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we are post-something alright. I made the same conclusion and it's weird that there is no new Bruce Willis on the market that made it in the last decade. We have people like Pedro Pascal who are good but not a-billion-dollar-garanteed-hit good.

When it comes to music and cinema what changed is we replaced major labels and cinemas with Spotify and Netflix... both are not paying as much as in the old days - up front and in the long run.

Music Albums are no more, most of us are just listening to singles right now – so why release an album at all? But the LP was basically invented by the Beatles who said we put out ten songs at once - before them like in the Elvis generation everything was released as singles! No one thought that you can make the kids buy an LP which was typically a collection of greatest hits until that point. Nobody thought 30-million-sellers like "Dark Side of the Moon" or "Appetite for Destruction" were even possible.

Artists these days need a build in audience which cater to the taste of their audience and then they maybe get the label contract or publisher deal - but I guess most just don't bother at that point and release their things on their own.

We live in a super fragmented market - I stumble upon these bubbles everyday where I think "so this person has a career for a decade appearently and I just learn now about it?" Even if it is completely up my alley...

But everybody can record an album these days that sounds like it was produced by bloody Bob Rock on a 1.000 dollar notebook... when it comes to music everything sounds pitch perfect - which it is thanks to Audiotune. And even "live music" is hardly "live music" anymore in a lot of cases these days. And most of it is derivative and banal.

Back in the days a major label could and would take some kids out of the gutter - who had no other choice to succeed but the Billboard 100 - and put them in front of 60.000 people where everybody just loved the same things. I mean these sort of things still happen but they are few and far between.

Why bother putting in the 10.000 hours to make a career in acting or music if you can get a business degree and make 6-figures anyways?

But I think it makes sense for these musicians to sell their publishing rights because its an easy way out. A lot of these people are old and its easier to give a couple o million dollars to your kids than a music catalog which they probably don't even know how to handle. I mean every musician worth a dime knows about the Frank Zappa family feud so maybe it's all in all better to give these music rights to people who actually know what they are doing.


> it's weird that there is no new Bruce Willis on the market that made it in the last decade

I always considered Dwayne Johnson to be the 80s action hero analog for today. At least the closest.


Well Dwayne Johnson is successful but he is not really a newcomer... The Scorpion King is 20 years old by now and he started his wrestling career in the 90`s.

And he is not really an "actor" actor - he is more like the Schwarzenegger of today I would say.

One could argue about Bruce Willis acting chops but he might will get an Oscar eventually for his lifetime work.


not just soldiers.. everybody had a good time with amphies for a while there. I don't know if the problem got as big as oxycontin but it was severe.


Amphetamine and Methamphetamine still commonly prescribed in USA, mainly for folks in the HN demographic. You'd be surprised.


Not just in USA. For folks with AD(H)D it's being prescribed to it is, however, barely useful for "having a good time" (unless you count having some kind of predictability on how you focus on tasks to be "a good time", which I guess works for its literal meaning).


Be nice if it didn't ball and chain you to a particular state...


I'm one, and I wish they worked as well for me as people in this comment chain are making them seem.


But why would anybody PUTIN such an effort?


I run without any noise and sometimes I do when the track goes through a nice forest or so. But for anything longer than 3 - 5 km there is gladly no shortage of music-playlists, podcasts or audio books to choose from.


And I always wonder if there is a use case for unsolicited "dick pics" in real live...


Art project?


I covered quite a few Nokia reviews back in the day and Nokia was by far the most arrogant company to deal with.

Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so.

And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding your publication and who would get the devices first and last. This was in Germany.

Everybody at Nokia strived for not just being difficult but outright jerks to deal with... so when Apple came around and the disaster started to unfold it was quite the show to watch...

"ah Nokia would like to invite you to this and that shebang..." ah no thanks I think I'm good.

I'm not the guy who carries a grudge but Nokia really made it personal with their whole behavior.

Apple and Samsung aren't perfect but their marketing people are always nice and super helpful.


To dogpile into this, in ~2005 I had one of the worst preseed round experiences raising from Nokia.

They clearly had a mandate to make some moves in mobile, so we were in their target sphere. But the investor was just so slow about moving, lackadaisical in personality, and seemed like he was more paid to come into the office versus actually achieve results (regardless of whether they funded us).

I later read Clayton Christianson and immediately knew what he was talking about with old dinosaurs resting on their laurels.

Good riddance. Market forces don't always act in the interest of society, but when it does like this (v Apple, Android) it's refreshing to see.


Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.


The difference is the target audience. When a company reaches a huge size, employees have an incentive to act nice internally, because that's the way to promotion; but they have no incentive to be nice towards external folks. It takes effort from management to ensure people act nicely towards others, and Nokia clearly failed at that.

I met one of their "evangelist" when they were trying to push Qt. He came to a iOS usergroup, so clearly in "enemy territory", and just used a precooked slide deck that compared Qt to Symbian - nobody gave a shit about Symbian there, but that's how they lived, stuck in their bubble. He was quite off-putting and way too commercial-focused for a tech UG; I already knew Qt and left thinking I could have done a better job of selling the tech.


You were on the other side of the table


That is obvious from my comment.


What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press.

Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.


I do get it alright.

Some people had a bad experience with a couple of folks and decided to extrapolate to everyone in the company.

Every single company has such pearls. If they don't, they aren't yet big enough.


No you still don't. It's not about which Nokia employee. It's about whether they were external vs internal facing.

E.g. I can perfectly believe the employees of the DMV are super sweet to each other, while being the bane of customers.


Have you stop for a second to wonder what might have been my set of roles, or what kind of relationship I might have had with Nokia customers?

Same applies to thousands of other employees.


What was it then? Were you in a customer facing role?

This wasn't clear from your original post at all -- you just said you had a lot of fun working there, not that you felt you treated customers super well.

If you were customer facing, and taking at face value you were wonderful to work with for outsiders, then yes, within Nokia you were a great outside facing person (and I'm sure there was at least 1 other in such a big company). But also with a lot of poor outside facing people (from the comments in this thread).


The point was your experiences are not reflective of reality of outside partners


For that you need to actually know what my experiences with outside partners happened to be like, but you don't.

A couple of people got some bad seeds and pretend everyone on the customer business units behave the same way.

No that wasn't my unit, but it also wasn't pure internal engineering bubble with zero customer contact.


I run PopOS on a Thinkbook and overall the experience is more hassle free than my Windows-System these days.


I'm a Ubuntu user but always install the PopOS shell for the wonderful tiling window manager.

It's such a convenient way to manage the desktop space and credit to System76 for making it available to other Gnome-based distros.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/


the problem is that social media is like Heroin and not even the parents are immune.

There is a difference in reading an article in a newspaper with critical thinking and lumping through a social media page where the whole purpose is not the content but to keep you glued to the screen.


Android manufacturers, unlike Apple, don't really earn much via the software - so there is really no reason for costly updates which keeps the customers from buying the next phone..


It's unfortunate that lack of updates don't prevent customers from buying the current phone.

It feels like we need consumer protection laws that require companies to prominently advertise the software "warranty". So Google and Apple can put "5 years" on the box and Asus needs to put "0 days". The problem is that it isn't something that most people think about. But when you point it out to them it definitely changes how they evaluate phones when you show them that this one will be dangerously insecure after 1y but this other one is good for 3y.


If Spartacus wouldn't have been enslaved there is a good chance that he might have ended up with Slaves on his own at one point or another in his life.


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