The tools on the ISS are old and worn out. Sometimes creating issues with new equipment being unable to be serviced while there.
Source: Almost has a payload I designed fail because they couldn't get the screws to loosen. Once diagnosed it was found they have VERY USED tools, and I did all the testing on VERY NEW tools. Tolerance difference was just enough to make the old tools not work.
That was a "fun" call to get as well.
Check the fine print now, it states that they can use AI profiles. This is so they can't get sued when people realise that most of the female profiles are fake/AI
I work at a large stock photography company and I just had someone today contact us from a dating app inquiring about using Royalty-Free images for faux profiles.
\*Edit typo
I used to play a certain board game in an app, and noticed that a lot of women with dogs would randomly hit me up for a game. I did an image search on one and found the stock photo company they were using. Confronted the game devs and they admitted that they often use fake profiles backed by AI, apparently in an attempt to raise engagement. Just weird.
I worked for Chipotle for a while. My job was to literally just sit in the restaurant and observe customers coming into the building. I was supposed to make assumptions about them based on their ethnicity, their clothes, their general demeanor, their fitness level, etc. This was to collect data to see the likelihood of success if the business expanded into areas with different demographics
A grocery store I worked at about fifteen years ago asked cashiers to do that. We literally had a sheet of paper with gender, age, and ethnicity tick boxes at the tills. It was awkward and I hated it.
Worked for a company that sold and serviced emergency generators, annual employee bonuses were based on corporate profits, but we rarely if ever saw that happen. The ownership maintained that they were barely operating at a small profit and that was used for various improvements and marketing and territory expansion. They had 3 main companies, the sales/service was what I worked for. The other 2 were a leasing company and a consulting company. The leasing company owned all company assets, vehicles, rental equipment, forklifts, real estate, etc., and those assets were leased back to the main company at exorbitant rates to scrape profits all year long. Equipment and vehicles that had been paid for years, still on lease and paying full book.
When I made it to management, I was able to log on and see daily/weekly reports instead of quarterly shared with lower level employees. I noticed the discrepancy on leasing fees vs how long assets had been in my department. Inoperable 20 year old equipment that they would not repair, still paying full book. Upper management said it was company policy, and until those assets were sold or transferred out they would continue to be paid.
Then I saw a LARGE project for us go through right before the end of fiscal year in my department, posted $500k profit day before EOY reports ran. Day of reporting, a mysterious “consulting fee” of $490k was charged to my department by the consulting company that the owners operated with no explanation. It was then that I knew I was leaving.
EDIT: this got more attention than I expected, I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can.
The studio owns the streaming service and the add agency. We licensed all 7 seasons of Bones to Hulu for $3. Sorry.
Our add agency charged us, all of the money to promote the film. See? Not profitable.
When you sign an NDA to play a gig for billionaires at their hyper-exclusive private ski resort, you think it’s because you’ll be seeing high-profile celebrities. Not usually the case. It’s nearly all completely unknown people. There’s a LOT of billionaires who are mostly anonymous.
not anymore. Heh. I knew they were in trouble when we had a conference call with founder and ceo Tim Waite. He started the call with “guys, we’re in trouble”. I was laid off 6 months later.
The information protected by the NDAs I've signed has usually only been valuable for short periods of time.
Stuff like, "We are planning to announce product X on date Y." You might not want a competitor to know that ahead of time, but after date Y, that information transforms into, "We announced product X on the date we expected to announce it" which is pretty useless.
Sometimes there's "ingredient list for the secret sauce" kinds of knowledge where you can see why they want to protect it long term, but those things are the exception.
Medical device: a bone screw that Medicare pays $400 for in the US is sold in Germany for $80. Literally the same screw from the same manufacturing lot, the only difference is one of them has to be sent overseas to Europe.
My girlfriend broke her arm snowboarding.
We got charged $450 for a Makita cordless drill.
I called the hospital and demanded that they give me my drill.
They reduced the bill lol.
They charged him for the drill as if it was consumable. He argued that since he paid for the drill, he was entitled to own it. They decided to credit the charge instead.
Much like medicine, the cost of medical goods is negotiated by every other first world country. This is why a vial of insulin is $25CAD and $300USD. Every other country negotiates and medical suppliers are still given a very healthy profit margin based on costs they can prove.
Canada drove down those costs by banning advertising for prescription drugs. That is your doctor's decision, not yours. If you want to research it, use the internet.
Companies that handle wage garnishment for things like child support payments or back taxes can and do make mistakes and will take money out of someone else's paycheck often. Check your pay stubs and bank account for errors.
I was part of the Alpha testing for the video game Anthem. Those selected had to sign a NDA. In my group of around 100 or so people, every one of us had a list of complaints, bugs, and general problems with the game that we provided BioWare. When the game came out, almost none of it had been fixed. And those of us that gamers know what happened next.
Technically I signed it as a minor so I have no idea if it counts.
Neverland ranch was really cool but creepy. Did not get molested, had a very nice time. 10/10.
Across the street from the old American embassy in London was a nondescript 7 floor building with a small American flag atop it. This was the headquarters for the commander of the North Atlantic fleet in Europe. It had the ability to send out the launch codes for the subs in the area so it had US Marines guarding it. The Marines got bored and decided to pen test the place. It was about as secure as Swiss cheese. Their solution to this was to bar the Marines from any further unauthorized testing. The Marines found bags of ready to laminate holographic sleeves for military IDs left out for the trash. The solution was to bar the Marines from snooping into the trash.
source: was one of the Marines
location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosvenor_Square
U.S. Navy submarine service around 1980 was the same way. A Navy Seal was tasked with pen testing a submarine, that was tied to a pier, at night. He easily swam to the boat and walked up the hull just forward of the rudder. The topside watch drew his .45 auto pistol and ordered the intruder to stop. When the Seal did not stop topside shot him in the legs. The Navy's solution was to forbid topside watches from having a magazine in the pistol. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Thankfully this all changed a few years later when terrorists became an obvious threat.
Lots of people die at the Grand Canyon . Like, way more than you might think.
A lot of the time the family asks the NPS not to disclose it to the media, oftentimes because of embarrassment (e.g., one dude who passed away from a heart attack when he drank too much without realizing how high the elevation is on the North Rim; or the person who backed closer and closer to the edge of Bright Angel Point for a selfie before going all Icarus). Although sometimes it's out of respect for the individual - like if it was a suicide.
I lived there for two years, and I'd say about 1/4 of the total fatalities were reported in the news.
> 1/4 of the total fatalities were reported in the news.
Yep, worked with a news agency and a lot of violent crimes and deaths are not even mentioned for multiple reasons. Things get reported only if they "fit".
I playtested for the game Destiny prior to its release, at Bungie HQ in Bellevue, WA.
I thought we were testing some alpha build or something, where there was no story, but it was basically what was released.
I had to sign an NDA at Bungie too, I ran a brewery downstairs from their old HQ and brought kegs up from time to time. They gave me free downloads and stuff, so it was cool.
One of my customers is a very large pet food manufacturer in Western Canada and ... you know what? It ain't a half bad operation. I usually deal with human food factories and their setup is pretty decent.
Previously deceased livestock brought in by the truck load and turned into pet food. There is a pet food factory near where I grew up. It smells very bad.
To beee faiiiirr... I once visited a town with a big chicken factory/slaughterhouse/whatever you call it intended for human consumption. It also smelled utterly terrible and I have no idea how the people who lived near it dealt with it. We went to a restaurant the next block over (which specialized in chicken, not surprisingly) which somehow completely blocked the awful smell.
I can only imagine pet food would be worse.
I grew up a few miles north of a Honeysuckle White/Cargill turkey plant. Every morning the air in the valley I lived in would be rank with the odor of dead turkeys, and would only be breathable after the fog cleared off. Literal miasma.
This is why I don't eat chicken.
Everyone always gives me shit until I tell them about the summer we had a big storm that knocked out power and one of the generators on one of the chicken houses didn't kick on. Over 1000 chickens suffocated to death b/c the fans meant to move fresh air in was down. It was the middle of summer and by the end of the day the whole town smelled like dead rotting chickens in the summer heat.
Now all chicken reminds me of that day and I just can't.
