GM announced at the end of March that it will not support CarPlay in any of its future EVs, opting instead to go all-in on a custom system developed on top of Android Automotive. According to GM, it wants to develop new navigation features and subscription revenue opportunities that arenât âdependent on a person having a cell phone.â
FFFS, what kind of poor person buys an electric vehicle but doesnât have a cell phone?
They donât care. What they want is a custom app store that they can monetize. They will throw in all the essential apps for the first year, and then you will need to subscribe to the ones you want. It is just more subscription shenanigans.
I was cursing subscription shenanigans last night and have determined that I think we are worse off now as far as watching media goes than we were 20 years ago. I donât mean the quality of shows, which is (usually) better, I mean the manner by which every company that has anything that people might want to watch has decided that they should make it available through their own specific streaming service.
I had been reminded that there was once a series made based on one of my favorite movies (Heathers) and I had never seen it and felt curious to check it out. Ok, so itâs on amazon, great. But only itâs not really on amazon, itâs on Paramount and you can buy episodes or subscribe to Paramount via amazon. This has happened before with British mysteries that amazon pretends to have but, oh wait, you need to subscribe to Acorn.
I donât know why I am so surprised and increasingly pissed about thisâitâs the same as their retail space, where more and more stuff they pretend theyâre selling is actually fulfilled by third-party vendors.
This is not much different than cable television, only a lot more complicated and less dependable because shows and movies move around a lot. This is this kind of nonsense that led people to torrent in the first place, and theyâre just going to wind up pushing people back to that. Or placing new value on owning the DVDs of things they really like (which is what I have started doing again).
Streaming was this interesting idea that has been executed in a way that makes things worse (welcome to modern life, I know).
Hearing you on subscriptions!
I am signed up to;
Amazon Prime - seems mandatory in US and generally good value. Have never watched anything on the streaming
Netflix - still my favourite
NBA app - have a cheap (and probably fake) Malaysia subscription for $30/year
Apple Music - easily best music app, sounds so much better than Spotify (which I canned)
Office 365 - use as my cloud backups and office is mandatory
Yoga - my wifeâs subscription
Disney Plus - I think I bought 12 months of this for some movies - kids like it. I should use it more
Wow⌠stuff adds up quick! I could probably cull Disney again
And you donât own any of it.
Disneyâs the worst for this, IIRC deliberately not issuing disc releases, but a lot of companies now are de-emphasising owning any media, they want you to just rent it forever instead.
Weirdly, I feel like streaming is working well for me. We always have Prime, but bounce around between Netflix, Apple, Disney, Max, Hulu, and Paramount (probably adding Peacock to the rotation sometime, too). We never pay for more than two of those at once, and that means we never really get decision paralysis: there just arenât many things we both can and want to watch at any one time.
But, yeah, if I cared about live sports, or had more specific viewing preferences or lots of stuff I wanted to stay up-to-date on, I could see it being really frustrating.
Oh, come to think of it, I do have one gripe: Destiny: A Tale of Kamakura. On my last flight before the pandemic, I watched the first half this through the in-flight service. I thought it was cute and fun enough that I wanted to hold off on watching the rest, so I could watch it with my wife and at least the second half would be fresh. It doesnât even seem to be possible to stream it anywhere.
But, like most frustrations with streaming, it ainât like cable would have been better.
The COVID war shows how our wondrous scientific knowledge has run far, far ahead of the organized human ability to apply that knowledge in practice. If we want to avoid a repetition of the catastrophe of 2020-22, we cannot ignore that the COVID war revealed a collective national incompetence in governance.
While I agree, this has been (and continues to be) ârevealedâ in the US countless timesâKatrina, January 6th, Puerto Rico/Maria, opioid/fentanyl crisis, inability to pass national budgets, ongoing school shootings, gerrymandering, healthcare, etc, etc. This is not really the revelation here that the author seems to think it is.
When does it become a feature and not a bug?
Impressive chase.
Thatâs some next level riding.
Only slightly more impressive than the running tax that guy is about to pay.
Itâs Brazil I believe so he was probably summarily executed. They have, as the kids say, zero chill.
Once again, you owe me coffee lol
Seriously. The womanâs a con artist. Fooling people is the thing sheâs really good at.
