you using that doesn’t require soap to remove it? They almost always have a residue that keeps them in place that doesn’t normally just wash off.
I don’t disagree with you on alternatives but again it’s challenging for the technical folks amongst our peer groups to help adoption of an alternative if we can’t provide places for the folks we support to download the alternative and try it
There’s no way for any of my family or friends to understand how to build their own browser, let alone setup a WSL2 environment to make it work. Their eyes are going to glaze over at the thought then they’re going to go download something else.
They don’t even have builds. How can we support tools the bulk of users can’t easily implement or recommend non technical people to try?
Captive finance companies do this all the time because they make money on the margin of the product. The financing is just an incentive to get up to purchase the product.
Population contraction and major shifts in wages compared to cost of living.