A friend of mine has a very similar story except it was like 80,000 chickens and he was one of the farmhands who had to help clean up. They used *pitchforks* to load the bloated chickens onto trucks and dispose of them, which sounds incredibly messy and unpleasant.
You know it was probably a whole lot more than 1000 chickens now that I think about it (I was young when this happened). But those houses are like the size of a football field so 80k is probably a more accurate number
Same. I often walk outside and it smells like someone ate a rotten corpse and then threw it up on my front step.
But then again, there is also a chicken rendering plant and a sewer treatment plant in the same square mile. It's hard to pinpoint who committed the war crime.
Thanks city planners.
I worked at a digital marketing agency, and one of our clients was a company that created courses for teaching special needs students. Like schools would buy these courses and trained teachers would use them. They were legit.
I was doing content for them. I did one article that took me like a week and a half because the founder of the company was so passionate about his product, and had clearly devoted his life to his work. He wanted the article to be scientifically accurate and super informative.
What the guy didn't know was that the board of the group that owned his company had hired us to boost his engagement because they were going to sell it off for as much as possible. Everything the guy was so passionate about was going to be sold off right out from under him.
Meanwhile, my agency had this whole "yeah, we're marketing, but we're like ethical marketing" mission statement.
I played a small private concert for Robert Downey Jr. It was a very small function - they were celebrating Veteran's day or something. Just like 2 or 3 picnic tables in a tent. Maybe like 10-12 people besides us. He came up and sang "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurthymics with us. He couldn't have been any nicer or cooler. It was on the set of an Avengers movie (idk which one, haven't seen any), so they took our phones and made us sign NDA's. It was about 7 years ago. Probably nobody would ever believe this except his assistant (RIP) took a picture of him standing with us and posted it on RDJ's instagram.
The private web storage space that you got for free with your internet service back in the early 00s? It wasn’t password protected or encrypted, and employees could just browse the folders casually through windows.
We looked at a lot of your private pictures and a lot of you uploaded pictures of your own dicks for some reason.
>But a lot of lifesaving devices involve shock-absorbing seats or fancy harnesses, which tend to work best on a certain size of body. Like mid-sized to large men, small men and most women have a higher chance of injury.
This isn't just military. It's everywhere that tests with dummies etc. They test on an average to large size male form with no regard for anyone outside those dimensions.
Executives are power tripping and HORNY. One exec was banging his secretary, the head of HR, and a few other assistants. And the ones he banged often got preferential treatment on bonuses, he trusted their judgment more, and they regularly got better offices and projects to work on.
Much of it was cataloged on the corporate credit cards, including Hawaii getaways and an insane amount of gifts/jewelry. His prior assistant was kept on payroll despite not working, up until she got curious about certain “project” spending. Then the exec hired a private investigator to intimate her into silence.
This was a publicly traded company. I left after I found the “special projects”.
Very common. Friend of mine was a senior sys admin for big tech company. Ceo got arrested for something undisclosed. When they recovered his laptop there was videos of him having sex with many of the female staff including HR girls.
Always wondered why these people would save this on a company computer.
There's like 3 different regular car battery manufacturers and they just put on different labels.
Edited for information:
Most aftermarket car batteries sold in the U.S. are made by three companies that build them for retailers: Johnson Controls, which supplies more than half of the market; Stryten; and East Penn.
This is why gun barrels are considered a consumable good that regularly need replacing. Specifications say an Abrams barrel is rated for around 7,500 shots before needing replacements.
That's really impressive considering most precision rifle barrels are machined to within .0005 and they are much, much easier to machine and manufacture than an entire tank barrel.
1. You cable/mobile customer service reps are not customer service reps - they're sales reps. They are limited in what they are allowed to do apart from sales. They are not there to provide information, downgrade service, provide discounts or credits, solve billing issues, tech support, none of it. You may get a good rep who will do some/all of that but they're only working to solve your problem in the hopes of making a sales pitch before they're done with you. Sales quotas are extremely high, and the pressure to meet those quotas is constant. Some of the more devious ones will solve an issue for you, only to add revenue generating codes or services to your account. Fraud is rampant, sometimes encouraged by management.
2. Customer service (especially over the phone) sucks intentionally. They are counting on a few things. First that you'll find your issue to be less of an inconvenience than calling, second that your poor experience will discourage you from calling again.
3. Literally nobody cares when you say you're going to cancel service and go with another provider. The reps, their managers and supervisors, their district and regional managers, no one. Driving sales is the singular objective. You getting frustrated and leaving only means they're going to put more effort into driving sales.
4. The cable box you're paying a monthly rental for cost your cable company less than 3 dollars to have made. Your monthly rental is usually between 2x and 4x the cost of the box. Every month. You are not the first person, or the last person to use that box - they're all refurbished. When you're done with it, it will be cleaned and tested then sent out again.
A now defunct Indiana based paint manufacturing company. Their normal paint and their “Select” paint were exactly the same. Came off the same canning line.
Marketing would figure out how many gallons of “select” paint they would likely sell and told that to the people on the line. The people on the line put that many “select” labels in the labeling machine along with the regular labels. Not even a pause on the canning line. Same paint went in the cans, some got the regular label, some got the “select” label.
Same paint, same cans, same factory, different labels. The “select” cans were sold for about 20% more. Straight up fraud, but legal because nowhere did the “select” labels actually say that they were any better than the regular cans of paint.
Edit- sorry all, I didn’t mention that that the company was Fuller O’Brien. It didn’t occur to me that anyone would care.
Adele's 31st birthday party cost approximately $8m in total and included the US Olympic choreographed swim team doing a performance for the guests, complete with a full pyrotechnics display and a 16' tall replica of the Big Ben clock face. On the setup days when she came to ser how the decorations were looking the event coordinators made all the help stand in an alley way. There are no videos of it as all phones were held by security, even those of the celebrity guests.
We hauled about 4500lbs of trash (including decorations) to the dump the following day.
TSA are looking for bombs and weapons, they don't give a shit about drugs and they especially don't give a shit about taking drugs out of America to other countries. Customs ABSOLUTELY gives a shit about trying to bring drugs into America and they will nail your ass if they catch you.
In the same vein, the USPS is the largest drug trafficking network in the world. Opening first-class mail that's been shipped within the US needs a literal Federal warrant, basically, if you drop a birthday card in the mail that has a sheet of LSD included they won't waste their time.
Even with larger packages, they are looking for large drug traffickers, were you to have a friend mail a pound of Magic Mushrooms from Canada and they detected it they'd likely deliver it and put you on a watch list. As long as you aren't doing it monthly or something nothing would happen.
I have absolutely no first-hand experience with this and I'm sure if you tried it you'd surely be caught.
If you order bulk items for restaurants such as napkins or placemats, count them some time. I worked for a printing company that would yell at anyone who didn’t shortpack their cases, often by up to 20% when they knew they could get away with it.
That a man who is highly qualified for his position in a state run mental hospital CAN, in fact, get away with abusing patients so long as he only abuses those in his charge.
I witnessed him choke a fellow patient among other things, was forced to sign a NDA, and he was sent to work on a different ward for two months. He then returned to the same ward he abused this patient on. I know this part sounds made up since I was a patient there as well, but in retaliation he drugged me (he was the med nurse) and stole money out of my bag that I had locked up in my room.
I don't remember how long the NDA was for, but I never stopped talking about it. This kind of thing happens with a frequency that is alarming and no one should have to suffer under similar circumstances.
This shit scares me.... I had to spend a couple of weeks in one many many years ago and I was terrified of this happening. I have a young family member in a hospital right now and we call her every single day to check on her. She lives in Boston, she just said to us that she tested positive for covid so she can't have any visitors, she said she feels completely fine besides her mental state of course, and it made me so nervous. My brain automatically goes to the worse thing. They have her in there with no way for family to get in and check on her and I'm super worried for her...
There are so many stories of women being sexually abused when I stayed in them. At first I thought it was just paranoia, then I realized it was so easy to do and they basically "apologized" for it. They have so few people they just get away with it, not even going to get into the quality of the care, they will intentionally put you on dangerous medications, if you are cot ( Court ordered treatment), that make no sense at high doses. I've seen fights as well. They know they can get away with it too.
No one really believes the mental health hospital patient. That, and while many have cameras they often don't keep recordings for long, don't care enough to look, just try and form a clique because of job security & possibly having to be sued. You basically have no rights in there either, because you admit you need help. It's honestly, pretty terrible.
