Take weather.com as an example. Don't give me an app with alerts that drains battery life and CPU performance 24/7. Just let me bookmark two pages for hourly and 10-day (maybe a third page for the current weather radar), show me the freaking temperature, tell me when it might rain, and include some static ads if you have to. Get rid of the fancy JavaScript, options to add/save 10 locations, high-res videos and animated ads, and the rest of the crap that makes it so painful that I gave up on visiting that web site on my cell phone.
I just say "ok google, what's the weather" and it does exactly what you want. After you ask it enough times it notes the habit and then starts displaying it as a notification. Kind of equal parts creepy and awesome.
Nothing. Just Google's, T-Mobile and Samsung's defaults.
This is why when my Samsung Galaxy S4 needed replacement, I went with a (used, unlocked, GSM) Nexus 6P with 128 GB of storage. No crap Samsung apps, no carrier apps. There were the Google apps (which can be removed) but otherwise it was clean. Plus if my provider decides to be a jerk, I can take my business elsewhere.
Microsoft's answer is to use SMS/MOM/SCCM/WSUS/whatever they call it nowadays, and run in a domain, and push the updates when you want. If you have 1000 users on your network, you likely have the domain infrastructure.
AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY. Sometimes you had to swap a floppy, then people got 10 MB hard drives and everybody started throwing around memory like it was free.
At my current job, I've set strict limits with my coworkers - I don't have any push notifications turned on, I refuse to install Slack on my personal phone, and I don't check e-mail when I'm not at work or on weekends. However, I'm probably the only person at my company who behaves this way, and it gets noticed and called out as being "inflexible".
Sounds like time to start looking for alternative employment. There are plenty of employers out there that don't expect 24/7 availability, or who compensate accordingly if they do. If it's quite literally the whole company steeped in this culture it's probably not worth the pain and hassle of fighting it -- find something better.
I heard the exact same complaint about email 20 years ago, and co-incident with effectively dealing with office interruptions. It's not a Slack problem, it's a people/culture problem. You can find books written decades ago that are filled with effective techniques to manage interruptions and work/life balance, as twenty years ago there were people staying late at work, who were emailing at all hours and expecting responses. You can work (meaning take some leadership) to establish reasonable boundaries, you can accept it as-is, or you can find work in an organization that values "off hours" from work. In my fifteen years on the current job, I've *never* been told I need to be on call 24/7, that I was expected to answer email outside working hours or that I should call in on vacation. Probably one of the reasons why I keep working here.
And its all just animated gifs and useless other crap.
If you are using this for work, you can establish a policy for professional communication that keeps things on topic and excludes animated gifs.
I hate slack, and i dont understand why people can't just use email for communication.
Slack (and other things like it) allow group conversations to happen where new group members can be added to the conversation and see all the history and discussion. This group discussion remains as a artifact to be referred to later by others who may find it useful. For example, marketing and development may discuss a new feature in a group chat to clarify details and let work start, or clarify points in a spec/user story. If more devs are added to the team they can review the discussion easily. When QEs need clarification they can refer to the discussion, and then also people who write documentation and tech support can use it as a source for customer questions or writing doc. When someone later comes along and doesn't like the feature, you can point them at similar discussions. If you tried the same thing in email, the conversation just dies and you need to re-hash it or find the people who participated. With slack, you just have the record there and anyone who has access can find it.
To me, the people that like slack, are the ones that want you to respond to every little thing ASAP and they see it as a way to force people to respond quicker.
That happens on email, too. It happened with voice mail. It happened with the land line telephone and written messages. It happened with postal mail -- "respond ASAP" is not a technology thing, it's a human thing.
At least with email there is an expectation that you may take an hour or two to read it.
No, not unless your workplace has that explicitly called out. People send me an email and call minutes later wanting to know why I haven't responded.
I blame phone culture personally,
Sad that the world has moved more and more in this direction, as reasoned responses take time to generate.
That's a trend that's been going on since the dawn of human history. It's not a Slack problem. Slack is a tool, like a phone, email, telegram or roll of paper attached to a bird's foot.
