I read a margin breakdown on every big box store in consumer reports and Costco was the lowest margin store there was. They make most of their money on the subscriptions.
There are also some items (beer for instance) that are drastically lower in price versus the competition. So much so that you can make your membership fee back in a couple of trips.
But yes, admittedly they do not have 100% unbelievable deals.
Yeah I question it especially because they tend to state shit like this sans evidence, and people just believe them because they are the “small government, fiscal responsibility” themed party.
You’re actually right though that lives saved would be part of the economic calculation if they were doing it, which they are not.
If I saw that obvious issue, what is their fucking problem?
The engineer’s problem is that the marketing and sales department started running all of the companies two decades ago. So, they’re constantly overruled.
Same here. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a double thick (or now triple thick 🫨) phablet that folds out into a full tablet.
The razr I bought two years ago is the first phone that comfortably fits in my pocket in like a decade.
The amount of lives saved isn’t what I was interested in. I was interested in the purportedly added cost. US car safety regulations are toothless compared to the EU. That’s partially why our roads are filled with monster truck sized pedestrian flatteners.
It’s just that capitalism rewards the worst actions taken by the worst people.
Um, unregulated garbage late stage capitalism sure. Maybe that’s all capitalism, because it does seem like it degenerates to that in every case. 🤷
The only way to build a better one is by fighting for it.
That’s exactly what democratic socialism is. It’s the fight for a better world.
It’s funny to me that folks can easily see the flaws in “the other side” but never their own side. Like, pretty obviously communism sucks in reality (the theory is well meaning) because you “have” to go through single-party socialism first, and once people get power they’re unlikely to ever give it up, but just as obviously capitalism sucks in reality because if a business has too much money and no government is enforcing antitrust it can buy up all of the competition.
That’s why you’re better off with a compromise. That compromise, IMO, is democratic socialism.
It’s fitting for 2025 that the center for disease control has the position that diseases should be out of control.
I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.
I’m not who you were originally replying to, but I think two seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.
Yes, there is definitely more content nowadays, and less people watching the same things at the same time because of all of the variety of services and content and platforms, etc.
But that content tends to still be homogenous. The settings and costumes of the shows might be different, but most content cannot pass, for instance, the bechdel test.
For all of the emphasis on “eradicating woke” in the last few years, there really isn’t a whole lot of actual diversity in most media. I could probably only name a single show that expresses, for instance, communist ideas, and I think it was cancelled in recent years alongside scores of lgbtq characters in shows.
Plotlines are typical, production values are stepped up but there’s a large amount of, for instance, ideological consistency among all media produced nowadays.
If you’re looking for a variety of typical genre shows, yes, you’re spoiled for choice. But when you’re looking for something that breaks the mold even slightly there are really only a handful of things from which to choose.
And that’s leaving out how much derivative media exists. Vince Gilligan in recent interviews even lamented how he was one of only a few people that could get a new show with a new concept even started in the industry. Many shows are set in “universes” that are decades old. A lot of “new” movies are reboots or sequels of old movies.
There’s a thread of choiceless variety that used to apply mainly to things like groceries that has now infected much of media as well. Whole political movements now push to eradicate the little diversity (ideological and character identity based) that exists.
All of this leaves out what happened to music btw, which is becoming so algorithm-driven that it’s hard for those using streaming services to even tell if it was produced by a person.
I’ll just leave this here as well:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/
Edit: I realized after a while that the easiest way to summarize the homogeneity you see in modern media is that it is supply-side oriented. Shows, movies, and music are made (or not) primarily based upon how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public’s throat.
EVs have completely killed “the car guy” to me. Like you can just buy a run-of-the-mill EV and it can easily have better overall performance characteristics, better energy efficiency, and require less maintenance than a random “sports car”.
But hey, I guess it doesn’t go “vroom-vroom”, set off everyone’s car alarm on the street when it passes, and doesn’t function as a dead giveaway that you’re an asshole creep who is having trouble masking their psychopathy.
Safety is basically self-certified in the US. What evidence is there that the extra cost is related to safety?
I understand that Republicans are often prohibited by their own belief systems to look at the profit margins of the things they occasionally pretend to want to make affordable, but in the US that’s exactly where a lot of the problem lies.
Go ahead and slant the CPI reports too you fucking stupid idiot. The only people that care about the fucking things are people on wall street. Most people shop for their own groceries and can see with their own two eyes that prices are increasing. All but the most devout of your cult members can tell you that you’re full of shit and inflation is still terrible.
Dude, I think you’re making up a guy to be mad at. People more often like AI because of vibes. There’s a fucking thing called vibe coding, and I’m supposed to take people seriously as software developers as they use the phrase.
So, then you are in favor of the disclosures?
Sounds absolutely fucking awful.
A few beers at a brewery.
However, I can’t tell you whether a suitable driver is already on board.
It likely isn’t. PC enthusiast Windows users all know that installing any device that isn’t very typical (monitors, keyboards, mice) usually involves hunting for drivers online if you didn’t keep the disk. When I buy different hardware (for example I bought a USB toslink adapter, and a USB to USB serial emulator) it most times comes with a tiny, useless little disk for Windows users.
This is generally not the case for Linux, but since you’re inexperienced with the OS you’d have no way of knowing that.
Shit works (or not, but often does) without the need to install additional drivers for every stupid little thing.
I mostly agree with this, but in corporate software the stuff mostly either doesn’t exist or is outdated to the point of basic inaccuracy.
I’m talking readmes that still have the template information in them or have stayed the same since the first commit.
IMO the best way to use this crap in software development for projects that already exist is to have the fucking things write up or amend docs.
Developers mostly hate writing docs, and in corporate software I’ve found that the docs are usually added once and then never verified again.
Writing up profuse gibberish that contains some amount of useful information is what these bullshit machines were made to do. Have it write up some docs, read them and make sure they aren’t completely insane and get a pat on the back from your boss for working with “agentic AI”.
Of course you do dude, you believe in the invisible handjob of the market.