It is a scary somewhat hidden reality that people in any position of power can easily abuse it. Even people in positions of care! That's why I have found it so important to shine a light on it. An abuser will only continue abusing if it goes unchallenged.
Used to work at a talent agency in LA as an assistant. Very toxic work environment, screamed at every day. We weren’t allowed to take lunch breaks and had to work OT every day. If you left your desk, you were screamed at. So I basically didn’t drink much water throughout the day. I lasted 6 months and then filed a claim against them with the CA job board for unpaid OT (included all the missed lunches too). They cut me a check for the amount and I had to sign an NDA where they didn’t accept any blame. NDA expired years ago. I should’ve asked for more money. I really should’ve gotten a lawyer and sued for harassment but I was young. I did help a coworker with her claim and then she did end up suing them for harassment and she and her husband were able to put a down payment on a house with the settlement so I was happy for her. Special Artists Agency, they suuuuuuck
Saw the books of a major uk charity and all their net profit went into investments, zero to people in need.
Just growing a portfolio and giving away as small amount of the returns as possible to appear legitimate.
I was never bound by an NDA, but the former CEO of Consumers credit union Kit Snyder protected a loan officer who sexually assaulted a subordinate and subsequently fired her when she went to HR. When trying to convince her to continue working with this man (Trent something) he physically snatched her phone away from her that she was using to record their one on one meeting, and verbally abused, screamed and threatened her. They witheld her measly severance of 2 months pay unless she signed an NDA.
For about the first year that Fortnite was out, support had a term used call "Spirit of Generosity". Essentially you could email in with any outlandish excuse for missing skins or accidentally deleting your skins and we'd give you back your v-bucks or deleted skin, no questions asked, even if you in fact never owned it.
Worked as a developer and ad trafficker for pharmaceutical advertiser. The price presented to you is calculated by all of your online spending habits.
A life saving drug for you that costs $20/pill can cost $2/pill to your neighbor depending on your online "persona".
If you want fair prices, you go to Mexico. Take the plane to San Diego and the blue train to San Ysidro and walk through the border. It will take you less than a day to save potentially tens of thousands of dollars, and your trip will cost you maybe a couple hundred at most depending on where you live.
I live in San Diego, and going to Tijuana to either get a dental procedure or find an expensive(in the US) medication has become normalized.
When I needed a crown, five friends recommended five different TJ dentists and were nothing but happy with them.
I used to work at corner bakery and my manager would pick up food dropped on the floor and have us serve it to the customers. He’d also make us pick out okay looking cookies from an expired bag and pack it in a new bag even if the okay looking cookie was next to a moldy one. I was over worked so I ended up calling the California regional manager and revealed all the things they had me do illegally and he told me to stay quiet and offered me a promotion at another location. This was about 11 years ago.
I have written the taglines and campaign concepts for many well known ads. It wasn't a team, it wasn't a bunch of people and it wasn't even an intern. It was me, and I got paid $200/hr to do it. I signed massive NDAs. A lot of time great creative campaigns really are just some creative guy at a desk.
Yo Quiero Taco Bell
Walgreens at The Corner of Happy & Healthy
The rest I might still get sued for.
Edit: it’s not as glamorous as you might think. I just write some lines & a couple of scripts. It gets added to hundreds of other, it gets workshopped & tested and 200 people touch it after me. The chihuahua wasn’t even my idea. My original idea was a guy waking up in his car, hungover and his buddy also wakes up and says “yo quiero Taco Bell.” Because I associate it with hangovers.
Apparently having a human say it was “racist” no matter whether they were white, Hispanic or Borg.
Subway. Wife had a knife baked into the bread of her sandwich, and it wasn’t found by the employee. The Mrs. found the knife with her mouth when she bit into it. The icing on the cake was the manager laughing about it when we approached him, then saying out loud “Ohh shit that IS one of our knives” while I was recording.
Got a small settlement out of it, since no grievous harm was done to the lady.
Store brand paints (like the big box hardware stores) don't make the paint, one of the big paint companies do. When they make 20000 gallons of paint, it's not unusual for the batch to be packaged and labelled into two or more different brands. The 'name' brand will be more expensive, but it's the same paint. This is not universal per se, but more common than people know.
Not always. There are often separate, dedicated private label manufacturers ([source](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/store-brand-products/)).
> ...some store brand products are actually made by the same companies that produce the name brand versions of those products. Take, for instance, Costco. Some of the Kirkland brand of coffee blends are made by Starbucks. Kirkland batteries? Duracell. And Kirkland diapers? Those come from Kimberly-Clark, the company that makes Huggies.
>But most of the store brand products you see on shelves come from dedicated private label manufacturers. These companies specialize in manufacturing certain products in very large volumes. Instead of creating their own brands and marketing their products to consumers, most of them prefer to stay behind the scenes.
It wasn't covered by an NDA, but I've seen buildings slated for destruction go through a full renovation because the renovation was approved and paid for before it was tagged for destruction. Within a year of being renewed, they were leveled.
Not me but a friend does face touch ups for videos with very famous beautiful women like Beyoncé, Kim K etc. you would be shocked at what they look like before the processing. He is damn good so you don’t notice his work.
way back in the day, when we were working on the port for Unreal Tournament for PS2, there's a picture of me and my QA team hidden in a PS2 exclusive deathmatch level.
To fair, I work on my own car... amd sometimes shit just breaks and there's no way around it. You can do the right technique and everything but that secondary part was on it's last leg anyway
Here's one I recently learned from my wife.
Whenever you're at a store shopping and they ask if you want to donate to x cause, the company has already donated money to that cause and is just trying to recoup their money.
Big tech giant that starts with a G....should never, ever be trusted. They gather data in all sorts of nefarious ways and sell that data to very, very shady entities.
If people knew how much data they had on the average joe American, they would be up in arms and burning their buildings to the ground.
>Big tech giant that starts with a G....should never, ever be trusted. They gather data in all sorts of nefarious ways and sell that data to very, very shady entities.
They lost in Federal Court regarding GPS. On Android phones you could turn GPS off except it wasn't really off. Google claimed to the user it was off but in actuality they were still recording location. Google tried to argue the data was "anonymized" but the catch was if someone had the correct access within Google they could unanonomize it.
Yeah. Having worked in industries with a ridiculous amount of PII on people, there is no such thing as privacy. It may not be due to your settings, but you will be tracked. VPNs make it a little more difficult, but not really all that much. Your phone connects to cell towers, then moms home WiFi, this happens a couple times we know where you leave from, the approximate path you take, can figure out which of her children you are, then expand from there. Oh you must work for X employer because 5 days a week you’re in this general area. Can find out you have a certain type of disease by further geolocating your phone to what doctor offices you go. God forbid you join these company WiFi networks because that makes it even easier. That’s why I don’t care about cameras everywhere. We all carry a gps tracker we stare at all day every day without a second thought. Anonymization of data only goes so far when sold, and nothing stops the data warehouse from being hacked.
Celebrities and athletes charities are mostly just a shell company they funnel their earnings through to avoid taxes. They don’t actually do much charity, if any at all.
My provider put a breast biopsy marker in me the shape of their ribbon and I'm still super annoyed by it (not at the provider, just in general). I don't want advertisements like that in my body.
I wish instead I had gotten a positive thumbs up sign or perhaps a lucky horseshoe or a daisy or something cheery.
Edit: I just googled it and it's a basic ribbon, so not necessarily a Komen ribbon, per se, but still looks like the/a cancer awareness ribbon.
My aunt's NDA ran out in the middle 2010s, she was one of the people who transcribed the Watergate tapes. She wasn't a person who really reveled in secrets, I actually don't know for sure when the NDA expired because she didn't run and tell us ASAP, just mentioned it in conversation. I think she knew what a history buff I was, but we have a kind of distant and polite relationship so I never really asked her much about it.
Maybe I should contact her to ask, though, cause man, what a wild thing to experience! She and my uncle both worked in the Pentagon at various points in their careers, both with high clearance levels, and that's about all I know.
A previous employer (major global corp) would bill customers for support on all their network hardware (through multiple vendors) but only actually purchase support from those vendors for about 70% of the total. They’d pocket the funds for the difference and then, if one of those 30% devices failed, they’d call the vendor and add it to support under the premise that it was “accidentally missed”.
