• 0 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 31st, 2023

help-circle

  • I think a major part of it is education and exposure. Conservativism is, generally, a desire to halt or even roll back “progress”. The embrace of traditions and nostalgia for the imaginary “good old days”. You know what your parents and your community taught you. You’ve established what normal is from your small sample size. Why change things? Everyone you know gets along just fine and you like the way it is. Different is scary.

    Unfortunately, the world is really fucking complicated. Simple explanations can make perfect sense when your understanding is simple. However, the more you learn about the world, the more diversity you are exposed to, the more context you discover, the more stereotypes get broken… the more accommodating and progressive you usually become.


  • The will and the resources have been there trying to move in this direction for a long time. I do agree that he’s absolutely fast tracked the process. His complete disregard for civility, shameless willingness to grift, and transparently transactional nature have enabled the absolute worst in us. From hateful, racist poor folks to deranged religious nutjobs to narcissistic billionaires - they’ve all been given the green light now.

    I just hope that everyone takes note of which side people are on and, when this is all over, make sure that the memory of those who stood on the wrong side of history are so shamed, ostracized, disgraced, and hated that this shit doesn’t happen again.



  • It can cost landlords a lot of money. You can evict everyone but then you need to actually go through the process with them, one by one. The union can also collectively call attention from the municipality, file official complaints, etc.

    If you rent strike and the landlord evicts eveyone, then they need to ready all the units all at once with none of the units generating any income. Assuming they have maintenance staff, they don’t have enough to handle that kind of volume. They’ll need to contract it out or deal with no income as units get ready one by one. The only downside (upside for them) is that they might be able to raise the rents on new tenants if demand is high enough.


  • Thanks for being so detailed!

    I use caddy for straightforward https, but every time I try to use it for a service that isn’t just a reverse_proxy entry, I really struggle to find resources I understand… and most of the time the “solutions” I find are outdated and don’t seem to work. The most recent example of this for me would be Baikal.

    Do you have any recommendations for where I might get good examples and learn more about how do troubleshoot and improve my Caddyfile entries?

    Thanks!


  • Do you know what a changing climate does to the needs of the people?

    I mean, obviously, natural disasters like severe weather impact the needs of the people. Look at the last two hurricanes in the US south or the wildfires out west. Death, injuries, lives disrupted, houses and businesses destroy or damaged, links in supply chains shattered.

    Imagine what happens to populated areas that, hypothetically, get hit repeatedly by this for a few years. Many in Florida can’t find home insurance already. Eventually they’ll have to leave and go… where? If this happens repeatedly in poorer neighboring countries? What if sea levels actually rise and wipe out coastal cities? Massive migration, climate refugees, regional instability. It gets too hot for a good crop yield or rainfall patterns change and we get less fresh water? Food and water scarcity, death and starvation… the needs of people can’t be met.

    Thr planet? It’ll likely be fine in a few million years. We won’t be.



  • the same process

    It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.

    Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.


  • I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

    1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
    2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
    3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

    A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

    Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:

    Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

    I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.


  • To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…

    1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
    2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
    3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

    Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.


  • Fundraisers and charities, when you have a lot money, are rarely acts of charity. They tend to be PR campaigns and power plays.

    Honestly, even when the acts have good intentions, they are often quite damaging. The involvement of the wealthy in charity is very similar to their involvement in politics. Their wealth buys influence and gives them a disproportionate say that allows them to ignore and overrule the will of the people and sometimes even reality.

    For example, look into the impact of Bill Gates’s “acts of charity” in the education space. He poured money into charter programs that negatively impacted public education. Later studies showed that his programs were not particularly effective.

    Let’s say, hypothetically, that a very rich person is convinced by some charlatan that they found the a means to produce free energy. The wealthy person throws tons of money at the idea. How many talented people will be taken from other legit programs because the paycheck at Bullshit Energy Nonprofit is better? These rich people are successful and think they know bestr. Their money ensures they get treated like experts because money makes things happen whether or not those things are helpful.



  • In maybe third grade I brought my collection of x-men trading cards as part of a sort of show and tell activity. It was in a sizable three-ring binder with those 3x3 slot cars sheets. I had a number of highly valued “foil/hologram” cards. The binder was gone when I got back from lunch. I was devastated and learned to never leave anything of value not locked up if I’m not watching it.

    At work we have a kitchen/break room. I’ve had shit stolen from there a lot. Utensils, cups, bowls. Wash it after lunch, put it in the drying rack, come back in an hour to get it and it’s gone. Once my department had a leftover pizza from an event donated to us. I brought in a baking sheet to reheat it in the oven for a lunch morale boost for the team because we had to work that weekend. The sheet, left in a drawer and not visible to any casual observers, was gone by Monday. That was actually the first item I’d had stolen there but I thought I was just s fluke.

    I’ve literally bought upgrades and utensil sets for the kitchen (maybe people “stealing” my utensils just forgot to bring a fork, borrowed mine, and brought it home by accident?). Stuff like drying towels, soap dispensers + large refill bottles, a microwave food cover… all stolen. I’d keep getting frustrated with, for example, people leaving the sponge wet in the sink. I’d think “its been a year since I last donated something, maybe it’ll be different this time…” and I’d buy an OXO sponge holder or something and within a week it would be gone. Everyone in my office, including secretaries and cleaning staff, gets paid at least a living wage with great health benefits. Some make well over 100k. I just imagine someone making twice my salary seeing a nice soap dispenser and taking it home… lost a good bit of faith in humanity and affected me way more than it should have.

    I found a solution though. Whoever was stealing this shit couldn’t deal with the shame of being reminded that they stole it. I started labeling the donated items using my organization’s acronym with a permanent marker in big visible letters. None of that’s been stolen. I was going to engrave my utensils/dishes but decided instead to look like an asshole and bring my own towel when washing my dishes, drying them immediately, and taking them back to my desk immediately.



  • I am just destroyed by this. I genuinely had a little faith in humanity that people wouldn’t fall for this bullshit but I guess I sorely was mistaken.

    Laitmer is a conservative, racist piece of shit who is going to take over Manchin’s job of fucking things up for progressives. Fucking hell this sucks.

    To top it off, Israel just successfully dropped a political nuke on a critic and will likely have everyone running scared in the future.



  • As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them… I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.

    All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.

    I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it’s me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.


  • Sadly, old Google doesn’t work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.

    The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren’t to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They’ll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.

    That’s why Google’s new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the “visit other websites” step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.

    Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed… you monster.