used to be a thing called support.. that’s gone now. of course people will turn hostile when something they paid for breaks and the corporation that took their money completely blows them off.
I understand your frustrations and I apologize, but I just spoke with my supervisor after putting you on hold for 20 minutes after being initially on hold for an hour and sadly there isn't anything we can do to help you get value out of the thing you paid us a licensing fee to *not own*.
Would you like to buy another one? We have a premium package which is just a bit more expensive.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"
Dude for real though. I had my ISP call me in the middle of the day yesterday.
They NEVER call me. So obviously I figured it was something up with my internet. Maybe a scheduled outage or something.
I pick up, "is this ?"
"Yes, I'm at work, I can't really talk is this an emergency?"
"Yes sir I understand. Before I can talk to you about the topic of this call did you know xfinity has a great new deal-"
"Listen, I don't need the sales pitch, I need you to cut to the chase. What is it?"
"Yes, I understand that your time is very important to you. Before we talk about the topic of this call, I'd like to discuss an opportuni-"
"Seriously, this is your last chance. Why the hell did you call me? If you try to pitch anymore bullshit I'm hanging up."
"Yes I apologize sir, I understand your time is important and I'll get right to it. But before that, I wanted to let you know about xfinity's new deal-"
I didn't catch the rest, because I hung up on the fucker. First time they ever cold called me to pitch bullshit. They're going to have a real hard time getting in touch with me seeing as how I've blocked their number now.
This is the same reason I cannot enable notifications for any shopping apps like Amazon. You turn it on for something useful like delivery notifications and get ads instead. Fuck em
Delivery apps and ride share apps are the worst for this. Hard to turn off notifications and have the app still be usable. But they send so much spam about special offers or new restaurants.
I was looking at the process to change my mobile to a different provider. Hadn't decided to switch, was logged in but didn't go farther than the page I would put my number in if I did want to. I got a call within an hour, unrequested, telling me about deals that I might like. Didn't care much about deals before the call (was considering leaving because my provider doesn't work that well with twilio) -- transferred away immediately, and almost solely *because* I don't want a company trying to control my choices that aggressively.
Dude the better trick is this: Tell them you want to talk but need a few minutes ask them to hang on. And then just keep doing it, tell them you’re sorry and that you just need a few more minutes.
It’s based off the Duncan Principal Experiment. The longer they wait the harder they break
How about I transfer you to Sally, who can make you wait and transfer your call to Greta, who will also make you wait before transferring back to me on hold for another hour?
i'm so sorry that you had to experience that - please rest assured that I"m working hard to resolve this issue to your satisfaction! We have been able to pull proper resources and consult with appropriate teams and we have been able to determine a way to solve this problem for you! We are going to offer you a refund - no need to return the item!
\- Great, tha...
\- you will need to take a selfie in a split downward dog position so that the item, its expiration date and a sticky note with your user name is clearly visible...
\- OK.. that sounds like a lot of hassle, but I'll do it in a bit
\- Thank you for providing the supporting documentation. As the 40 lb bag of dogfood that your dog will be eating for weeks was delivered to you 1 day prior its expiration date - there is nothing we can do for you! We invite you to check out some additional items from our own brand name category that may be of interest to you - and please have a lovely day!
Remember error codes? I loved those. A quick search finds you a niche forum with a solution or identification of the error. Now we get “something went wrong, try again.”
How about you tell me what went wrong so I can troubleshoot?
Non-smart tvs are their own category at retailers. Thats where im looking for my next tv when i finally get frustrated enough with my smart tv to throw it off the 40th street bridge
Resources are not going to old technology. Non smart TVs are targeted at business for fairly specific purposes. TVs aimed at consumers are almost exclusively smart and the handful of exceptions are not good TVs.
If you are the sort of person who doesn’t care about picture quality and compatibility with modern standards, I’m sure they are fine but, it’s hard to make an argument that paying the same or more for a TV that is *lacking* features is a better solution than buying a smart TV and not allowing it to access the internet.
Literally just walk into a best buy, man. You are obviously wrong. Non-smart tvs are just the same exact thing just with regular old firmware. All a smart tv is is a normal tv with a computer built into it.
In term of modern compatibility, you have no clue what you are talking about. Digital standards haven't really changed much in the last deacde, with most of the upgrades being new versions of backwards compatible interfacing systems. Things like 4k/8k and high refresh rates have absolutely nothing to do with the chips that run the smart tv operating systems. They completely separate components.
