“I was in Bitcoin! THERE WAS SHRINKAGE!”
I’m not sure I’d put PayPal on the good side.
Apple Maps, on the other hand, is fully worthy of an episode.
Ironically, there are companies that put rubber bladders in shipping vessels to prevent leaks. I got in early at Kramerica, but sold before Darren joined the Nazi party.
As far as I can tell, your entire enterprise is no more than a solitary man with a messy apartment which may or may not contain a chicken.
Seinfeld is the single biggest unc show
i liked it tho 🥺
That makes you an unc, which is not a bad thing. Uncs are beloved.
yippeeeeeeeeee :3
Wtf does unc mean, I keep seeing it used
Uncle. Old man
Unc is unc.
I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t know a couple of the “Bad tech” ideas. I can figure out the metaverse land sales but have no idea what a blind box is.
“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.
Loot/Blind boxes are like a random pack of baseball cards that you can only show to other owners of baseball cards, or someone who is baseball-card adjacent.
Some of them are “rare” in the sense that the card printing company refuses to make more, despite it costing them nothing after the initial card is made.
What’s more is that the printing compamy has decades of psycologic practices to use on their card pack purchasers. For Example:
- Casino-esque animations, enticing younger collectors before that aren’t even allowed to gamble legally, in person.
- Rarity manipulation, making things rarer than listed. If they list anything more than ‘trust me bro.’
- Making sure that purchasers are surrounded by pack buyers who have already got the rarer cards, generating card envy.
- Removing entire card sets from purchase wirh the whole purpose of making purchasers feel like they will miss out, right now and forever, if they do not buy more packs of cards.
Finally, there is also the fact that all of these cards are entirely digital, so the existance of the cards depend almost entirely on the whims of the printers.
The only blind boxes I know are those little toy collections you purchase in an opaque wrapper or box. You don’t know which one you got until you’ve paid. Generally some kind of licensed product, so movie/TV characters, or whatever else will get a child to talk their parents into spending money. There are others aimed at adults, too, like mini versions of classic branded products (Kitchenaid stand mixer, Kraft mac and cheese box, etc)
I can already see Kramer running NFT scams… or crypto rug pull xD
Kramer would spend all his money on NFTs and then freak out trying to flip them. He would enlist George as a fictional investor who would try to inflate the value of the NFTs by offering exorbitant amounts for them in front of potential buyers.
Jerry would riff on the copyability of NFTs and try to talk Kramer out of it, but would secretly sell an NFT of himself for a low amount of money.Elaine would secretly purchase the Jerry NFT and hold it over him forever.
In the end, Newman would buy all of Kramer’s NFTs and think he was getting a steal. George, who was promised 50% of the profits would be aghast when he learns Kramer lost a thousand bucks in the transaction, even more so when Kramer requests $500 from George for his share of the negative profits.
Newman would then flip the NFTs for a genuine profit.
I just watched 22 minutes of Seinfeld in a 90 second read.
This is gold, agent641, gold!
Giddy up!
Seinfeld had an episode about cell phones, though.
I don’t remember the exact plot, but I think it was Elaine called somebody about something serious, like expressing condolences for a death or something, and she called from a cell phone while she was out and about, instead of calling from a land line at home. This was seen as a faux pas.
A non 212 phone number also a faux pas.
This was seen as a faux pas.
That’s because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you’d be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn’t that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
It was the episode where Elaine gets a cellphone, and I think it was about the importance of when to use the cellphone.
That sounds vaguely familiar… did she have bad reception or something and her condolences came across as insulting as words got cut
My memory was that she had bad reception, but that the call wasn’t cut, and when she hung up, she thought she had done a good job until corrected by Jerry. But I haven’t seen this episode in over two decades probably, so my memory isn’t going to be exactly right.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2Jf29hlXA
From the finale episode
Something something Seinfeld something something Epstein island lemonade
Kramer would go the Epstein Island literally for the snorkeling.
Oh, it’s got gorgeous water.
And the rich people dont care if you sneak on, they just write it off, Jerry.
Giving Seinfeld shit for having a laugh track doesn’t make sense. There are shows from eras before and after using laugh tracks, so Seinfeld is not an outlier in that regard. However, Jerry’s occupation is literally a comedian. Having a laugh track in Seinfeld thus makes more sense than most shows that have one.
Was it a laugh track? Was it not live audience?
