China’s not exactly flush with cash to buy debt with at the moment, they’re having their own struggle party at the moment, although they tend to be less vocal about it. After all, their real estate market basically got massively over leveraged and a lot of capital disappeared and turned out wasted.

The Saudi’s too are having a bit of a liquidity problem at the moment, they’ve made a lot of commitments on weird mega projects and spent a lot of money trying to diversify their economy and repair their image, much of it with limited success.

They’re buying them from production committees and other such organizations. Most anime is made on essentially “commission” basis, where a studio is payed a fixed upfront amount by a group of financiers and other interests, who then distribute the show, sell the merch, and license it internationally. Essentially studios and those who work there are payed no residuals or other profit sharing scheme like is common in the American film and television industry.

There is actually a bit of a cartel in that regard, with the third parties that purchase shows from studios having collaborated to suppress the cost of seasons for nearly 2 decades, leading to stagnant wages and rampant overworking of artists as the quality and quantity of work expected increases while the budget stays the same. Increasingly artists at the companies have had to fall back on gig work beyond their standard hours to make ends meet, getting payed by frame in their off hours to make a little extra money, effectively working 16 hour days through this additional work. There is some movement to change this as of late, but, this is still essentially the norm.

Prices really haven’t come back to normal. Average prices is around 7 dollars a dozen, with lows around 5 dollars a dozen depending on area.

In 2019 it was between 1.30 and 2 dollars a dozen.

The H5 bird flu strain hasn’t been contained, and it probably never will be, it’s been rampant for nearly half a decade at this point and they’re still nowhere near containing it. It’s endemic in the migratory bird population. At this point the only flocks that won’t be routinely wiped by it are smaller flocks in better conditions.

Beyond the reality of higher turn over in flocks due to routine outbreaks, it also gives them an excuse to steadily press up prices to pad margins.

The prices are also still like 5X what they were before this bout of bird flue started over 5 years ago.

More like with debt, but who will buy the bonds that fund that debt?

They could probably start by putting all the units they’re holding off the market back on the market, but that wouldn’t let them keep rents artificially high.

And if they did that then they couldn’t exaggerate the value of the buildings, since the theoretical earnings is based on the average rent multiplied by the total number of units.

And if the value of the buildings dropped because the average rent fell, then they would suddenly be over leveraged on all the loans they’ve taken out with the buildings as collateral, and they couldn’t take out new loans to pay the interest on the old loans.

We wouldn’t want a that to happen now would we?

Like, they’re shooting them selves in the foot right now, this demand they’re trying to cut costs to keep up with, was artificially created by them!

Open AI is the largest single source of the demand, and they’re just redeeming credit Microsoft gave them in exchange for letting Microsoft use their models. Much of the rest of the demand is from users messing around with, or accidentally activating, the models from OpenAI that Microsoft has hastily welded on to anything they could. Microsoft could argue that’s bringing in money, but really Microsoft just raised the price of the office suite and didn’t make it clear that people could have kept the old price by switching to a new tier that didn’t have the features. Like, they could have just raised the price without the new features and pocketed the money without inducing demand or giving OpenAI free compute.

And now to pay for that unforced error, they’re going to let their games side fall even further behind. Like, it’s not happening yet, but, I think we’re quickly going to reach a point where Xbox has gone the way of the Dreamcast, and windows is no longer the default for PC games because it’s such a bloated mess.

That’s the core of the issue, crunchy roll has sat its self as a corporate middleman, buying the rights to distribute shows and then charging consumers a subscription for access.

But they can’t be bothered to do the only actual damn work their position would realistically demand, beyond renting server space; providing translations for the foreign media they’re distributing.

That’s without even discussing the fact that not a single penny users give them will end up in the hands of any of the exploited artists who actually made the shows, since the industry doesn’t work on residuals or any other kind of profit sharing, the licensing fees crunchy roll pays essentially going straight to financiers.

See that’s the kicker, for the longest time it was basically all fan translated subtitles, and only recently have payed for translation become the norm.

So it’s really quite pathetic for them to try and save a few bucks by replacing a proper translator with a LLM, given that there are still plenty of passionate fans who would have done it for free. Especially given that translating between Japanese and English in a cultural context heavy situation is something these LLMs are really bad at.

Be nice if there was a way to use it that was just a web page.

Almost like there’s some kind of deeper generational economic divide, almost like all the people who own all the stock are retiring and starting to live off investments, and thus companies are pressured to payout ether in buy backs or dividends, so prices are rising while quality and pay falls, and only those benefiting from the record profitability can afford the new prices.

Sort of like the allocation of resources and labor are being redistributed to a retiring and wealthy leisure class and the burden to support that is falling on the younger generation.

