I got my mind on my money and money on my mind in this week's newsletter — but not just my money. I'm also thinking about Tim Cook's money and whether he's going to take Pink Floyd's advice and buy himself a football team.

A couple of weeks back, my wife and I gave Netflix the ol' heave-ho, cutting ties with the streaming service not long after it announced its second price hike in less than two years. Our Standard plan would have gone up another $2 per month to $20 per month, an 11% increase with no corresponding 11% increase in value. 

Price hikes of $1 to $2 per month may not seem like much — that's the mindset streaming services are hoping you'll adopt before you notice that all the different services you're paying for are also going up and that your monthly budget is being pecked to death by ducks. In the Schmichaels household, though, we have a completely different approach to these sorts of things.

My wife keeps records of what we pay for various streaming services, and she can tell you that just two years ago, our Netflix account cost just $15.50. Go back to 2023, and our monthly Netflix expenditure topped out at $12. So that's a 66% increase over the course of three years — not exactly keeping pace with the average rise in salaries over time (real wage growth has been flat) and far outpacing the approximately 8% that inflation has increased since 2023. 

Let me repeat that: Wages have been flat, inflation has been clocked at a cumulative 8% for the last three years, and Netflix has decided to boost prices by 66%, or more than eight times the rate of inflation.

That $20 also doesn't look like a bargain when compared to streaming service bundles. Our household pays $15/month for an Apple TV/Peacock bundle, and a $10 monthly add-on to our Verizon wireless service gets us a Disney Plus bundle that includes both Hulu and ESPN+. Yes, $25 is more than $20, but on a per-service basis, $5 per service is less than $20.

It also doesn't help that the content on the streaming has been pretty hit or miss for us with more titles in the latter category, particularly when it comes to Netflix originals. My wife enjoyed How to Get to Heaven from Belfast — I tapped out after realizing it wasn't my cup of tea, same as with Bodkin. We did enjoy bingeing Monsieur Spade, Lupin and Dept. Q, but only one of those is coming back for a second season.

And that's where there's still an advantage for streaming services over traditional cable: Cancelling your cable subscription remains a pain in the ass, and it's not like cable operators let you ditch individual channels. And if your cable service is also tied up with other utilities like phone or internet, getting rid of one service often changes what you pay for the others.

Streaming services aren't like that. When my wife and I decide we are done with Netflix, we just mash that cancel button to our heart's content. When we want to re-up, we can, without any sort of promise that we won't just cancel again when the whim hits us. Yes, this practice forces you to be on top of what streaming services you're paying for, but you should always be paying attention to whether or not you're getting your money's worth out of anything.

So my advice is: Every couple of months, take inventory of the streaming services you have and whether you're watching them enough to justify the monthly cost. Then, dip in or out as the programming on those services dictates. You'll get a lot more bang out of your streaming buck with that approach, believe me. 

And there's a quiet satisfaction in telling the plutocrats who blow up costs well beyond inflation (looking at you, Reed Hastings!) to go pound sand every now and again.

In case you don't follow the ins and outs of baseball, allow me to inform you that this year's Boston Red Sox kind of stink. 

This was not a surprise to some of us, who predicted the pitching would be fine but the team would struggle to score. Turns out we were wrong about the pitching end of things, and the entire team is pretty woeful to the point that they're at the bottom of the American League East, having won fewer than 40% of their games. As you might imagine, heads have rolled, with the Red Sox sacking the manager and fair chunk of the coaching staff a couple of weeks back.

But that's not what I want to talk about here. Instead, it's one of the fired coaches who's been on my mind, because of the unusual title he had.

Jason Varitek was Boston's "game-planning coach," or at least he was until the Red Sox announced that he was being reassigned to another role. (Subsequent reports have indicated that new role is "having no further connection to this dumpster fire.") 

Now, I've been following baseball fairly closely for the last five decades, and I am not embarrassed to admit this: I have no idea what a game-planning coach is supposed to do.

"Here's our game plan today," I imagine Varitek announcing to his expectant charges. "We are going to try to score more runs than the other team while minimizing their opportunities to score lots of runs against us." What else is there to plan — some sort of bank heist during the fifth inning when no one's expecting it?

In my day, baseball teams had four or five people on their coaching staff — a manager, a pitching coach, two guys to stand in the coaching boxes on the first and third base lines, and maybe a drinking buddy for the manager. Sometime, along the way, the number of coaches began to grow, with bench coaches and bullpen coaches joining the mix. The former is a more formal title for the drinking buddy post, while the latter is tasked with making sure the relief pitchers aren't making prank calls on the bullpen phone.

But apparently, baseball took a look at the growing phalanx of sideline NFL coaches and thought, "We need some of that, too," because now dugouts are jammed with various assistants charged with dubious game-time "responsibilities." The Detroit Tigers — the team I've currently pledged my loyalty to until something better comes along — have two assistants each for the hitting and pitching coaches, plus a catching coach. There's also a quality-control coach who I assume must check the bats before each game to make sure no one's snuck in any aluminum, Nerf, or whiffleball gear.

The Athletics boast two hitting coaches plus a director of hitting on their coaching staff, while the Seattle Mariners have both a director of pitching strategy as well as a pitching strategist. I hope these guys are all comparing notes.

Multiple major league teams have expanded their coaching staffs to include a Major League Field Coordinator. No, I don't know what that is either, but you have to admit the coordination of fields in Major League Baseball has been superlative this year.

