Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Fuel at $6 a gallon, wow, I can’t remember when it was last that cheap. We were just under $10 a gallon 2 weeks ago, when I last filled up my car. I stopped filling up when the pump reached $100, and there was still room for more in my compact SUV (Nissan Qashqai). I filled up again last night and it was back down to “only” $7.70 a gallon.
This time last year, the prices were a more reasonable $6.16 a gallon.
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A few thoughts on Apple’s Friday Night Baseball:
- The broadcast team: I’m a Mets guy so I always miss Gary, Ron, and Keith any time the Mets are not on their own network (SNY). I agree the conversation drifted a little too much for my taste, but I tried to keep two things in mind-- one, this is a national broadcast trying to appeal to a more general audience, and two, any new team takes some time to gel. They’re all experienced on their own, but this was the first time they had worked together. This is not the first time there’s been a woman doing play by play.
- The visuals: I thought the graphics were really good, and I liked the use of San Francisco font. I thought the video quality was great. It seemed less compressed than usual, and looked way better than the ads surrounding the game. Speaking of which…
- The ads/package: Maybe this came together too late for Apple to doing something different, but it was weird to see an Apple product with gambling ads and the usual crap you get from a game. I’d have preferred they drop the ads and use the ad space for on-field interviews or maybe some packaged segments. They just didn’t really do anything different from a regular broadcast. I thought the pre-game show was pretty lame, though to be fair most of them are.
- The tech: As I said, I thought the visuals were good. I didn’t have any issues with drop-out’s. My bigger issue was that Apple and MLB treated this like every other broadcast. They didn’t do anything different to take advantage of the fact that it was not carried on cable or OTA, that everyone was essentially watching on a computing device of some kind. They could have had better playback controls, for starters. Maybe have multiple audio tracks (e.g., how about just a mix of the field/stadium), or camera options, or be able to do different stats/graphics overlays. My hope is that they’ll evolve and improve.
@Leo regarding the distraction of in-office meetings, I would counter with this statistic from Microsoft’s March 2022 Work Trend Index report: Since February 2020, the average Teams user has seen the number of weekly meetings increase 153%. This is consistent with my anecdotal experience. Since the pandemic and a shift to primarily WFH for my company’s 10k+ people, I now have a lot more meetings. Stuff that might have happened over coffee or whatever, is now a meeting. Projects now have more frequent status meetings. Same for organizational and team updates. Many things that used to be an email are now a meeting. It’s like people are trying to make up for the lack of face-time and in-person togetherness.
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Yes, but; the US is one of the world’s largest petroleum producers and usually THE LARGEST - so petroleum products should be much lower cost here
The 10 largest oil producers and share of total world oil production in 2020
|United States|18.61|20%|
|Saudi Arabia|10.81|12%|
|Russia|10.50|11%|
|Canada|5.23|6%|
|China|4.86|5%|
|Iraq|4.16|4%|
|United Arab Emirates|3.78|4%|
|Brazil|3.77|4%|
|Iran|3.01|3%|
|Kuwait|2.75|3%|
|Total top 10|67.49|72%|
|World total|93.86|
Apple TV+ Severance has me wondering how many other retired folks are having Déjà vu? Eagerly waiting for season 2 now confirmed.
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I was listening to Jason Snell on RelayFM podcast, Upgrade and he was saying that a lot of the content, including the announcers, were from the MLB Network. The agreement with MLB and Apple was close to the beginning of the season and they didn’t really have enough time to put their touch on the broadcast. He was saying that it should improve as the season goes on. Also, regarding the advertisements, that will go away if and when they don’t allow people to watch it for free which you can do currently without an AppleTV login.
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This deal was just signed a month ago. The broadcast will continue to evolve as they have more time.