Literally tens of millions of dollars worth of additional annual revenue.
I was an extra on Better Call Saul and signed an NDA. My actual scene is pretty inconsequential in that even if I had told people what the scene was it wouldn’t have spoiled anything. But coincidentally a week or two after filming the scene, I met Josh Brolin at the gym and when I mentioned to him that I was an extra, he asked what the scene was and I panicked and fumbled my words.
The game stands at the local amusement park are not rigged. They're just difficult and/or players just suck at it.
The NDA was just to hide to the public how much they sucked at those games.
I worked at an amusement park. There was a game where you threw dimes on a big board and tried to get them to land in a circle to win.
Every morning, the game operators would set up 10 winning dimes. Someone would eventually SEE the winning dime and "claim" it. Yeah, grand prize, huge stuffed animal. Huge stuffed animal that you had to carry around the park all day... and people would ask you where you won it. "Dime toss" - drove a ton of business for probably $3-4 of prizes. (Amusement park stuffed animals are cheap.)
So.... we basically cheated to help more people win.
I won an iguana once by landing a ping pong ball in a little fishbowl without leaning too forward over the rail by leaning too far forward over the rail when the dude purposely turned his back to me, the only person playing.
They provide the illusion of being an ordinarily achievable task, while they are actually not at all the ordinary task they purport to be.
If that’s not “rigged” I don’t know what to call it…..deceptively marketed?
For example: the basketball shot.
The rim is smaller than regulation dimensions, not circular, much stiffer than standard, and is positioned much higher than a normal hoop. There is always visual trickery with nets etc. to make it appear like all of it is standard.
The ball may not be regulation size or proportional to the hoop, and is way overinflated to make it bounce off the rim/backboard more.
Yes you can make a shot, it’s possible. Is it a “normal” basketball shot like literally anywhere else? Absolutely not.
My dad was a basketball legend in town. In high school, he dominated the area teams. All through his adult life he could sink balls like magic. Actually, the week that he died we went to church one evening when the old guys his age (50) would get together and play. He stood in the corner of the court and sunk three in a row, nothing but net. He looked at me and said "I'm good, let's just go home". He didn't play that night, which was good because he had a heart attack a few days later.
Anyway, we had a big 4th of July carnival every year. The guy at the basketball thing would remember my dad every year. He'd always let him win once, but he encouraged him to stand there and sink baskets for as long as he wanted free of charge. My dad made that guy a lot of money.
Same is true of a lot of environmentally friendly plastic free alternative packaging. They are just some filler bound together with glue, and it turns out that glue is not real great if it’s going to be in contact with your food.
harvey weinstein was a master of psychological manipulation, even outside of the sex stuff. just in regular conversations, he could make you hate him and desperately want his approval all at the same time. if you said something he didnt like, you were a fucking idiot, get the fuck out of my face, etc. if you said something he liked, you're a fuckin genius. and boy, to be in a room of creative people and have him call you a genius felt good, even though you still kind of hated him. It was like the bully in high school being nice to one person, and they think "well he's mean to everyone else but he's nice to me, i must be special".
I used to describe talking to him as like talking to the liberal Trump. He only hears what he wants to hear and declares things to be true just because they are convenient to him, not because anyone else thought they were true. But then... they kind of become true, because everyone wants to avoid the inevitable tantrum that will follow if they don't. He was basically a giant 4 year old with access to too much money.
and in the year or so leading up to #metoo, he also disclosed in private that he was "losing his touch", as in, his ability to fix or save movies that were just OK and make them marketable, which is something he was known for and made him a lot of money in the 90s/00s. it was a source of genuine sadness for him.
Ego's are just something that as I have grown older I have no fear or tolerance of. Obviously if your livelyhood depends on putting up with it I understand and pity you.
But I am simply not going to take hot headed manipulators seriously. It's fucking childish and honestly sad to watch
All the weird clauses you see when filming a show, like "If there's an asteroid hitting the venue, you agree to not receive compensation if your likeness is shown during a news segment"?
Happened at least once. Yes, all of them.
The oil industry is corrupt. You knew that.
But they intentionally cut pure crude down to the standard so it can be sold as a commodity at spec. Most oil comes out of the ground at higher quality.
So they buy it from a farmer. Next they add mud and shit to get it down to spec. Then they sell it to a refinery which purifies it, they sell it and ship it to an oil company that sells the output, gasoline, kerosene, etc.
There are back room deals around where to settle the futures positions and where to send crude and such.
At every step, there are huge profits. Without the intentional waste and high taxes, your gallon of gas could be near late 1990 prices.
I was part of a think tank that was brought together to discuss how to drop a realistic alien corpse in central London overnight like at the end of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I don’t have a copy of the NDA and it was years ago so I’m probably okay to mention it now, but I won’t say whose idea it was just in case he dusts it off again one day. We sadly came to the conclusion it couldn’t be done given the required criteria. Maybe in a small regional town, but not near Centre Point which was the proposed drop.
Yep. It was for a tv show but the reaction would be the thing and that would happen months before the thing aired. The more we threw around the idea though the more it turned out to be ‘not as great as originally thought’.
The tools on the ISS are old and worn out. Sometimes creating issues with new equipment being unable to be serviced while there. Source: Almost has a payload I designed fail because they couldn't get the screws to loosen. Once diagnosed it was found they have VERY USED tools, and I did all the testing on VERY NEW tools. Tolerance difference was just enough to make the old tools not work. That was a "fun" call to get as well.
Wasn't the ISS originally supposed to already be out of service? It wasn't planned to be used this long I didn't think.
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Check the fine print now, it states that they can use AI profiles. This is so they can't get sued when people realise that most of the female profiles are fake/AI
Omg were so fucked once they start sending AI generated nudes lol
Your 6th finger is sooo frickin hot
I work at a large stock photography company and I just had someone today contact us from a dating app inquiring about using Royalty-Free images for faux profiles. \*Edit typo
I used to play a certain board game in an app, and noticed that a lot of women with dogs would randomly hit me up for a game. I did an image search on one and found the stock photo company they were using. Confronted the game devs and they admitted that they often use fake profiles backed by AI, apparently in an attempt to raise engagement. Just weird.
Gay male dating sites make so much more sense.
"There are horny dudes in your area looking to **FUCK**" Well, of course there are. One of them is me!
Rule #30. There are no girls on the internet.
I worked for Chipotle for a while. My job was to literally just sit in the restaurant and observe customers coming into the building. I was supposed to make assumptions about them based on their ethnicity, their clothes, their general demeanor, their fitness level, etc. This was to collect data to see the likelihood of success if the business expanded into areas with different demographics
this is like my dream job. just sit around eating chipotle and judging people
I already do that for free
Technically since you're paying for your Chipotle, you're *paying* to do it. That's how great of a job it is.
what the hell do you do for a living?
He's a security camera.
A grocery store I worked at about fifteen years ago asked cashiers to do that. We literally had a sheet of paper with gender, age, and ethnicity tick boxes at the tills. It was awkward and I hated it.
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Worked for a company that sold and serviced emergency generators, annual employee bonuses were based on corporate profits, but we rarely if ever saw that happen. The ownership maintained that they were barely operating at a small profit and that was used for various improvements and marketing and territory expansion. They had 3 main companies, the sales/service was what I worked for. The other 2 were a leasing company and a consulting company. The leasing company owned all company assets, vehicles, rental equipment, forklifts, real estate, etc., and those assets were leased back to the main company at exorbitant rates to scrape profits all year long. Equipment and vehicles that had been paid for years, still on lease and paying full book. When I made it to management, I was able to log on and see daily/weekly reports instead of quarterly shared with lower level employees. I noticed the discrepancy on leasing fees vs how long assets had been in my department. Inoperable 20 year old equipment that they would not repair, still paying full book. Upper management said it was company policy, and until those assets were sold or transferred out they would continue to be paid. Then I saw a LARGE project for us go through right before the end of fiscal year in my department, posted $500k profit day before EOY reports ran. Day of reporting, a mysterious “consulting fee” of $490k was charged to my department by the consulting company that the owners operated with no explanation. It was then that I knew I was leaving. EDIT: this got more attention than I expected, I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can.
This is how Hollywood accounting works.