FWIW, I'm still a "subscriber" since I didn't delete the account. Why did my feed suck, though? I searched on my interests and found relevant people to follow -- I didn't subscribe to any celebrity feeds. I cut useless feeds when they proved useless or when the the tweets were too numerous (e.g. celebrities that are too self-absorbed). Like I said, I gave it a solid month to try and figure it out. As for "fastest source of news"... I guess that's the case if you want news sources that just wildly agree with you and put together an echo chamber, news is one of the easiest things to get from many sources and methods, I don't need Twitter for that. As for "anyone in the public eye", it seems to largely be drivel, or there are other means I can use to keep up where I can look at my leisure, where the tweet I might care about wasn't washed away. I don't think that it's Slashdot users not understanding, perhaps they evaluate the signal/noise ratio and find that other methods of reading news or getting information are more concise and useful?
I didn't "get" it, but "everyone" said it was a big thing, so I signed up, found people, followed people relevant to my interests, tried to keep up. Gave it a month, checking in regularly on my account. At the end of the month I walked away, deleted the app and walked away, and never logged in again. At least I tried it but I honestly have no idea why it's so popular, what purpose it serves or how it can create a sustainable business. I can get how Facebook works, I can get how Google works, I can even understand how people make money off free software. But I just don't get Twitter. Are there that many people in the world who can and want to keep up with an endless diarrhea of fairly useless and low value information?
Wal-Mart makes up (or maybe "made up"?) something like 3% of US GDP and the family who runs it has multiple members in the "100 Richest people in the world" list put out annually by Fortune. Their relentless push to drive down prices and overall cheapness is well documented in business circles, and their business tactics have forced many American manufacturers to relocate their manufacturing facilities overseas, mostly to China, so that Walmart could shave the prices down some more. This is well documented in stories such as "The Man Who Said No To Walmart" in "Fast Company" and "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" on PBS's Frontline. There are many other such analyses that show how Walmart's influence led to American jobs being pushed out. Let's also not forget Walmart is also a leader in putting their employees on Medicaid, effectively stuffing the taxpayer to pay their employee health care (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/dec/06/alan-grayson/alan-grayson-says-more-walmart-employees-medicaid-/), so by having a Walmart in your state, your tax dollars are going to fund their healthcare while the corporate office is pushing for tax breaks to pay out more executive bonuses to quite literally one of the wealthiest families in the world.
We could do with considerably less of all the above. For a while there the menace of auto-play video was actively and widely discouraged as really bad practice, like the blink tag or doing your whole site in Flash. Somehow, though, it oozed itself out of the grave and has started sprouting like so many mushrooms on your lawn. I don't know who or what wants this. I do like sites that disable autoplay when you are running an ad blocker, and throw up a message that says something along the lines of "we won't be auto-playing videos because that takes bandwidth, and that costs money, and your ad blocker blocks our money". Actually, if you weren't auto-playing videos you might save money on bandwidth. In addition, there's a special circle of hell for sites who start autoplaying, then move the video to the lower right hand corner of the page after you stop the video and start playing again.
We hear about "the Dow" as being some majestic heartbeat of the health of the stock market. It's not really that accurate and/or useful, and better metrics exist. It has history, so people latch on to it as some sort of magic number or indicator. In reality, not that great. But still reported on because it's easy and familiar. Unemployment is actually a complex and multivariate metric, too. It can be sliced and diced by region, ethnicity, age, martial status, gender, job seeking status (as well as combinations of such metrics). This is the kind of thing economists and data nerds get into but when people are listening to the news about all the news will report is the top line number, since reporting the complexity will make for a long report most people don't care about. But the metric has been gathered the same way for years, so it's not a "lie" per se -- it's just people don't generally care about the minutae of the underlying data. It would be worse if the metric were redefined on the whims of politics or popular opinion, then it would really be a lie, or just useless. Including retirees or people who aren't actively looking for a job -- students, children, stay at home parents and retirees -- can be very reasonable assumptions since all those people are doing something else that prevents them from entering the workforce, or they have left the workforce entirely with no plans to return.
Governments should be caring a lot about the minutae of these metric, though, for many reasons. Having high unemployment for young people (especially young men) can have severe consequences for tax revenues, security/unrest/happiness, ability to pay for entitlement programs. Also, young people may leave if they can find work elsewhere, and not come back to help your economy. As retirees live longer they take more financial resources for longer than previous statistical models used for long term budgeting allowed, leading to funding issues for healthcare and drugs.
Of course, you also have politicians who take good numbers as a sign of their brilliance, and bemoan bad numbers as "a result of the poor statistical design of metrics" or "not representing reality", etc. Success has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.
