bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Around the time of the Gillette thing, I'd bought a bunch of Mach 3 heads. They'd changed something about them. They are blue now, instead of green. But the issue I had was that my hair gets caught between the blades. This is actually why I used Mach 3, since my hair would clog up other brands. I don't know if the space between the blades is too large or too small.
So I haven't used Mach 3 since, and just picked up a cheap electric razor.
But not boycott related. Unless Gillette intentionally stirred up controversy at a time they made the change.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I may have been wrong about that. It looks like it was the 'Food Babe' who pushed for it, and she only claims to be (as far as google tells me) a 'vegetarian at home', though she does advocate for vegans by bullying companies to remove non-vegan ingredients (and for some reason companies seem to comply?)
With Kraft Dinner, she pushed for them to remove artificial colours. She seems to be against 'chemicals'.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Tight-knit communities are built around something, and that something is almost always the church. In tight-knit communities you do not yield the state's power against your neighbour. Even if courts exist, there's a police force, you'll almost always create bad blood by invoking the state's power in your disputes. And the police, prosecutors, judges, and juries, will all be members of the tight-knit community.
If you believe neighbour wrongs you, you'd go to your priest for help, or other neighbours. Part of being a tight-knit community is that social consequences can be enough to affect a resolution, and one that is moral/just, rather than one that is technically legal.
When you go to the police, you're basically going above the community. If the legal consequences for something are worse than what your community will tolerate, then it's likely the police will try to dissuade you, the prosecutor will decline to bring charges, the judge will give the defendant every benefit of the doubt, etc. Because they are all part of the same community.
But an outsider isn't going to be influenced much by social pressures, and so using the force of the state is seen as acceptable.
If you look at Hasidic Jewish communities, they often have their own police, 'courts', their own schools, etc. They aren't willing to use the state's violence against each other. If they were, they wouldn't be tight-knit communities. Many native reserves are also like this.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
What's something that a person could do with their time and money to make the world a better place. Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?
Maybe. I guess it depends what your goals are. The thing is that finding the 'right' people to hand cash to can be hard. Hand too much money to someone poor and they can easily end up worse off. Hand money to someone doing well, and you might not feel like you've really improved anything.
You could browse a sub like /r/entrepreneur or /r/sweatystartup, lurking to find random users who seem like they have drive, but capital is the thing holding them back. Could probably do the same thing with artists and writers.
Even people struggling with illness or disability. Find their passion and fund it. Gives them purpose, and probably helps them in a way most charities can't. There are plenty of charities out there handing out wheelchairs to cripples. But if that cripple loves woodworking, there ain't no charity handing out tablesaws and lathes.
Handing out free 3D printers to people wanting one is probably far more altruistic than giving the same amount of money to a charity that will shovel it into a bottomless pit.
Most charity revolves around surviving, rather than living. Once people start living, they tend to become a bit better at surviving on their own.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
If killing Russian soldiers in this situation is right and necessary, then anything that contributes to their killing is also right and necessary.
Which means that Finland deploying to Ukraine is right and necessary.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out Wang and Ellison had orchestrated this whole thing, and SBF is simply a patsy. They are both admitting guilt, and that they knew at the time what they were doing was wrong. If SBF has a shred of evidence that they misled him, he'll probably get off, while Wang and Ellison get a slap on the wrist.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
IMO, the acting by everybody, except David, John, and the little girl, was sub-par. Beverly D'Angelo was rough to look at, but I guess she suited the character. Other than that, this was a great movie. I kind of wanted more of Santa's origins, but maybe we'll get a sequel. Though I hope a sequel doesn't become 'we have to find even more violent, over-the-top ways to kill people' because that will wear thin quickly.
Like you said, the script was tight. Should easily become a classic. I wonder if it'll get cut down to a PG/PG-13 for television.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Nobody thinks housing prices are booming right now.
But with mortgage rates increasing, the monthly cost is still increasing more than housing prices are dropping, aren't they? At least in Canada it is true.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Google something that does have results (usually they says x million), and go like 20 pages in. There's nothing. Hell, results repeat over and over throughout those pages.
And another experience I had the other day, I googled something and it told me there were like 5 pages of results. Clicked to the last page and suddenly it millions of results and pages after pages.
