#redboxing

[realtimefanduboutofcontext]

remembering redbox

[destielmemenews]

Chicken Soup for the Soul files for bankruptcy

https://fortune.com/2024/06/29/redbox-dvd-kiosks-chicken-soup-for-the-soul-chapter-11-bankruptcy-filing/

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[vounnasi]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The long bezzle

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

When it comes to the modern world of enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "bezzle," JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

The bezzle is contained by two forces.

First, Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop."

Second, Keynes's: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

On the one hand, extremely badly run businesses that strip all the value out of the firm, making things progressively worse for its suppliers, workers and customers will eventually fail (Stein's Law).

On the other hand, as the private equity sector has repeatedly demonstrated, there are all kinds of accounting tricks, subsidies and frauds that can animate a decaying, zombie firm long after its best-before date (Keynes's irrational markets):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

One company that has done an admirable job of balancing on a knife edge between Stein and Keynes is Verizon, a monopoly telecoms firm that has proven that a business can remain large, its products relied upon by millions, its stock actively traded and its market cap buoyant, despite manifest, repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.

This week, Verizon shut down Bluejeans, an also-ran videoconferencing service the company bought for $400 million in 2020 as a panic-buy to keep up with Zoom. As they lit that $400 mil on fire, Verizon praised its own vision, calling Bluejeans "an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape":

https://9to5google.com/2023/08/08/verizon-bluejeans-shutting-down/

Writing for Techdirt, Karl Bode runs down a partial list of all the unbelievably terrible business decisions Verizon has made without losing investor confidence or going under, in a kind of tribute to Keynes's maxim:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/10/verizon-fails-again-shutters-attempted-zoom-alternative-bluejeans-after-paying-400-million-for-it/

Remember Go90, the "dud" streaming service launched in 2015 and shuttered in 2018? You probably don't, and neither (apparently) do Verizon's shareholders, who lost $1.2 billion on this folly:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/02/verizons-sad-attempt-to-woo-millennials-falls-flat-face/

Then there was Verizon's bid to rescue Redbox with a new joint-venture streaming service, Redbox Instant, launched 2012, killed in 2014, $450,000,000 later:

https://variety.com/2014/digital/news/verizon-redbox-to-pull-plug-on-video-streaming-service-1201321484/

Then there was Sugarstring, a tech "news" website where journalists were prohibited from saying nice things about Net Neutrality or surveillance – born 2014, died 2014:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/2/7324063/verizon-kills-off-sugarstring

An app store, started in 2010, killed in 2012:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/5/3605618/verizon-apps-store-closing-january-2013

Vcast, 2005-2012, yet another failed streaming service (pray that someday you find someone who loves you as much as Verizon's C-suite loves doomed streaming services):

https://venturebeat.com/media/verizon-vcast-shutting-down/

And the granddaddy of them all, Oath, Verizon's 2017, $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo/AOL, whose name refers to the fact that the company's mismanagement provoked involuntary, protracted swearing from all who witnessed the $4.6 billion write-down the company took a year later:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/if-youre-surprised-verizons-aol-yahoo-face-plant-you-dont-know-verizon/

Verizon isn't just bad at being a phone company that does non-phone-company things – it's incredibly bad at being a phone company, too. As Bode points out, Verizon's only real competency is in capturing its regulators at the FCC:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/05/02/new-verizon-video-blatantly-lies-about-whats-happening-to-net-neutrality/

And sucking up massive public subsidies from rubes in the state houses of New York:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/03/14/new-york-city-sues-verizon-fiber-optic-bait-switch/

New Jersey:

https://www.techdirt.com/2014/04/25/verizon-knows-youre-sucker-takes-taxpayer-subsidies-broadband-doesnt-deliver-lobbies-to-drop-requirements/

and Pennsylvania:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/06/15/verizon-gets-wrist-slap-years-neglecting-broadband-networks-new-jersey-pennsylvania/

Despite all this, and vast unfunded liabilities – like remediating the population-destroying lead in their cables – they remain solvent:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/verizon-sued-by-investors-over-lead-cables-environmental-statements-2023-08-02/

Verizon has remained irrational longer than any short seller could remain solvent.

Short-sellers – who bet against companies and get paid when their stock prices go down – get a bad rap: billionaire shorts were the villains of the Gamestop squeeze, accused of running negative PR campaigns against beloved businesses to drive them under and pay their bets off:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

But shorts can do the lord's work. Writing for Bloomberg, Kathy Burton tells the story of Nate Anderson, whose Hindenburg Research has cost some of the world's wealthiest people over $99 billion by publishing investigative reports on their balance-sheet shell-games just this year:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-06/how-much-did-hindenburg-make-from-shorting-adani-dorsey-icahn

Anderson started off trying to earn a living as a SEC whistleblower, identifying financial shenanigans and collecting the bounties on offer, but that didn't pan out. So he turned his forensic research skills to preparing mediagenic, viral reports on the scams underpinning the financial boasts of giant companies…after taking a short position in them.

