I too buy less mayo, but that's a matter of trying not to waste things I'm never going to eat. I do see a drastic difference with food and cable channels going unused though.

Regarding the other aspect, you still end up paying less. Sure you get less, but you get everything you want. I don't pay my cable bill, so I have no idea what it costs, but lets settle at an arbitrary $50 per month. At $600 a year, you'd get the shows you want (the three you listed) and a ton of stuff you're never going to watch. Now, what if Amazon or whoever placed those shows at $201 per season. You can get them for $603 for the year, and you get everything you want, and nothing you don't but it costs not even a penny a day more. But would you? No, you buy them for about $30-40 each season. That's about $120 a year (at most). Still a tremendous savings under $600. But what if Amazon did jack the prices? Would you pay $80 each a season? Would you pay $100? $120? $150? $200 to exactly equal a full years worth of cable? I can't imagine anyone would bite. I can imagine that Amazon negotiated a price range which allows A) the studio to be happy, B) Amazon to grab a profit, and C) the consumer to actually pay for just three shows.

Wait, you would gladly pay more for less?

I'm usually quite on board with the government not paying money to help businesses further their own causes, but there are exceptions to every rule.

This should be seen as acceptable, just like it's seen as acceptable for the government to pay for the NHSTA to crash cars to test them. Those tests are given back to the manufacturers to make... wait for it... better cars. Sure it helps the manufacturers, but more importantly it helps the consumer, or more important to the governments cause, the citizenry.

No government can safely doll out money and not expect it to get back into the pockets of big business somewhere down stream in commerce. To think so is asinine (and I'm not suggesting that's what your suggesting). But there has to be exceptions, and this one, I think falls under such exceptions.

In addition to asking how to deal with some previous dev copying web-published code, he also asked how he can tell his company, or if he should, or what might happen if he does/doesn't.

I pointed out a very harmless way to "spill the beans" if he so chooses.

The problem is not ratting out the former dev, the problem is that the former dev is now his superior. If he wants to point out that the code is copied to a higher up, yet not assign blame to his current boss, the way to do it is the old switch-a-roo. I laid it all out.