It’s a matter of optics and positioning, he’s saying he wants to do these things, he’s saying “ here’s how we do these things, and the average citizen of the Empire State won’t pay a dime for it” and he has the mandate of the public in NYC to do them.

If the state legislature blocks these, it’s on them to explain why they won’t do it. They have to go to their constituencies and tell them that “no we will not raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for public services”.

In wealthy bedroom communities lavished in generational wealth like Mount Kisco and Whiteplains, that will go over just fine. But In Schenectady, Rochester and Buffalo, that’s going to ruffle some feathers.

Sure upstate dislikes NYC for taking up all the oxygen in the room, but their fundamental gripe is with the elites of NYC who refuse to spend a dime to support them. The elites of NYC in the suburbs throwing out fire and brimstone about spending money on public services will strike a sore spot with upstate voters desperate for public investment.

The legislators from upstate will say “We shouldn’t be letting NYC spend 9 billion dollars on their public services when ours are falling apart.” And the public there will say “yah! Let’s raise taxes on the NYC rich to pay for our public services!” and now the legislators who don’t want to tax the rich have to explain why they will be funding no ones public services.

All he has to do at that point to get these past is say “ let hit the rich NYC elite piñata a little bit harder and we can fund my proposal and stuff in upstate”. Without control of NYC proper’s politics, the rich are caught between a rock and a hard place, the actual legislative influence of the communities they live in is tiny compared to NYC and upstate.

Well of course, if an initiative for a public services decreases revenue it’s a failure! I mean, clearly the goal of a public services is to make money! Not, you know, provide a service to the public, what an absurd notion!

I think I have about 50 bucks of monthly subscriptions all in by this point, and most of that is to patreons or various similar systems for smaller independent creators I wish to support directly. The rest is for a VPN for cough “downloading Linux ISO”, also libro fm for audio books to listen to on the night shift.

I actually spend a fair bit monthly on one time donations, purchases of media or related merch, especially stuff I already have access to and wish to support the creators of. I’d probably support more creators this way if it was easier to do so but there are so many times where there just is no way to do so.

With media on big streaming services, it’s been made pretty clear that I have little to no input on if the money I’m spending will actually end up supporting the creatives who make the media I enjoy. In fact it seems most of the money I spend will end up getting spent on stuff I do not care about. “Supporting creatives” through these means feels more like handing the reins of culture and art over to large companies and shareholders.

It’s not even really cheaper. Especially for Microsoft who is actually footing the bill to run all the data centers.

But, the potential benefit lies in the fact that it’s a potential labor substitute that can’t unionize, can be rapidly switched between different skill sets, won’t quit, won’t ask for raises, and won’t protest when you ask it to participate in DOD contracts. The labor that goes in to making it work is constant, uniform, alienated from the actual outputs of the system, and easily replaced if they start causing problems.

Want more capacity at the company? Build another data center. Need to pivot company priories to the latest fad? Just reduce token allocation form one department to another, no need to fire a bunch of people and wade through that legal mess, then wade through the mire of hiring a bunch of new people from a limited talent pool. Not using all the data center capacity? rent out the remainder to other companies.

It reduces the complex and intricate system of a company to a simple resource allocation that can be wielded at will by company leadership.

Nadella is perfectly sane and doing the most logical thing given his set of priorities and incentives. He’s payed insane amounts of money to push initiatives and pursue goals at the behest of the board, the board is attempting to maximize shareholder value, the value of stock is largely determined by perceptions of theoretical future growth.

The reality is irrelevant, the narrative and adhering to the party line is what matters.

Can’t wait to see which way Eric Adam’s independent run splits the vote in the general. I bet that Curtis Sliwa will be competing with Eric Adam’s voters.

someone finally told him about how much oil passes through Hormuz.

“The beatings shall continue until morale improves”

I’m from America, I’ve never heard of it being used in a derogatory context. i’ve heard it used in a couple of contexts, one being out of AAVE as an endearing term, usually used between women. The other being a shortening of the term drag queen, again, usually in an endearing context. I think the two uses have a link in the past as drag shows have a lot of roots in the queer African American community, but I haven’t looked that deeply in to it.

Generally I think the “it’s not ok for people outside of the group to say it” kind of terms are usually reclaimed derogatory terms or slurs, and I’ve never heard of queen being used in a derogatory sense, outside perhaps the term “welfare queen” coined by regan to disparage people who relied on various welfare programs, specifically single African American mothers. But, that context is kind of a race and class context and not where I think the term comes from even in AAVE. Could be wrong, maybe it is a reclaiming of that, but that wouldn’t really be a LGBTQ community thing.

There’s probably a different history in the UK, maybe something to do with the monarchy, but at least in American English if there is any sensitive element there, it probably links back more to African American culture than to queer culture.