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See, Apple stopped releasing their per-unit sales data to give a more 'holistic' view of their... something. Yeah, I don't know.
Basically, like me, most analysts and even their investors saw this as them looking at bad forecasts and deciding to gloss over them with a single coat of cheap white paint. As a result, investors went looking elsewhere, which led them to the stocks of Apple's suppliers.
A bunch of which suddenly posted profit warnings or slower-than-expected sales forecasts owing to lower orders from "significant clients".
Everybody got the message and started dumping Apple stock, causing it to take a bit of a drop. Which to every other company not Amazon, means basically a giant nosedive that drug a lot of the stock market with it.
Aside from the continued nightmare, this is still basically a wait-and-see game. It's not like, an actual nightmare or anything, but I thought it was interesting.
n.
a game that people play in order to try to prove that they can tell the future better than the game can
Considering this was based on sales numbers expected in super-unrealistic circumstances and various other forms of tomfoolery I'm surprised this wasn't secretly a ploy by someone to make a whole bunch of money by selling inflated Apple stock.
paperssites robust opinion sections, and how reading opinion journalism is Super Bad (for reasons I do not know and or care for).From the sites themselves, there's this image they seem to maintain of having fair opinion sections where All Voices Can Be Heard because it's not like said sites are politically biased in any way or anything (they basically all are, and that's not exactly a bad thing).
But, actually, the main thing I'd say is it turns out most opinion columns on reputable sites are actually just ads for books the author of the piece has coming out. So, it turns out opinion columns are just really well integrated advertorials.
I feel like a lot of modern life, no matter how fancy and cerebral it seems, is boiling down to 'buy more stuff'.
Like, before, I used to get the sense of rebellion being about not being a nice corporate drone who behaved and bought stuff to fit in.
Now, with Pride Month kind of existing and feeling like it never ends at this point (I don't... I don't know how I don't make this statement sound the way it does, but I think it's more than obvious that it's not meant to be homophobic in any way), it feels like people are literally begging Corporations (which only count as people under the law) to validate their existence as, like, I don't know, actual human beings.
There's really no limit in how far a company, which logically has no opinions of it's own, will go to sell you it's products, so trusting them and/or feeling that companies coming out to support you is an honest boon is a questionable position to hold. Or maybe the truth is that companies control the cultural conversation now, as there's literally no other means of doing so (I mean I'm nowhere near advocating for religion to get back in that seat), and I should just accept this and stop complaining/leave people be.
But if you want a more idealist take, you can consider people asking for X less as begging and more as putting their grain of sand to show that whatever it is they're supporting is acceptable (and have others do the same) and big companies are simply going with the cultural flow.
At any rate, the thing about opinion articles advertising sounds less like corporate culture and more like... well, an individual wanting to make money/fame. I mean, I know there's a publisher behind it that may be a big corporation, but they're not the ones behind the author's self-promotion. Or maybe we're talking about different things I'unno.
This is a good point.
The Guardian, for example, has it's own book store where you can buy copies of said books. Thanks to various examples of vertical and horizontal integration, you never know if a book being hyped on a site is published by a company that also owns the site, and/or the site you're purchasing the book off of.
Plus, it's entirely possible that publishers "grease the wheels" of an opinion piece getting into somebody's hands. That's more networking than bribery, but it's still something to think about.
I understand this, but it comes with a lot of baggage. It's sort of... an attempt to make a company look better, and make them part of your cultural viewpoint, for very little true effort*. For example, I saw a box of Bic recycled eco-friendly pencils one day that came in the same exact plastic-front-case packaging as the non-eco-friendly variants. It's half-baked and somehow feels more insidious than the original product.
Similarly, Unilever recently released this ad about how all of their products "do good" and like, it's basically a joke (or a lie, if we're going to be serious about it), but nobody acknowledges that because humans love to gloss over things.
*I say this because on the other, human "side", it's very rare I think for a company to not be... given too much credit. Everybody wants a piece of the pie, and companies basically love exploiting that. This might be improved by better media literacy for... everybody, but I can't say I'll ever enjoy watching people's emotions be manipulated in this way.
Ahh, I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, you're probably right. I think it helps that the opinionists I've followed have always seemed like opinion writers first and book writers a distant second, if at all.
If I understand correctly, your problem is not so much that people want companies to be on "their side" but that they consider companies to be on "their side" too easily, without there necessarily being a significant material effort to help out?
Because... *shrugs* maybe?
I don't think they need to *do* anything outside circumstances where they're directly involved (like with these examples re: the environment) but that just means in cases where they don't do anything they're gaining patronage via brownie points they don't deserve.
It's kind of an overly moralistic position to be in, but that's how I feel.
Okay, I feel like I'm taking this thread in circles now, so let's have some fun.
Sooooooo: Meet Isaac Larian, CEO of toy company MGA Entertainment. He's emerged as a real force in the toy industry, moving from hit to hit and creating some of the most ridiculous popular Holiday toys of the past couple of years.
Isaac Larian also tweets a lot, and is frankly quite ridiculous in what he does tweet. Since MGA's Bratz hit the market, he has been so obsessed with fakes that he's created campaign after campaign to stamp them out forever. Not in a normal sort of way, but in a This Bothers Him Way Too Much sort of way. He's not the sort to be... half-baked, about things.
Recently, Isaac Larian has been trying to buy Mattel, and this has come to a close with a less than a stellar end. I mean, his starting position wasn't great (he wanted to fire the whole board, for good reason, but that's not a thing you just like, do). Mattel has had a lot of issues recently, from it's deal with Netflix that continues to be a giant nightmare and it's seemingly insane pivot from being a toy company to being a 'media' company.
Which is really sad, because even on that front MGA is winning via it's brilliant management of social media, whereas Mattel insists on putting it's content behind paywalls. On the bright side, Polly Pocket is getting a second season?
Yeah, that's understandable.