Jump to content

HamsterHookah

crowd sourced
  • Posts

    1495
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by HamsterHookah

  1. 19 hours ago, Porterhouse said:

    Not really. I imagine ESG talk has died considerably for most people in this thread.  The narrative has changed over the years from “ESG” to “the energy transition” to people openly saying we can’t have the transition that organizations/politicians want us to have, so let’s focus on de-carbonization, to capital coming back into the industry because returns are fantastic. ESG simply doesn’t come up. I speak for the world I play in because it’s what I know. 

    You could offer your perspective instead of being critical of mine, like I’m just pulling it out of thin air. 

    I appreciate your perspective and experience. Mine is a bit different, I just got back from Houston and two full days of meetings with a large, publicly traded midstream company with its origins in Enron (wink wink), where I can attest that ESG is a board/C-level hot button issue that they are activated around. Not only Scope 1-3 but more interestingly the DEI stuff (the “S” in ESG most people forget about) is still a metric that they care about positively growing. 

    My experiences and interactions differ considerably than yours and probably the people we interface with and their goals are different. I’m corporate focused and care about increasing earnings per share, versus dyed-in-wool oilman stuff or field operations.

  2. 1 hour ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

    Just got back from Vancouver. Tons of homeless, and since I couldn't open carry and start blasting them, I decided to hide in the hotel room

    spacer.png

    I’ve seen worse homelessness than most American cities not named SF, Austin or Nashville in Calgary freaking Alberta. Canada has warts too.

    • Hook 'Em 1
    • Like 1
  3. 3 minutes ago, C-Man said:

    You know it's a weak episode when the Nate storyline is the most compelling. The part where the hostess joined him at the window table near the end was a rare throwback to Season 1's vibe, IMO. The other highlight for me was Jamie asking Roy, "Tomorrow at 4AM?" and Roy responding, "Damn fucking right" felt damn good.

    I'm coming to grips with the idea that they are never going to recapture that first season magic.

    You are 100% spot on.

    But I'm definitely pot-committed and invested and will watch until the end, and it's probably for the best this is the last season (I'm going to be curious to see the ratings for this season compared to s1 and even s2). That season one was lighting in a bottle and special wasn't it?

    Crazy how that works with creative arts and things like TV and s1 just so happened to catch that slippery zeitgeist and nail that wispy perfect time-and-a-place for something fresh and earnest and sincere and funny before devolving into the familiar and formulaic sitcom-y, trope-y, above average show that are a dime a dozen.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  4. 3 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

    Maybe that moron at OXY will make a better offer.

    Speaking of OXY, read this fascinating piece in the WSJ:

    Quote

     

    About fifty miles southwest of Midland, Texas, deep in the oil-saturated Permian Basin, more than 100 workers are busy laying out roads and water lines, preparing to build an elaborate complex of fans, each as large as a tennis court. 

    When they start running in 2024, the fans will suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air. The carbon will be funneled thousands of feet down deep wells into geological formations, where it should remain for centuries. 

    The company behind this environmental moonshot is Occidental Petroleum Corp., OXY 0.73%increase; green up pointing triangle one of the country’s most successful oil-and-gas producers. It hopes the enterprise will give it license to keep operating as a driller decades into the future. 

    It is spending more than $1 billion to build the first in a planned fleet of plants using direct-air capture to pull the CO2 out of the air, a budding technology with fuzzy economics. Bolstering the move are generous tax incentives included in the climate package President Biden signed into law last year that cover up to 45% of Occidental’s expected initial costs per metric ton. 

    Chief Executive Vicki Hollub, who has the blessing of the company’s largest investor, Warren Buffett, said the plan will help it reach net-zero emissions on all its operations, its own energy use and its customers’ use of its products, by 2050, and allow it to keep investing in oil extraction.

    Removing CO2 from the atmosphere at this scale has never been done before, and the enterprise comes with abundant commercial and scientific uncertainties. It is unclear what the appetite for carbon removal will be, how much the service will eventually cost or how massive volumes of buried carbon dioxide will affect the subsurface in the long term.

