I’m really looking forward to the Last Week Tonight segment on this.

Besides the childbirth comparison. Some people are starting to value how they spend their attention. Also more people starting to learning how their habits are being mined to influence them. It is bound to spread to more people, thus cutting into the profits of the companies that does this. They are too late to the party and no lobbied (i.e. bought) regulation in the world is going to make them as profitable as it used to be for Netflix, YouTube and Facebook.

I suppose “child birth” was inevitable after being fucked by AT&T for so many years.

I suspect that AT&T’s corporate culture remembers the era of its monopoly fondly. This development suggests they are trying to find a way back there.

As for HBO, to the corporate executive, being profitable isn’t enough. Profits must grow, just as the spice must flow. That a given division isn’t capable of organically growing its profits by 12-14% per year, year in and year out, doesn’t bother them. When a vein is tapped out, it will be abandoned, after first stripping it of any possible future value before dumping it. Besides, by then, they will have moved their personal mining operations to another division or company, so taking the blame won’t be an issue.

What will inevitably happen with HBO, if execs like Stinky have their way, is to take it down the path well-trodden by channels such as History, Discovery, and FoodTV.

Some here will remember the great casts of SNL, and some might even have noticed its path down that road, to homogenized blandness. SCTV and Mad TV, not to mention In Living Color all overshadowed SNL in terms of getting belly-laughs, at least for a time, but all eventually fell prey to the same demon: homogenized blandness.

I get that History got to the point where the joke “all Hitler, all the time” (NB: They havern’t completely forgotten their raison d’etre, though), but going to “all Pawn Stars, all the time” wasn’t a notable improvement. The problem with the Stinkys of the world is that they want to take specialty organizations such as HBO and turn them into status quo operations in a crowded market, confident that what used to make it special will give them an advantage, even after they stop doing it. It’ll fail, of course, but not until after the Stinkys have gotten rewarded for sending the business down the highway to Meaninglessness.

Corporations tend to value cleverness over thought, but if you can slip the question under the radar, MBAs think they are the same thing. Well, not think, but believe, and belief is the only justification that cleverness needs.

If Stinky gets his way, in five years or so, HBO will have joined the ranks of Discovery, et alia, as just another place to get shows to go viral. Duck Dynasty Mk. II, here we come!

Oddly enough, once the non-creative MBAs have pushed the creative people out of the way, substance and quality go to hell – but don’t worry, I have a brand new corporate training initiative that will encourage creative people to take risks and be creative – subject to executive approval and accompanied by a bonus in the tens of thousands for ideas that generate tens of millions. Or more likely just thousands, but might as well be generous, since the process includes review of creative ideas by non-creative executives.

Writing TV episodes to drive advertising sales makes sense, to an MBA. The often-annoying predictability this imposes on shows means nothing to them. If a show can’t meet the demands of ad sales while getting and staying popular is never a problem as far as MBA-imposed restrictions are concerned – not if you ask MBAs, anyway. No, the restrictions, in their view, are completely reasonable and non-problematic. After all, other shows get popular under the format, so the problem must be with the creative people, right? MBAs know for a fact that MBAs make good business decisions, so it couldn’t be any of them.

Just ask them. If the MBA you ask doesn’t answer with a terse dismissal, he’ll give you an even bigger earful than I have, in explaining how MBAs know how everything works, and how the people who complain are completely unreasonable. After all, all their fellow MBAs agree as to what the best practices are, so following the best practices can’t go wrong. Must be a problem with actors, writers, directors or producers, if a show fails. The MBAs are following the best industry practices.

That’s the thing about MBAs, they value proven methods over innovation, every time. Predictable outcomes are better than taking risks with the unknown. More of the same is always better than something different, something that might fail. If a show breaks through all that, and succeeds, it will promptly be followed by imitations that try to cash in on the new model.

that isn’t to say that MBAs don’t have a worthwhile place in the scene. They do. The issue is that as MBAs, they approach every situation with their MBA hammers, even when what’s at issue is a screw rather than a nail. Bosses tell people what to do, they don’t listen to what the employees think needs doing.

Put a guy like Stinky in charge for, say, three years. Five years from now, he will have moved on to a more lucrative position, and HBO will have been transformed into a desert of blandness – which is just the kind of environment an executive will need to personally benefit, if/when a show takes off unexpectedly.

Bah. MBAs are all about conforming to established ways of doing business, even unsustainable ones such as demanding growth in profits advance by at least 12% per annum, or else; or firing the lowest 10% of your employees, year after year. Say what you will about sustainability, but that’s MBA thinking: set goals and expect them to be achieved. If they are not achieved, the underperformers pay the price, not the goal-setters that often don’t have a clue about what the rank-and-file employees even do.

If any MBAs happen to read this, there are primarily two options: Explain to the world how I’m wrong, because MBAs are always right, or get what I’m saying, buck the system, and move on to a new career field.

Because if nothing else, successful MBAs manage to avoid getting past the Dunning-Kruger crisis point. Gaining the expertise to pass it takes too long for career enhancement, and besides, other MBAs won’t respect the effort. They’d rather announce that the hiring of a successful MBA in the field of manufacturing fidget spinners brings a “fresh perspective” to MRI unit manufacturing. Well, yeah, if you want someone who knows nothing about making the damn things to decide how they’d be more profitable if some “unimportant” corners got cut. Bullshit.

As long as I’ve gone on, I could go much, much longer. To those who read all the way through, I salute your commitment to masochism.

But yeah, AT&T isn’t exactly “eivil”, it’s just that it still believes it should be a mono[poly again, and that its management is all-MBA, all the way, baby.

And if MBAs have no other skills, they are all good at diverting blame onto others, while gathering credit for themselves. It’s inherent to the field; you can’t advance without taking credit for the work of others while blaming failures on those doing the work. Crediting others (in a meaningful sense) and taking responsibility for failures is the death of advancement, when done honestly.

But, like so many others, MBAs tend to believe that their fancy degree from a fancy college makes them an expert on everything. A college degree is proof that you are smarter than those who don’t have one, after all. If someone with a college degree reads this, they will no doubt tell me how much smarter and better-informed than I am. Can’t argue, since they have a pretty certificate, and I don’t – and the certificate is what matters, just listen to any college graduate argue with people who lack one.

Executives made the decision to leverage the CBS subscription model by forcing Trek fans to pay to watch their new “Trek”. Maybe the series will have legs, I don’t know; but as a Trek fan, I cannot condone or support CBS’s blatant disrespect of the Trek fandom. No, I will not pay you extra to watch the series, the way you expected me to blindly do. Bullshit. Creation Cons were bad enough, but that? To pay for the privilege of making their subscription plan work? That’s not just bad, that’s Omega Glory bad.