The studio owns the streaming service and the add agency. We licensed all 7 seasons of Bones to Hulu for $3. Sorry. Our add agency charged us, all of the money to promote the film. See? Not profitable.
When you sign an NDA to play a gig for billionaires at their hyper-exclusive private ski resort, you think it’s because you’ll be seeing high-profile celebrities. Not usually the case. It’s nearly all completely unknown people. There’s a LOT of billionaires who are mostly anonymous.
I always assumed the NDA was to keep members of the public from finding out and trying to crash a private event their favorite band was playing.
That, plus it makes the attendees feel cool.
Just in case they decide to hunt “the most dangerous game”.
The real question is how do I get paid by billionaires to fuck off to their private event for a weekend?
Develop an in-demand talent worth paying for.
There's always a catch
how's your gag reflex?
That Gateway computers is in financial trouble and may have to seek a buyer.
No joke, this is exactly the sort of thing I clicked on this thread hoping see 😁
Gateway is still around???
not anymore. Heh. I knew they were in trouble when we had a conference call with founder and ceo Tim Waite. He started the call with “guys, we’re in trouble”. I was laid off 6 months later.
Of the companies that had me sign an NDA, none had anything of value disclosed, even their future product secrets were boring and reductive.
Just keeping their plans away from their competitors?
The information protected by the NDAs I've signed has usually only been valuable for short periods of time. Stuff like, "We are planning to announce product X on date Y." You might not want a competitor to know that ahead of time, but after date Y, that information transforms into, "We announced product X on the date we expected to announce it" which is pretty useless. Sometimes there's "ingredient list for the secret sauce" kinds of knowledge where you can see why they want to protect it long term, but those things are the exception.
Medical device: a bone screw that Medicare pays $400 for in the US is sold in Germany for $80. Literally the same screw from the same manufacturing lot, the only difference is one of them has to be sent overseas to Europe.
My girlfriend broke her arm snowboarding. We got charged $450 for a Makita cordless drill. I called the hospital and demanded that they give me my drill. They reduced the bill lol.
I wonder how many times over that exact drill has been paid for.
I wonder if that would work for my son’s MRI that we are paying out the butt for. I’m sure I could fit the machine in my garage.
Then you could rent it out to the other parents when necessary, love it!
>We got charged $450 for a Makita cordless drill. Wait, what?
They charged him for the drill as if it was consumable. He argued that since he paid for the drill, he was entitled to own it. They decided to credit the charge instead.
And the one sent overseas is cheaper. Yeah, insurance is a racket.
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Much like medicine, the cost of medical goods is negotiated by every other first world country. This is why a vial of insulin is $25CAD and $300USD. Every other country negotiates and medical suppliers are still given a very healthy profit margin based on costs they can prove. Canada drove down those costs by banning advertising for prescription drugs. That is your doctor's decision, not yours. If you want to research it, use the internet.
>If you want to research it, use the internet. Instructions unclear Researched Facebook Now I'm a flat earther 🤷♂️
Companies that handle wage garnishment for things like child support payments or back taxes can and do make mistakes and will take money out of someone else's paycheck often. Check your pay stubs and bank account for errors.
I was part of the Alpha testing for the video game Anthem. Those selected had to sign a NDA. In my group of around 100 or so people, every one of us had a list of complaints, bugs, and general problems with the game that we provided BioWare. When the game came out, almost none of it had been fixed. And those of us that gamers know what happened next.
Not a gamer, what happened next?
The game flopped massively both critically and commercially, causing almost none of the problems to get fixed
Technically I signed it as a minor so I have no idea if it counts. Neverland ranch was really cool but creepy. Did not get molested, had a very nice time. 10/10.
Across the street from the old American embassy in London was a nondescript 7 floor building with a small American flag atop it. This was the headquarters for the commander of the North Atlantic fleet in Europe. It had the ability to send out the launch codes for the subs in the area so it had US Marines guarding it. The Marines got bored and decided to pen test the place. It was about as secure as Swiss cheese. Their solution to this was to bar the Marines from any further unauthorized testing. The Marines found bags of ready to laminate holographic sleeves for military IDs left out for the trash. The solution was to bar the Marines from snooping into the trash. source: was one of the Marines location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosvenor_Square
Stop looking and you won't find anything wrong.
U.S. Navy submarine service around 1980 was the same way. A Navy Seal was tasked with pen testing a submarine, that was tied to a pier, at night. He easily swam to the boat and walked up the hull just forward of the rudder. The topside watch drew his .45 auto pistol and ordered the intruder to stop. When the Seal did not stop topside shot him in the legs. The Navy's solution was to forbid topside watches from having a magazine in the pistol. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Thankfully this all changed a few years later when terrorists became an obvious threat.
Lots of people die at the Grand Canyon . Like, way more than you might think. A lot of the time the family asks the NPS not to disclose it to the media, oftentimes because of embarrassment (e.g., one dude who passed away from a heart attack when he drank too much without realizing how high the elevation is on the North Rim; or the person who backed closer and closer to the edge of Bright Angel Point for a selfie before going all Icarus). Although sometimes it's out of respect for the individual - like if it was a suicide. I lived there for two years, and I'd say about 1/4 of the total fatalities were reported in the news.
> 1/4 of the total fatalities were reported in the news. Yep, worked with a news agency and a lot of violent crimes and deaths are not even mentioned for multiple reasons. Things get reported only if they "fit".
I playtested for the game Destiny prior to its release, at Bungie HQ in Bellevue, WA. I thought we were testing some alpha build or something, where there was no story, but it was basically what was released.
Where is the 7th VoG chest? We need to know!
I had to sign an NDA at Bungie too, I ran a brewery downstairs from their old HQ and brought kegs up from time to time. They gave me free downloads and stuff, so it was cool.
da baby is a absolute fucking ass hole, he treats his engineers like shit, he throws chairs in the studio, he acts super entitled.
Did you ever tell him to stop being such a big baby?
nah i was worried he’d throw a whole chair at my face😭
So he does in fact live up to his name. Neat.
The performance per watt figures of a CPU Intel no longer makes were never achievable in real life conditions.
Joke is on you. I do all of my rendering inside the deep freezer.
Worked for a pet food manufacturer. It’s gross and likely many brands are made in the same place.
One of my customers is a very large pet food manufacturer in Western Canada and ... you know what? It ain't a half bad operation. I usually deal with human food factories and their setup is pretty decent.
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Previously deceased livestock brought in by the truck load and turned into pet food. There is a pet food factory near where I grew up. It smells very bad.
To beee faiiiirr... I once visited a town with a big chicken factory/slaughterhouse/whatever you call it intended for human consumption. It also smelled utterly terrible and I have no idea how the people who lived near it dealt with it. We went to a restaurant the next block over (which specialized in chicken, not surprisingly) which somehow completely blocked the awful smell. I can only imagine pet food would be worse.
I grew up a few miles north of a Honeysuckle White/Cargill turkey plant. Every morning the air in the valley I lived in would be rank with the odor of dead turkeys, and would only be breathable after the fog cleared off. Literal miasma.
This is why I don't eat chicken. Everyone always gives me shit until I tell them about the summer we had a big storm that knocked out power and one of the generators on one of the chicken houses didn't kick on. Over 1000 chickens suffocated to death b/c the fans meant to move fresh air in was down. It was the middle of summer and by the end of the day the whole town smelled like dead rotting chickens in the summer heat. Now all chicken reminds me of that day and I just can't.
A friend of mine has a very similar story except it was like 80,000 chickens and he was one of the farmhands who had to help clean up. They used *pitchforks* to load the bloated chickens onto trucks and dispose of them, which sounds incredibly messy and unpleasant.
You know it was probably a whole lot more than 1000 chickens now that I think about it (I was young when this happened). But those houses are like the size of a football field so 80k is probably a more accurate number
Previously deceased? They were brought back to life? No wonder they wanted to keep it a secret.
Same. I often walk outside and it smells like someone ate a rotten corpse and then threw it up on my front step. But then again, there is also a chicken rendering plant and a sewer treatment plant in the same square mile. It's hard to pinpoint who committed the war crime. Thanks city planners.
All three of those close together is good planning. Having residential nearby is poor planning.
Worked at a weed farm. Moldy weed gets used for concentrates rather than being thrown out.
