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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. European roadworthineas tests are no joke. I would estimate that over 50 percent of U.S. cars on the road would fail a German inspection. I don’t know if Musk is the dumb one or if he’s just using this as a grift. Regardless, geological time is hard. 450 million years is twice as long as the dinosaurs were around (including several mass extinction events). Humans evolved 300k years ago. It’s just not worth thinking about. We need to gameplan how to keep our planet habitable for the next 200.
  2. Disagree on the bonehead stuff, kind of. He’ll sometimes get greedy and tends to sail the ball on long passes. He doesn’t make a lot of bad dangerous throws.
  3. Green is a real talent and it’s a shame he’s on this team. Multiple times that he got out of pressure and made a play.
  4. Decently crisp game day called for chili. Chili blend is puya, ancho, arbol. Meat is cubed chuck and pork 2-1 ratio. No tomatoes. And a quesadilla toasted in cast iron with a bit of tallow.
  5. The Hoggies have had script helmets for decades. Maybe a few years broken up but that’s the classic look, although the yellow highlights are relatively new.
  6. BBC broadcast a documentary where the narrator was the son of a Hamas Deputy Minister and didn’t bother to note that in the broadcast. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c629j5m2n01o
  7. For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
  8. Waiting is never a viable strategy with this admin, it’s an invitation to more pressure.
  9. October 7 attacker arrested in Louisiana. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/gaza-man-arrested-alleged-involvement-october-7-2023-terrorist-attacks
  10. What are you talking about man, he has double digit playoff wins. He took JMU to the FCS NC game and semis twice, he has some other wins too.
  11. Hard, hard, hard disagree and the statistics back me up. Across cultures, religions, continents rising levels of income, educational attainment, employment, and economic opportunity goes right along with declining birthrates and lower/later marriages. And that even holds true within countries— higher income and options means fewer kids. It holds true despite incentives and benefits to mothers; and in fact the most generous governments see some of the lowest birthrates. A lot going on with this but one of the big reasons is introducing other options, choices, and stability for women. They can afford to be selective with mates and when they do select, there is a preference for high-investment parenting into fewer children. The data are pretty clear, for the most part early marriage and lots of kids (and for that matter lots of kids) is poverty behavior.
  12. It does but the thing is that Bloomington is a Rockwell painting. Fantastic town and place to live.
  13. Yeah, and the earlier “good” version is not a loss leader as Vegas describes. Costco’s hot dogs are a loss leader. They get you in the door and build good will and then you buy other stuff that you need that is profitable. Enshitiffication would be if Costco sold hot dogs for a dime while overpaying for wieners at every producer so long as they only sold to Costco. Then, when the only place you can get a hot dog is Costco, they add a small dollop of shit to the “basic dog” but left it off if you upgraded to the 20 dollar dog— and at the same time reduce what they pay to the weiner producers. This is basically how big tech operates.
  14. Thursday night happy hour was lit, but all the co-workers have gone home I see.
  15. Just who Murray is. Before he shifted to caring about Gaza, he was denying that the GRU was behind the poisoning in Salisbury and was blaming NATO for Russia’s invasion. He’s a real lying asshole. FWIW I think the stats are made up as a quick search of his Twitter has him citing different numbers. I think that screenshot of his is doctored. And it of course we don’t know how many dead Ukrainian kids are in Mariupol and the tweet doesn’t mention the over 35K kidnapped Ukrainian children. Almost anytime you see someone comparing these two, it’s someone trying to deflect for Putin.
  16. That article is just about the groundwork for a UNSC resolution to authorize the force. Not the composition of it. I am very, very skeptical you will see any Western forces actually inside of Gaza.
  17. I would 100 percent support Hellfire drone strikes on Indian call centers. No one spans my phone to sell Venezuelan fentanyl.
  18. Dude, Apple is the enshitifier par excellence (I type on an iPhone). Here’s a vignette: I’m being issued a new credit card, and it’s going to be a pain in the ass for me if I decide to renew my Spotify subscription. Why? Because I can’t renew it via the app. Why can’t I renew it via the app? Because the App Store takes a 30 percent (30 percent!) vig from anything sold via an app in its App Store. So Spotify can either lose the massive global iPhone market, or it can pay the 30, or it can make the user experience shitty and I will have to go via the browser to renew (I’ve forgotten my password) and honestly I may just say fuck it at this point. And here’s the thing— Apple doesn’t charge all apps the same. Apple wants me to use Apple Music and there I can subscribe via the app. And sometimes Apple picks winners— Uber does not pay a 30 percent, but smaller ride shares do. Competition! And of course I’m totally locked into Apple. Two factor authentication. Photos. Shit in the cloud. When I need a new phone I for sure want to just image my iPhone to the new one; trying to move to Android makes me shudder. And— key point— my choices are Apple and Android, basically, for a functioning OS. And also it’s a felony to jailbreak my iPhone to move shit. Remember, iPhone is supposed to be easier. User friendly. Seamless. Unless I want to use a streaming service I like more than Apple Music. Then it’s not, and that’s enshitification. Pure rent-seeking; and we could regulate this shit and say “Apple, you basically have a monopoly on apps. You have to extend them all the same terms of use and fees.” We could say “we aren’t going to make it a felony for people to move their own data from one phone to another.” And this is everywhere. Getting commercials on Amazon Prime streaming— after you cut the cord and bought a sub— is enshitification. The entire Amazon search is a grift scheme designed to have sellers compete for how much they will pay for product placement and you the buyer have to work harder to find what you want in a sea of drop-shop slop. That’s enshitification. I am sure it’s creating shareholder value but it’s not creating value. And back to AI— what OpenAI is doing is getting OpenAI in EVERYTHING. Walmart, your bank, whatever. And then once it’s there and you can’t get a toilet plunger at the Wal-Mart without it Altman will jack up the price and reduce support and add on features to make it even more impossible to dislodge. And that’s where the shareholder value comes in. This is not “creative destruction.”
  19. Always remember that mobile providers could stop this if they chose to.
  20. I’ll come back to this. You’re not wrong, you’ve identified accurately that nearly all start-ups (especially tech) come to play with a built in enshitification model. The issues is that this is a fundamentally predatory business model that suffocates innovation and uses rent-seeking strategies to preserve monopolies and cartels. The model is: make something good for cheap, burn through VC cash till alternatives/competitors are broke, impose artificial costs to prevent customers from leaving, then make money by making the thing worse for everyone. And it’s allowed to happen because of policy and regulatory choices.
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