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The stock market is both. No …?
It’s a rigged game, so fraud
DTCC delenda est 😎
Depends on who you are.
Broke-ass everyday American? Gambling.
Rich-ass spoiled-brat insider-knowledge-having-dick multi-millionaire? Fraud.
Everything is a scam, and NOTHING works anymore. Customer Service is often “I’m Lily, your AI customer service chatbot. I’m still learning, so please be patient with me. What can I help you with today?”
Bitch, I got a problem with your product/service, and I need help. I don’t want to be your volunteer learning experience, I want you to solve my problem, not teach you how to be human.
Agree on the chatbot thing but to be honest, it was like that way before LLMs.
There was a full decade where they would just keyword match you to different chat flowcharts.
Reminds me of that one time I had to have blood drawn and my phlebotomist was a phlebotomist in training. I’ve never seen my blood splurt like that
I had an experience like that donating blood once. Except the trainee was cute and followed me outside after I was done to apologize and ask if I wanted to get lunch sometime.
I think I got a better deal than you, now that I think about it.
Like 10 minutes ago I was trying to figure out the cost of adding a hotspot to my mobile plan, but I couldn’t find a strsightfiward answer. They ended up sending me to their chatbot who took me round in circles before eventually giving in. Why did that have to be so frustrating? Why did it need ai?
(My kid has poor WiFi in his dorm and his college doesn’t seem to be able to help)
WDYM by poor WiFi
Latency 300-1200 ms, bandwidth topping out at 12mbs. But the thing is he’s captain of one of the e-sports teams and on the board of the larger e-sports organization. How are you supposed to compete with latency like that?
He’s on the top floor of his dorm so I don’t know if that’s part of it. Also a good view of the skyline if I have to pay for a hotspot. He was getting much better performance using his phones hotspot than the college WiFi, but ran into the cap pretty quickly
So far IT support keeps wanting to futz with settings on his pc, but he was getting reasonably close to gigabit WiFi with single digit latency at my house, and use WiFi to connect to his phones hotspot with decent performance. He’s able to connect in his dorm and he has settings that gave outstanding network here so I find it hard to believe the issue is his pc
As the other commenter said, he needs to hook up to the ethernet jack in his room. The Wifi generally sucks in dorms, too crowded.
Tried that. No go.
That sucks.
If the college won’t fix their infrastructure, path of least resistance is to get out of the dorms at the first available chance. Likely next semester or next year.
Speaking of not keeping up their infrastructure, we’re told there’s not enough dorm space so only 10% of juniors and seniors can live on campus. Yep, he’s getting out of the dorms next years whether he likes it or not.
…… and he’s apply for “in Washington DC” for one semester next year so that will make it even more challenging
There’s no Ethernet Jack? I was going to suggest an expensive extender but the latency is odd. It indicates packet loss. Where’s the nearest AP? If he could do a test there it would rule out what hard wire it’s connected to.
There’s a jack but the college says they took the infrastructure out so it doesn’t go anywhere.
Which is annoying because my other kid at a different school said similar but Ethernet just worked
I don’t know where the nearest hotspot is - there’s a lot of closed doors. But yeah they had him run multiple speed tests
eSports at anything above “having a giggle” and WiFi network connectivity are mutually exclusive things.
Having any latency at all makes your lad about as much use as a one legged bloke in an arse kicking competition. He and his team should be on hardwired gigabit fibre, and that he isn’t should be seen as embarrassing for his institution.
For what it’s worth, I’m a simple home user (in the UK) and I have a gigabit fibre to the transceiver in the cellar, to a basic gigabit switch which routes to patch boxes in every room of my 150 year old house. That I can do that affordably and a supposedly professionally run institution can’t handle such is profoundly humiliating.
Perhaps try putting it like that to the powers that be and see how they react? 💛
Same here. He may be spoiled that I have gigabit fiber, Ethernet to every room, and gigabit WiFi. Multi-gig switches are starting to be affordable and claim I should get several gig without even upgrading my existing cat5e …… soon
So far I’ve let him deal with it - he’s an adult now, technically. But it’s getting to be time to see if I can do any better
But how did we get here? We’re not suddenly going to start making the right choices. Our choices led us here and they are what keeps us here.
