Kathleen technically fills the specified criteria if you remove the context of the conversation, which is whether or not Lucas shared a morally acceptable portion of the billions of dollars of wealth generated by LucasFilm that he took for himself, including the $4 billion he made personally from it’s sale to Disney.

Your other two of your allegedly obvious examples are absolutely not from LucasFilm and one of them has a net worth of $20m, which is definitively not “hundreds of millions”.

I presume, therefore, that you either argue in bad faith or don’t try very hard. In either case, you aren’t worth my time anymore.

I could throw a dart on a list of names and get such a person.

Fascinating. You respond with the president of LucasFilm who started, more or less, months before LucasFilm was sold to Disney in 2012, an actor who has had an amazing career well beyond anything related to LucasFilm, and an actor with a career is admittedly most associated with the Star Wars Franchise (though he’s done a lot of voice work in unrelated franchises) but who’s net worth is only about 20 million.

So 1/3 are actually part of LucasFilm, and that one didn’t really work under Lucas. Ford did star in a two franchises under LucasFilm, but he is not part of LucasFilm.

Thanks for wasting a few minutes of my time.

If you can name another person from LucasFilm that also had, at some point, several hundred million dollars, I’ll make an effort to look into that claim.

If the people who worked on making money from the Star Wars franchise generated literally billions of dollars in value for George Lucas’s company and George still has billions of dollars then no, he did not distribute those billions to those people. How do you not understand? I’ll simplify this for you.

If I have 1000 employees and my company rakes in $4 billion in revenue, I’m not a good guy even if I give them $1,000,000 each and keep the remaining… $3,000,000,000. That would imply that I think my work was 3,000x more important and valuable then their work. I guarantee that some people that helped Lucas make billions of dollars were paid as little as possible, with many likely in foreign countries with much lower minimum wages.

Society likes to pretend that rich people earn their money. What actually happens is that rich people create a situation in which they are disproportionately rewarded for work done by many other people. Yes, it’s likely they did some work too (occasionally even good work), but not work proportional to their compensation. The fact that they insisted that they be the ones retaining a disproportionately large percentage of the surplus value is very telling.

Or he could have distributed the billions he made, as he was making them, to more equitably pay everyone who’s work generated that wealth.

That’s my point.

My mother’s life insurance policies, many of which she’s had for decades, are actually bleeding her dry with premium increases. I’m hoping seeing an accountant can convince her to drop at least some of them. She’s so obsessed with “leaving me something” when she dies that she’s going into debt to pay for it…

Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to get anything from her and I’ve told her so repeatedly.

Where do you think he got his billions?

He owned the IP. He ensured that he’d retain merchandise rights and sequel rights via his contract for the original Star Wars film. He made his billions off of that. Mostly merchandise. Then he sold his company LucasFilm (along with those rights) to Disney in 2012 for a few billion in cash and a few billion in Disney stock (making him one of the largest shareholders).

So yeah, he did own the franchise first.

So instead of more evenly distributing the profit from the franchise to everyone who contributed, he’s going to hand the wealth to an already obscenely wealthy corporation so that he can have control over it again?

You know how in many industries there is a standard amount of time something takes and that determines the standard cost? Like it takes .5 work hours to change your oil so they charge .5 of labor + cost? Well, as I understand it, the plan was to limit the amount of anesthesia they’d cover based on the standard/expected time a medical procedure would take.

“In other words, if a procedure takes longer than expected, patients may wake up to an unexpected bill.” https://www.prevention.com/health/a63104965/blue-cross-blue-shield-anthem-insurance-anesthesia-time-limit/

The only time precedent ever matters to conservatives is if it works in their favor.

No, before anyone says it, it is not smart to stoop to their level

While it’s a bit disappointing, I understand that one perspective is that it is a defensive move. I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that Trump is going to abuse his power and weaponize the Justice Dept to extract everything he can, politically, from the resulting show.

I don’t know whether or not Biden would have done the exact same thing if it was a more reasonable Republican administration coming in. That would be far more telling. It might have been that Biden was making a show of it with the assumption that he’d be overseeing and influencing it all as president and if that weren’t the case he’d be abusing his authority to spare his son.

Yes, it’s frustrating because of the message it send but frankly, I don’t think it’ll cause much trouble. Everyone who’d see it as an admission of the guilt of the “Biden crime family” wasn’t going to change their mind, even if Hunter was publicly drawn and quartered by the Biden administration. Those folks would immediately move the goal post - “Yeah, whatever, but what about…” or just insist Hunter’s death was fake and it was all sham.

You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.

If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.

If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.

the same process

It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.

Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.

I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:

Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.

To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…

1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.

My point is that people like Trump aren’t looking to help the weak. Trump is looking to exploit them. The only “problems” be wants to fix are barriers to more easily exploit them.