Don't get me wrong: a man in my unemployed position appreciates any excuse to give someone a lofty sinecure with some ill-defined duties like "Make sure our players run to first." And if the writing and editing gigs don't start appearing soon — hit me up if you know of any opportunities — I'd gladly accept the title of Assistant Checker of Baseballs for any local nine.

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's CEO, though he'll remain the company's chairman. We've had our initial burst of "What It All Means" coverage addressing Cook's tenure and what to expect from his replacement, but with Cook not actually exiting, pursued by a bear, until September 1, we're entering the Silly Season for stories about his post-CEO plans.

How else to explain the rumor that Tim Cook is mulling the purchase of the Seattle Seahawks as a way to decompress after spending the last 15 years running the world's most valuable company? Depending on who's doing the telling, Cook would either be part of an ownership group that potentially includes Mark Zuckerberg — Meta Glasses for all my Seahawks! — or, once the rumor's been distorted game-of-Telephone-style, buying the team all by his lonesome.

The rumor of Tim Cook buying into a football team one way or another has been subsequently batted down, but it still got me thinking about the reasons why people buy into sports teams. 

We have this mystique of owners as benevolent sportsmen who've decided to take the fortune they earned from grim industry and apply the money to their true passion of fun and games, but the reality is usually far from that. Generally speaking, people buy a sports team because they see it as a means to advance a larger goal.

Supporting this theory: The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, which chronicles the 1883 pennant race in the American Association and the people who founded that upstart league. That cast of characters includes St. Louis Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe, a saloon owner in St. Louis who bought into baseball precisely because he saw it as an avenue for selling more beer. In that regard, he proved to be quite the visionary.

These days, sports owners are less interested in results on the field than they are in using their teams to pursue other interests. You need only look at John Fisher, owner of the peripatetic Athletics, whose ultimate dream is not a World Series title but a lucrative stadium deal that lets him cash out. The private equity ghouls running the Chelsea FC football team have basically turned that operation into an arbitrage operation in which they buy players for one price and sell them for a higher one, the team's win-loss record be damned.

Owning a sports team used to be a way to get your name out there. There's a passage from the 1994 book Lords of the Realm that's stuck with me, in which a would-be owner explains his rationale for buying a team as "I'm rich and not enough people know it." 

As financier John W. Henry can tell you, that kind of adoration is fleeting. The Red Sox may have won four world titles under his stewardship after winning precisely zero in the preceding 86 years, and his Liverpool football club may have won multiple titles, with one coming as recently as a year ago, but none of that is stopping both fan bases from braying for his head. Better to put aside your dreams of fame and use sports ownership as a means to an end of expanding your fortune.

So we are unlikely to see the Seattle Seahawks ditch their current colors for rose gold and space gray as Tim Cook takes control of the team. But if it turns out that the soon-to-be-ex Apple CEO does transition into the world of sports, it won't be because he likes going to football games.

Sometimes, a bullet point is enough.

As part of our speed run to get the most out of Netflix before pulling the plug on the streaming service, we streamed all the Netflix exclusives we could get through. And that meant viewing one of the streamer's big prestige titles from last year, Nuremberg. 

It's not appropriate to describe a movie about holding previously-unchecked government officials responsible for their crimes against humanity as entertaining, but one can certainly assert that Nuremberg was a compelling picture and well worth a watch if you haven't yet cut the cord on Netflix. There's some element of courtroom drama to Nuremberg, though that's one of the movie's less compelling angles, especially since it's been done before. Rather, the reason to watch Nuremberg is for the interactions between the Army psychiatrist tasked with keeping accused Nazis from killing themselves before they can be put on public trial and Herman Goring, the star prisoner who must be brought to justice if this entire concept of holding the powerful to account is to actually happen.

Russell Crowe plays Goring, and it's an eye-opening performance, in part because Crowe has been a figure of fun in recent years. (That's what happens when you make an exorcism movie that has you scooting about the streets of Rome on a Vespa in your clerical vestments.) Nuremberg makes good use of the extra timber Crowe's been carrying around, as it helps sell the notion of a vainglorious officer who still regards himself as in full flower even as he's visibly gone to seed. To his credit, Crowe jumps into that aspect of the part with both feet, and the total commitment lends itself to some of the best work he's turned in since his Ocar contender days. Any on-screen portrayal of Nazis is going to summon up that concept of the banality of evil, and that's certainly the case here. But Nuremberg is playing at something else in the way Crowe portrays Goring. Here's a guy who's convinced he's doing nothing wrong, that if you were in the same situation as him, you wouldn't do anything different. And he dares you to prove him wrong.

I'm not as sold on Rami Malek's turn as the Army doctor, which is unfortunate, as the one-on-one sessions between him and Crowe are the main thrust of the movie. 

The ultimate theme of Nuremberg is that there are far more Nazis among us than we care to admit, and that if we're not vigilant about that fact, we leave the door cracked open for some pretty terrible people to take advantage of that. Maybe that's not a message audiences were eager to hear, judging by the lack of blockbusting lines that greeted Nuremberg's brief theatrical run last year, but it's definitely one that needs to be shouted more often than not.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Until next time, I'll be plumbing the depths of Tubi and cackling about keeping Netflix's hands out of my pocket. I'll also continue my quest for steady employment, so if you want to hire your Phil — or recommend him to someone — take a look at why I'm hireable.