This book was the ignition that changed my life... https://archive.org/details/z-80-reference-guide-alan-tullya...

In the dealership model - after transit, they do a once over and post-production/transit repairs before the car appears on the lot. So much so that most states wrote legislation to limit repairs allowed while still being called "new". (often ~5% of the retail value of the car). Note that dealers also pay wholesale rates on the cost estimate for that, so this can be quite large repairs.

The T* direct-model should put the SC in that same spot. Bug is they're not doing the work - probably the emphasis on throughput incentivizes the wrong behavior. All too often the the SC tries to palm-off problems and/or the consumer has to do drive QA. Fixing it means the customer is on point - obviously YMMV.

IMHO this is a huge gap and flaw. Unfortunately OEM dealership behavior is so predatorily atrocious that even this flaw isn't enough to overcome the otherwise positive T* sales experience. I now know how few signatures are needed to buy a car in my state. I have zero intention of participating in the "sit outside of a finance office for an hour, no I don't need Scotchgard, interest rate manipulation" routine ever again.

Dealerships often talk about "relationships" - this BS sales talk - we're just prey to them.

In turn this has drove up the pricing, enabled exploitation by subpar producers, and over-extension of streamer capital in a bid to stay competitive.

Implosion and consolidate seems inevitable, the market just isn’t big enough to support 5x Netflix sized companies.

This isn't necessarily a Netflix thing - it's a streaming industry problem - driven by short supply and high demand with having multiple competitors in the market with big bank balances. When Netflix first started, they were pure quality distribution, now they and other streamers are bleeding money in bidding wars for content generated primarily by lame "chose one word from each column" production houses. Aliens, Teenage, Investigators - out pops humdrum 8 episodes of binge-fodder.

I went to streaming to escape from the cable playbook. I anticipate that all these additional revenue tactics will result in me dropping Netflix, and others. Maybe I'll return once the market has consolidated a little. Maybe not.

Since then the world and his wife have captured data and inserted telemetry beacons everywhere. Consider how many services you use that are today subsidized by “anonymized” selling/trading/sharing/merging user event streams - the TV your watching, your cellphone provider selling user behaviour data, even your ISP is selling your DNS lookups - they’re all at it now. Worse, mobile has made it much easier to install platform frameworks that offer developer features in return for data-collection such as location, user profile etc.

I don’t think it’s overblown - that “anonymity” isn’t that anonymous when you add enough dimensions - you just haven’t seen how massive the data broker business is.

Is it unethical to study behavior of the populous? If anything bringing it into a clinical study probably brought more oversight in terms of ethical handling, and aggregation/anonymization of data than the source would provide.