"The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings"

You will (soon) own nothing and be happy.

I don't think he implied that. Criminality and ghoulish ethics are just one of many reasons a company may offer above market compensation.

Missing last.fm support is the only thing keeping me from switching from Spotify to Apple Music

There are 3rd-party apps that have near seamless Apple Music integration, at least on MacOS (Scrobbles for Last.fm) and iPhone (Marvis).

Yeah, this seems to be the case for a lot of people. I frequently get support tickets asking how to connect Apple Music. There are some alternative players you can use, but it's not really an accessible solution suitable for mainstream use

Other recommendations in other siblings, but Neptunes on macOS and Finale on iOS are excellent. I only got into it a couple years ago, but aside from a few quirks, using those two has been super smooth and easy.

What's funny is that Onion article uses "a blockbuster $112 billion deal" because in 1998 a figure that high was so preposterous it helped with the parody. They'd need to add a few zeros today.

Also funny is how many of the companies listed as top-level parts of the conglomerates, like Viacom, Paramount, Boeing, SBC-Ameritech, Bell Atlantic-NYNEX, etc. have since conglomerated further in the years since!

> A spokesperson for the newly formed Bank One-Chase Manhattan-MCI-WorldCom said the company plans to cut 92,000 jobs this month.

They're pretty close with the headcount though

“Dr. Evil, this is 1969, that kind of money doesn’t even exist! It’s like saying you want a gajillion bajillion dollars!”

Inflation adjusted it would be about double since 1998 - $223 billion, this Netflix deal is for approximately 1/3rd that amount.

> Bill Clinton, chief executive of U.S. Government, a division of MCI-WorldCom, praised Monday’s merger as “an excellent move.”

Lockheed-Northrop-Boeing-Pepsico is an excellent joke all on its own damn.

> Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Also a pretty subtle one, this article was written after Boeing and McConnell Douglas merged a year prior.

Remember, that's just a subsidiairy of the Sheinhardt Wig Company.

"Not poisoning rivers since 1997"

> Bill Clinton, chief executive of U.S. Government, a division of MCI-WorldCom, praised Monday’s merger as “an excellent move.”

> “Take Paramount-Viacom-ABC-Disney, for example,” he said. “Disney makes the movie, Joel Siegel of Paramount-owned ABC-TV gives the movie a rave review, and Disney subsidiaries Blockbuster and McDonald’s promote the video release of the movie in their respective stores with mail-in rebates and Happy Meal action figures. It’s a win-win scenario.”

Apart from McDonald's, we're not that far!

Wow, I get two cookie banners and an unclosable full screen pop up on that link. The web really has become garbage.

Canada does have 30 year mortgages

They're amortized over 30 years, but the term is a maximum of 10 years, more commonly 5. After the term is up the next term will have a different interest rate.

Instagram Messenger is not

You can actually pay for Instagram, if you don't want ads. You still have messages tied with the feed.

Now, one must also say that Instagram wasn't the incumbent messaging platform in any place in the world. It's just that newer generations always cannot tolerate to do things like their parents did, so if their parents primarily used Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger (oh, wait, all of them owned by Meta!) to communicate, they ought to find a new platform to get locked in.

This is very cool, but why does the battery die so quickly?

Probably to test the "low battery" part of the state machine without having to wait several years.

> It doesn’t browse for you

I would hope not