Anyways, I think there are multiple reasons this is happening. First, Google is constantly trying to keep spammy results out of the search (they've gotten pretty bad lately, imo). It is relatively easy to get a website to the top of the results for most searches. Google is constantly adjusting their algorithm to deal with shit like that, but people learn pretty quick how to overcome that.
The side effect of this is that you're only ever going to get results from large websites that have a dedicated team who are working to get their results on Google, and spammy websites that are literally solely dedicated to getting a high rank. Basically 99% of the internet from even a year ago will be penalized in the results, because they aren't following whatever 'best practices' Google has decided on today. You won't find the internet of the 90s or 00s on Google anymore.
Another thing is that Google wants to control what you see. The concern over 'misinformation' means that most websites are going to be penalized, while the mainstream media and some social media sites get prioritized.
I also personally believe that Google is beginning to create a walled garden. 95% of people are searching for the same 5% of content. From a business standpoint, Google can prune 95% of their results and most people won't be impacted (or at least most searches won't be impacted). This would save them a lot of money, and make them profitable as all hell. This is even more true for YouTube, which has an even WORSE search than Google. I'm simply amazed at how many repeated videos I see when I search something, how many videos completely unrelated to my search, unrelated to my search terms, and they are all from 'big' accounts. I pop on over to Google and search for YouTube videos, and suddenly there's an unimaginable amount of content that I am actually looking for. And I can only imagine that if this were the old Google search, that I'd get an even better experience.
Honestly, I prefer Yandex these days. DDG, Bing, Google, they are useless.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
As far as I can tell, James Trusty is a competent attorney with the requisite experience to litigate issues at this level but he just fell flat on his face hard. No amount of legal acumen can compensate for having a client who insists on unreasonable demands and tactics.
Seems most likely that this was a (seemingly successful) delay tactic.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
A lot of success comes from your network and how well you can leverage it. So increasing how social your kids are will help. Get them involved in many activities. If you can get them in events where they'll rub elbows with people above their social class, that would probably help a lot.
You also need to socialize your kids with people older than them, particularly adults. I've noticed a lot of young people seem to have been confined to the 'kids table' throughout their lives (and I don't just mean at big holiday meals, but in any situation where adults are present). And there seems to be no point at which they transition to sitting with adults beyond their age; they are always relegated to their peer group. This goes on until they graduate college, and suddenly they are thrust into the real world, and they are basically socially inept at communicating with their elders. Then they self-segregate, gravitating towards people their age, and miss out on opportunities.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
It seems like there's a bit of a Gell-Mann amnesia effect with how people treat 'happenings' in foreign countries. COVID protests in US (or Canada); danger to democracy, but also just a bunch of idiots who know nothing. COVID protests in China? That's DEMOCRACY™ in action, the will of the people.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Jamal Khashoggi, the 'journalist' who got chopped up by Saudi Arabia, was a mouthpiece for Qatar, pushing propaganda against Saudi Arabia in one of America's top papers. So I wouldn't be surprised if this campaign against Qatar is largely driven by Saudi Arabia. If they are willing to chop up a journalist, I'd imagine they are happy to twist facts and feed them to the media. And western media, particularly Americans (imo), seem to be quite lazy. If you just do their work for them, they'll happily publish it, as long as it doesn't go against their personal biases (and if it reinforces those biases, they'll fall over themselves to oblige).
That's why so many news articles are basically a copy & paste of press releases.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Should do a movie where The Rock is dropped into medieval times. He believes his greatest asset is strength, so keeps going to battles. But he just casually points out seemingly common sense things, which inspire great leaps forward. Basically a time travelling Forrest Gump. Then when The Rock comes back to the future, society is extremely technologically advanced, but he's looked down on as a dumb brute.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Iron Beam and similar directed energy weapons. They can allegedly shoot down satellites. Apparently China, Russia, Israel, and the US have these weapons. There also may, or may not be, DEWs in space, which can either shoot down other satellites or possibly ground based targets (I can't imagine they'd be too effective shooting the ground, unless they are one time use, or spend a hell of a long time charging; maybe a nuclear powered one could do it?).
The Jewish space laser conspiracies started with simple 'space laser' conspiracies. There was a growing conspiracy around various forest fires being done by DEWs. Lots of videos of California neighbourhoods burned down, but all the trees and stuff being untouched; melted cars; and then there were 'strange' light beams visible on some weather satellites. I just follow conspiracies for fun, so I don't really try to remember all the details.