I’ve got some bad news for you about where the majority of fediverse users are based.
Literally a reddit argument
I don’t know the sentiment behind your comment but my point is it’s stupid to argue about Americentrism on a Americentric platform.
Like it’s fine if you don’t want to see that content but go to a different platform rather than whine about it. It’s not the bakeries fault you arrived wanting to buy a car.
It’s not an American problem, it’s a capitalism problem. The States might be slightly ahead, but every capitalist nation is heading the same direction.
It’s a move from profit seeking to rent seeking by the capitalists. Some have called it feudalism.
This CGP Gray video from a decade ago makes the point that when the bulk of a countries wealth comes from a very small area of production/industry - tyranny will soon follow.
When all the wealth comes from a few tech-billionaires (rather than the productive labour of the diverse masses) - the representative/leader/dictator ONLY has to please the small minority who has all the money.
Innovation these days is just “what if I was able to somehow insert myself into this already functioning service and skim some money off it”.
And now AI is inserting itself in the insertion!
Just ask AI to make your Door Dash order for your Pizza delivery driver.
There’s a cute little novel about that: “Automatic Noodle.” Except in that one, a bunch of sentient robots can do Biang Biang better than an algorithm.
Using your Account® Account™ (one Account™ for all your accounts) in the App® App™ (one App™ for all your apps)!
Can you imagine if there was somebody out there so monumentally stupid that they thought that an app, let’s call it “X” hypothetically, that did everything was a good idea?
He got the idea from the Chinese. All you need is complete control by the government to force it upon everybody. So fascism, which is exactly what they are working towards.
Demonizing the Chinese is silly. Their move for so much control is, in large part, a response to constant sabotage my capitalist interests.
I’m not saying terrible things haven’t been done or won’t be done by them. I’m just stating the fact that you can’t be polite or play nice in a room full of violent fascists looking to make you fail. This is what China learned by watching the cold war with the USSR.
Capitalism since…ever. Regulation is the only balance and that no longer exists.
Corporations don’t invent new products or improve existing ones anymore. The R&D needed costs too much along with creating the tooling to manufacture and distribute products. Usually quite the opposite, they look how to cheapen products’ construction and durability while charging more to increase the profit margin.
It’s far easier to make a product a subscription, or desirable features a subscription, sell commonly needed add-ons separately at ridiculously inflated costs (like printer ink or power tool batteries) or as you said, insert middle-men to extract fees for the convenience of their existing between the customer and the desired product.
I’ve ranted about this for years. I’ve had a bad streak of luck the past 8 years, and everything I’ve tried to do to improve my situation has just become an increasingly horrible cesspool of predatory horseshit. Every computer application, service, university, and social program is so much worse than they were 10-15 years ago, and I hate it.
And now we have ten years of fucked up young adults who think this is how it’s always been.
“Enshittification” better be the word of the year.
Equally fitting if the word of the year is “Clauding™: to leverage Anthropic™ intelligence tooling to simplify your life and maximize you potential. Brought to you by Anthropic™! Get your free trial today!”
It’s literally the bad future from BttF2
Complete with Trump-as-Biff-as-Trump.
Biff wasn’t a pedophile who murdered kids though.
… that we know of.
He was literally ready to murder Marty
I mean, Trump didn’t fuck or murder children onscreen either.
Or maybe he did and it’s not public.
I mean, Putin probably has those tapes to hang over his little puppet.
If any government had any god damn balls, advertising would be heavily regulated and your personal data would be wholly under your control.
…and your personal data would be wholly under your control.
But then, how can the IC spy on you without a warrant.
Amen, brotha! I am so sick of being solicited, constantly.
We let the MBAs take over. Our culture has been consumed by the idea that it’s ok to say and do absolutely anything in the pursuit of a dollar
Thank Reagan.
When he deregulated the banks he gave a blank check to a bunch of third raters who’d gone to small time banks because they knew they couldn’t cut it anywhere else.
Reagan fucked everything up, of course, but we cannot forget about Bill Clinton overseeing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act
Clinton had a GOP Congress.
