Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the Scrooge McDuck of envelope piles, announced Monday that new subscribers to his company's streaming service will soon be paying a bit more than those of us who already consider it a basic utility. During his first-quarter earnings report yesterday (note: Netflix earned a lot), he revealed that new memberships would go up a dollar or two, an effort to increase development of new original programming. Prices for existing members will reportedly remain untouched for another couple years or so. For now, old Netflix accounts will be the rent-stabilized apartments of shut-in binge-watching.

It's not all bad news from the conference call, though. Hastings also used the opportunity to come out publicly against that rotten Comcast/Time-Warner Cable merger, warning of the "anticompetitive leverage" that would obviously create. "I don't know that we want anybody to control half of the U.S. Internet," he added. Let us be wary placing too many amusing gifs in too few hands. Such are gods made.