I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem.
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense:
- Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time.
- Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money.
- Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that
- So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible.
Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
Only if you’re optimizing for easily measured metrics alone. The value of a companies brand is not just some arbitrary number on a balance sheet it does influence the easily measured metrics like the number of customers you have across multiple segments in a noisy way. Which then influences your profits, which those institutional investors do care about.
That said, the general public is more price conscious than most people on HN. Walmart is generously rewarded for finding a good price:quality match for a huge segment of the population.
Reputation will only become more important as AI generated content permeates society, the name behind what you’ll read, watch or listen will be a bigger factor in whether anyone would commit minutes to hours to consuming what could be slop.
I think this erosion of trust will have far reaching consequences and people will become less open to ideas and experiences front strangers.
Running your brand into the ground in the early days will be costly.
HBO became an incredibly valuable brand because of a well deserved reputation for quality. Any one great show or highly visible screwup will only move that needle so much, but they do compound over time. I still remember the leaked audio from some years ago when the new HBO ownership explicitly said they wanted to take a more quantity over quality approach. This latest case certainly reinforces my mental model that HBO isn't what it used to be and probably isn't worth combing back to any time soon, given that there are better streaming options out there.
You're absolutely right, and I don't know why more people aren't talking about that instead of just pointing out aspect ratio issues in their favorite movies and TV shows...
This is the end goal of a system that doesn't think beyond next quarter, that wants to accumulate vast sums of money above all else, and that treats customers as an annoying side effect of the line going up. They'd take our money and give us nothing, if they could get away with it. Based on what passes for products these days (seriously? A toilet with a camera?) we're very nearly there.
It's shocking how much pictures influence judgment: Without reading much, at first, I thought: Poor guy, maybe he got pulled into something, ...
Then I saw the pictures of him in a leopard fur pajama and indoor sunglasses, and with his (an assumption on my side) trophy wife, and thought: "Naah, he probably deserves it"
Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo.
A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.
"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.
Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.
Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.
The fact that it's been done over a long period of time does not prove that it's beneficial. As you say, that's why there are double-blind studies. If the only evidence of benefit is that it's been done for a long time, that literally is just tradition. It's worth looking into it to see if it works, but there are plenty of traditional remedies with long histories that don't.
perhaps an experiment has verbally controlled its inputs and outputs in analyzing the effect of an independant variable upon a dependant variable. this does not imply that that those inputs and outputs were actually controlled for , nor does it imply that any found correlations are inherently causative. between folk wisdom that kinda works vs. corporate advice that also kinda works but happens to make someone a huge profit ....... ill take the thermal baths first
Science is a process, and from what you described above it is working.
Everyone in science knows that all knowledge is provisional, and that goes 100-fold for things which haven't been replicated. Science is an algorithm for ratcheting understanding despite the fact that humans are fallible and some humans are outright frauds.
When we say "everyone in science", I think the part that people find scary is that it's hard to tell who is in science versus who is in 'science'.
Or in other words, it's hard to tell from the outside who really believes what you're stating and who believes it until it's inconvenient, or until it clashes with their personal ideology.
When what you're referring to is "science" in quotes, you seem to already have admitted what these people are appealing to is "science" in name only.
People acting in bad faith will appeal to whatever authority they think will achieve their goals. It says nothing of the legitimacy of Science, and if you let the actions of bad actors take actual Science off the table, you've only empowered bad actors to make things far worse for yourself.
After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...
I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
Well, a lot of countries aren't worth leaving. Taking my home of the UK as an example, Wikipedia lists 19 countries with higher GDP per capita, but if I don't want to learn a new language, overcome bureaucratic obstacles and leave my family behind, there is nowhere to go and this criteria describes almost everybody who gets an education here, even the smart ones. Romania is #53 on the list and their EU membership means they can emigrate easily.
TV documentaries today are arguably worse. Dumbed down to "here's someone who knows science stuff" and "here's a startup that does science stuff" over and over again.
The point I was trying to make is that many "news" articles aren't really new. It's not unheard of that the publisher just wants your attention so they'll keep rehasing old stuff.
oh this is cool.
I did think for a 2 day setup and 1/2 day takedown it wasn't a huge efficiency saving but it is if you move it down the road at the same time.
As the comment above mentions, safety is a huge factor too.
During the night, there will be 1 lane open in each direction (one on the side of the bridge, and one on the opposite carriageway), so the bridge can be moved.
I guess it's theoretically possible to engineer a bridge that can move with traffic on it.
But this bridge is engineered with solid feet for taking traffic loads. The wheels are only extended for movement and wouldn't be able to take the load of traffic.
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
Sorry, rant over ;P