My mother's family is extensive in the Pittsburgh area. My grandfather and uncle worked in the mills, my grandmother worked in the mills during WWII. After the steel industry collapsed, the town was largely written off for dead, but there are some people who love the town and its history and have worked hard to get it back on track. Good to see their efforts paying off. On the plus side, Pittsburgh has a lot of things that people like in a city: major sports franchises, good universities (CMU has a looooong history!), local color. Pittsburgh also has four seasons and the surrounding area has a lot going for people who like four season outdoor pursuits -- hiking, fishing, hunting, skiing, etc. There's some unique mixing from all the people who worked in the mills over the years. Housing can be very reasonable versus other cities. There is an international airport there, too. Of course, there are downsides: there is still a lot of straight up poverty, the winter can suck if you don't like snow/cold, the city is still is very much in "recovery" mode, PA has weird liquor laws. But as someone who works in tech, I'd not just turn down an offer from there any more outright given the better press it's been getting and reports from people who have lived there in the last few years.
Not to mention the three or four bus companies that charge rock bottom fares, but seem to not catch on fire or run into as many things as the Fung Wah used to.
Well, even 12 hours still beats the time to drive or take a train across the US. City clusters like Boston/Baltimore/NYC/Philadelphia/DC can make a lot of sense for rail -- the TSA/parking/delay of air travel, plus the location of downtown/business district train stations that hook up to other transport make a lot of sense, in addition to the population density. Getting from NYC to LA on a train 12 hours, you'd need to average 250 MPH. That's a lot of track, a lot of fuel, a lot of tunnel, a lot of states, a lot of populated areas, a lot of NIMBY to get through.
There are flying machines that can whisk you between coasts in about six hours. I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's true. It's even safer than driving! Even better, there are also options for stopping in cities BETWEEN the coasts! There are even well-developed electronic systems for procuring travel tickets at times convenient to you!
I use google all the time for searches, but very rarely do I visit the search/home page. Most of the time I'm doing searches just by typing them into Chrome. It seems that they are just replicating the google assistant stuff on the homepage. I've already bought into it so.... meh. The vast majority of times I end up at google it's on some other machine where I don't sign into the google account, anyway.
There is some WTF in that Google is turning its back on one of the most ironic and clean home page designs that differentiated it from AltaVista/MSN/Yahoo/Lycos, which all had/have the "visual clutter" knob turned to 11.
Theoretically, there are $15 seats at Fenway... but realistically you are going to be out at least $75, probably more. The Fenway Frank is also very hard to resist. I've heard of people going to Cleveland, Baltimore or Toronto to see the Sox for the same money as going to a game at Fenway depending on what seats you are willing to pay for.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I was able to swing a Metallica ticket in high school no problem, working a part-time minimum wage job. We all got tickets, grabbed some fast food on the way to the show and had a great time. This was for the Justice tour, so they were a pretty big name by then and they played a local arena (and rocked!). Metallica just came by where I live playing an arena show. The crap tickets were well over $100. AC/DC also came around for what seems like their third or fourth retirement show and the tickets were also similarly ridiculously priced. I was moderately interested in U2, but not $700 for a pair of tickets interested.
I agree on the NFL schedule. The Thursday night game needs to go, if only because it can put teams at a severe disadvantage if they have a Sunday game. With all the effort the NFL puts into trying to keep teams evenly matched, it seems an anomaly and as you said, dilutes it. I liked the tradition of MNF, but after it went off broadcast I can't see it anymore unless my local team is playing. I also don't get ESPN or NFL Network so I skip the year round drama and keep football as my fall/winter favorite miniseries.
I also gave up on baseball since my local team's games are all on cable and we cut that cord long ago, as the value cable was delivering to my house was pretty low relative to the cost.
I'm a NFL fan. I can carve out three hours to plop down on the couch and watch my team in a week. During that three hours, I can do other things like fold laundry, cook a meal, keep an eye on my kids. To attend a game requires me spending a non-trivial amount of money for tickets, an hour or two each way to get to the stadium and return, plus spending other non-trivial amounts on parking and food at the stadium. Not to mention the fact I live in a northern city where the weather can suck. If I wanted to take all four members of my family to a game we'd likely spend at least $600 a game, probably more. If I wanted to see the whole season with the family in tow I'd probably be out (very conservatively) $10K a year. Or I can sit at home, watch the game for free on the antenna, and feed my family for about $20-30.
I also love live music, but even cheap tickets for a small venue end up getting to $60/each pretty easily. If it's a big name, well established band, the tickets very easily break $100, and commonly head on up to $150 or $200 a head. I can do that a couple times a year but not nearly the number of times I'd actually like to see a band -- I'd be broke.