By blaming the minorities, he creates a scapegoat for his base and others to blame for their problems. This distracts them from the fact that him and people like him are the cause of their problems.

Sure, some of them are racist but I honestly think most of them are just hurt, angry, scared, ignorant, and desperate. If they had more exposure to minorities most of them would change their beliefs.

I think the problem is that the powerful are endlessly fucking over the weak for profit. It’s been getting worse and we’re feeling more squeezed every year.

Racism is just a tried and true, old reliable, when it comes finding a scapegoat to get people to blame someone else.

nowhere am I finding any indication that anyone is earnestly making the argument that Israel has the right to rape prisoners.

It literally happened a little over a week ago.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/

Paragraphs 5-7. I recall there being a video of the moment but I don’t know if it is included in the linked article.

A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, speaking Monday at a meeting of lawmakers, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, shouting angrily at colleagues questioning the alleged behavior that anything was legitimate to do to “terrorists” in custody.

Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum?”

“Yes!” he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

…

nowhere am I finding any indication that anyone is earnestly making the argument that Israel has the right to rape prisoners.

An Israeli lawmaker was asked if anal rape with a stick was legitimate and the Israeli lawmaker replied “Yes” and clarified that “Everything is legitimate to do” so long as the recipient is Hamas. Is he in the majority? No, but someone is earnestly making the argument.

Here’s the thing. The fact that I’m making the effort to demonstrate this utterly fucked up reality is, I guarantee, going to convince someone here that I’m antisemitic. I don’t think it will matter to them that I have family that is Jewish or that I’m 50% Ashkenazi by blood.

The fact that this is happening, and that any Israeli lawmaker would defend it, literally makes Jews worldwide less safe. It gives real, actual antisemitism more perceived legitimacy.

Edit: Video Link. Couldn’t find anything outside twitter/insta/tiktok, none of which I ever visit directly. Kind if telling that American news outlets don’t have it posted anywhere I could easily find but whatever. While I’ve had folks attest to the accuracy of the translation, I don’t speak Hebrew so feel free to continue to pretend it isn’t happening.

https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/1817904053462196523

What is so maddening about this comment is how much it proves my point that you don’t see.

…

This was literally the first sentence of my post. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough and “maddened you”.

At this point I feel like it’s akin to art that people just don’t get. The average person doesn’t understand the message or point.

I personally don’t often enjoy art. In particular, the art where the artists are creating some kind of layered metaphor like a blank canvas with a cryptic title or something. The artist might be trying to communicate that consumerism will never fill our need for social contact or whatever but the message is lost on me.

The same thing applies here for most people I think. However, for once I actually see a meaning in it. I get horrified by the act, then I read later how little actual damage is done. Then I reflect on it and realize there is no way the protestors didn’t know that the Mona Lisa was protected by glass. There is no way they accidentally used the least harmful bright paint they could find on Stonehenge… and it occurs to me that I was so immediately upset at the perceived harm but have become desensitized to news of the actual harm of climate change.

I’m not stating that this message is obvious or that people are stupid if they are angry - I’m stating it gets lost and most people don’t get it. Yes, I’m a bit angry that the media often never mentions up front how little damage is done in any headlines I see. It’s usually “climate activists throw soup on Mona Lisa, arrested, condemned by bystanders and art lovers everywhere” not “activists harmlessly throw soup on painting protected by glass to demonstrate humanity’s questionable priorities”. Sure, the glass can be in the article somewhere but nobody bothers to read that far.

Regardless, I agree that the end result isn’t helping because most people don’t understand. I, however, sympathetic with the activists and felt compelled to explain the message as I saw it.

What is most interesting to me is that the “powers that be” have so much influence over the news that I feel like harmless acts of protests have lost their power and are demonized by default. Climate change, income inequality, police abuse, Gaza… I’m honestly concerned that people with very legitimate concerns (at least, in my mind) will have to further escalate their actions in order to feel heard. This is just the beginning I think.

“I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.” MLK

At this point I feel like it’s akin to art that people just don’t get. The average person doesn’t understand the message or point.

These protestors are committing simple acts that threaten to damage something that people value. People are so very angry that biodegradable paint was sprayed on an ancient monument, or that soup was tossed onto the glass protecting a famous painting.

Yet they continue on with their lives and refuse to hold many corporations accountable while those corporations make our planet less habitable. This would become a wall of text that nobody would read if I tried to just outline the existential threat human society faces thanks to the reckless behavior of many of the organizations. The suffering, loss of life, economic damage… unimaginable… yet we are basically barreling toward that inevitability at full steam.

But I’m sorry, how silly of me. How could I forget that some scientists might lose the opportunity to study undisturbed lichen on Stonehenge this year.