My brother lived with our grandmother, and I think they were mostly lazy - didn’t like to cook / shop for groceries. Neither one of them really got health problems from that, though my brother did gain a bit of weight.
Great grandmother (reportedly, never met her in person) was mean spirited and feisty to the end.
My grandmother ate Wendys daily, as her only meal of the day, for 20+ years, she lived to 99. She’s unusual (and she also controlled her calorie intake so she didn’t become overweight.)
Your mileage will most likely vary, that stuff isn’t healthy. Oh, by the way, her mother chewed tobacco to age 96 and lived to 98 - also not typical.
most people just go with ill-fitting off-the-shelf industrial goods instead.
The age of Amazon has made it so much worse… even poor people went to clothing stores and tried stuff on before buying it.
Now, if you don’t want to pay triple, you get it from mail order and just hope it fits - yeah you can return it if it doesn’t fit, but how much hassle is that, if it’s “close enough” people generally don’t bother, whereas if you were in the store you’d get the right size within a minute or two before buying it.
Oh, c’mon - have you EVER tried managing people? They’re a pain in the ass: expensive, unpredictable, needy beyond just the money they demand. Of course dimwit managers would rather outsource their people jobs to a service company wherever and whenever they can, let the service company do all that messy people-management.
What they’re missing is: those outsourcing service providers, even the ones providing AI “workers”, are themselves made possible by, staffed with: people. Your outsourcing bills are ultimately paying for: people. Once they become dependent upon these outsourced service providers, guess what? Their billing rates will go up and up and up right up to the point that it’s almost tempting to stop paying the service provider and just: hire their own people to do the work.
Worth the time to read: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-18-asbestos-in-the-walls-government-by-spicy-autocomplete-ff437603809c
Well, really, it’s wage slavery. Work is all you have, and the pay you get is not enough to give you any freedom from the work.
As you say, you don’t have enough time / energy to go look for another job - such places also intimidate the workforce and arbitrarily fire workers who might signal that they are looking for another job (such firing probably being a favor in the long run, but not if you starve to death in the meantime…)
Ben & Jerry had it right with a 5:1 ratio. No person in a company’s time is “worth” more than 5x the value of another person’s time. Some incentive to develop skills, advance in your role, recognition of better performance, sure. At 5x, that should be enough to recognize your investment in yourself and your skills and your commitment to the company vs some guy who just shows up to push a broom. It wasn’t so out of line with “reality” when they did it in the 1980s, but today it just doesn’t work - the US is stratifying into classes/castes like the ones India is trying to abolish, just without explicit labels. The US system is based on how many digits are in your annual income figure: 4, 5, 6, 7, more?
UBI would go a long way toward rectifying all of this. Let business do what they will, provide every citizen with enough money to live, instead of 0 + whatever they can squeeze out of the bureacrazy by “demonstrating need.” If “illegals” can earn enough to live better here than elsewhere without any UBI, let them - if they get into financial trouble, give them assistance getting back to where they came from - otherwise: live and let live. At the very least, businesses would have to improve working conditions - otherwise the workers would just stay home until they find a better deal elsewhere. I can tell you from experience in the disabled community: people want work, they want to get out and have their value to society acknowledged with a paycheck - they also like to be able to buy shiny things. The current welfare system is a big bureaucratic stick hanging over their head threatening to beat them with benefit cancellation if they do get out and earn a little money.
On the surface I agree - what’s being shown at top headlines, etc. But the PRC wasn’t as TACO as 2025 USA.
Its random and arbitrary enforced.
A direction the US is moving towards…
I hope it doesn’t spread outside of China, and I hope it ends (in practice) there soon.
“Although the Chinese Supreme People’s Court ruled 996 illegal in 2021, the practice remains a de facto standard in many private companies due to lax labor law enforcement.”
500,000 jobs eliminated, how many of those 500,000 are still unemployed? Of those, how many have the means to “band together and take the billionaires down?”
the amount of corporate-personalized shit I want in my life
would be zero when unsolicited. Don’t send me SMS, don’t send me e-mails, NEVER have my home speaker announce things I didn’t explicitly ask for.
However, when I search for things, make requests of “the cloud” to bring me information, I do appreciate having my personal history influence those results. I don’t want to sift through all the NFL, NBA, NHL, etc. score results and commentary just to get a weather forecast. I don’t want to see all the “big celebrity / entertainment news” mixed in with my local news. And, this means that some degree of customization of my feeds and search results is necessary to steer those results to my preferences.
Would I appreciate having more direct, intuitive, transparent control of the filtering? Hell yes. Is anybody offering anything better than Google out there right now? Very few, and mostly of very limited capability. Please prove me wrong with links to examples in your responses.
Our (prior) neighborhood had 3 miles of roads with one entrance, a 911 call could get a sheriff’s car response to block the entrance with a description of the vehicle (plate number, even).
Our current neighborhood, only 1/4 mile of road, so yeah, you’d have to shoot 'em.
I rented a house with some friends while at University… come to find out, the reason the owner rented it to us was because the neighbor was doing extensive renovations for 16 months… at 12 months the landlord “let us” switch to a month to month lease, then when the renovations completed she served us notice to vacate within 3 weeks.
One to mix the kool aid, one to serve the kool aid, nine for the kool aid servers to sleep in while preparing for the crowds coming to drink the kool aid…
Were I a neighbor (with a lot of money) in this situation, I think I’d be waiting until Zuck tries to use those properties, then registering my neighboring properties via overseas shell corporations and starting a Cuban Embassy infra-sound attack regime, right up to the limits of what’s legally “acceptable” for construction noise limits - shutting it off as the cops approach the neighborhood, then restarting it at random times every day for as long as this construction is taking. When a formal complaint is filed, document return of the noise cancelling headphones as “obvious adequate relief.”
the 80s action guy who’s totally justified in crashing dozens of cars during rush hour cause he kills the one bad guy in the end
Axel Foley is my hero!
It’s all entertainment - what I will never comprehend (though they are so simple it’s easy to understand) is how a glimpsed female nipple is a bigger problem “for the children” than GI Joe spraying a village with napalm and bullets.
roughly translates to “fuck you, got mine”.
In the US you much more frequently hear it the other way around: “I got mine, now you fuck off.” Until they “get theirs” they maintain the pretense of sociability.
The spread of the superhero (Übermenschen) to ubiquity in pop culture, especially Hollywood
You mean, like Superman (1938), Flash Gordon (1936), Captain Marvel (1941), etc.?
the cost of this kind of inviduality is.
The thing is, it’s a rare individual who “benefits” from the direction we are continuing to move in. Unless they’re a bunch of sadists who like watching the rest of the world suffer while they insulate themselves with security forces, that they can’t really trust, because where do you get the people to maintain the security?
A society where the richest can walk down High Street in London without a thought to “personal security” is better for the people at the top, too. Unless they’re sadists.
The full view thing is … interesting, unique in my experience. It’s one of the few “good” things about the recent unpleasantness. Hopefully all this blatant graft, corruption and just plain evil in clear view leads to some reforms.
Checking the year of manufacture of my daily driver laptop… 2018. It’s fine, it works well, does everything I need, just like it did 8 years ago when it was an “average” new laptop.
Oh, it’s also running Linux, I don’t know what would have happened if I left Windows on it - that got dumped in 2018 too.