I'm betting the "stitching of the images" and "sound" part happens on Intel. They could be working on chips/algorithms that do that live/quickly. As a parallel example, Silicon Graphics (far diminished from what it used to be) was/is a big part of painting the first down line and other graphics "on field" for NFL games. http://insightreplay.com/the-s... . I'd actually consider a VR rig if they started putting NFL games out in this format.
The H-2B visa is used extensively by Trump's own businesses, including his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida. During the presidential campaign, Trump explained his use of H-2B visas by saying that "getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible."
"... at the wage and benefit levels we are offering"
Slashdot Mirror
Take weather.com as an example. Don't give me an app with alerts that drains battery life and CPU performance 24/7. Just let me bookmark two pages for hourly and 10-day (maybe a third page for the current weather radar), show me the freaking temperature, tell me when it might rain, and include some static ads if you have to. Get rid of the fancy JavaScript, options to add/save 10 locations, high-res videos and animated ads, and the rest of the crap that makes it so painful that I gave up on visiting that web site on my cell phone.
I just say "ok google, what's the weather" and it does exactly what you want. After you ask it enough times it notes the habit and then starts displaying it as a notification. Kind of equal parts creepy and awesome.
Nothing. Just Google's, T-Mobile and Samsung's defaults.
This is why when my Samsung Galaxy S4 needed replacement, I went with a (used, unlocked, GSM) Nexus 6P with 128 GB of storage. No crap Samsung apps, no carrier apps. There were the Google apps (which can be removed) but otherwise it was clean. Plus if my provider decides to be a jerk, I can take my business elsewhere.
Microsoft's answer is to use SMS/MOM/SCCM/WSUS/whatever they call it nowadays, and run in a domain, and push the updates when you want. If you have 1000 users on your network, you likely have the domain infrastructure.
AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY. Sometimes you had to swap a floppy, then people got 10 MB hard drives and everybody started throwing around memory like it was free.
At my current job, I've set strict limits with my coworkers - I don't have any push notifications turned on, I refuse to install Slack on my personal phone, and I don't check e-mail when I'm not at work or on weekends. However, I'm probably the only person at my company who behaves this way, and it gets noticed and called out as being "inflexible".
Sounds like time to start looking for alternative employment. There are plenty of employers out there that don't expect 24/7 availability, or who compensate accordingly if they do. If it's quite literally the whole company steeped in this culture it's probably not worth the pain and hassle of fighting it -- find something better.
I heard the exact same complaint about email 20 years ago, and co-incident with effectively dealing with office interruptions. It's not a Slack problem, it's a people/culture problem. You can find books written decades ago that are filled with effective techniques to manage interruptions and work/life balance, as twenty years ago there were people staying late at work, who were emailing at all hours and expecting responses. You can work (meaning take some leadership) to establish reasonable boundaries, you can accept it as-is, or you can find work in an organization that values "off hours" from work. In my fifteen years on the current job, I've *never* been told I need to be on call 24/7, that I was expected to answer email outside working hours or that I should call in on vacation. Probably one of the reasons why I keep working here.
And its all just animated gifs and useless other crap.
If you are using this for work, you can establish a policy for professional communication that keeps things on topic and excludes animated gifs.
I hate slack, and i dont understand why people can't just use email for communication.
Slack (and other things like it) allow group conversations to happen where new group members can be added to the conversation and see all the history and discussion. This group discussion remains as a artifact to be referred to later by others who may find it useful. For example, marketing and development may discuss a new feature in a group chat to clarify details and let work start, or clarify points in a spec/user story. If more devs are added to the team they can review the discussion easily. When QEs need clarification they can refer to the discussion, and then also people who write documentation and tech support can use it as a source for customer questions or writing doc. When someone later comes along and doesn't like the feature, you can point them at similar discussions. If you tried the same thing in email, the conversation just dies and you need to re-hash it or find the people who participated. With slack, you just have the record there and anyone who has access can find it.
To me, the people that like slack, are the ones that want you to respond to every little thing ASAP and they see it as a way to force people to respond quicker.
That happens on email, too. It happened with voice mail. It happened with the land line telephone and written messages. It happened with postal mail -- "respond ASAP" is not a technology thing, it's a human thing.
At least with email there is an expectation that you may take an hour or two to read it.
No, not unless your workplace has that explicitly called out. People send me an email and call minutes later wanting to know why I haven't responded.