    Occidental plans to make money with the CO2 removal plant by selling carbon-dioxide removal credits to companies such as airlines, trucking and marine companies that can’t currently switch to clean energy without breaking their business models. It also plans to turn some of the carbon dioxide into products to sell, including synthetic jet fuel, or use it in the process of pumping what the company calls net-zero oil from its own wells that it hopes to sell at a premium.

     

    • Like 1
  5. 10 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

    Biden will win his second term without issue, barring some kind of major financial collapse.  I mean if people have time to be pissed about bud light cans, they don’t have real issues.  The ‘28 election is where it gets dicey. I don’t know if a threepeat happens for the D’s. I think it’ll swing very hard the other direction at that point. Maybe not Trump hard, but who knows.  

    Agreed. I read today that Bud Light has lost $5bh due to the whole rigmarole, which I found surprising. 

    • Fuck You 1
  6. 20 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    I also guarantee that the worst, least competent engineer at the KSA is 10X the "technical genius" the Elon is.

    prob.

    Hey you'll get a kick out of the Elon answers from his interview, paraphrased:

    On why he bought Twitter: Musk admitted that he went ahead with the $44 billion acquisition because he believed he would lose his legal case to try and back out of it. Buying Twitter has come with “emotional strain,” he added, saying running it had been “painful.” But he said he still thought buying it was the right thing to do.

    On profitability: Since buying Twitter six months ago, Musk has slashed staff and made big changes to the platform — including an $8 monthly blue-check subscription — to try to reverse losses. (The slimmed-down Twitter has experienced a series of outages and user unrest, but he largely blew off those problems as glitches.) Musk reiterated that Twitter was on a path to be cash-flow positive this quarter (without giving evidence) and claimed advertisers were returning to the platform.

    Head count: There are 1,500 Twitter staffers on payroll, down from “just under 8,000” when he took over, Musk said. He defended the mass layoffs, saying the company was four months from going bankrupt and “drastic action” was needed. But he added that it was “not fun at all” to fire people, and admitted that not everyone had been told in person: “It’s not possible to talk with that many people face to face.”

    On bots, disinformation and mainstream media: Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, pushed back hard on the BBC’s assertions that there had been more hate speech on the platform since he took over. He said it was his mission to make Twitter as accurate as possible — by, for example, removing automated accounts — but he added that “no system is going to be perfect.” He also returned to a favorite punching bag: the mainstream media, which, he complained, “is able to trash me on a regular basis.”

    On blue checks: With advertising revenue shrinking, Musk is going all in on subscriptions. He says the blue checks that were once given to celebrities, influencers and journalists to verify their accounts will be phased out by next week, after the company missed an earlier deadline.

    But he also grumbled that big media companies were reluctant to pay for blue checks. “It’s a small amount of money, so I don’t know what their problem is,” he said.

    On who succeeds him as C.E.O.: Musk said in December that he would abide by the results of a Twitter user poll and step down from running the company. When pressed on that promise, he joked that his dog was in charge. But his jovial mood vanished when he was asked about running the business. He said that the workload meant he sometimes sleeps on a couch at Twitter headquarters. (Another regret: When asked about his sometimes controversial tweets, he said, “I think I should not tweet after 3 a.m.”)

  7. 1 hour ago, Beau Vine said:

    The writers have just abandoned all pretense of subtlety in the story.  It's like watching a high school play after the kids have studied a unit on foreshadowing.  

    This is shite.

    Yep. We are back to season two level quality after being teased the last few weeks. Even the motivational speech at the end felt canned. I wonder if the writers are using chatgpt

  8. Les scene has been telegraphed for two episodes now, I guess an attempt to make keeleys character interesting or relevant again.

    Speaking of interesting, probably not great that the best and most interesting parts of this episode was the Nate story arc and his emotional journey. I’m just sick of Richmond being losers on the pitch and am tired of them sucking I guess. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  9. 32 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

    Imagine having a brand like HBO who has spent decades producing the best television in the world and thinking we should get rid of that. 

    @Chopper pasted an interesting reason why they did this on the business of hollywood thread, but I'll post it here since it's specific to HBO, and it does make sense, especially the bolded:

    Quote

     

    It is not yet clear how existing subscribers will migrate from HBO Max to the new service once it’s available. That is one of the topics that executives are expected to address on Wednesday. Discovery+ will remain a stand-alone app.

