OpenStars

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

They do it simply b/c they can.

Well, hopefully not that shocked.

Not true. They voted, and THAT legacy will be with us for a LONG time…

And sadly, I don’t even mean DT - there’s Ted Cruz, Moscow Mitch, the whole cohort - along with all the international agreements that we’ve already pulled out of and so on.

See, they left us something after all?! :-P This economy, lack of access to healthcare, and so much more!?

Btw, I don’t know about you, but I have a retirement plan for my old age. I plan to die. :-P

In fairness, it is less that they are “selfish” and more that they are “clueless” (to the point of obstinacy, outright refusing to open their eyes) - b/c as you said, your mother didn’t inherit anything, and yet THEY are fine, so why wouldn’t you be, with nothing left to you either? (remember as you think this through to remove all of the actual “facts” first, and add the layer of Faux News Nostalgia factor)

Not true. They voted, and THAT legacy will be with us for a LONG time…

And sadly, I don’t even mean DT - there’s Ted Cruz, Moscow Mitch, the whole cohort - along with all the international agreements that we’ve already pulled out of and so on.

See, they left us something after all?! :-P This economy, lack of access to healthcare, and so much more!?

Btw, I don’t know about you, but I have a retirement plan for my old age. I plan to die. :-P

In fairness, it is less that they are “selfish” and more that they are “clueless” (to the point of obstinacy, refusing to open their eyes) - b/c as you said, your mother didn’t inherit anything, and yet THEY are fine, so why wouldn’t you be, with nothing left to you either? (remember as you think this through to remove all of the actual “facts” first, and add the layer of Faux News Nostalgia factor)

deleted by creator

Hehe, nothing to see here, these are not the stories you are looking for, move along :-P

On the bright side, Kbin is showing a picture of absolutely gorgeous cherry blossoms 🌸 in the snow for this post. :-P

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

Just at a guess, people who say that surely must be factoring in medical healthcare costs, to deal with the consequences of obesity and such.

I just clicked twice to find the article title, and don’t have time today to actually read through it… but it could be any number of things, including too early in the investigation to know, but we’ll have to read it to find out! :-D

Edit: okay so I did look (free full text here), and they don’t seem to know so precisely, except it transmits to grandchildren via the father, so like it could not be microbiome, it must be something in the sperm (even if something else also happens in the eggs too).

But once you pay farmers to grow corn, they have to sell it somewhere. Hence HFCS, and corn oil, and corn gas, and ofc corn corn, and… The then-head of NIH Francis Collins was once asked what single thing Americans could do to be healthier - he said to eat better, especially less sugar, and Congress could remove the farming subsidies, or at least expand them from beyond corn & soybean to include fruits & vegetables. They laughed in his face. Ain’t nobody got time for 'dat!

The single worst part of it all is that those subsidies were put into place when a huge fraction of aspiring volunteer soldiers were turned away in WWII due to “malnutrition”. Thus the campaign was born to literally fatten up America. It worked!!! And it will continue to work… forever, bc once you create a voting block, ending it or even redirecting (towards a healthier end for us all, but lower profits for Monsanto in the short term) seems next to impossible. It actually is a good argument against socialism, at least in the USA where the government is so enormously susceptible to special interest groups (although there are even better arguments against capitalism so I don’t mean to say that it PROVES that socialism is bad, just that it is one example of its misuse, when the government is in charge of something and also the government is stupid; and before anyone says it, yes this situation is an argument against both at the same time:-P).

An excellent documentary about it, most of what I’m saying here is from part 4: https://www.hbo.com/the-weight-of-the-nation/season-1. I know, filmmakers can be… uninformed some(MANY MANY)times, but this was done as a joint venture between the FDA and NIH, so this is highly credentialed. Also trigger warning; it will make you very very sad watching this, bc facts in this era of end-stage capitalism tend to do that, so if you do not want to see things like mothers feeding their 300 pound 10-year old an enormous meal of pasta - literally killing them right before your eyes, slowly and painfully - then… well, I did warn you at least.

The title used by the reporter:

A Popular Sweetener Was Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice

The title of the original publication:

Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression

I did not read the latter so I cannot vouch for it, but the former is most definitely click bait, through and through, from title to content. I mean, here we are talking about it and sharing the link so… they accomplished their purpose, and why should they care what happens afterwards?

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

Next up, sipping on orphan tears.

Not every boss earns the respect of their employees… in fact most people worthy of respect end up being removed from a managerial role, I’ve found. Sorta like a good politician - more likely to end up killed than reforming the system.:-(

Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.

Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.

I’m saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It’s all up to you now though… my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):

Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.

You missed the part where the boss fires those who don’t comply.

“Want to” isn’t a natural language statement, it’s a bullying one as in “You want to do this, or else, RIGHT!?”

I am not sure how democracy can survive, globally. It takes so very much effort, but people are so extremely lazy, yet those two factors seem like they work against one another? Many parents just want to use schools as daycare centers, and I’ve even heard of some schools having to potty train the youngest ones, who somehow never did learn that at home.

While at the same time, globalization and mechanization make schooling irrelevant for so many, who will earn less in service jobs that don’t need it, but still are told to vote, as if they are capable of properly understanding political discourse, and especially how to spot misinformation. Places like Russia heavily push misinformation, and many of the dumbest Western societies seem to lack any defense against it, by people who kinda don’t even care which message they send so long as it lines their personal pocketbooks.

In this time period we live in where technology is at a higher level than it’s ever been, so very many people fall through the cracks and cannot access the most basic tenants of previous eras - like the ability to work hard and thus buy a home, or at least be able to afford rent so as to avoid becoming homeless.

In the face of all that, schooling seems to be not a priority for people just trying to hold on for dear life through these economic upsets. It’s like in chess, in order to perform a really cool end-game move, you have to survive the next few rounds first, and then the next several after that, and so on. So even if schooling would have been “the solution to all (many) of our problems”, it nevertheless may get ignored, especially as several Western nations go through major constitutional crises in the next decade.