If you want a lesson, it’s vote in every election and always mark your ballot to hurt the GOP worse.
Clinton had veto power.
and congress had numbers, overwhelming numbers. it was a bi-partisan bill that passed 362-57 & 90-8. it was gonna happen with or without his signature.
Cool. Then make them do it.
What’s the point in that?
Except it was passed overwhelmingly. Veto would’ve delayed the inevitable and been amazingly politically stupid.
Oh I guess in that case they just shouldn’t bother vetoing? Yeah no fuck that.
Thank the people who vote for a piece of shit multiple times just to ‘own the libs’
I mean obviously, but they only exist because of the absolute machine of propaganda carefully designed to create exactly that deranged mindset. Chicken and egg thing.
The MBAs are making use of the math associated with risk management. An MBA with a flat tire teleworks for the day or takes a second car to work while a mobile mechanic service fixes the tire. A shift worker misses the shift and potentially loses the job for not finding someone to cover the shift.
MBAs who need a wrench can buy whichever wrench they want because they can afford it: a low end wrench if they need it to work once, a mid tier wrench if they’re looking for a mix of quality and cost, or a high end wrench if they like to buy it for life. A shift worker buys what they can afford and has to pray it doesn’t break because prayer is the only insurance they can afford.
A shift worker can’t afford a better wrench because a team of economists, psychologists, and political scientists have calculated exactly how low they can pay a person and keep the economy from grinding to a halt. An MBA eats lunch for $15 every day because nobody charges them $150.
If I ever invent a time machine, I’m making a few pit stops on my way back in time to cap Hitler, and Milton Friedman and his friends are on the list. He’s the misanthrope who popularized the idea that the only duty of a company’s leadership is to deliver profit, and any other pursuit is a disservice to the shareholders. This is known as the Friedman Doctrine.
i think you could make a case for Edward Bernays too
Added to the stops. This is going to be a busy fieldtrip through time.
It’s relentless. Every fucking thing is made wrong. Design, which is the practice of making things easy to use or understand, not look pretty, is dead.
Design is absolutely thriving. Things are made, with great care and precision, to more easily manipulate and mislead buyers and to more easily misinform the population. Most importantly, things are made to more easily extract wealth from everyone else.
What you are assuming, incorrectly, is that the general population is the customer. The general population is, in fact, just another resource for the wealthy and powerful (the real customers).
No. What I’m assuming correctly is that design schools teach you how to work for the population. I never fucking learned how to make something work like shit, so the user has to use it for longer. I learned how to anticipate needs and communicate to the user. THAT is what design is. I have no fucking clue what that other practice is called, but it’s not what my design school taught me. Design is fucking dead.
YouTube asked me to upgrade to premium… to download my own fucking video!
My business works almost entirely organically. We charge a fair rate. Not the cheapest, not the most expensive. We never broke our ethical code. You’d be surprised how many people scoff at me.
As much as everything is a scam, a vast majority of the customers are asking to be scammed. Should I sell the cheapest shit, cash out, and walk away while the work performed for the customer breaks down within a few months?
People don’t get it. Still. It’s mostly the consumer’s fault for not choosing businesses with ethics. People chose quantity. That’s not a decent business person’s fault. Now, we’re here and very few businesses with ethics exist.
Whose fault do you seriously think that is? The person with the money who always had a choice where they could purchase a product or is it the competing businesses who offer a product? It only becomes the businesses fault when there’s no choice left.
There were choices. Choices were made. Now everyone is bitching about how there’s no good businesses left. So start giving your money to decent people.
It’s just like voting. You vote for the scummiest people. Wtf do you expect? A paradise? You’re not getting a paradise and you’re not getting a good product. You.
But just like voting the choices you vote for have incentives to rig the system in their own favor. It’s hard to vote with your wallet as they say because the companies are so big they will either lobby for laws to make themselves the only viable option or they will just buy up their competitors.
For example I always try to favor local businesses so when I moved I signed up for the local bank. It was small and had one or two branches. The next year a larger regional ank bought them. Then a larger national bank bought them. Next thing I knew it was bank of America somehow.
I would have never voted for any of that. So it’s not really the fault of the consumer
Yeah. This person’s (who you are replying to) industry does not represent every industry.