    Some analysts question whether combining Discovery’s library of programming with the scripted shows available on HBO Max will put the new combined app over the top. Julia Alexander, the director of strategy at the research firm Parrot Analytics, said she was “skeptical that it will drive the level of subscriber acquisition that some on Wall Street are looking for.”

    But, she argued, it will help with time spent on the app, pointing to data that many subscribers use streaming services for ambient television experiences — the kind of watch-it-while-you-fold-the-laundry fare that is Discovery’s bread and butter with brands like HGTV and the Food Network.

    “You’re opening HBO Max once a week and might not open it up for the rest of the week,” she said. “They want you to open it two, three or four times a week. Unscripted programming creates that increased engagement.”

    Indeed, even though HBO has been on a delirious hot streak — one hit after the next going back to August, including “The House of the Dragon,” “The White Lotus,” “The Last of Us” and, now, “Succession” — the amount of time spent on the app in the United States is toiling in the lower-middle ranks of the top streaming services.

    According to Nielsen, 1.3 percent of the total minutes spent by Americans using television was with HBO Max in February, a fraction of what YouTube (7.9 percent), Netflix (7.3 percent), Hulu (3.3 percent) and Amazon Prime (3 percent) garnered. HBO Max instead finds itself in the same neighborhood as Comcast’s Peacock and the Fox Corporation’s free advertising-supported streaming service, Tubi.

    If there is more time spent on the new service, Ms. Alexander said, that could help prevent subscribers from canceling the service when the company inevitably raises the price. And it could increase revenue from advertisers on the streaming service’s lower-priced tier.

    And removing HBO from the streaming service’s name also signals an ambition to attract more subscribers.

    “Dropping HBO from the name is cementing that ‘we’re not just a home for premium programming,’” Ms. Alexander said. “‘We’re the home for anything you want to watch.’”

     

    I think there are a ton of people like me, as I mentioned in the other thread,  who gladly pay the HBO subscription to open the app once a week for my show (Succession) and that's it. Once the show ends, I'll cancel my subscription again. I can see how trying to be more sticky is important these days to Wall St. and investors, and to be growing outside of the small and intelligent viewer who likes prestige shows and into more reality-shows and stupid vapid crap that HGTV and Cooking Channel competitions do all day.

    • Rage+1 1
  10. 1 hour ago, Augustus said:

    He was contemplating the nature of life, humanity and death.  Which wound up being a foreshadow.

    And yes, that was Colin his "fixer", his bodyguard, etc. the one who got Kendall out of the mess with killing the drug partner in the car.

  11. 1 hour ago, Chopper said:

    @HamsterHookah

    I've c&p'd the more interesting analysis culled from today's NYT article. The problem for HBO is their growth in subscribers from traditional cable is dead, so they need growth and profits from the app. "Max" is supposed to cut costs, grow viewership AND increase subscribers' time spent on the app. The crew in charge seems way out of their depth. I don't think HBO viewers want low budget, unscripted, cookie-cutter shows like those that thrive on the discovery channels.
     

     

    Thanks for posting this. That makes a TON of sense now. And I agree with the Street and the analysts that HBO, while a premium product with premium content, is more "appointment" TV than background noise/general entertainment. I am one of those who gladly pay the HBO subscription to open the app once a week for my show (Succession) and am one of those the article talks about that is content to do so. Once the show ends, I'll cancel my subscription again. I can see how trying to be more sticky is important these days.

  12. On 3/29/2023 at 4:36 PM, Rimbo said:

    nowadays i find it's no longer an interesting question to ask if I'm hurting somewhere; the only things that change are which parts are hurting.

    today's ouchies are: pain in my left side from shingles leftovers, some weird pain in my right elbow/shoulder or something, and my daughter's attitude

    I'm glad I got the Shingrex vax from what I've heard. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
    • Like 1
  13. 1 minute ago, Chopper said:

    Discovery+ will still exist as a separate stream. Bye HBOMAX, hello MAX, and all the cheap-ass, uncreative programming decisions likely to ensue, including portions (or perhaps all) that is currently on Discovery+.

    My understanding that the whole reason they merged this companies and brought in that CEO was to be aggressive in cutting costs and turning profits a la "year of efficiency" that has gripped all the tech companies.

×
×
  • Create New...