Then the Space Force came out, talking about how China and Russia had DEWs in space (or targeting space?). And so then the conspiracies around DEWs went into overdrive. I don't know how the Jewish part ended up being added, but I assume Israel. If not Israel, then it's probably just 'The Powers That Be'. You can attribute any conspiracy to the Jews.
Turning the frogs gay was about a chemical (atrazine) that was getting into the water (usually from runoff from farms), and frogs exposed to it would change into females. So it's really the frogs are trans, rather than gay. And if 'they' means the government, then I suppose we could blame them. So 'they are turning the frogs gay' is mostly true.
And space lasers almost certainly exist; whether they are space-based and shooting at other satellites, or ground-based and shooting into space. Don't know about space to ground. I imagine there's a >90% chance that a Jewish person was heavily involved in designing it. And I imagine there's a >50% chance that Israel has some. So Jewish Space Lasers seems mostly true to me, though probably not quite as nefarious as the wording makes it seem.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
It's all part of a cycle. Black people blame white people for their oppression. And then one day they 'notice' that a good chunk of the white people in Hollywood, the media, running the big businesses, in academia, are Jews. Whites gentiles are under-represented, probably moreso than African-Americans.
And once they 'notice' that, then they start to wonder if they are oppressed at all. You get the idea that maybe it's just a 'mental prison'. They believe they can free themselves by simply believing they aren't oppressed. And from there they get to thinking that maybe it is the Jews that are the oppressors. This feeds into black nationalism, which feeds into blacks having their own country, which feeds into the idea that hey, maybe Israel is actually a black country. Maybe blacks are the real Jews.
As this process has played out, time and time again, over the past century, it was largely countered or overshadowed by a larger civil rights movement. But the current civil rights movement isn't asking for equality; it's asking for equity. And to get that equity, it's going to have to come from the Jews, at least partly. Otherwise gentile whites are going to be essentially pushed out of society, and that will almost certainly lead to the Holocaust 2.0.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
According to Politifact;
"The association between COVID-19 and blood clots was recognized early in the pandemic among hospitalized COVID-19 patients," said Yazan Abou-Ismail, a hematologist at University of Utah Health. "These patients experienced blood clots both in deep veins and arteries, which sometimes led to strokes and heart attacks. Although these conditions have mostly been seen in patients with severe COVID-19 illness, people with moderate illness have also developed blood clots."
Abou-Ismail said the incidence of blood clots ranged from 20% to 40% among patients with severe COVID-19 illness, and 3% to 9% among those with mild to moderate COVID-19 illness.
and;
The National Funeral Directors Association, a U.S. professional organization, told PolitiFact that embalmers in its network have noticed similar abnormalities in COVID-related deaths, but among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
"It’s only anecdotal evidence, and there’s no scientific evidence to draw any conclusions," said Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the association.
So it's more than just "one or a few" noticing. Politifact chalks it up to COVID. I seem to remember someone saying something like "COVID-19 is the first airborne vascular disease" when the pandemic first popped off.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
what do the climate change protest stunts actually accomplish? Governments, unrelated companies, and all sorts of startups are working on climate change.
A feeling of success and the ability to claim part of it, without having to actually do the hard work.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
In an ideal world, the police would be focusing their resources on catching those criminals, rather than hoping a random broken tail light will lead to a major bust. And major criminals wouldn't feel the need to run (or kill) in order to evade a minor ticket.
If we are simply using minor laws to capture criminals, then why not make more minor laws to catch criminals? I'd prefer to live in a society where laws are meant to keep people on track, rather than to undermine people in order for cops to hold broader investigations. So having wider enforcement, but smaller punishments, for minor crimes and civil violations seems more important, overall.
Police have no incentive in actually reducing minor crime if their purpose is to simply use minor crime as a pretext to find people with warrants, guns, drugs, etc.
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I don't think back-to-work legislation would be constitutional anymore. In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that striking is a constitutional right, a component of collective bargaining which is protected in the charter under the freedom to associate. And Ontario courts struck down the 2012 back-to-work legislation as infringing on the collective bargaining rights of school employees.
So using the notwithstanding clause seems like the only way to actually do this, since I doubt the courts will see janitors as essential as police or w/e (and I never read the full Supreme Court case, so who knows, maybe police and doctors are allowed to strike?).