I blame phone culture personally,
Sad that the world has moved more and more in this direction, as reasoned responses take time to generate.
That's a trend that's been going on since the dawn of human history. It's not a Slack problem. Slack is a tool, like a phone, email, telegram or roll of paper attached to a bird's foot.
Thank you! This is a rational reason for keeping my account around!
FWIW, I'm still a "subscriber" since I didn't delete the account. Why did my feed suck, though? I searched on my interests and found relevant people to follow -- I didn't subscribe to any celebrity feeds. I cut useless feeds when they proved useless or when the the tweets were too numerous (e.g. celebrities that are too self-absorbed). Like I said, I gave it a solid month to try and figure it out. As for "fastest source of news" ... I guess that's the case if you want news sources that just wildly agree with you and put together an echo chamber, news is one of the easiest things to get from many sources and methods, I don't need Twitter for that. As for "anyone in the public eye", it seems to largely be drivel, or there are other means I can use to keep up where I can look at my leisure, where the tweet I might care about wasn't washed away. I don't think that it's Slashdot users not understanding, perhaps they evaluate the signal/noise ratio and find that other methods of reading news or getting information are more concise and useful?
I didn't "get" it, but "everyone" said it was a big thing, so I signed up, found people, followed people relevant to my interests, tried to keep up. Gave it a month, checking in regularly on my account. At the end of the month I walked away, deleted the app and walked away, and never logged in again. At least I tried it but I honestly have no idea why it's so popular, what purpose it serves or how it can create a sustainable business. I can get how Facebook works, I can get how Google works, I can even understand how people make money off free software. But I just don't get Twitter. Are there that many people in the world who can and want to keep up with an endless diarrhea of fairly useless and low value information?
Wal-Mart makes up (or maybe "made up"?) something like 3% of US GDP and the family who runs it has multiple members in the "100 Richest people in the world" list put out annually by Fortune. Their relentless push to drive down prices and overall cheapness is well documented in business circles, and their business tactics have forced many American manufacturers to relocate their manufacturing facilities overseas, mostly to China, so that Walmart could shave the prices down some more. This is well documented in stories such as "The Man Who Said No To Walmart" in "Fast Company" and "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" on PBS's Frontline. There are many other such analyses that show how Walmart's influence led to American jobs being pushed out. Let's also not forget Walmart is also a leader in putting their employees on Medicaid, effectively stuffing the taxpayer to pay their employee health care (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/dec/06/alan-grayson/alan-grayson-says-more-walmart-employees-medicaid-/), so by having a Walmart in your state, your tax dollars are going to fund their healthcare while the corporate office is pushing for tax breaks to pay out more executive bonuses to quite literally one of the wealthiest families in the world.
We could do with considerably less of all the above. For a while there the menace of auto-play video was actively and widely discouraged as really bad practice, like the blink tag or doing your whole site in Flash. Somehow, though, it oozed itself out of the grave and has started sprouting like so many mushrooms on your lawn. I don't know who or what wants this. I do like sites that disable autoplay when you are running an ad blocker, and throw up a message that says something along the lines of "we won't be auto-playing videos because that takes bandwidth, and that costs money, and your ad blocker blocks our money". Actually, if you weren't auto-playing videos you might save money on bandwidth. In addition, there's a special circle of hell for sites who start autoplaying, then move the video to the lower right hand corner of the page after you stop the video and start playing again.
We hear about "the Dow" as being some majestic heartbeat of the health of the stock market. It's not really that accurate and/or useful, and better metrics exist. It has history, so people latch on to it as some sort of magic number or indicator. In reality, not that great. But still reported on because it's easy and familiar. Unemployment is actually a complex and multivariate metric, too. It can be sliced and diced by region, ethnicity, age, martial status, gender, job seeking status (as well as combinations of such metrics). This is the kind of thing economists and data nerds get into but when people are listening to the news about all the news will report is the top line number, since reporting the complexity will make for a long report most people don't care about. But the metric has been gathered the same way for years, so it's not a "lie" per se -- it's just people don't generally care about the minutae of the underlying data. It would be worse if the metric were redefined on the whims of politics or popular opinion, then it would really be a lie, or just useless. Including retirees or people who aren't actively looking for a job -- students, children, stay at home parents and retirees -- can be very reasonable assumptions since all those people are doing something else that prevents them from entering the workforce, or they have left the workforce entirely with no plans to return.
