Amarsir

I do, and I remember being amused that it's the rare tech product that would sell way better offline. If I'm proactive enough to get a defensive product, I'll just install guard software and run a check myself. But someone who sees it at the store, whether they already have a problem or not, could very plausibly pick one up. They have a bigger problem: their $2 million website at leapfrog.bid doesn't seem to do anything. It's a front page with an email address for would-be investors. I'm sure there are people who would rather buy online and don't figure on learning much from a test drive. Especially when there is a warranty involved. But man were they a mess.

I'm with them. She wasn't inept, and had some very good instincts about how their product is beneficial as well as how you can foot-in-the-door with a cheap option and an upsale. But she let a small hiccup derail her, and that's a major problem. There is promise there though, especially with a little proper training in sales. I didn't catch the title, but I'm completely with you there. Good to see her but she looked like she's being run ragged. Also it's an interesting idea to combine Inkkas Shoes and Flex Watches, but as I recall the owners of each were very personally involved so I wonder how well they're dealing with it.

On a positive note, thus far at least they seem to have toned back the over-the-top editing. The contestants are characatures and the studio has silly stuff like fish tossing for no reason. But at least there’s not a constant stream of splash screens and theme music and After Effects experiments going on. I don’t legitimately know if overcooking your fish is worse than measuring the wrong amount of cream, but I was in complete agreement that the tie goes to whichever one has a twin.

I was surprised Alice (of Alice's Table flower arrangements) didn't use the word "franchise" at all. She acted like this was a concept she just invented. Which it clearly isn't, and avoiding the formality of a franchise label is only inviting comparison to less-savory practices like MLM. I don't think the business is actually bad: she takes about $100 of the $699 fee meaning the profit isn't really in recruiting "execs" like a pyramid scheme. And of the $65 fee she gets $19, which leaves $46 for the operator and supplies. That might be too big of a cut for my taste, but I can see how someone who actually wanted to host these things could make a profit. Basically I believe Alice wants execs to succeed, and she offers booking services through her site to help the "execs" attract customers. That's better than the Herbalife / Cutco / etc schemes where they are basically making you pay to find them customers. My problem is that I think she's half-assing it. Who's guaranteeing the success of the event? If they are hosted out of homes the experience will be wildly different. (And if not, there's no profit left in it.) Also it's not a new service, although perhaps it's new enough to get a new brand in. I don't think Mark was trying to be that harsh, although everything you say about cost and exclusivity is very true and should have been mentioned. Mark's point sounded to me like "I believe you're good, but if you can't prove it then you have no way of protecting yourself from the next person who claims they're as good as you."

It surely doesn't help, although it sounds to me like she just anticipates this being copied in all the dollar stores. (Which maybe was her problem with them last time too.) Actually think the entrepreneurs should drop the deal this time. They gave away 25% of a royalty deal that's already done and for which the Dragons offer nothing. And took their investment for the Canadian side which the Dragons think will never pay off. Not a good deal. Perhaps if they'd structured it more creatively, like "30% of US until your money is paid back and then dropping to 5%, plus 30% of Canada in perpetuity".

A hot air balloon as a never-before-conceived transportation device is great. And makes a neat Wizard of Oz comparison given Michael's chicanery. I love this idea. You know, as long as I'm on previously.tv with you guys, I'm always in the Fake Good Place.

I agree. It's one thing to make offensive jokes, but a complete other to label what you do as "saying sexist/racist remarks". There's no deniability in the latter. It's also very true that people feel the need to weigh in with their reviews of stuff they only know from TV. Any time a restaurant or hotel shows up on a fixer-upper show like Restaurant Impossible, Yelp suddenly gets a bunch of new reviews. (None of which oddly enough are about how awful Robert Irvine is.)