This year, Anderson's targets have included Carl Icahn, whose company lost $17b in market cap after Anderson accused it of overvaluing its assets. He went after the world's fourth-richest man, Gautam Adani, accusing him of "accounting fraud and stock manipulation," wiping out 34% of his net worth. He took on Jack Dorsey, whose payment processor Square renamed itself Block and went all in on the cryptocurrency bezzle, lopping 16% off its share price.

Burton points out that Anderson's upside for these massive bloodletting was comparatively modest. A perfectly timed exit from the $17b Icahn report would have netted $56m. What's more, Anderson faces legal threats and worse – one short seller was attacked by a man wearing brass-knuckles, an attack attributed to her short activism.

Shorts are lauded as one of capitalism's self-correcting mechanisms, and Hindenberg certainly has taken some big, successful swings at some of the great bezzles of our time. But as Verizon shows, shorts alone can't discipline a market where profits and investor confidence are totally decoupled from competence or providing a decent product or service.

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/10/smartest-guys-in-the-room/#can-you-hear-me-now

[misfitwashere]

Unless you can hold it in your hand, it's not yours.

[horsefigureoftheday]

Hello! I have some images here from my thrifting adventures that I want to share.

Spotted at my local flea market (and posted on shiftythrifting). Redbox carousel copyright 1991

Woah, it's so cute!!! Thanks for including a pic of the logo<33

[spacemancharisma]

REDBOX IS DEAD I WILL CRY FOREVER

[yesmaddyposts]

Redbox going out of business you say? Perfect time to buy Barbie on blu-ray for $3.99 !!

[wasteful-barbie]

I can smell the pizza rolls cooking in the oven now…

[kanerallels]

Holy KRIFF have y'all SEEN how many streaming services The Chosen is available on???

[mikodrawnnarratives]

Nova and Maggie, Broken clasp duo (i love that name so much omg anyways), post canon, post reveal and all the drama that would bring: I love the idea of both of them going on small (PLATONIC) dates every now and then.

I love to think about how the two of them would deal with their different perceptions of the other PreReveal. The sister each never got to have. The What Ifs they've built over the years, and now have a real person to be compared to.

Reveal would come with a lot of angst i've discussed b4, but once everything (for the most part) has settled.. Nova and Maggie get to learn about each other. Get to learn who their sister ACTUALLY IS

And what better way than finding time to just. Hang out.

Once they might just walk around the city and talk about whatever comes to mind, what their childhoods looked like, maybe even show the places they visited the most.

They find a diner and order, find out what the other's favorite foods are, DO they have a favorite food, oh look there is a dish NEITHER have tried LETS TRY IT because WHY NOT

Order the WHOLE MENU over time (or all at once because Nova has MONEY NOW WAAAOOOOOOWW poor financial decisions her friends would SO ENCOURAGE) and give their reviews

Nova teaches Maggie how to shoot, the best tips and tricks she's learned over the years. Maggie doesn't know how to feel from the experience, so used to having a limited range with her telekinesis that using something like a shotgun, FEELING the bullet leave at such a speed and go so far.. it's...

It's something alright!

she'll figure out later if its a good thing

Going to an antique shop with a budget ("We have money. If i find out you steal anything I will make your life a living nightmare" "I heard you the last 80 times on the way here. Can we go in now?") and get to look at all the pretty things, Maggie easily spots the most valuable things and Nova gets to learn more about the specifics of her sisters power. They even find some uranium glass! So they of course buy it.

Just. Things like that.

And they'll get to learn all the ways they are SO. SIMILAR. TO. EACH OTHER. its MINDBOGGLING like "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE" insanity "the children's hom-" "no- yep yep I realized as I said it"

and both would get to feel the survivals guilt while also being like "why are YOU guilty?? thank GOD youre here!" (maggie to my hcs would be like "PSH im not guilty! Im great. I survived. Woo. WOO! (she's trying to convince herself cuz psshh she PRIDES herself on her survival she can't feel GUILTY FOR THAT that goes AGAINST her survival smh ur dumb for suggesting it)(survivals guilt over callum's death ahem hem hemmm))

This would be in addition to the family therapy I'd sure HOPE they'd start going to. Last of the Artino bloodline need COUNSELING

[garthnadermemestash]

You’re next merica! 🇺🇸

[princessisnikki]

So many memories of having little money to my name, getting myself a 1$ movie as a treat.

I miss the old days. I hate new technology hate the way our new world works. I hate inflation.

I wish to go back to simpler times.

[h4lcyonism]

just finished watching the jl x rwby movie and as somebody who was apprehensive of the idea of the crossover at first, i can say that i thoroughly enjoyed it!! i have a draft with all my in-depth thoughts throughout the movie that i’ll post on tuesday, so please support the official release through amazon prime video if you can!!

[xanderisbraindead]

So was anyone gonna fuckin tell me redbox shut down 8 days ago? I was tryna rent a movie right now what the fuck!!!

I wanted to watch the new strangers with my friend but movie theaters overstimulate him now i have no choice but to BUY it. UGH

[theheartofappalachia]

The end of an era.