I live in a rural area outside of a small town in the southern USA. The local electrician, basically the guy almost everybody calls if they need basic residential electrical work, earns almost twice the high end of what that job listing is paying. Granted, he’s basically on call 7 days a week and I’m sure his job isn’t always unicorn farts and leprechaun rainbows, but he’s his own boss and works his own hours.
Nice try Steve.
Remember that time I discovered a major bug in Reddit that I reported dozens of times to the site’s feedback form and directly to your user account but I never got a response about and it never got fixed (until I used the exploit in a way that directly affected you)? Well, if that rings a bell, then guess what? It’s me again. Toodles.
Any pretty much any physical job comes with copious risks to your body and health, yet these types of employers typically don’t pay for employee health plans nor do they pay enough for employees to comfortably afford their own. Why would anybody want to risk severing a finger, breaking a leg, getting bitten by a dangerous snake, a nail to the hand, etc if they don’t have to, especially knowing they can’t afford the treatment and it could lead to lifelong pain and disability?
I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long to show up in the numbers, but I am fully aware that I’m in a bit of a bubble.
Most people I know got all their big ticket spending done before January, and then hunkered down into saving money mode so that they’d have some cushion for if and when things go bad. Sure, there have been some outliers, but they aren’t the norm.
Part of the problem is, even a lot of people who still have their good jobs are cutting way back and trying to put money aside because they simply do not know how much longer they’ll have a job. People who once saw themselves as indispensable to their employer and have enjoyed stable careers are no longer so confident in the economy or their job because they’ve seen what’s happened to so many others recently.
Also, if you have pets that go outside, such as a dog you take for walks, you need to check them even if they are on flea and tick prevention. Ticks are more than glad to hitchhike indoors on pets and then later decide to rehome themselves onto a human.
Incorrect. There are MANY species of tick.
It’s a mineral, Gurk.
It’s a comforting sentiment, but unfortunately, it’s not really true.
A lot of grifters grift not because they failed at “legitimate or useful” employment, but because grifting is easier, quicker, and better money for them (or has other tangible benefits) and they have no moral quandaries about what they’re doing.
Right hand to baby Jesus, I thought Kmart was basically no longer in operation, when did it become a programming language for nerds?
Removed by mod
I need to bookmark this for when I have time to read it.
Not going to lie, there’s something persuasive, almost like the call of the void, with this for me. There are days when I wish I could just get lost in AI fueled fantasy worlds. I’m not even sure how that would work or what it would look like. I feel like it’s akin to going to church as a kid, when all the other children my age were supposedly talking to Jesus and feeling his presence, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t experience any of that. Made me feel like I’m either deficient or they’re delusional. And sometimes, I honestly fully believe it would be better if I could live in some kind of delusion like that where I feel special as though I have a direct line to the divine. If an AI were trying to convince me of some spiritual awakening, I honestly believe I’d just continue seeing through it, knowing that this is just a computer running algorithms and nothing deeper to it than that.
That’s basically my Pandora experience. They’ll have ads where if you click to watch a video, you’ll get X amount of time, usually an hour, ad free. There’s about a 50% chance the ad will cause the app to crash, but only AFTER the ad finishes playing. And once I start the app up again, it doesn’t remember the offer or that I watched the ad. Same thing if I close the app, accidentally or otherwise. If I start it back up, that ad free hour is gone.
Not that I plan on going back to Wendy’s, certainly not any time soon, but is that $5 deal a relatively new thing and/or a national thing?
When I was a poor college student working multiple jobs and having to do a lot of driving to get from one place to another, Wendy’s was one of my go-to places. For about $4 I could get 2 burgers that had real, fresh lettuce, tomato, onion, plus a drink. I went to Wendy’s a year or two ago and the same exact thing was a bit over $11. For what it’s worth, if they had some kind of $5 special, I didn’t see it on the menu.
Taco Bell was the same way. Back in my college days, I could get a couple 5-layer burritos and a drink for $3 and some change. Last time I went and got that order, it was $9 or $10 and the burritos were missing a few layers, not to mention just absolutely gross.
Most national/international fast food places seem to have looked at the “good, fast, cheap” principle and decided the answer is D) None of the above.
Have they been getting by on inertia and nostalgia in recent history? I could be an incredibly unlucky person, but all my experiences with these places have just been bad, bad in the past 5 or so years. I excused it a bit during the height of covid, but there’s been time to work things out and they just haven’t even bothered.
I’m not exactly their target audience, since I rarely get food at fast food places, but as it stands, if I were going to get fast food, the whole Trump McDonald’s circus show has turned me off to that brand entirely. Burger King is a no-go after getting incredibly sick from their food. Taco Bell just completely gave up on themselves. Wendy’s is so expensive now that I can’t justify it anymore even as a guilty treat while traveling. I’d rather pack some ham sandwiches in a mini-cooler and make do with that.
This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!
Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.
AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.
So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.
You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.
You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.
And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.
On the other hand, it’s amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you’re talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn’t even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That’s not to say that some app isn’t or hasn’t done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.
Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam’s Razor.
I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they’ve only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.
As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.
Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there’s limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we’re all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn’t specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn’t we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach’s? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.
I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can’t feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.
Just an opinion, but I feel like trouble was on the horizon for Target regardless of this DEI fiasco.
Of the major online general retailers, it seemed like Target held out the longest against 3rd party sellers. That was one of the biggest reasons I preferred to buy from Target. But they caved on that and somehow came out with one of the worst implementations. That decision really tarnished their brand for me.
Another factor that made me favor Target over the years is that their clothing offerings were pretty decent quality in styles I liked and affordable prices. But the last few times I’ve purchased clothes from Target, it’s been outright junk and Target should be ashamed. Either way, it turned me off from buying clothes there, and by extension, soured me to the brand almost entirely.
By the end of 2024 I had basically given up on Target, and I can’t help but think that all the issues I was having were systemic to the company. Feels like preemptively caving on diversity and equity policies was just another sign of the actual problem the company is facing (i.e. bad management and poor decision making).
I think it’s more than half, and I think the other half just touches themselves in private areas too taboo to mention on a Christian oriented site like Lemmy. Let’s just say, stay away from the devil’ jewels kiddos.