Could you help me understand something? Is this person also… dumb? I don’t mean to be disparaging or judgemental, but I’m trying to navigate all this and I’m having a hard time understanding how someone can lack this much self-awareness and still function in society. Unless, they can’t do that either? Thanks.

For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

I did this once. Only way to get rid of it was to sell my house.

Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.

I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?

Yup. Consider the role of NORAD and the missile defense shield. USA is not only a poorly run meth lab, but it also provides armed security for the whole building.

The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

Good point.

Now that you mention it, eggs fit the right conditions for this kind of scheme. They’re experiencing an abnormal spike in value, are highly perishable (somewhat inelastic demand), and probably are stored under low security since they were (recently) cheap. Just the right commodity for arbitrage before everyone involved wises up or things normalize.

WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically

The scope of this statement is a shock, but the motivation that led to it, isn’t. That said, I hate everything about this.

I’m not the first to bring this up, but it bears repeating. This is colonialism, plain and simple. That, in turn, is an outcome of unchecked capitalism. Practiced ideologically (i.e. as the guiding light in one’s life), it holds up “exploitation at all costs” as a virtue. Second to that is “give your competition no quarter.” Combined, that explains the current state of affairs.

We all may be used to thinking of colonialism as some thing that ended on one more more independence days in the last 300 years or so. In reality, the engines of commerce and industry that made that happen kept right on running. Since nation-state-sized real-estate deals like this don’t come along very often anymore, these animals are quick to react and pounce before someone else figures out how to exploit the situation.

As an aside: the attitudes and values that enabled things like the US westward expansion, slavery, classism, eradication of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction in the pursuit of minerals, pollution and litter from energy extraction, etc., are still alive and well in the population. Being this kind of evil is insanely profitable under the right conditions, which confers an outsized advantage to reproduction and social influence. Which is to say that it’s not the ideology of capitalism that propels these values to stay with us, but rather the other way around. It’s as though those colonists with exploitation in their hearts are still very much with us, and that’s something to keep an eye on.

This does make me wonder: do municipalities with a large number of roundabouts have stats for how these things foil drunk drivers? I feel like there’s a serious possibility of reducing fatalities if we just replace the center of these circles with ponds and/or sand traps.

How? Asynchronous communication is better for a lot of people. And now that we have really good choices for that, it’s hard to ignore.

A phone call demands that you drop everything in that moment and pay close attention to the person on the other end. If they ramble, deviate, breathe heavily, have a lot of background noise, etc, you’re stuck with that experience for the duration. Also, recording without consent is illegal in a lot of places, so you have to be able to write things down in order to refer back to the conversation if it contains any important information.

In contrast, everything else is self-documenting, can be read through multiple times, and can be handled when there is time to focus on that task. As a bonus: most people can read and understand text faster than they can listen. So it’s just more efficient.

To be completely fair, it’s hard to overstate the durability of an old Thinkpad. They’re so ubiquitous, Linux compatibility is almost guaranteed. Then, after the battery goes, attach it to a UPC and ride that setup for another decade at least.

The Dialer.

• Comes with every phone
• 10+ digit number instantly connects you with millions of people, services, and institutions
• 3 digits connects you with life-saving emergency support
• Very low-latency voice support
• High quality audio (most of the time)
• No ads
• No obnoxious UI

All kidding aside, I’m routinely astounded at how we have yet to top the ease and utility of old-fashioned phone service.

I’m gonna be “that guy” and say they’re pulses.

Oh, are we posting beans now? Again?

Here’s my contribution:

Yes, but to be fair, it’s peak mid. Most other chains do a worse job on burgers, and to do better, you have to go substantially upmarket.

Trump might as well sign an executive order that declares himself Emperor of the Moon and Supreme Chancellor of Outer Space, it’ll have about the same amount of impact as this first round of executive orders will.

Look, not to call you out or anything, but the impact of these edicts (however nonsensical) is radically different now that he’s in office.

The problem isn’t the legitimacy or legality of any such order, it’s the veracity and scope to which they are carried out regardless of those facts. He just pardoned the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Now, people that are handed off-the-wall, yet much more clear, orders from the White House can now go on thinking that illegal activity pursued in the name of said order will be washed away. So, stuff like this will cause damage to be done well before any courts can intervene, constitutionality be damned.

As a bonus, this adds culpability to the actions of his subordinates. Step in line or lose your job. Fail me after committing a crime and you go straight to prison. This is an organized crime tactic to keep shady people in line.

This is the part about harm reduction that I wish more people understood. Either you do it the right way - set up a clinic - or pay for it later in terms of security systems/service, insurance rates, theft, property damage, and the occasional violent encounter (e.g. during theft). This guy did the math and realized that a $20 bill is WAY cheaper than the alternative(s).

This is fine.

Krull?! We can agree on that. It really is an amazing and entertaining mess of a film. I can just hear the writers now…

Hrm, the script just seems kinda… flat. I know… <> let’s add storm troopers and lasers to the mix.

However…

videoganes from the Atari era such as ET

That is a game that is difficult to love. You may be in a very exclusive club on that one.