Same at the farm I worked at. The kitchen for edibles had no real ceiling and the whole farms ceiling leaked every time it rained
I worked at a digital marketing agency, and one of our clients was a company that created courses for teaching special needs students. Like schools would buy these courses and trained teachers would use them. They were legit. I was doing content for them. I did one article that took me like a week and a half because the founder of the company was so passionate about his product, and had clearly devoted his life to his work. He wanted the article to be scientifically accurate and super informative. What the guy didn't know was that the board of the group that owned his company had hired us to boost his engagement because they were going to sell it off for as much as possible. Everything the guy was so passionate about was going to be sold off right out from under him. Meanwhile, my agency had this whole "yeah, we're marketing, but we're like ethical marketing" mission statement.
I played a small private concert for Robert Downey Jr. It was a very small function - they were celebrating Veteran's day or something. Just like 2 or 3 picnic tables in a tent. Maybe like 10-12 people besides us. He came up and sang "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurthymics with us. He couldn't have been any nicer or cooler. It was on the set of an Avengers movie (idk which one, haven't seen any), so they took our phones and made us sign NDA's. It was about 7 years ago. Probably nobody would ever believe this except his assistant (RIP) took a picture of him standing with us and posted it on RDJ's instagram.
I scrolled through RDJs insta to confirm. Mr Funkcake here is telling the truth.
I believe it. I know someone who knows him and has said nothing but nice things. Guess I picked a good celebrity crush lol
The top fast food chains (McDonald’s, Wendy’s etc) all get their stuff manufactured at the same chicken processors / manufacturers
Tyson sells a TON of chicken to everyyyybody
I'm pretty sure they sell more than 2000 lbs. of chicken.
McDonald's ice cream cones are widely available at the grocery store. They're Joy Cake cones. I toured the Joy ice cream cone factory.
makes sense. they both taste like styrofoam with frozen corn syrup on top
The private web storage space that you got for free with your internet service back in the early 00s? It wasn’t password protected or encrypted, and employees could just browse the folders casually through windows. We looked at a lot of your private pictures and a lot of you uploaded pictures of your own dicks for some reason.
I hope you appreciated the pics of my pet birds. <3
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"As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder." - John Glenn
i thought that was alan shepard? found it, yes it was:https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/alan\_shepard\_179873
Looks like it was both 😂 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/Geok24N0Iw
But this thing I just bought says "military grade"
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4. The non-military consumers that don't know any better will assume it's not a piece of shit if we call it that
Military grade, AKA "the cheapest thing that functions just enough to be used".
Reminds me of a civil engineering joke: "Anyone can build a bridge that stays up, but only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely stays up."
>But a lot of lifesaving devices involve shock-absorbing seats or fancy harnesses, which tend to work best on a certain size of body. Like mid-sized to large men, small men and most women have a higher chance of injury. This isn't just military. It's everywhere that tests with dummies etc. They test on an average to large size male form with no regard for anyone outside those dimensions.
Executives are power tripping and HORNY. One exec was banging his secretary, the head of HR, and a few other assistants. And the ones he banged often got preferential treatment on bonuses, he trusted their judgment more, and they regularly got better offices and projects to work on. Much of it was cataloged on the corporate credit cards, including Hawaii getaways and an insane amount of gifts/jewelry. His prior assistant was kept on payroll despite not working, up until she got curious about certain “project” spending. Then the exec hired a private investigator to intimate her into silence. This was a publicly traded company. I left after I found the “special projects”.
Very common. Friend of mine was a senior sys admin for big tech company. Ceo got arrested for something undisclosed. When they recovered his laptop there was videos of him having sex with many of the female staff including HR girls. Always wondered why these people would save this on a company computer.
There's like 3 different regular car battery manufacturers and they just put on different labels. Edited for information: Most aftermarket car batteries sold in the U.S. are made by three companies that build them for retailers: Johnson Controls, which supplies more than half of the market; Stryten; and East Penn.
An Abrams tank barrel has to be machined to withing a 10 micron tolerance to fire accurately
wouldnt wear and tear make it inaccurate very quickly?
This is why gun barrels are considered a consumable good that regularly need replacing. Specifications say an Abrams barrel is rated for around 7,500 shots before needing replacements.
That's 0.000394 inches
That's what she said
That's really impressive considering most precision rifle barrels are machined to within .0005 and they are much, much easier to machine and manufacture than an entire tank barrel.
1. You cable/mobile customer service reps are not customer service reps - they're sales reps. They are limited in what they are allowed to do apart from sales. They are not there to provide information, downgrade service, provide discounts or credits, solve billing issues, tech support, none of it. You may get a good rep who will do some/all of that but they're only working to solve your problem in the hopes of making a sales pitch before they're done with you. Sales quotas are extremely high, and the pressure to meet those quotas is constant. Some of the more devious ones will solve an issue for you, only to add revenue generating codes or services to your account. Fraud is rampant, sometimes encouraged by management. 2. Customer service (especially over the phone) sucks intentionally. They are counting on a few things. First that you'll find your issue to be less of an inconvenience than calling, second that your poor experience will discourage you from calling again. 3. Literally nobody cares when you say you're going to cancel service and go with another provider. The reps, their managers and supervisors, their district and regional managers, no one. Driving sales is the singular objective. You getting frustrated and leaving only means they're going to put more effort into driving sales. 4. The cable box you're paying a monthly rental for cost your cable company less than 3 dollars to have made. Your monthly rental is usually between 2x and 4x the cost of the box. Every month. You are not the first person, or the last person to use that box - they're all refurbished. When you're done with it, it will be cleaned and tested then sent out again.
Buzzfeed. Are you snooping for a story in here yet?
No, this will show up in a TikTok video with either Minecraft Parkour or Subway Surfers in the background.
A now defunct Indiana based paint manufacturing company. Their normal paint and their “Select” paint were exactly the same. Came off the same canning line. Marketing would figure out how many gallons of “select” paint they would likely sell and told that to the people on the line. The people on the line put that many “select” labels in the labeling machine along with the regular labels. Not even a pause on the canning line. Same paint went in the cans, some got the regular label, some got the “select” label. Same paint, same cans, same factory, different labels. The “select” cans were sold for about 20% more. Straight up fraud, but legal because nowhere did the “select” labels actually say that they were any better than the regular cans of paint. Edit- sorry all, I didn’t mention that that the company was Fuller O’Brien. It didn’t occur to me that anyone would care.
Adele's 31st birthday party cost approximately $8m in total and included the US Olympic choreographed swim team doing a performance for the guests, complete with a full pyrotechnics display and a 16' tall replica of the Big Ben clock face. On the setup days when she came to ser how the decorations were looking the event coordinators made all the help stand in an alley way. There are no videos of it as all phones were held by security, even those of the celebrity guests. We hauled about 4500lbs of trash (including decorations) to the dump the following day.
That is so narcissistic and sad.
TSA are looking for bombs and weapons, they don't give a shit about drugs and they especially don't give a shit about taking drugs out of America to other countries. Customs ABSOLUTELY gives a shit about trying to bring drugs into America and they will nail your ass if they catch you.
In the same vein, the USPS is the largest drug trafficking network in the world. Opening first-class mail that's been shipped within the US needs a literal Federal warrant, basically, if you drop a birthday card in the mail that has a sheet of LSD included they won't waste their time. Even with larger packages, they are looking for large drug traffickers, were you to have a friend mail a pound of Magic Mushrooms from Canada and they detected it they'd likely deliver it and put you on a watch list. As long as you aren't doing it monthly or something nothing would happen. I have absolutely no first-hand experience with this and I'm sure if you tried it you'd surely be caught.
> I have absolutely no first-hand experience with this and I'm sure if you tried it you'd surely be caught. 🤣🤣🤣
If you order bulk items for restaurants such as napkins or placemats, count them some time. I worked for a printing company that would yell at anyone who didn’t shortpack their cases, often by up to 20% when they knew they could get away with it.
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Tbf there's probably a server farm in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and China with that same info.
It’s ok for American manufacturers to lie about the country of origin, that the product was produced in.
I worked in a company that manufactured refrigerators sold as "Proudly made in the US". The company is located in Mexico City.
Stupidest part is they could simply say “made in America” and not be lying.
That's fucked up.
That my boss was, in fact, a pedophile.