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
I remember stores offering curbside pick-up for roughly $5 prior to the pandemic (in Canada). I think Loblaws and Walmart were rolling it out. They took out some handicap parking spots and replaced them with pickup spots, lol.
I'd imagine the cost of an employee picking items is going to be less than that for most orders. The costs of bagging/checking out are already baked in. So I don't think it's uneconomical.
If a chain were to be completely curbside pickup, it would be extremely economical, though. We're talking a much smaller footprint, tiny parking lot. So the costs to set up and maintain the business will be a lot smaller. You can optimize the layout for picking. You get to do first in, first out. You'd be saving a lot on spoilage. You'd be saving a lot from theft.
Right now, in a regular store, it probably takes 5 minutes for a worker to fill a simple order, especially if you have products at opposite ends of the store. Many stores are laid out in a fashion to get the customer to have to go through it, and spend longer, hoping they'll buy more stuff. Items are placed in certain areas to influence what you grab (name brands and new products at eye level).
With a store optimized for picking, you'd have multiple people filling a single order, just different parts of it (frozen/refrigerated/bulk/produce/dry goods/etc). Popular items would be grouped together. You could get the picking time to a total half a minute for a simple order. A half dozen employees should be able to run a high traffic outlet with little issue. The labour cost (in Canada, with a ~$15/hr wage) would be $90/hr, then all the other costs (payroll taxes, benefits, insurance and such). You're looking at a max of $150/hr in labour to have a capacity to fill roughly 500 orders each hour (though it largely depends on the average order size; if all orders are small, you'll be able to do over 700 per hour; if all orders had hundreds of items, you're looking at <100). So maybe an average of 30 cents per order, in labour costs. And you could probably get that down even more with some automation, conveyors, etc. But it's going to get more and more expensive, at least upfront, to get the per order picking time down much further.
Worst case scenario would be taking each employee 1 minute to fill their part of an order, for a total of 6 man-minutes per hour. You're getting 60 orders done an hour. You're coming in at $2.50/order. This is likely close to the cost grocery stores are paying right now for offering curbside pick-up.
Your labour costs in other areas would remain the same or drop. For stocking shelves, you'd just be stocking the picking area. No time wasted on product presentation, rotating product, price labeling, price checking, etc. Nobody in the checkout line holding up other customers. Don't have to worry about a lack of cashiers becoming a bottleneck. No need to train cashiers. Every employee can be trained to pick, and if things get exceptionally busy, you can pull people from one job and toss them on another. If it's Christmas and everyone is buying a turkey, you can throw an extra person in the fridge.
Your labour costs should easily be less than the average grocery store, while having the capacity to serve more people per hour, and those customers not being frustrated by crowds, lines, things being out of stock (since hopefully the system would prevent out-of-stock items from being ordered). You'll save a ton of money on utilities, as you're not battling with keeping food cold and customers warm. You'll save a ton on the cost of the property, as you won't need substantial parking (half your lot will probably be employee parking), and you can have a drive-thru to help get customers through faster (with a couple employees that just load vehicles up? This could be the more expensive part, but likely less than cashiers). Smaller building (easily less than half the size).
With those Amazon cashless store, you're really only eliminating the cashier. And that's coming at the high cost of the system required to monitor a customer's shopping. If some tech has to step foot in that store once a week, that's likely wiping out the savings from not having a cashier. And the stores I've seen (from photos/videos online) are pretty small, more akin to a convenience store, with a small selection of products. High volume isn't going to happen.
With a store that only does curbside, assuming they have enough volume, it may be possible to do free delivery and still be competitive with other stores. Especially if it's scheduled rather than on-demand. It seems most delivery gig jobs are doing 1 delivery per trip, which is horribly inefficient. But I think the delivery side comes with far more headaches; people not answering their door and claiming an order never came, drivers having to deal with long driveways, gates, and other shit that increases their time. Apartment buildings, too, with needing to get buzzed in and take an order up. An order delivered to the top floor of a building would easily wipe out any profit. The points where employees interact with customers are almost always a bottleneck, and reducing those as much as possible will save a ton of money.
We need to bring back milk doors. It would decrease delivery times significantly, making it cheaper for customers and businesses.
