Joe Bernstein

We spent $5.6 trillion on war in Afghanistan and Iraq, destabilizing the region and allowing for the rise of ISIS. We should instead invest in Medicare-for-all, Tuition free college, and a “green new deal” jobs and infrastructure. That’s fiscal wisdom and national security.

This is the same story you find at every institution that has had its own right-wing insurrection: in response to “progressive” censorship, the new guard blows up the guardrails, leading to an influx of unserious but dangerous people who transform the institution into a joke.

The math Italy just handed Netflix is terrifying for every subscription company on Earth. 5.4 million Italian subscribers. Up to €500 per Premium user, €250 per Standard user. Netflix launched in Italy at €11.99/month in 2015 and hiked four times to €19.99 by 2024. The court said every single increase was illegal because the contract never stated a justified reason for any of them. The total refund exposure is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of euros. For a single country with ~2% of Netflix's 325 million global subscribers. Here's what nobody is pricing in: Germany and Spain have already filed identical challenges using the same EU Directive from 1993. Berlin and Cologne courts already ruled that generic price-change clauses are void. Italy just gave every consumer group in Europe a finished legal template. Netflix hiked prices globally on March 26. Six days later, this ruling dropped. The company is now simultaneously raising prices worldwide while a court in its fourth-largest European market ordered it to roll prices back to 2015 levels. The real exposure here isn't Italy. Netflix can absorb hundreds of millions. The real exposure is the legal principle: telling customers "we're raising your price, you can cancel if you don't like it" is not consent under EU law. That logic applies to every subscription service operating in Europe. Every SaaS company. Every streaming platform. Every telecom. The freedom to cancel is not the freedom to agree. That one sentence just repriced the entire European subscription economy.

Batman: The Animated Series achieved its iconic “dark deco” look by painting backgrounds on black paper instead of white.

The beauty of a Quetzal

Who remembers?

Watch the entire sequence of Juan Soto getting hurt …. (In one minute)