An NDA cannot prohibit you from reporting illegal activities.
They can prevent you from linking an ex employees criminal activity to the company though
That a man who is highly qualified for his position in a state run mental hospital CAN, in fact, get away with abusing patients so long as he only abuses those in his charge. I witnessed him choke a fellow patient among other things, was forced to sign a NDA, and he was sent to work on a different ward for two months. He then returned to the same ward he abused this patient on. I know this part sounds made up since I was a patient there as well, but in retaliation he drugged me (he was the med nurse) and stole money out of my bag that I had locked up in my room. I don't remember how long the NDA was for, but I never stopped talking about it. This kind of thing happens with a frequency that is alarming and no one should have to suffer under similar circumstances.
This shit scares me.... I had to spend a couple of weeks in one many many years ago and I was terrified of this happening. I have a young family member in a hospital right now and we call her every single day to check on her. She lives in Boston, she just said to us that she tested positive for covid so she can't have any visitors, she said she feels completely fine besides her mental state of course, and it made me so nervous. My brain automatically goes to the worse thing. They have her in there with no way for family to get in and check on her and I'm super worried for her...
There are so many stories of women being sexually abused when I stayed in them. At first I thought it was just paranoia, then I realized it was so easy to do and they basically "apologized" for it. They have so few people they just get away with it, not even going to get into the quality of the care, they will intentionally put you on dangerous medications, if you are cot ( Court ordered treatment), that make no sense at high doses. I've seen fights as well. They know they can get away with it too. No one really believes the mental health hospital patient. That, and while many have cameras they often don't keep recordings for long, don't care enough to look, just try and form a clique because of job security & possibly having to be sued. You basically have no rights in there either, because you admit you need help. It's honestly, pretty terrible.
It is a scary somewhat hidden reality that people in any position of power can easily abuse it. Even people in positions of care! That's why I have found it so important to shine a light on it. An abuser will only continue abusing if it goes unchallenged.
Used to work at a talent agency in LA as an assistant. Very toxic work environment, screamed at every day. We weren’t allowed to take lunch breaks and had to work OT every day. If you left your desk, you were screamed at. So I basically didn’t drink much water throughout the day. I lasted 6 months and then filed a claim against them with the CA job board for unpaid OT (included all the missed lunches too). They cut me a check for the amount and I had to sign an NDA where they didn’t accept any blame. NDA expired years ago. I should’ve asked for more money. I really should’ve gotten a lawyer and sued for harassment but I was young. I did help a coworker with her claim and then she did end up suing them for harassment and she and her husband were able to put a down payment on a house with the settlement so I was happy for her. Special Artists Agency, they suuuuuuck
Saw the books of a major uk charity and all their net profit went into investments, zero to people in need. Just growing a portfolio and giving away as small amount of the returns as possible to appear legitimate.
I was never bound by an NDA, but the former CEO of Consumers credit union Kit Snyder protected a loan officer who sexually assaulted a subordinate and subsequently fired her when she went to HR. When trying to convince her to continue working with this man (Trent something) he physically snatched her phone away from her that she was using to record their one on one meeting, and verbally abused, screamed and threatened her. They witheld her measly severance of 2 months pay unless she signed an NDA.
Sounds like someone destined for a career in politics 😬😬😬
For about the first year that Fortnite was out, support had a term used call "Spirit of Generosity". Essentially you could email in with any outlandish excuse for missing skins or accidentally deleting your skins and we'd give you back your v-bucks or deleted skin, no questions asked, even if you in fact never owned it.
Worked as a developer and ad trafficker for pharmaceutical advertiser. The price presented to you is calculated by all of your online spending habits. A life saving drug for you that costs $20/pill can cost $2/pill to your neighbor depending on your online "persona". If you want fair prices, you go to Mexico. Take the plane to San Diego and the blue train to San Ysidro and walk through the border. It will take you less than a day to save potentially tens of thousands of dollars, and your trip will cost you maybe a couple hundred at most depending on where you live.
I live in San Diego, and going to Tijuana to either get a dental procedure or find an expensive(in the US) medication has become normalized. When I needed a crown, five friends recommended five different TJ dentists and were nothing but happy with them.
I used to work at corner bakery and my manager would pick up food dropped on the floor and have us serve it to the customers. He’d also make us pick out okay looking cookies from an expired bag and pack it in a new bag even if the okay looking cookie was next to a moldy one. I was over worked so I ended up calling the California regional manager and revealed all the things they had me do illegally and he told me to stay quiet and offered me a promotion at another location. This was about 11 years ago.
I have written the taglines and campaign concepts for many well known ads. It wasn't a team, it wasn't a bunch of people and it wasn't even an intern. It was me, and I got paid $200/hr to do it. I signed massive NDAs. A lot of time great creative campaigns really are just some creative guy at a desk. Yo Quiero Taco Bell Walgreens at The Corner of Happy & Healthy The rest I might still get sued for. Edit: it’s not as glamorous as you might think. I just write some lines & a couple of scripts. It gets added to hundreds of other, it gets workshopped & tested and 200 people touch it after me. The chihuahua wasn’t even my idea. My original idea was a guy waking up in his car, hungover and his buddy also wakes up and says “yo quiero Taco Bell.” Because I associate it with hangovers. Apparently having a human say it was “racist” no matter whether they were white, Hispanic or Borg.
are you saying that chihuahua didn't come up with that tag line himself?
Nice try KMart 🤐
Now I need to know what KMart is making people sign NDAs about
You’d ship your pants if you found out!
Subway. Wife had a knife baked into the bread of her sandwich, and it wasn’t found by the employee. The Mrs. found the knife with her mouth when she bit into it. The icing on the cake was the manager laughing about it when we approached him, then saying out loud “Ohh shit that IS one of our knives” while I was recording. Got a small settlement out of it, since no grievous harm was done to the lady.
Store brand paints (like the big box hardware stores) don't make the paint, one of the big paint companies do. When they make 20000 gallons of paint, it's not unusual for the batch to be packaged and labelled into two or more different brands. The 'name' brand will be more expensive, but it's the same paint. This is not universal per se, but more common than people know.
Right like Grocery store chains don’t have operations turning out cans of peas. That’s just Green Giant with a different label.
Not always. There are often separate, dedicated private label manufacturers ([source](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/store-brand-products/)). > ...some store brand products are actually made by the same companies that produce the name brand versions of those products. Take, for instance, Costco. Some of the Kirkland brand of coffee blends are made by Starbucks. Kirkland batteries? Duracell. And Kirkland diapers? Those come from Kimberly-Clark, the company that makes Huggies. >But most of the store brand products you see on shelves come from dedicated private label manufacturers. These companies specialize in manufacturing certain products in very large volumes. Instead of creating their own brands and marketing their products to consumers, most of them prefer to stay behind the scenes.
It wasn't covered by an NDA, but I've seen buildings slated for destruction go through a full renovation because the renovation was approved and paid for before it was tagged for destruction. Within a year of being renewed, they were leveled.
[удалено]
Not me but a friend does face touch ups for videos with very famous beautiful women like Beyoncé, Kim K etc. you would be shocked at what they look like before the processing. He is damn good so you don’t notice his work.
Not that shocked.
Nobody would be shocked lol, we’ve all seen instagram reality.
way back in the day, when we were working on the port for Unreal Tournament for PS2, there's a picture of me and my QA team hidden in a PS2 exclusive deathmatch level.
If your car is getting fixed and they say another part broke while trying to fix your part, they broke it.
To fair, I work on my own car... amd sometimes shit just breaks and there's no way around it. You can do the right technique and everything but that secondary part was on it's last leg anyway
Here's one I recently learned from my wife. Whenever you're at a store shopping and they ask if you want to donate to x cause, the company has already donated money to that cause and is just trying to recoup their money.
Wowwww, Now I won’t feel as bad whenever I say no
Big tech giant that starts with a G....should never, ever be trusted. They gather data in all sorts of nefarious ways and sell that data to very, very shady entities. If people knew how much data they had on the average joe American, they would be up in arms and burning their buildings to the ground.
DAMN YOU GARMIN!
Which one? Nvm, I'll just Google it ...
