While I technically agree, they are trying…

https://cybersecuritynews.com/lg-monitor-app-installs-adware/

I think climate change is a more relevant term. Yes, as a whole, the earth is warming up. However, this is not the only effect and it is not felt everywhere equally. Some places may actually not get warmer or even get cooler (for now). Changing air and water currents can change things in many different ways. Either way, weather patterns and climates are being changed.

What sucks is that some people act in bad faith. “Well this winter in this one city was technically cooler this year so Global Warming is a hoax!”

That’s your buying habbit. They’ve had that for a while now.

For TVs a single sale gets you a microphones for “voice features”, maybe a camera for web video chatting, and can take snapshots of your screen every X seconds to ID what content you are watching, and so much more.

I understand what you are saying. If they reduce the price of their TV (and the profit that TVs sales generate) they are just removing the profit from one category into another.

I honestly don’t have enough energy to write a better researched response - I spent more time than I wanted trying to find any numbers as it is.

If you want to believe that the gigabytes of data your TVs regularly send to their manufacturers and their business partners aren’t a primary driver of lower prices… and that it is really because it has become markedly cheaper to mine precious metals and manufacture semiconductors than it has to run factory farms, then go ahead.

So in order for it to be real, everything must be merged together into a single source of revenue/profit?

I am in no way confused as to whether or not they could make a profit without selling TVs - it says to me that the more TVs they sell, the more the platform can make. The platform becomes the profit generator and the cost and sale price of the TV hardware then becomes a line item in the platform profit calculation.

I’m not a business major but I don’t understand how separating the services and hardware that delivers the services into two measures invalidates my assertion that the services are the profit driving force and the hardware is secondary to that. With the hardware being secondary, keeping its price low or at a loss makes economic sense if the platform generates that much more profit.

I’m arguing such logic has driven down the prices. What are you actually asserting that is relevant to my point?

So you are saying that they are talking about profit and not revenue. Profit - the actual net gain the company gets and the sole reason businesses exist in a capitalist economy, and arguably the more important responsibility of a corporation to its shareholders…

Gross profit:

To me, it looks like they are making more profit from the platform than from the TV sales themselves. To the point where they could, as you say, literally sell TVs at a loss, and still profit…but that barely matters when it comes to the price of the TV?

When the TV is on the modest end, I think that matters a whole lot. Bigger TVs don’t generate more platform+ revenue than small ones do.

They won’t be giving away 75" TVs or anything, but I think “platform” revenue has sizeable impact on why you can get absurdly cheap 27" flat panel TVs from Vizio and the like.

I don’t disagree that manufacturing costs have gone down, but I question whether that or ads, data collection, and other new smart “features” have most contributed to the lowering price of TVs and other electronics. Note, the reporting referenced are over 5 years old… before AI really took off and the demand for every scrap of data became so profitable.

https://www.howtogeek.com/767919/tv-manufacturers-make-more-from-ads-than-selling-tvs/

A lot of it is actually data collection (mass spying and surveillance) being used to harvest and sell vast quantities of data… and that subsidizes the price of the device.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/research/smart-tv-data-privacy

Basically, if we make the devices cheaper and spy on every customer, it becomes more profitable to sell at a loss to get more customers to spy on. If they could spy on your eating habbits with food, food prices would also come down.

Also, black Friday is bullshit. The prices usually get artificially inflated ahead of time and the good deals usually have very little units in stock. Door busters for the first five customers or some bullshit.

More importantly though, if it stops being so profitable to harvest data, prices will go up quite a bit on anything used to collect it.

Nonsensical? Ludicrous? I’m deeply offended by your unpatriotic rantings, you communist coward. It is, by far, the most efficient system… for siphoning money into the pockets of the already rich, who deserve every penny.

You just need to work harder at pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. You may think you have grit, determination, and intelligence but clearly you don’t have enough of any of those things because, if you did, you’d have managed to be born to rich, connected parents.

Agree to disagree. Marxism wasn’t the driving force behind the failure of Communist/Socialist endeavor that I’ve heard of.

Americans are backing progressives not because they want socialism, but because they want candidates who will fight for the working class

That’s the literal goal of socialism though…

They’re voting for progressive Democrats not because they want socialism, support the Democratic Socialists of America, or reject candidates called “moderate”.

They’re voting for candidates whom they believe will fight to make housing, food, healthcare and childcare affordable to average working families. And who’ll take on Trump’s billionaire backers, CEOs and Wall Street titans who are rigging the economy against them.

So they are voting for socialists not because they want socialism, but because the alternatives are refusing to reign in, or are overtly in favor of, unfettered capitalism…

Well, being disingenuous with literally ever fucking word they speak has worked wonders for Republicans. Turns out to be an effective technique for Corporate and Zionist Democrats too. It’s almost like a class war or something.

Many of them are cheering on, and enthusiastically voted for, the ethnic cleansing of the United States. They do not give a single fuck about the genocide of brown people.

Recently, my Steam shader processes have gobbled up every scrap of my excessive 64GB of RAM and 16GB of swap until the executioner kills it… or kills system monitor or btop or whatever I’m using to monitor or document it like a bloodthirsty monster.

Though it’s not my typical book, I enjoyed it.

I literally just finished Circe by Madeline Miller less than 24 hours ago. The book includes a version of this story, among many others, from Circe’s perspective. I was also unfamiliar with the character despite being a big Greek & Roman mythology nerd as a kid.

One interesting and fucked up related fact is that when Amazon expands its delivery network it has a bunch of last-mile delivery services spin up to their specifications, promising them business. Then, after it analyzes its output and determines how much excess delivery bandwidth it has, it just leaves whatever last mile delivery businesses it doesn’t need holding the bag (and a bunch of Amazon branded delivery trucks, because of course Amazon doesn’t front the cost for that necessary investment).

I’m in the closed beta. Its great! I pay extra for the premium tier - I only have to subject myself to free use by any random shareholder visiting my town on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The base-tier peasants have to give up their whole weekends to shareholders like fuckin losers lol.

Queue the new subscription cloud version of Windows that force-feeds you whatever the fuck Microslop has a hard on for this week. Advertisements in your start menu, open video stream everything you are doing, slop token credits if you answers surveys about what you are doing so CoPilot can train off of your screen recordings, un-uninstallable CoPilot/OneDrive of course, free license for Microslop to use anything OneDrive ingests (everything it manages to discover) without limitation…

I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn’t also decreased.