America's screen writers adopted the Seinfeld paradigm years ago:
No hugging, no learning.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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I could see george having FOMO and doing most of this shit. Kramer would fall for the AI chatbot.
*The AI chatbot would fall for Kramer.
Seinfeld had an episode about cell phones, though.
I don't remember the exact plot, but I think it was Elaine called somebody about something serious, like expressing condolences for a death or something, and she called from a cell phone while she was out and about, instead of calling from a land line at home. This was seen as a faux pas.
That sounds vaguely familiar.. did she have bad reception or something and her condolences came across as insulting as words got cut
My memory was that she had bad reception, but that the call wasn't cut, and when she hung up, she thought she had done a good job until corrected by Jerry. But I haven't seen this episode in over two decades probably, so my memory isn't going to be exactly right.
STOP REPOSTING NAZI BOT SHIT.
Giving Seinfeld shit for having a laugh track doesn't make sense. There are shows from eras before and after using laugh tracks, so Seinfeld is not an outlier in that regard. However, Jerry's occupation is literally a comedian. Having a laugh track in Seinfeld thus makes more sense than most shows that have one.
I don’t have a problem with laugh tracks existing. I have a problem with shows not recorded before a live audience having laughter added in.
Does a laugh track destroy the show? No. But there is no 10/10 top tier show with a laugh track.
Golden Girls
I Love Lucy.
Mr. Bean.
M*A*S*H?
The laugh track is also used to fill in the pause the actors had to take due to the audience reaction. Just like with comedy shows people in groups laugh more than when you are watching at home.
i don't like any show with a laughtrack
- Google being evil aside, I still think about how great google maps is and how it seemed to come out of nowhere.
- Paypal is straight up evil, no redeeming value for the past decade. Use something else. They also own Venmo.
- Battery packs and cell phones are great in that general sense.
Out of nowhere? MapQuest and printed out directions were a thing for many years.
Not to mention mapping GPS receivers. Google maps was probably the most obvious use case for a smart phone after making phone calls and listening to music.
Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn't. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.
Almost every country around the world has a free way of moving money between people without using an app or third party website. It's just a standard part of banking. I haven't looked into it, but I wouldn't be surprised if Paypal has bribed and lobbied to keep that kind of functionality out of the US. So, the US has a shittier, more expensive, less convenient, more privacy-invasive version of what everybody else takes for granted. Just like with medical care, taxes, etc.
To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.
To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn't a company with that).
Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient's IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.
Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there's a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they're working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It'll be interesting to see how that works out.
We have Zelle in the US, but it's not the same as PayPal. At its simplest PayPal is just a way to send money from one entity to another, but it does a lot more than that. It has escrow and fraud protection (debatable if they do a good job at it). With Zelle it's much more like handing someone cash. There have been some instances of fraud resulting in reversed transactions but those are big deals not your everyday scams or unreliable sellers.
Because PayPal and Venmo has been shitty a lot, Zelle is gaining a lot of use. I pay my rent with Zelle. Buying or selling stuff on craigslist or marketplace I'll use Zelle if it's more than like 40 bucks. It's nice as a seller because there is no way to reverse the transaction after the fact.
I would expect the American credit card companies and banks lobby just as hard if not harder to prevent that from being a free service in the US. Electronic Funds Transfers are an option at every bank in the US, but they’re not very easy for individuals and seem to always charge a fee to either the sender or receiver.
it was created by merging a company started by peter thiel with one started by elon musk. how much more evil can you get?
I think they had a couple of years where they weren't evil, but pretty close to always. They own Ebay too, and they're also evil.
I think other countries have payment systems where they're not evil. It's ran by the government I think? There are no fees and it just comes out of your account. I guess payment systems in the general sense would be a better mention.
Only bad thing is that you need to watch a long series of near constant laugh tracks to see the plots. Ive only seen a few episodes though, so might have a gotten a bad impression of an otherwise good show?
It is a show of its time. Seinfeld revolutionized a lot regarding what sitcoms could be, but it was still operating somewhat in the rules of the time.
Regarding the laugh track, every US sitcom of the era was filmed in front of a live audience. It goes back to the tradition of the medium where it was meant to be a remote viewing of a play which oddly stuck with sitcoms.
And that the show has Jerry Seinfeld, a known Zionist supporter of genocide, in it.
Jerry is the worst part.
The supporting cast is what was most memorable
The art is good. Beyond the entertainment value, it's a way to understand the zeitgeist of the era... you can watch it even from an anthropological perspective. It stings a little to admit that im old enough that periods of my own life could be studied from the standpoint of a historical science, but, that's just how she goes.
Several of the actors ended up being gigantic pieces of shit. While I think it's worth accepting that truth, I think the hard reality is that material success and any meaningful period of public reverence does that to a person. Any media you enjoy now, the reality is that the actors are probably pieces of shit too and it just hasn't come out yet... and again, that's just how she goes.
Way she goes
It’s particularly funny if you view the entire thing as Larry David doing a terrifically slow burn on how shitty Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy actually is.
Also: see Gary Gulman’s special Born on Third Base for an excellent rip on wealth inequality regarding “the guy who played Jerry on Seinfeld”
"Good" and "bad" are far more subjective than with most shows, in this case.
The problem with being one of the shows that popularised - if not outright created - a lot of what became staple sitcom tropes is that people tend to look back with the modern lens, of those being extremely over-used and stale. Is just that they weren't, when the show was current.
A lot of viewers also tend to get stuck on the "wow, these are some truly awful people" part, which similarly was the point. To directly quote Larry David; "No hugging, no learning".
To dramatically over-simplify things, it is a show about three terrible people going about their lives, and failing to learn any lessons in the process; as is so famously quoted, a show about nothing.
Whether good or bad, it was still important. Walked, so a generation of later shows could run, if you will. (Or even if you won't, I don't think anyone could deny that)
it is a show about three terrible people going about their lives, and failing to learn any lessons in the process
Only three terrible people? Which of the four main characters are you excluding?
Nah, it’s a bad show full of bad boomer humor. And god, laugh tracks are terrible…
Laugh tracks aside, the show had funny writing and dialogue. Check out Curb Your Enthusiasm for a more modern version.
Curb has the problem that far too many episodes try to justify Larry's response/position. Whereas most Seinfeld episodes were very clear that Jerry et al were horrible.
It's Always Sunny did similar stuff where The Gang are pretty much constantly vilified in earlier seasons. But later ones will often try to make it clear that they had a point but went about it wrong.
That said: I love all three shows.
To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it's a good product.
If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they've spotted a killer side hustle, then it's a bad product.
Now, I'm not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren't complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven't been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.
Hmm. Do we want good tech, or do we want to inspire new Seinfeld episodes? This is a tough one.
Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.
MADOFF!
What episode would benefit from PayPal that doesn't benefit from cryptocurrency? I've never seen the show, so this is a genuine question.
Kramer would be completely on board with crypto, which is really the only thing that needs to be said.