Governments should be caring a lot about the minutae of these metric, though, for many reasons. Having high unemployment for young people (especially young men) can have severe consequences for tax revenues, security/unrest/happiness, ability to pay for entitlement programs. Also, young people may leave if they can find work elsewhere, and not come back to help your economy. As retirees live longer they take more financial resources for longer than previous statistical models used for long term budgeting allowed, leading to funding issues for healthcare and drugs.
Of course, you also have politicians who take good numbers as a sign of their brilliance, and bemoan bad numbers as "a result of the poor statistical design of metrics" or "not representing reality", etc. Success has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.
My mother's family is extensive in the Pittsburgh area. My grandfather and uncle worked in the mills, my grandmother worked in the mills during WWII. After the steel industry collapsed, the town was largely written off for dead, but there are some people who love the town and its history and have worked hard to get it back on track. Good to see their efforts paying off. On the plus side, Pittsburgh has a lot of things that people like in a city: major sports franchises, good universities (CMU has a looooong history!), local color. Pittsburgh also has four seasons and the surrounding area has a lot going for people who like four season outdoor pursuits -- hiking, fishing, hunting, skiing, etc. There's some unique mixing from all the people who worked in the mills over the years. Housing can be very reasonable versus other cities. There is an international airport there, too. Of course, there are downsides: there is still a lot of straight up poverty, the winter can suck if you don't like snow/cold, the city is still is very much in "recovery" mode, PA has weird liquor laws. But as someone who works in tech, I'd not just turn down an offer from there any more outright given the better press it's been getting and reports from people who have lived there in the last few years.
Boring tunnels through the continental US presents a bit of challenge, though.
Not to mention the three or four bus companies that charge rock bottom fares, but seem to not catch on fire or run into as many things as the Fung Wah used to.
Well, even 12 hours still beats the time to drive or take a train across the US. City clusters like Boston/Baltimore/NYC/Philadelphia/DC can make a lot of sense for rail -- the TSA/parking/delay of air travel, plus the location of downtown/business district train stations that hook up to other transport make a lot of sense, in addition to the population density. Getting from NYC to LA on a train 12 hours, you'd need to average 250 MPH. That's a lot of track, a lot of fuel, a lot of tunnel, a lot of states, a lot of populated areas, a lot of NIMBY to get through.
There are flying machines that can whisk you between coasts in about six hours. I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's true. It's even safer than driving! Even better, there are also options for stopping in cities BETWEEN the coasts! There are even well-developed electronic systems for procuring travel tickets at times convenient to you!
There is some WTF in that Google is turning its back on one of the most ironic and clean home page designs that differentiated it from AltaVista/MSN/Yahoo/Lycos, which all had/have the "visual clutter" knob turned to 11.
Theoretically, there are $15 seats at Fenway ... but realistically you are going to be out at least $75, probably more. The Fenway Frank is also very hard to resist. I've heard of people going to Cleveland, Baltimore or Toronto to see the Sox for the same money as going to a game at Fenway depending on what seats you are willing to pay for.
I agree on the NFL schedule. The Thursday night game needs to go, if only because it can put teams at a severe disadvantage if they have a Sunday game. With all the effort the NFL puts into trying to keep teams evenly matched, it seems an anomaly and as you said, dilutes it. I liked the tradition of MNF, but after it went off broadcast I can't see it anymore unless my local team is playing. I also don't get ESPN or NFL Network so I skip the year round drama and keep football as my fall/winter favorite miniseries.
I also gave up on baseball since my local team's games are all on cable and we cut that cord long ago, as the value cable was delivering to my house was pretty low relative to the cost.
I also love live music, but even cheap tickets for a small venue end up getting to $60/each pretty easily. If it's a big name, well established band, the tickets very easily break $100, and commonly head on up to $150 or $200 a head. I can do that a couple times a year but not nearly the number of times I'd actually like to see a band -- I'd be broke.
I'm betting the "stitching of the images" and "sound" part happens on Intel. They could be working on chips/algorithms that do that live/quickly. As a parallel example, Silicon Graphics (far diminished from what it used to be) was/is a big part of painting the first down line and other graphics "on field" for NFL games. http://insightreplay.com/the-s... . I'd actually consider a VR rig if they started putting NFL games out in this format.
The H-2B visa is used extensively by Trump's own businesses, including his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida. During the presidential campaign, Trump explained his use of H-2B visas by saying that "getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible."
"... at the wage and benefit levels we are offering"
I'm not suggesting that every Apple Watch is 10K, but that Apple has added "exclusives" in the past, and priced them at eye-popping price points.