Well he stepped right into it when he said "I think every guy feels that way a bit". I can understand the idea that it might be cathartic to listen to an alter ego. Shock Jocks have been around for a long time, and while they may not be a great aspect of our culture I would argue they're less damaging than a softer-spoken true believer. Eric Cartman is racist, sexist, and all kinds of other horrible. But we can laugh when South Park features his rant at gingers because he's a ridiculous character. We just don't identify with him. Being a fictional character as you say is true, but also don't sell out your audience. I don't think the RayJus guys were bad, but they were a perfect storm of bad publicity. Offensive on-air persona + bad working conditions + tax problems + absentee owners. Marcus was smart to get on the other side of that. As for the bait-and-switch, I think they just don't build a lot of extra candidates into the schedule these days. The Bentley's stuff wasn't complete filler, as we did get to see new developments in the business. But we have seen them a lot and it seems like he used that because it was easy to film, not because it was something we needed to see. Although to be honest I feel like I can guess what would have happened anyway. The owners need to sell their boats, the main business item is going to be a generic shirt which will be sold in all his sporting good stores, and the episode will end on air conditioning being pumped into the work room with a voiceover about how people are the most important thing.

I've only seen a handful of season 2 so I don't know if the whole quality is in decline, but this was weak. As a general rule I never like any sitcom episode where the cast is just split up into pairs and the A/B plots have nothing to do with each other. It's lazy.

I seem to recall reading about it existing a few years ago. The location was one of the floors of a NY skyscraper and the banker types would go spend $40 for a 20-minute nap or something ridiculous. And I can see it working there: they'd have the money, the schedule that's been running them since 4am, and a short distance to travel. What I don't see is that many possible locations. Also I'm terrible at falling asleep on demand, so that whole thing would be worthless to me unless I was desperate for 20 minutes of quiet meditation.

I have to confess that I laughed my ass off at that. Of course I wasn't in the room and had already seen her as cartoonish by that point. And if it had been Daymond dismissed like that I'd probably react differently. But Lori breaking in to announce that she's out was a power play, and to have it turned back on her like that was hilarious. Just to clarify, they dropped him. After the show they said they wanted a higher valuation, and Mark said he doesn't renegotiate once an agreement is reached. I have no idea what valuation Kevin came in at, but I suspect Mark is content to have stuck on principle rather than chasing a deal.

I would say that line was probably for our ears, because I don't think it strictly is "everything they ever wanted". Maybe for Chidi who studied morality he was always focused on The Good Place (by whatever name). But on Earth the other 3 certainly wanted lots of other stuff. And during most of the time in the afterlife they thought they were there and wouldn't have "always wanted" it either. (Even if they don't remember that time.) The more accurate statement would be "this is exactly what we wanted these past few months". But that wouldn't match Michael in the beginning. My guess was that they would be faced with a situation where they can get in but Michael can't, so the humans have to choose between "everything they ever wanted" and a new path just like Michael did. But I like your idea that The Good Place has fine print and doesn't live up to expectations. (Which might turn out to be the same thing.)

A valid point of view that seems to be the majority in the Black Mirror universe(s?) but is under-represented here. The nature of identity / consciousness / humanity / souls has been debated philosophically forever and Black Mirror is just the latest sci-fi to tap into it. For me the issue isn't whether they're "real" or not so much as whether they experience what we would recognize as suffering an are incapable of doing anything about it. So in Hang the DJ the reason I'm fine with it is less that they don't remember their past but that it gives them an ending which they seem happy to accept.

It's that she didn't look down. Bad Janet did a 360 to scan the whole neighborhood, but would miss anything directly below (or I guess above) her.

That was one of the smartest scripts I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing. When this show comes back, it comes back!

I thought it was a rerun too until Marcus said something on Twitter. A repeat would have made sense to capitalize on California law going into effect, and they didn't advertise it effectively enough in this regard. CNBC has always had special investigations by on-air talent, like David Faber e.g. I think they're just leveraging The Profit because it does well in the ratings already and Marcus is amenable. Fortunately the show is back to regular episodes next week with a sports clothing maker.

