Burning waste qualifies as recycling.
I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.
How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it “put ads here, here and here”.
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes “I know this guy, they’re an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I’ll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face”. Someone else yells “I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn’t bought one yet.”
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That’s extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
And how you’re tracked online. I’ve worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don’t see you,the user, and your data.
I just click “female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone” and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they’re super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that’s advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won’t even get into the audience side of things and they’ll stick to keywords: they’ll show you an ad because you searched for “autumn home decor” and that’s all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don’t have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don’t understand it, and it’s true, they don’t have time… so then Google takes your “autumn wreath” keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for “Christmas trees”, because they’re both seasons and they’re both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn’t interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn’t fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren’t there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It’s fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it’s bad for everyone except Google.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.
The worms in those strawberries are just some extra protein.
And that is why the Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries!
Not worried about that as much as things that scurry. Barf.
If you want to feel the thrill of hunting some scurrying critters for extra protein, you can get the protein activity package. It’s normally only 17.99 €, but if you also bring a friend, you get a -50% discount.
Wow on sale! Sign me u— waitaminit…
Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.
At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).
It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.
IMO, for the average, healthy customer, the sanitation requirements are overkill. But not every customer is, so the rules help protect the less healthy customers.
The biggest thing about food, is most of it is pasteurized by the cooking. Raw foods like salads are the ones that need a much higher standard.
I can guarantee you that many of the rules keep even healthy guests with solid immune systems from getting sick or even dying. The FDA Food Code is like 700 pages. There are A LOT of rules. Many seem overkill from a layman’s perspective, but they protect against unlikely but serious consequences. There are a ton of ways that contamination can occur, even after the food has already been cooked.
That you don’t notice is just a good sign that you’re eating at safe places.
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
I’m not sure I understand what happened here. Was this all just because the receptionist didn’t want to ask for approval because it seemed like a hassle?
Yep… at least that was my guess. Didn’t want to pull the specialist back out of what she was then doing/didn’t want the hassle. But I was adamant that we weren’t going anywhere until she checked.
Some people are just finicky and I can’t really say for sure what her deal was, but her demeanor was just rude and like she didn’t have the time of day to give us…
What a fucking bizarre attitude to have when working in healthcare. Laziness in that area can cause deaths.
It’s more prevalent in the industry than you’d like to think… Burnout is often linked with lack of empathy.
I worked exclusively with adults whose illness was severe enough that they were residing in various residential care facilities (RCFs) and assisted living facilities (ALFs) in my region.
I was a 3rd party and a mandated reporter and I can’t tell you how many times I hotlined facilities and did internal/DMH/DHSS reporting/assistance with investigations. Misallocation of Client funds was a common problem (especially at specific RCFs), medication errors/stealing Residents’ meds, neglect of facilities/cleaning, improper nutrition, and abuse and neglect were all too common…
At first I thought the same thing when I started that position, wondering why someone like that would even take those positions. But people are complicated and often shitty. Some people like to power trip, some people want to take advantage of the disadvantaged, some people’s self-care is so neglected by being over-worked that they no longer have the capacity, and some people are just assholes…
Technically not my industry anymore, but: companies that sell human-generated AI training data to other companies most often are selling data that a) isn’t 100% human generated or b) was generated by a group of people pretending to belong to a different demographic to save money.
To give an example, let’s say a company wants a training set of 50,000 text utterances of US English for chatbot training. More often than not, this data will be generated using contract workers in a non-US locale who have been told to try and sound as American as possible. The Philippines is a common choice at the moment, where workers are often paid between $1-2 an hour: more than an order of magnitude less what it would generally cost to use real US English speakers.
In the last year or so, it’s also become common to generate all of the utterances using a language model, like ChatGPT. Then, you use the same worker pool to perform a post-edit task (look at what ChatGPT came up with, edit it if it’s weird, and then approve it). This reduces the time that the worker needs to spend on the project while also ensuring that each datapoint has “seen a set of eyes”.
Obviously, this makes for bad training data – for one, workers from the wrong locale will not be generating the locale-specific nuance that is desired by this kind of training data. It’s much worse when it’s actually generated by ChatGPT, since it ends up being a kind of AI feedback loop. But every company I’ve worked for in that space has done it, and most of them would not be profitable at all if they actually produced the product as intended. The clients know this – which is perhaps why it ends up being this strange facade of “yep, US English wink wink” on every project.
I used to work as a contractor for an environmental remediation firm. All the waterways that you joke about not swimming in are actually full of some awful carcinogen. Old industrial plants dumped awful chemicals for years and years. Some of these issues are being slowly addressed, but regulation is always well behind the science. But often, if the liability is significant enough, companies will spend millions of dollars a year to kick the can down the road doing studies and monitoring so that they can avoid what would be hundreds of millions to actually remediate the problem.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.
And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.
I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%
Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.
It really doesn’t matter which one unless it’s like super high end. And you’ve almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.
Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
Sounds like it’d be pretty simple to just replace it and not tell them. If they tell you they know it should’ve broken down by now, just ask, “Why, did you intentionally sell me something defective?”
Psst, that’s another secret
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
You didn’t talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.
While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.
The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.
You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.
You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.
The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.
Truth
The past decade of the tech industry has felt very snakeoil-y.
INB4 “It always has been.”
What’s sad is there are plenty of actual problems out there that could be solved with software. Most of the time they’re not that ‘sexy’ and management is so blinded by greed that they throw away all the good opportunities.
I think it started with registry cleaners.
Those weren’t really pushed as a get-rich-quick scheme, which a lot of the hustle seems to be currently.
Oh, you’re thinking of crypto to junk. Nah, Fudge That.
If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.
Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.
Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.
React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?
This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.
It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.
