Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.

I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.

Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.

It’s a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won’t have politicians that can be bought. That’s a different discussion altogether.

In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.

Jail time isn’t a likely outcome. It just isn’t the world we live in, unfortunately.

I see what you’re getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.

A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.

That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I’m sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.

Do you live in a city or an are with a lower population? I strap the helmet on in the city or doing some speed, but when we’re out visiting with family in the country or a small town, we usually go without it.

I’ve been using Shokz for a decade now. They’ve replaced a couple sets at no cost. I wear mine every day. Even for the occasional swim.

Listening to podcasts definitely gives longer battery life than listening to music. Though even the odd time I’ve drained the battery in a day, I charge it with a battery pack for fifteen minutes and it’s charged again.

Not many products I’d say are worth every cent, but from the quality to the customer service, Shokz are great.

Sounds like my usage is just different to yours. I can’t remember why but I got accustomed to listening to audio at increased speed around a decade ago and slowly cranked it up to the point that now I can follow certain people’s conversations slightly higher than 2x. Only with voices and cadence I’m familiar with though. Any guests on a show can really throw me off.

The silence trimming aspect is a bit absurd honestly. It makes laughter sound almost all the same and robotic; you have to infer where comedic, dramatic, or thoughtful pauses in the speech are; and if there’s a more rapid fire back and forth in the conversation it can be tricky to follow. Although that last point doesn’t happen with podcasts where all the speakers record separately and it’s edited together to be coherent.

If you listen to a lot of shows, with hundreds of hours of episodes, it’s worth dialing up as much as you can stand. Then again, if I didn’t have two dozen podcasts with decades of backlog, I sure wouldn’t be listening at auctioneer pace.

After reading your comment, I checked my Pocket Casts stats page and it looks like between the skipping, variable speed (1.5-2x), and trimmed silence (mad max), I save nearly 20% of listening time with the majority of that being the silence trimming.

Might be an outlier, but with daily podcast listening, trimming is important enough to keep me on Pocket Casts, even though AntennaPod is attractive given it’s open source nature.