Compared to the first marijuana special, this was much more about growing than retail. I found it very interesting - especially how many growers are choosing not to become legal because the taxes for it are so high.

Fortunately she wasn't present. Marcus has two brief conversations with the Governor, but nothing more than "it's hard, but we're moving forward". This was a decent special for human interest stories, but not much of The Profit. We saw the devastation around the island but with just a little focus on businesses. Marcus said a number of times "The government should be doing more" but didn't seem to be doing much investigation into what was being done and what's holding it up. Over his multiple visits you could see progress, but it wasn't what he focused on so much as "look at all these unresolved problems". Marcus's concern is definitely genuine, as I know he was Tweeting a lot while he was down there. But what you'll get out of the special depends on how much you've been following the situation already. If you already know about washed-away bridges, lack of water and electricity, etc, then there's probably nothing here that will be new to you.

Maybe they thought the snowman technically qualified as a golem? I found it interesting that they went without a host for the Runners-Up special. I'd like to say it proves they don't need one, but truth be told even the most boring of hosts would have been preferable to them splitting the sentences in 3 like Shakespearean witches.

So there's an inherent paradox with what we saw. The computer told them it's 99.8% accurate, but it couldn't know 2/1000 of the simulations would diverge until after their simulation had run. (Or alternatively it's saying 0.2% of all simulations diverge, and did so in this group as well. But that's not how statistics work.) Hardly a big problem for the episode, but it stuck out at me. This was a neat idea. Solving a problem by repeatedly simulating it is a common approach, and seeing it from the point of view of one of those (very accurate) simulations was a good way to tell a story. There were enough hints that there was something odd about this world, but at least to me I didn't quite see the ending coming. And I love the idea of a world whose goal is to get the participants to break the world's rules. And this did it a lot better than all the Divergent movies. That said, it was the acting that really carried this one. On story alone, "boy meets girl but they're kept apart" wouldn't hold me for a full episode. But it was very easy to feel for our two protagonists and as a result I really enjoyed it.

My only problem with this is episode the abrupt twist of Rolo's character into "unreliable narrator" just before the end. He said that Clayton's family didn't care about him, and we immediately saw a flashback of his wife to reveal that wasn't true. I didn't like that timing. Either start introducing earlier in the episode that his stories aren't 100% true*, or else let it go another minute and have the daughter reveal to the audience that he was lying. Putting it there undermined the climax without being early enough for proper foreshadowing. * Unless of course they actually did do that and I didn't recognize it as such. I mean he was obviously being a carnival barker when he talked about "beating the crowd" and such, but I didn't see anything to disbelieve about the pain addict or monkey stories.

Not my favorite, mostly because I feel like the tech was incidental to the plot. There's an accidental murder followed by deliberate murders to cover it up. Standard crime story. That the witness testimony is being visualized rather than relayed is a minor difference. (Except that it enables the ending.) And she committed a classic blunder: don't remove your mask while still at the crime scene. I like the automatic pizza truck. It seems the pizza company from last episode has advanced enough to not need delivery guys anymore.

It occurs to me that real-world Nanette is probably going to think she was party to a murder. All she knows is that her nerdy boss was home alone on the computer, she tricked him into swapping out his neural interface, and shortly after he turned into a vegetable. So I guess this episode had a dark side to the ending after all.

There's a book The Fear Factor by Georgetown professor Abigail Marsh about her study of fear in psychology. She discovered that one of the most consistent traits of psychopaths is their inability to recognize fear, let alone relate to it. (A quote from one mass-murderer upon being shown a picture of someone exhibiting fear: "I don't know what that emotion is, but that's the same expression my victims had before I stabbed them.") This is in regard to S04:E02 ArcAngel.

I don't think the captives dying to a random player would make me like Daly any better. But the fact that one could debate that makes me kind of wish they had. For traditional storytelling I agree there's better closure with what we got. But for Black Mirror which leaves us questioning philosophy, I might have preferred more complication than "bad guy was bad and the good guys got a good result".