I skip the app and use one of Safeway’s “Please Don’t Rape Me” cards that I found in the parking lot.

If you value your privacy and you have a choice between using a browser to access a service vs installing their app, use the browser.

Online services can get much more information about you through an app vs the browser. Browsers are generally locked down more. Apps in general have access to much more information from your device.

True. And the nepo-babies that lead these corporations are making millions off dollars each year simply by showing up to work.
Switching over to electric vehicles is inevitable. But who’s going to do that work and take that risk? What if they screw up? Ain’t no nepo-baby gonna screw up that cash cow. They’re going to continue showing up to work every day, sucking up the income and when the end of gasoline happens, they’ll throw up their hands and say, “No one could have seen that coming.”

(To be fair, it’s not just management. There are tons of people at every level who don’t want to risk losing their job with an uncertain outcome over just showing up to work every day and doing the same job they already know. But it’s the “leadership’s” job to do that anyway for the long-term health of the company.)

But not at the software companies that require monthly subscriptions, right? They get money every month, so they have lots of incentive to fix all the bugs. Right? … Right? /s

Talking about energy wastage, next time you’re walking around commercial buildings, pay attention to how many lights are on during the middle of the day.

Drove by a closed car lot the other day. The place has been abandoned for months. Weeds growing up everywhere. The entire lot is fenced off getting ready for demolition.
The only building on the lot is small and completely surrounded by glass walls, so you can see right through it. The red neon around the outside of the building is still on 24 hours.

Back in the day there were stores that could definitely answer such questions. The employees were trained to be able to tell you which aisle (side and end) you could find their products.

Not anymore. Guess the training got cut so the CEO could get his quarterly bonus for being a genius. /s

Love this feature. Wish they did this on more cars. Hot, sunny days that heat tue cabin are perfect for driving the solar-powered fan that helps cool the cabin.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I know how all of this works, but from experience, the people running these scams are rarely the people who suffer.

Here’s one I’ve seen myself:

There’s a new hot startup. Wall Street rolls up to the C-suite of this company and makes an offer: Go public and we’ll give you thousands of “special” shares. (Some companies might even get multiple of these offers from different Wall St. investors.)

Once the company agrees to go public, Wall St. gives that company’s C-suite Special Shares. Wall St. also gives these shares to friends, family and power people they would like to reward and/or influence.

On the big day, the company goes public. (To the Moon, Baby!) Everyone with Special shares can sell anytime they like. Company employees have a 6-month “blackout window”. The general public is encourages to “invest now before the shares go up so they can sell after they go higher!”

After the stock climbs in value, the Special Stock holders dump their shares and rake in the cash. Everyone else is left holding the bag.

So who in this scenario are the losers? The people who bought the stock and watched it lose value? The people who sold their Special Stock after it went up and before it crashed? Who gets punished? Who goes to jail? Where does the money go?

You saw this whole scam condensed to it’s essentials during the Crypto Currency scams a few years back.

So many different variations on this scam. Keeps working too, so long as you don’t get sloppy and steal from rich people like Bernie Madoff did.

The left blame the employer and the system, the right blame the people accepting those conditions.

The Left punches up. The Right punches down.

Because the investors are always using Other People’s Money. They “invest” OPM and if it succeeds they take a huge cut and proclaim themselves to be geniuses. If it fails, they shrug and make up some BS to console the loser.

The movie industry version of Return To Office.

In order to continue using Netflix, you have to watch 3 movies a week in the theater.

I’m going to take a somewhat different tack to describing this.

There are many ways to motivate large groups of people. You’ve likely seen this a lot and not really noticed or paid attention to it. Some examples are tribalism (“Hey! They’re not one of us!”), nationalism (“Those dirty foreign people!”), religion (“Do what I say and go to heaven!”), money (“Do this and I’ll give you something valuable”), etc.

One of the best motivators is fear. (“Do this or I/they will do something you really don’t like”).

Political groups need something to motivate large groups of people. When done well, they appeal to the better sides of humanity. When done by the lazy, the dumb and the craven, they go with the simple one: fear.

That’s what Conservatism has been hammering for a while now. They don’t really have a way to appeal to people’s better sides, primarily because their platform isn’t to make humanity better off. They platform is to make a few people better off to the detriment of everyone else. So they try tribalism (“Those brown people are trying to take your money!”), nationalism (“Those foreigners are taking your jobs!”), religion (“Those non-Christians are trying to install sharia law!”), etc. The most effective one is still fear. So getting their followers scared and angry is the best way to motivate them, get them to stop thinking rationally and build moats that will isolate them from people that might talk them down.

This is used to motivate people to vote in certain ways, as well as motivate them to watch advertisements. In other words: power and money.

This was pre-PnP (also pre-JPEG!), so you had to know all the addresses, IRQs, DMA info, etc, of your hardware

Thanks for that flashback. <shiver>

At a certain point, a company’s primary product becomes its stock.

That’s a very concise point. Thank you for this insight.

Basically a financial swarm of locusts.

Egads. Perfect anology. I’m going to steal that one. Thank you!

This seems similar to Wall Street’s “profits must increase every quarter” approach. Once a business gets somewhat popular, Wall St. types start sniffing around and offer to take it public. Once public, Wall St. wrings more profits out of the business every quarter until service/products collapse and customers flee elsewhere.

Timer seems easy to do.

I’m pretty sure the answer is that building a lasgun and a shield is more expensive than building a nuke.

I proposed to drop a (inexpensive) laser gun on the enemy’s (existing city/fortress) shield. Simple, cheap and (overly) effective.

Agreed. I’m convinced that most YouTube videos are slowed by 25%. The ones I watch are barely tolerable at 125% speed. I usually run them at 150%.

You know 4 languages!?!?! That’s amazing. Don’t let anyone judge you because you’re not 100% in 4 friken languages.