I use JustWatch for that, it's amazing to find where to get my content.
The biggest issue is to unsubscribe each time on the different service. At one point we will have a middle man that does this for us, we will go full circle.
Not gonna happen, Poland barely has enough power to sustain itself, with so little energy investment that we are going to experience serious deficits in the next decade during electricity consumption peaks (mainly hot summer days with AC systems at full capacity).
There are some plans to build new coal units, but these obviously meet with a lot of justified protest. There are also plans to build nuclear units, but only in some undefined distant future and they could meet with protest too. And renewables are gaining ground too slowly to replace coal (which will be shutting down over time due to brown coal depletion, environmental impact and aging technology). Not that wind and solar can completely replace fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro – the variance in output is too great and beyond our control at the moment.
Personally, I think major investment in nuclear would be best. It would cost a lot though, there's no way around that. But environmental impact would be greatly limited and a Europe–wide effort could significantly reduce costs. Unfortunately it seems that it's not gonna happen, with Germany for example irrationally shutting down plants after Fukushima was hit with a tsunami (as if there was any risk of a natural disaster in Germany).
Funny how that keeps being said about most of Germany's neighbouring countries... usually the claim is they'd import nuclear energy from France. Also funny how, in net terms, this never happens, and Germany has pretty consistently been a net exporter of electricity.
Investors have always disliked Google's bad capital allocation. They'd much rather have the cash. The expansion in the buyback is a signal for a new era of capital return.
This kind of thinking leads to companies becoming irrelevant over time. I for one would much rather go for an interesting 50-year vision instead of pushing for quarterly stock gains exclusively. Ad revenue growth is slowing down across the board. FB is still showing increased growth because of Instagram which is just so perfect for ads. AMZN is a small player to begin with, so their growth will naturally be high. Also their platform is very well positioned for display ads and especially sponsored product ads because they tie in to their main business so well.
Alphabet will have ad revenue for a long time, yes. But cloud will eventually be more important. So they need to make sure they catch up to MSFT and AMZN eventually. And the moonshots are very important as well. Their very nature is risk. If successful anyone of them could potentially be worth hundreds of billions. Morgan Stanley speculates that Waymo could be worth a quarter of trillion in 10 years. DeepmMind and Google Brain/AI are two of the leading AI entities in the world. Wing could be very important for Google Shopping. And they really need to build out their shopping offerings. And then there are the healthcare/life science efforts. No one even knows what Calico is doing exactly.
What they are missing is basically a space initiative. Yes there is loon and Access but Amazon is already in the process of launching their Starlink-like satellite network. And then there is Bezos's Blue Origin.
My (amateurish) prediction is to be positioned in:
AI, biotech/genetic engineering, space industries.
I for one would much rather go for an interesting 50-year vision instead of pushing for quarterly stock gains exclusively.
That's great if you're, say, under the age of 50 and plan to hold your stock your entire life until retirement.
But consider a company whose stock price never went up but which had a great 50 year vision. Maybe towards the end of the 50 years it starts going up fast, but by then you already lived a big chunk of your life and passed many moments when you could have used some of the money.
At some point you're going to want ROI. One quarter is short for sure, but 50 years is the opposite extreme. Why wait such a long time for hypothetical ROI that may never come?
For Google specifically their problem is their revenue has way outpaced their ability to come up with new ideas. Since Larry Page stepped into the shadows the ambition and drive are gone. I'm not sure there's any vision, let alone a 50 year vision. The only highlights are their successes with AI, and maybe Waymo, but those are small parts of the overall company. AI mostly seems to be leading to incremental improvements in their existing products.
When you cast your eyes wider you see large amounts of what might uncharitably be described as self-indulgent waste. How many chat services are they up to now? And how many of them had any kind of interesting competitive advantage? How many languages and VMs without any obvious competitive advantage has Google created? How many internal systems do they rewrite without any clear idea of why, other than because someone needs to get promoted?
Dig around and discover just how many projects there are producing uncompetitive 'experimental' pseudo-products nobody has ever heard of and likely nobody ever will e.g.
Google has so many products they end up reusing their own names! Google Go is one thing, Google Gallery Go is a totally different thing - a mobile photo gallery app specifically for Nigeria, for some reason.
When you look at the firm closely you see a firehose of projects with zero business case and often near-zero impact. Why does Google think these things are better ways to invest the money than what other companies are doing?
> When you look at the firm closely you see a firehose of projects with zero business case and often near-zero impact. Why does Google think these things are better ways to invest the money than what other companies are doing?
Silicon Valley often sees "a firehose of startups with zero business case and often near-zero impact." And yet, it is considered a key driver of the economic growth / innovation / good jobs and places all over the world want to replicate its success. Maybe, Google just wants to have an in-house Silicon Valley?
In the hope that GOOG pays out cash in future. Either via dividends or stock buybacks.
At least, that's why I've been holding my shares. I was thinking of dumping them for better performing tech stocks, given the malaise I see there, but if they're finally starting to admit they may have run out of ideas and start returning money for reallocation elsewhere in the economy, then ... well ... maybe I'll hold a little longer.
