Copernican

Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn't have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.

Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don't think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.

But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.

Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn't always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren't easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it's basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don't own it all, but that's fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.

I don't think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn't get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB's for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it's not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.

Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.

Weird choice of quotes and headlines:

From the OP article:

"He has been “uncharacteristically vocal” about his support during press calls for his new film, Unfrosted, The New York Times reported."

From the NYT link in the quote:

"As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely"

But when you go to the link to the NY Times article that references Mr. Seinfeld as being recently vocal about his support of Israel, one of the concluding comments in the article is:

Surely, Mr. Seinfeld sees it differently. His public comments have largely avoided geopolitical specifics, dwelling little on the choices of the Netanyahu government or prospective conditions for a cease-fire.

And he can still sound hesitant even in recent discussions about the Jewishness of “Seinfeld” — which an NBC executive once described as “too New York, too Jewish.”

Nothing about this makes me think Seinfield is a a strong supported of the war. Support for Israel after the attack can be a lot of things and does not mean pro Netanyahu war machine.

But the point is we can't trust personal responsibility. If a significant volume of the population is basically guaranteed to not invest and save voluntarily for retirement that is always going to be a social problem. Also, there's the problem of employers voluntarily providing retirement programs. Sure, I think there's a question of what or how that savings is invested for retirement (pension, 401k, etc), but it seems there needs to be more mandate to require employer's of a certain size to support retirement plans. And possibly even more mandate to require contributions to retirement plans. The article describes this in Australia: "Australia’s Superannuation Guarantee requires companies to contribute the equivalent of 11 percent of an employee’s monthly pay to an investment account that is controlled by the worker, who can also put in additional money. The “Super,” as it is known, includes full-time and part-time workers and has proved to be enormously successful. With its relatively small population — just 27 million — Australia now has the world’s fourth-highest per capita contributions to a pension system, and almost 80 percent of its work force is covered."

I think the "Pensions you don’t contribute to and the amount you get is fixed." is a bit murky. If you have a pension that probably means you have a lower salary compared to an equivalent non pension job, because part of your labor value goes into funding the pension. But the main thing is 401(k) puts a lot of responsibility on the individual. And as this article points out, if you put a lot put retirement financial planning on the individual, that creates a larger social problem since many people can't sufficiently do that themselves, even if they are being responsible with what they earn.

But isn't the point of this article highlighting personal responsibility can't solve the larger social issue we are facing.

Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch. I know folks forget to do this when setting up IRAs, but kind of hard to do with 401k. Who knows.

How do you think pension plans make money? They are managed by fiduciaries responsible for investing. Guess where they invest. 20% of the stock market is owned by pension funds :https://retiregenz.com/what-percentage-of-the-stock-market-is-owned-by-pension-funds/

So my employer did this thing where new hires automatically got enrolled in a 401k. If you did absolutely nothing to your 401k, each year it would automatically up your percentage to a max of Y. Is that common or uncommon? And in this world of 401k over pension, should that be more of a norm to help protect people that don't know better build retirement savings. It doesn't solve the problem of folks not having enough money and needing to use 401k for emergency funds...

Is it possible that commenter is putting money into retirement accounts but not putting that money into any funds, etfs, or bonds? But even then, I would hope it's in a money market type core position where they are getting some return. But I rolled over all my stuff into a target fund at my new employer 9 years ago. I'm up 21% on my cost basis.