This was a plot point in the recent Flash movie.

“You are not the customer, you are the product” is true so often, but in many cases (like this one) it doesn’t really apply.

First off, “not the customer but the product” is an inherently antagonistic relationship. Your goals are opposed to Facebook’s, for instance, because you want to spend less time on the platform and you want to interact with friends and not brands, but Facebook wants the opposite of both. But with HSA administration, your goals and your employer’s goals are aligned: you both want someone who will quickly and painlessly manage your account without being a pain.

Second, “not the customer but the product” implies an undisclosed, extractive payment occurring behind the scenes. TikTok is harvesting a great deal of data from you and selling it to other companies. You are the product in that your data has value. But with HSA administration, the product is just the management of your HSA money; there’s no under-the-table dealing going on here (or there shouldn’t be); they’re getting paid by your company for their services.

Third, “not the customer but the product” relationships are entirely one-way; you have no way to impact the providing company beyond just not using their services. They do not, will not, and at some level can never care about your experience beyond making it as minimally useful to you to keep you on the platform. But that HSA provider desperately needs your company’s business, so if enough of your coworkers raise a stink and get your company to complain, they will make a change.

In actuality, “not the customer but the product” ignores the unfortunate reality of most HR/payroll service companies in this case: they’re just the lowest bidder, contracted at the bottom dollar to provide the cheapest services possible, because your employers don’t have to use their services and don’t care about your experience.

At the very least, the USPS is getting money out of them. More than the 2¢, even.

Isn’t that less than two miles away?

I suppose he could also have to travel down 79th a bit, but Manhattan is only about 2 miles wide anyway, right? So like…worst case scenario, a four mile walk.

Okay. That would be a significant walk. Probably an hour or two. But in NYC, how likely is it that you can get to your car, travel to your destination four miles away, find parking, and then walk to your destination (1) in less than an hour, and (2) for less than $9?

Get a bike, bro. Or hey, I hear New York has this fancy new doohickey called a “subway.”

Meh. A whole bunch of cringe posts from twenty years ago will show how much I’ve grown since I was 19. Some more recent arguments I got tired of will rear their ugly heads. But I generally try to be the same person online as offline, and that person isn’t particularly controversial, at least around the circles I run in.

But there would be a lot of people who would be in bodily danger.

Rally’s used to have a slogan that went, “If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face,” and I think that’s probably a life lesson in a similar vein.

Whoa. I hadn’t done the calculation to see what it should have been, but yikes.

And flipped the other way, listening to “how about tens and twenties?” feels to the modern ear like “how about singles and twos?”

I mean, it’s an odd request, but hardly extravagant in those denominations.

$5 million is less than 0.2% of the Disney company’s annual income. They probably spend more than that on copy paper.

That $34 a month for an individual, on the other hand, could be the cost of a prescription, or a phone bill, or something like that. It’s a more significant amount of money than it seems, especially since authors aren’t typically rolling in money.

It’s the characters that are most interesting to me. The Hardy Boys fell into public domain last year, Nancy Drew follows in a couple of years. Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, obviously. Popeye. Sherlock Holmes.

These characters are still relevant in the public consciousness, and now they can appear in other works, be remixed, etc.

Unfortunately I think this would have the opposite effect. Individuals would have to weigh the benefits of renewing their copyright vs. buying groceries, while companies could, as you note, write off the fees as chump change.

So (for instance), next year, John Green would have to try to decide whether he should pay to renew the copyright on his massive 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, while Disney wouldn’t think twice about renewing the copyright on box office flop Tomorrowland in a couple years, just on the off-chance that it might someday be popular.

Instead, I think copyright should be an initial 14-year term with the option to renew twice at no charge; but the catch would be, only individuals and groups could hold and renew copyright. Copyright could not be owned by, assigned to, sold to, or administrated by any corporate entity, only by an individual and their heirs. Work-for-hire would come with an automatic blanket license assignment for the duration of the first copyright term, but following that? Better keep Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft happy if you want to make any Toy Story sequels, Disney. And if you don’t, they can take the characters to DreamWorks after 14 years.

It gets sticky with movies themselves, since you essentially have a group of hundreds or even thousands of people to coordinate the license terms for, but I’m sure some sort of voting system or trust could be put in place. Yes, it could be manipulated, but hardly more than it already is.

The bottom line is, authors and creators (and their families) should be able to make money off of their creation for a reasonable amount of time, but also adult creators should be able to make adaptations of media that they enjoyed as children. Balancing those two things isn’t as hard as companies have convinced Congress it is.

Jack Welch’s whole business philosophy.

Before him, it was more or less understood that business owners had a responsibility to do what was best for their customers, their employees, their communities, and their company’s long-term sustainability; the companies that didn’t (or didn’t at least make it look like they were) were looked down upon.

Welch was the first one to popularize the notion that short-term shareholder value was the CEO’s highest priority. He normalized companies’ c-suites being cutthroat, craven capitalists.

To be sure, not everything that’s wrong with the world today can be laid at his feet. But late-stage capitalism can.

It’s going to happen (probably this year or next), but it’s going to be mostly Chrome OS and Steam OS.

Every year we watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and every year Sally’s request for Santa to bring her “tens and twenties”—intended at the time to be a ridiculous sum, to show how commercialized Christmas is—becomes less unreasonable.

Actually, I think a year or two ago it flipped, and started to seem like a comically low amount. I’m just waiting for my kids to ask why Charlie Brown is so disgusted by such a small request.

This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they’re going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they’re going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn’t there.

Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it’s actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.

Oh, interesting! I stand corrected.

“So make it rain and then we’ll talk about physics.”

“Can I borrow that VHS?”

20 years ago it would have been DVDs. But even before that, we didn’t call them "VHS"es. We called them tapes, or video tapes if we wanted to distinguish from audio tapes.

We will never solve the Scunthorpe Problem.