People seem to forget that Live Audience used to be a thing
Seinfeld had more scenes than people realize.
It was normally a live audience, with exceptions for things like pre-recorded exterior scenes
The laugh track is also used to fill in the pause the actors had to take due to the audience reaction. Just like with comedy shows people in groups laugh more than when you are watching at home.
The ‘audience reaction’ existed because the show needed a laugh track from the audience. Justifying one by the other is circular reasoning at its finest.
This has always bugged me. In any bygone, popular TV show when an actor first shows up there’s a roar of applause, claps, stomps, whistling and shouting for 10 seconds where they just stand, kind of awkwardly waiting for noise to stop in order to say their line. I mean it’s ok for a live crowd, but cut that shit off my TV show for fuck’s sake.
Gotta fill up that 20 minute runtime somehow! Add catch phrases and innuendo (for the obligatory oooh from the laugh track machine) and you have half an episode, right there
I don’t have a problem with laugh tracks existing. I have a problem with shows not recorded before a live audience having laughter added in.
Is that just a general statement? Because Seinfeld was recorded in front of an audience. As a general statement I agree with that.
Yeah, I was being general.
i don’t like any show with a laughtrack
Does a laugh track destroy the show? No. But there is no 10/10 top tier show with a laugh track.
Edit: people keep replying with shows that are, at best, sensible chuckles.
Mr. Bean.
M*A*S*H?
I Love Lucy.
Golden Girls
Keeping Up Appearances, Only Fools and Horses, Harry Enfield and Chums
America’s screen writers adopted the Seinfeld paradigm years ago:
No hugging, no learning.
I could see george having FOMO and doing most of this shit. Kramer would fall for the AI chatbot.
*The AI chatbot would fall for Kramer.
- Google being evil aside, I still think about how great google maps is and how it seemed to come out of nowhere.
- Paypal is straight up evil, no redeeming value for the past decade. Use something else. They also own Venmo.
- Battery packs and cell phones are great in that general sense.
Out of nowhere? MapQuest and printed out directions were a thing for many years.
Not to mention mapping GPS receivers. Google maps was probably the most obvious use case for a smart phone after making phone calls and listening to music.
Mapquest was no google maps. Google had you in real time recommending restaurants and giving you directions with voice. You could see a streetview. It felt like a huge leap at the time to me. You may have a different viewpoint.
Google Maps in the era before smartphones really pulled ahead with Street View. That might’ve been their first real game-changing innovation.
The first game changer for me was that all the other maps, you had to click up, down, left and right to get anywhere on the map. With Google Maps you could(can) just drag around. All the others were web 1.0 and Google Maps was web 2.0. And it was lightning fast! I remember thinking it was magic, when everything else was so bad to use in comparison.
Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.
it was created by merging a company started by peter thiel with one started by elon musk. how much more evil can you get?
Almost every country around the world has a free way of moving money between people without using an app or third party website. It’s just a standard part of banking. I haven’t looked into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Paypal has bribed and lobbied to keep that kind of functionality out of the US. So, the US has a shittier, more expensive, less convenient, more privacy-invasive version of what everybody else takes for granted. Just like with medical care, taxes, etc.
To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.
To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn’t a company with that).
Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient’s IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.
Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there’s a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they’re working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
I mean, revolut is still a thing despite instant transfers, because being able to just send money to a phone number from your contact list is still hella more convenient than sharing QR codes or IBANs.
I would expect the American credit card companies and banks lobby just as hard if not harder to prevent that from being a free service in the US. Electronic Funds Transfers are an option at every bank in the US, but they’re not very easy for individuals and seem to always charge a fee to either the sender or receiver.
Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.
We have Zelle in the US, but it’s not the same as PayPal. At its simplest PayPal is just a way to send money from one entity to another, but it does a lot more than that. It has escrow and fraud protection (debatable if they do a good job at it). With Zelle it’s much more like handing someone cash. There have been some instances of fraud resulting in reversed transactions but those are big deals not your everyday scams or unreliable sellers.
Because PayPal and Venmo has been shitty a lot, Zelle is gaining a lot of use. I pay my rent with Zelle. Buying or selling stuff on craigslist or marketplace I’ll use Zelle if it’s more than like 40 bucks. It’s nice as a seller because there is no way to reverse the transaction after the fact.
I think they had a couple of years where they weren’t evil, but pretty close to always. They own Ebay too, and they’re also evil.