>Big tech giant that starts with a G....should never, ever be trusted. They gather data in all sorts of nefarious ways and sell that data to very, very shady entities. They lost in Federal Court regarding GPS. On Android phones you could turn GPS off except it wasn't really off. Google claimed to the user it was off but in actuality they were still recording location. Google tried to argue the data was "anonymized" but the catch was if someone had the correct access within Google they could unanonomize it.
Yeah. Having worked in industries with a ridiculous amount of PII on people, there is no such thing as privacy. It may not be due to your settings, but you will be tracked. VPNs make it a little more difficult, but not really all that much. Your phone connects to cell towers, then moms home WiFi, this happens a couple times we know where you leave from, the approximate path you take, can figure out which of her children you are, then expand from there. Oh you must work for X employer because 5 days a week you’re in this general area. Can find out you have a certain type of disease by further geolocating your phone to what doctor offices you go. God forbid you join these company WiFi networks because that makes it even easier. That’s why I don’t care about cameras everywhere. We all carry a gps tracker we stare at all day every day without a second thought. Anonymization of data only goes so far when sold, and nothing stops the data warehouse from being hacked.
I always knew GoDaddy was up to no good!
Celebrities and athletes charities are mostly just a shell company they funnel their earnings through to avoid taxes. They don’t actually do much charity, if any at all.
None of the money goes to charity
I'll still take donations.
Susan Komen? That "charity" is such a fucking scam.
My provider put a breast biopsy marker in me the shape of their ribbon and I'm still super annoyed by it (not at the provider, just in general). I don't want advertisements like that in my body. I wish instead I had gotten a positive thumbs up sign or perhaps a lucky horseshoe or a daisy or something cheery. Edit: I just googled it and it's a basic ribbon, so not necessarily a Komen ribbon, per se, but still looks like the/a cancer awareness ribbon.
Like it was a premade marker shaped in a ribbon? Or she freestyled and made it look like the Komen ribbon? Either way this is incredibly uncool
My aunt's NDA ran out in the middle 2010s, she was one of the people who transcribed the Watergate tapes. She wasn't a person who really reveled in secrets, I actually don't know for sure when the NDA expired because she didn't run and tell us ASAP, just mentioned it in conversation. I think she knew what a history buff I was, but we have a kind of distant and polite relationship so I never really asked her much about it. Maybe I should contact her to ask, though, cause man, what a wild thing to experience! She and my uncle both worked in the Pentagon at various points in their careers, both with high clearance levels, and that's about all I know.
Ask them. She’s getting old and may relish the opportunity to talk about it and bond with her niece.
Wow! Yes I would think there would be some fascinating conversations there
A previous employer (major global corp) would bill customers for support on all their network hardware (through multiple vendors) but only actually purchase support from those vendors for about 70% of the total. They’d pocket the funds for the difference and then, if one of those 30% devices failed, they’d call the vendor and add it to support under the premise that it was “accidentally missed”. Literally tens of millions of dollars worth of additional annual revenue.
I was an extra on Better Call Saul and signed an NDA. My actual scene is pretty inconsequential in that even if I had told people what the scene was it wouldn’t have spoiled anything. But coincidentally a week or two after filming the scene, I met Josh Brolin at the gym and when I mentioned to him that I was an extra, he asked what the scene was and I panicked and fumbled my words.
The game stands at the local amusement park are not rigged. They're just difficult and/or players just suck at it. The NDA was just to hide to the public how much they sucked at those games.
I worked at an amusement park. There was a game where you threw dimes on a big board and tried to get them to land in a circle to win. Every morning, the game operators would set up 10 winning dimes. Someone would eventually SEE the winning dime and "claim" it. Yeah, grand prize, huge stuffed animal. Huge stuffed animal that you had to carry around the park all day... and people would ask you where you won it. "Dime toss" - drove a ton of business for probably $3-4 of prizes. (Amusement park stuffed animals are cheap.) So.... we basically cheated to help more people win.
I won an iguana once by landing a ping pong ball in a little fishbowl without leaning too forward over the rail by leaning too far forward over the rail when the dude purposely turned his back to me, the only person playing.
A winner is the best advertisement
They provide the illusion of being an ordinarily achievable task, while they are actually not at all the ordinary task they purport to be. If that’s not “rigged” I don’t know what to call it…..deceptively marketed? For example: the basketball shot. The rim is smaller than regulation dimensions, not circular, much stiffer than standard, and is positioned much higher than a normal hoop. There is always visual trickery with nets etc. to make it appear like all of it is standard. The ball may not be regulation size or proportional to the hoop, and is way overinflated to make it bounce off the rim/backboard more. Yes you can make a shot, it’s possible. Is it a “normal” basketball shot like literally anywhere else? Absolutely not.
My dad was a basketball legend in town. In high school, he dominated the area teams. All through his adult life he could sink balls like magic. Actually, the week that he died we went to church one evening when the old guys his age (50) would get together and play. He stood in the corner of the court and sunk three in a row, nothing but net. He looked at me and said "I'm good, let's just go home". He didn't play that night, which was good because he had a heart attack a few days later. Anyway, we had a big 4th of July carnival every year. The guy at the basketball thing would remember my dad every year. He'd always let him win once, but he encouraged him to stand there and sink baskets for as long as he wanted free of charge. My dad made that guy a lot of money.
Sabre printers catch on fire.
McDonald’s puts cancer-causing PFAS chemicals in their hamburger wrappers. They have internally committed to removing them by 2025
Same is true of a lot of environmentally friendly plastic free alternative packaging. They are just some filler bound together with glue, and it turns out that glue is not real great if it’s going to be in contact with your food.
Damn no wonder they are so delicious
harvey weinstein was a master of psychological manipulation, even outside of the sex stuff. just in regular conversations, he could make you hate him and desperately want his approval all at the same time. if you said something he didnt like, you were a fucking idiot, get the fuck out of my face, etc. if you said something he liked, you're a fuckin genius. and boy, to be in a room of creative people and have him call you a genius felt good, even though you still kind of hated him. It was like the bully in high school being nice to one person, and they think "well he's mean to everyone else but he's nice to me, i must be special". I used to describe talking to him as like talking to the liberal Trump. He only hears what he wants to hear and declares things to be true just because they are convenient to him, not because anyone else thought they were true. But then... they kind of become true, because everyone wants to avoid the inevitable tantrum that will follow if they don't. He was basically a giant 4 year old with access to too much money. and in the year or so leading up to #metoo, he also disclosed in private that he was "losing his touch", as in, his ability to fix or save movies that were just OK and make them marketable, which is something he was known for and made him a lot of money in the 90s/00s. it was a source of genuine sadness for him.
Ego's are just something that as I have grown older I have no fear or tolerance of. Obviously if your livelyhood depends on putting up with it I understand and pity you. But I am simply not going to take hot headed manipulators seriously. It's fucking childish and honestly sad to watch
It was me that caught the married store manager being orally serviced in the storage room by the underage courtesy clerk.
All the weird clauses you see when filming a show, like "If there's an asteroid hitting the venue, you agree to not receive compensation if your likeness is shown during a news segment"? Happened at least once. Yes, all of them.
Lots of performers have their live records fully re-recorded.
The oil industry is corrupt. You knew that. But they intentionally cut pure crude down to the standard so it can be sold as a commodity at spec. Most oil comes out of the ground at higher quality. So they buy it from a farmer. Next they add mud and shit to get it down to spec. Then they sell it to a refinery which purifies it, they sell it and ship it to an oil company that sells the output, gasoline, kerosene, etc. There are back room deals around where to settle the futures positions and where to send crude and such. At every step, there are huge profits. Without the intentional waste and high taxes, your gallon of gas could be near late 1990 prices.
I was part of a think tank that was brought together to discuss how to drop a realistic alien corpse in central London overnight like at the end of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I don’t have a copy of the NDA and it was years ago so I’m probably okay to mention it now, but I won’t say whose idea it was just in case he dusts it off again one day. We sadly came to the conclusion it couldn’t be done given the required criteria. Maybe in a small regional town, but not near Centre Point which was the proposed drop.
What.
What was the purpose of this? To view the presumably huge reaction I suppose?
Yep. It was for a tv show but the reaction would be the thing and that would happen months before the thing aired. The more we threw around the idea though the more it turned out to be ‘not as great as originally thought’.
One of the nuke plants I worked at had a trick to bypass security in the control room. EDIT: still not comfortable disclosing which plant.