New business idea; Mr Venture Capitalist, what we'll do is use billions of your money to begin offering free installation of 'drop boxes' in high and middle income communities. In exchange, we control access to this box (we'll sell it as a safety feature, so people can't shove unwanted shit in there, or steal stuff). We'll make deals with various companies (UberEats, Amazon, FedEx etc) to pay us to access these boxes for delivery. When something is put in it, the homeowner is notified on their phone. Hell, we'll even put some cameras on it so they can see. For companies like Amazon/FedEx, they wouldn't have to charge less for delivery, as the selling point is that the customer's package is safely delivered and can't be stolen; FedEx and Amazon will save money on the time spent delivering (especially FedEx from having far less 'delivery attempts') but also on 'lost/stolen/damaged' packages that they might have to fork out for. For companies like UberEats, they may be able to pass some of the savings to their customers, increasing the frequency of ordering.
And there's big savings in not having their customer service deal with as many complaints (especially from scammers). We can simply share video with Uber/FedEx/Amazon when a claim of lost/stolen/damaged delivery is made.
The next step would be to get into lower/working class neighbourhoods. These won't be as profitable, so we'll need to conjure up a media campaign claiming that it is discriminatory that there aren't boxes like ours in low income BIPOC communities. Then we angle for the government to give us subsidies/grants to fund the roll out of these to low-income BIPOC communities. We won't include all the fancy tech that the middle/upper class gets, though. This is because we're moving away from providing value for other businesses, since our 'drop boxes' are now becoming the norm. They can't not use it.
We're also going to need to do some regulatory capture. We'll push for regulations on our boxes, that just happen to conform with the exact specifications of our boxes. This will make any up-and-coming competitors have to toss out all their shit and start over. We'll also push for increased liability for box providers, and then have a department that will focus solely on finding cases where our competitors have failed to comply with regulations, so they get hit with fines or lawsuits. Feed some stories to the lesser press about babies being killed in 'unsecure' boxes of our competitors or something.
Anyways, once regulatory capture is complete, we're going to need to turn our boxes into a permanent piggy bank. What we'll do is convince the government that our 'drop boxes' are actually a 'public utility', and that every company should have access to them. We'll now just collect a fee that goes to 'maintaining' the box network, while 'retailers' (which are companies we'll start on the side, primarily in upper and middle class areas) sell access to the network. This will further destroy any competition we may have had.
Then we convince Elon Musk to buy the business for $694.20/share. Then get our press buddies to say how that's fascism. Our buddies in government will then nationalize our boxes, paying us a premium to keep it out of the hands of literal Nazis.
This increased efficiency of delivery will allow our curbside grocery outlets to offer free delivery. We'll be able to take this customer facing businesses (and as I said before, interactions with customers are a bottleneck) and turn it into a business that has absolutely no customer interaction (other than our social media team, who will mostly just make fun of customers for being stupid, which will somehow make the average customer feel smarter and want to use our business).
Oh right, and one detail I forgot; our proprietary 'drop boxes' will be the ideal size the fit 'grocery boxes' we use at our store to put groceries in. We'll own the company making these boxes, out of some 'bio-friendly' material, and we'll get politicians to pass a low making these particular boxes the standard for delivery (or boxes that are certain fractions of the size), forcing all companies to buy these boxes for delivery, except in the cases of oversized packaged (which we'll push the government to punitively tax the living shit out of, to encourage more companies to think inside the box). We'll also collect fees for picking up these boxes, cleaning them, maintaining them, replacing them. Maybe a deposit program. Or we can convince people to put recyclables in them, then convince the government to give
bsbbtnh
1yr ago
Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself?
Isn't a benefit of Shutterstock that if an image you use somehow violates copyright, they'll take on the liability?
With AI art being a potential copyright minefield, most people probably don't want to end up in a situation where they are defending against a relatively novel suit. So having access to AI art that is produced based on Shutterstock's images, and presumably the protection against copyright violations, that's probably a great thing to have for many companies/users, big and small.
its authorship cannot be attributed to an individual person consistent with the original copyright ownership required to license rights.
Isn't that in stark contrast to DALL-E, which says anybody who generates an image is the full legal owner of it, and can do whatever they want? If DALL-E were to spit out two identical images, I wonder who owns it? lol
There's a sub on reddit called translater with people who have transitioned later than Zephyr, and many are passable.
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