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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Streaming is a perfect example of this, as people don’t seem to realise just how expensive it is to maintain the infrastructure for it compared to traditional cable infrastructure

    Much of the cost of streaming for platforms like Netflix, and especially YouTube, are due to the need to centralize it to allow for more data collection. The cost of streaming also gets overblown, by a lot. Companies like Google and Netflix are spending huge amounts of money trying to build out new features and offerings, like games, that make it look like maintaining the streaming service is far more expensive than it is

    But that price was also only possible because of various venture capitalists investing heavily in Netflix

    Netflix has never needed to rely on venture capital for their streaming platform. Netflix has made a gross profit every quarter since 2011 when this data starts. They have also had a net income all but one of those quarters, which is absolutely insane for a new tech company investing that much in R&D + licensing

    The recent hikes (all the way up to what, $20?) are the result of venture capital drying up

    No. They’re the result of perpetually increasing profit margins. They were very profitable before the price hikes. Their expenses have gone up far slower than their revenue. It’s simply extracting more wealth without providing additional value

    as Netflix went from a market-shaker startup to revenue generating machine

    It’s a bit pedantic, but Netflix wasn’t a startup when they got into streaming. They were an existing business that was profitable to fund their pivot to a technology platform

    So how do you offset these increases?

    Netflix has had an operating income (revenue - operating expenses) of $12.6B over the past 12 months. With ~300M subscribers, that’s about $3.50 per subscriber per month. Subscription prices are much lower in most countries than in the US. For the ~80M US subscribers, that is probably $6 in profit. The $5 cheaper ad tier is probably about what we’d expect their prices to be if they had simply continued to make a couple billion a year in profit. Also keep in mind they would probably get and retain more subscribers with a lower price, and their increased operating expenses includes them building out tons of stupid mobile games most people don’t want, and one-off necessary expenses like building out their original content capabilities

    Note: This last bit is doing some napkin math and is subject to error. I didn’t feel like digging deep enough into their financials to get more exact numbers (such as the average subscription price for the rest of the world)

    TL;DR – Much of the price increases and addition of ads can be attributed to increasing profit margins, not increased operating costs



  • The largest cost is going to be building out data centers and buying the chips to fill them. OpenAI has essentially been telling investors they’re only losing money for now as they build out infrastructure, but when that’s done they’ll be making money hand over fist

    We have no idea what the compute costs actually are since OpenAI is a private company. It’s just a shift in the speculation that it’s higher than previously estimated



  • You’re missing the point because they didn’t use precise language

    Congress establishes what coins and bills are to be minted. The executive branch executes that directive. Congress has directed the executive branch to mint pennies. The executive branch determined 0 is a number of pennies to mint. The Mint is not minting pennies, despite congress directing them to do so

    If the president is allowed to interpret laws congress passes so broadly, it gives an incredible amount of power to the executive branch. Historically, the president hasn’t been given nearly that level of authority

    It’s illegal because congress said to mint pennies, but the executive branch is not minting pennies













  • You’d likely have to pay for it

    Much better way to get rid of them: Submit a FOIA request for their data. So far many cities are simply getting rid of them to prevent that data being public

    Even if the government is happy to comply with the request, the data is a powerful tool to sway public sentiment. Camera near some bars? Request the data from 1:30-2:30 each weekend morning. Near a church? Request the Sunday morning data. Whole lot of people will realize how dangerous Flock cameras are when you anonymously post lists of people doing various things to one of those neighborhood apps

    Note: The government can charge “reasonable” amounts based on costs incurred complying with a FOIA request. I recommend keeping your requests narrow as a result