I think other countries have payment systems where they’re not evil. It’s ran by the government I think? There are no fees and it just comes out of your account. I guess payment systems in the general sense would be a better mention.
Only bad thing is that you need to watch a long series of near constant laugh tracks to see the plots. Ive only seen a few episodes though, so might have a gotten a bad impression of an otherwise good show?
I would say it’s worth watching even if you dislike “laugh tracks” (live studio audience).
If you want the modern, better version of Seinfeld then there is It’s always sunny in Philadelphia.
Same setup of the show of the main characters being terrible people, but much more critical of issues.
Their episodes on Gun control and Genderless bathroom are some of my favorites.
They do have a meta episode where they criticize laugh tracks too.
And that the show has Jerry Seinfeld, a known Zionist supporter of genocide, in it.
Also at points in the shows production he was 39 years old and dating a 17 year old.
Jerry is the worst part.
The supporting cast is what was most memorable
It is a show of its time. Seinfeld revolutionized a lot regarding what sitcoms could be, but it was still operating somewhat in the rules of the time.
Regarding the laugh track, every US sitcom of the era was filmed in front of a live audience. It goes back to the tradition of the medium where it was meant to be a remote viewing of a play which oddly stuck with sitcoms.
For context, there’s a trope Seinfeld is unfunny that’s basically that Seinfeld was so pioneering it’s been copied and referenced so much that it’s original jokes and ideas are now cliche
The art is good. Beyond the entertainment value, it’s a way to understand the zeitgeist of the era… you can watch it even from an anthropological perspective. It stings a little to admit that im old enough that periods of my own life could be studied from the standpoint of a historical science, but, that’s just how she goes.
Several of the actors ended up being gigantic pieces of shit. While I think it’s worth accepting that truth, I think the hard reality is that material success and any meaningful period of public reverence does that to a person. Any media you enjoy now, the reality is that the actors are probably pieces of shit too and it just hasn’t come out yet… and again, that’s just how she goes.
Way she goes
“Good” and “bad” are far more subjective than with most shows, in this case.
The problem with being one of the shows that popularised - if not outright created - a lot of what became staple sitcom tropes is that people tend to look back with the modern lens, of those being extremely over-used and stale. Is just that they weren’t, when the show was current.
A lot of viewers also tend to get stuck on the “wow, these are some truly awful people” part, which similarly was the point. To directly quote Larry David; “No hugging, no learning”.
To dramatically over-simplify things, it is a show about three terrible people going about their lives, and failing to learn any lessons in the process; as is so famously quoted, a show about nothing.
Whether good or bad, it was still important. Walked, so a generation of later shows could run, if you will. (Or even if you won’t, I don’t think anyone could deny that)
it is a show about three terrible people going about their lives, and failing to learn any lessons in the process
Only three terrible people? Which of the four main characters are you excluding?
Ellain started out good. Then she became obsessed with hurting people .
It’s particularly funny if you view the entire thing as Larry David doing a terrifically slow burn on how shitty Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy actually is.
Also: see Gary Gulman’s special Born on Third Base for an excellent rip on wealth inequality regarding “the guy who played Jerry on Seinfeld”
It’s interesting because what Jerry really brought to the show was someone palatable. Before Seinfeld and even during it Larry had a problem: himself. Jerry didn’t pick fights with the network. Jerry wasn’t extremely unpleasant to be around. The fact that Jerry wasn’t particularly funny didn’t matter, Larry was funny enough for the both of them. Jerry still seems to not understand that
Laugh tracks aside, the show had funny writing and dialogue. Check out Curb Your Enthusiasm for a more modern version.
Curb has the problem that far too many episodes try to justify Larry’s response/position. Whereas most Seinfeld episodes were very clear that Jerry et al were horrible.
It’s Always Sunny did similar stuff where The Gang are pretty much constantly vilified in earlier seasons. But later ones will often try to make it clear that they had a point but went about it wrong.
That said: I love all three shows.
Incorrect, check out It’s always sunny in Philadelphia for a modern, better version.
Nah, it’s a bad show full of bad boomer humor. And god, laugh tracks are terrible…
Sorry, let me cheer you up with some humor from your generation: “Six seeeeveeeeen. Six seeeeveeeeen. Six seeeeveeeeen. Six seeeeveeeeen. Six seeeeveeeeen. Six seeeeveeeeen. Six seeeeveeeeen.”
