Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its self-driving robotaxi on the Warner Bros. lot amid widespread anger in the industry over the brand’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, resulting in a rejection of its cars.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    Am I the only one who has noticed that direct-to-consumer sales are floundering and business-to-business sales are up?

    They’re just planning on bailing on the consumer market entirely. Expect things like your shopping to be more ad-supported than ever, because they know regular-ass-people don’t have disposable cash.

    Businesses on the other hand, have loads of money to spend, so we’re seeing the economy twist itself into knots to just support businesses buying and selling to other businesses, with taking care of the humans doing the work as an afterthought to be handled by someone else (see: Walmart educating their employees on how to apply for Food Stamps). Why worry about making sales to consumers when businesses have boatloads of money to spend on “services.” So many businesses farm out their “labor” to third party companies these days, everything from payroll to janitorial.

    They already have a plan, they are in the middle of executing it. Our futures will be ad supported, much like One Million Merits of Black Mirror fame. Expect all four walls of your ‘apartment’ to be covered in ads you can’t avoid just so you can afford an apartment. Expect ads and bullshit everywhere to “support” your life while closing doors to consumer access to almost anything. They don’t like poor people having access to information, and right now the only thing they have to fight access to information is disinformation and misinformation. They’ll drop those pretenses once the consumers are locked out.

    “What will happen if their employees are too poor to buy anything?” Nothing, they don’t give a damn that their employees are too poor to eat. They stopped marketing to consumers, they’re marketing to other businesses which have money. They’re genuinely not concerned with what happens to their employees.

    “You’ll own nothing and be happy” is a threat, just not in the way stupid right-wing capitalists think it is.

    Example: NVIDIA is making way more money selling fleets of GPU’s aimed at AI processing to businesses than they are selling video cards to the consumer gaming market. Gamers are like “when will GPU prices ever come down?” They won’t, gamers are not the key market anymore.