Congratulations on being able to run an completely ethical business - it can’t be easy. I say that non-sarcastically.
I think one of the many issue which has lead to the state we are in now is that it’s often impossible to tell the true quality or value of a product before buying it. So simply buying something more expensive is no guarantee of a better product, because the optimal strategy for an unethical business is to sell the cheapest possible product at the highest possible volume x price.
Welcome to the world brought to you by corporations, who exist to extract wealth, for the owners, who do not have a limit to their desire for more power, to feed their malignant narcissism. Selfishness on a grand scale is the only reason for the enshitification of existence.
Capitalism bitch! Where the ONLY metric for anything or anyone is how much money it can make.
Rent seeking behavior, the thing capitalism is best at :’)
I love when people act like the alternative to capitalism is zero private business and full communism. It’s like, no, the thing before the -ism is simply the thing it centers. Capitalism, as you say, centers capital but after that it can take several forms, all of which suck major ass as they reward nearly any behaviour which makes more money. Even objectively awful shit can just be paid off, it’s insane.
Sure wish Americans would do something about this so the rest of the world doesn’t have to suffer.
Let’s not pretend the rest of the world is so much better. I’ll concede the US is winning the race to the bottom. This is the winning Trump was talking about.
The rest of the world is largely getting their cues from the US, though. I wish they wouldn’t, but with the massive presence of US media and popular culture, the propaganda hits more than just the US.
with the massive presence of US media and popular culture
Look to the billionaires, the Epstein class, for who’s to blame for that.
Almost a quarter of American adults have never traveled abroad. Only another quarter has been to 5 or more countries. Americans, by and large, only understand the world outside of their own country in the terms American media presents it to them.
A quarter going to 5 or more countries feels incredibly generous.
Hell a quarter never traveling also feels like a huge under estimate.
Granted, unlike, Europe, we aren’t all a 30 minute drive from another country.
It’s not a quarter of all people, just adults and Canada and Mexico are both pretty easy for a lot of Americans. Plus cruises and/or resort trips to the Caribbean and there’s plenty of people who have “been to another country” without ever having really experienced another country.
This is so true…so many have zero world view
I’d have to drive almost 1500 miles to reach a “foreign country” (I’m not counting Canada, which I’ve visited a bunch of times) and the structure of our government means all foreign relations goes through the Fed over which I have negligible influence. And that’s coming from someone with a dim view of patriotism. We are physically and geopolitically isolated in a lot of ways, not least of which is the cost (material and opportunity) of travel. It’s a lot of work for no obvious benefit to keep abreast of current affairs around the world.
no obvious benefit
Traveling is probably the best thing you can do to not be a complete shithead about 90% of things in life.
We have a similar problem here in Australia. But because of our low population. And compulsory voting. It’s not able to manifest as much in the elected governments… Yet. There is definitely a push by outside groups and a few scallywags here trying to make it like the US.
But we continue to push back….Mostly.
AUKUS was the latest version of us failing in the pursuit of sense. Thankfully the US will fuck up the whole thing so bad it might just work out alright in a decade or two.
A criticism of “MAGA” I have made is, “why settle for great when we were amazing?”
Haha! Sure. You believe what you want to. But the fact is that there are countries in the world that are actively battling this scammy rubbish. Through governments and local leadership. What is concerning however, is the attitude that scams are just now a part of the accepted narrative. When they should be anything but.
Take the Nigerian scams of the early 2000’s. They were successfully fought against on all levels. And have now pretty much dropped off.
Just because your country has thrown in the metaphorical towel. Don’t lump the rest of us with you.
I didn’t. I said it as a warning to the countries that are following the path, and some are. If yours is in good shape, then great, keep it that way.
Also, I don’t associate countries and the ones in control with the people who live there. It’s not some team sport where all represent, most citizens of a place don’t have all that much control over what their country does. Most of us are born into a place and system that we have to live in and can’t change. That’s not throwing in the towel, that’s just knowing you can change some things directly around you, but you can’t change everything, so you have to adjust the best you can.
You’re allowed to do your own thing ya know.
Unless you do your own thing too much and the CIA takes interest.
