WesternInfidels

I worked in an American grocery store for a while, and the employees, even the managers, did not take cooler temperatures seriously. They were eager to shrug off, make excuses for, anomalies. Because they were too busy, and a freezer meltdown (which happened as the result of malfunctions more than once) was a ton of work, a huge disruption.

Far from saving money, I’m sure an automatic monitoring and control system that raised an alarm at headquarters would have cost that store more money. But it also would have resulted in better monitoring. It would have done a better job than the people who were avoiding that job were doing.

Much later, I worked at an engineering sub-contractor for a hospital equipment manufacturer. One of my projects included adding automatic temperature monitoring and logging to some pretty simple OR appliances. Humans were supposed to be checking the temperatures of these things on a regular basis, but I got the notion that we weren’t trying to save staffing costs so much as we were trying to make sure the mandated monitoring actually happened. Who really has time to check the temperature of the blood cabinet every hour? When things get busy, that’s the kind of thing that gets skipped first. If anyone was even taking it seriously in the first place.

have prioritized large trucks and SUVs because they get better profit margins

And we have tariffs to thank for that, in no small part.

…it is important to note that shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law.

– The Dumbest Business Idea Ever. The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value, By Lynn Stout

To the English-speaking world and probably beyond.

My Windows 2000 machine had 512MB of RAM. With it I could browse the web, run full-featured word processors, scan images, edit images, play 3D games, edit / compile / debug C and C++ programs, and so on.

If memory serves, my office machine about that time only had 128MB of RAM. It was slower, but it could do just about all of that stuff, too.

I’m not sure there are any broad categories of tasks I use computers for today that I wasn’t already using my Windows 2000 machine for back in 2001 or so.

It’s hard to fathom where all the RAM in modern systems goes. A million somethings is a lot. A million bytes is a huge amount of information. War And Peace is under four million characters.

The reality: “Nobody stops to fuel their vehicle taking gasoline, gets out, rushes as fast as possible, puts as much fuel in the car as possible, and gets back in the car and drives away,” Cutler said.

Say what? Outside of a long road trip, that’s very much what I do every time. I haven’t been into the store at my gas station in years. I’m hardly alone, I see plenty of other people fill up and leave.

The “charging problem” is most completely addressed by doing less driving. Obviously.

Sounds like big oil propaganda you’re spouting. These are the kinds of talking points I hear from right-wing media.

You don’t like some issue I’m bringing up, so you’re attacking me instead of the issue. Who does that remind you of?

the headline doesn’t claim that the total expense drops to ⅑th, it says the cost to drive it does

Yes, your objection would make perfect sense if the headline was all about the cost to drive a stolen car.

[depreciation] might be something that a fleet manager would care about, but the average driver wouldn’t consider in a hundred years

This is just so completely wrong I don’t know what to say. Have you owned a car? Have you bought a new car? Have you ever sat down and penciled out the numbers to see what you could afford? Have you spent any time budgeting for your household? Have you ever checked out a cost-to-own calculator for cars, of which there are many online? Have you perused any consumer advice on car buying?

Depreciation comes up, to put it mildly.

People who actually buy new cars* – the only people who matter, as far as the market goes – think about this quite a lot, because they’re usually planning to trade in after five years, or three years, or what-have-you. Depreciation is reason schmucks like me can afford an (old) car at all.

* i.e., not me

By “nine times cheaper,” they mean the fuel for the EV can cost as little as 1/9th as much as the fuel for a gasoline / petrol car.

That’s great, as far as it goes, but depreciation per mile is usually a bigger cost than fuel. Other costs like registration taxes, insurance, and maintenance shouldn’t be expected to follow this 1/9th pattern either, of course. You’re not going to switch to an EV and find your total expense drops to 1/9th.

It feels to me like they’re telling an incomplete story on purpose.

Yes, it kinda does! Isn’t that crummy?

Years ago, in the early 20-teens, I had posted on HN in protest to some new web property that aimed to tie yet another aspect of life to cell phones. I said something like “I work in software but I still don’t have a cell phone, I don’t like them, I don’t want one, I don’t want yet another aspect of modern life to encourage dependence on some subscription service like a phone.” Which was all true.

This attracted rather more reaction than anything else I posted on there. The reactions fell into a few categories:

1. I don’t believe you, liar, why would you post this
2. I have no sympathy for you, loser, go buy a phone
3. Fuck you

Any illusion I had that the HN people were software-loving geeks like me kind of dissolved after that, and I stopped visiting. I suppose that’s exactly what they wanted.

People in positions of privilege very often tell on themselves when they dismiss anything that challenges their worldview as “political,” and therefore inappropriate for whatever “no politics, please” forum they’re in. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid, but it does mean they’re stunted. They would be better leaders if they had broader horizons.

When the law comes for little people, they call this civil forfeiture.

When the law comes for the bigwigs… we don’t have a name for that. Because it doesn’t go down that way.

Did you know, if you use uBlock origin, you can add these to your “My Filters” custom filter list:

||facebook.com^  
||instagram.com^  

And you’ll never accidentally surf to one of those again?

Meta’s content moderation system stepped in … on the grounds that it violated a rule on promoting “social topics…”

Advertising is social by its very nature and I can’t imagine any sort of serious ad that wouldn’t fall under that “social” umbrella.

An ad that suggested “Stay home and do nothing” would still be a case of one human being reaching out to another human being.

I know my reasoning isn’t going to make Meta crumble, but I do want to make it clear how dishonest and craven this is.

But but but the machine God moves through me, you see. My hands are his hands. My undertakings are God’s will.

“Yellow journalism” is a 19th century term, even.

I voted Harris, but I really suspect that hypothetical better timeline would still have homelessness, a medical care crisis, and also space weapons.

No no no no. You evil tech bros are supposed to be endlessly re-inventing trains. Did you even study in evil tech bro school, bro?

We would all be better off if we collectively pretended that Tan didn’t exist.