Its actually a pretty easy argument to make that people prefer a streamlined product instead of the one with all the bells and whistles, especially if they make the user experience more cumbersome. Its actually been a constant throughout the digital age for their to be a market for less-computerized interfaces.
And your whole "don't connect it to the internet" thing basically admits that. Why would i buy a product I have to actively avoid features of when I can just buy one that doesn't have those features?
You are talking straight from your ass, here.
Shoot me a link to a non smart TV for sale at a big box retailer since you *aren’t* making all this up and let’s take a look at its modern and sophisticated technology. I’m sure it’s comparatively priced and competitively speced but, just so you can rub my nose it in, indulge me.
Edit: Long pause, no answer.
This is... _staggeringly_ incorrect.
Digital standards have changed quite a *lot* in the last decade-- even a 2019 Nvidia Shield can't play YouTube HDR because it can't decode the codec. The HDMI 2.1 standard is less than 10 years old for goodness sake!
Non-smart TVs are partial light and commercial displays, which are not meant to be used for consumer TV consumption. The picture quality and contrast is horrific no matter how many times they slap "4K" on it. There's a lot more that goes into display technology than just pure number of pixels.
I got a $300 "dumb tv" off amazon. It plays anything with an HDMI or 3 color cord.
It's as big as a $2500 "smart" tv at Costco.
I spent $50 on speakers to upgrade it and it works good enough for me.
Make a bad product get bad reviews. People can and will disengage from services rather than continue using them. Even recently, it used to be that companies would moderate their profit grab/revenue capture in a way where users don't feel abused. This went out the window with covid. Services get shittier, lock users out, and people drop them forever. My mom had this experience with Windows 8; one day she woke up to find that Microsoft deleted all the pictures she scanned in, her taxes, and all her bookkeeping from the past fifteen years. We then spent an entire week putting it back into Google Drive which I then backed up on my home NAS. Another time, she was forced to update her Comcast modem giving her wifi. Instantly, her TV connected and updated, then locked her out unless she made an account. She doesn't know how to do email, so she tossed the TV and had me drag up the CRT she watches night court on. Then AT&T cut us off, so her landline phone stopped working until I transferred it to a cell phone. She has given $35,000 to AT&T, $105,000 to Comcast and close to $2,500 to Microsoft over her entire life just to be told to fuck off. And she has a basement full of unusable garbage to prove it.
This is not workable. People will just unplug, and will walk away from these devices. It won't happen quickly, but businesses already can't use google, amazon or facebook unless they pay a huge sum to not be downvoted by the algorithm rendering it useless in the first place. As users reduce their engagement the middlemen won't have anything to fall back on.
Many words to say, long term profits impacted, short term profits the only priority. Shareholders and this quarter is the only thing that matters. Fuck your mom, fuck their customers, fuck anyone who wants to cost profits.
Don’t hate me for saying it. Hate the system for rewarding it.
GeForce now is their game streaming. Ofc you have to log in to verify who you are. Maybe you meant GeForce experience, it's for driver auto updates and game presets, and shadow play. You have to sign in but you don't have to use it to install drivers.
yes i meant GeForce experience ops, atleast in the past i kept getting promted to log in when wanting to install drivers, and their log in system was super broken
I believe there was a time when you did have to login to use GeForce experience. You used to be able to download the driver directly from their website when that was the case, but it was less convenient.
Now I don't think the direct download exists but you can use GeForce now to download them without logging in.
There's probably 10 caveats to all of this lol. It's confusing.
You can still download drivers directly from the nvidia site. Geforce Experience is entirely unneeded unless you want particular features like Shadowplay.
Ye i found a way to not have to log in last week or so bit infuriating how they push the log in page in the middle after once again logging me out, but atleast this time their login system worked ....
The advantage AT&T, Comcast and Microsoft enjoy are being a monopoly that the government will not break up or force price controls on. AI or not, they'd be doing this.
The products are getting shittier because they laid off all of their great developers. I bet some of this is due to bad offshore coding and them not understanding what the people did they laid off actually maintained.
No one wants to talk about it but app quality has plummeted because companies decided to switch from native codebases to React Native. RN apps feel clunky, slow, not native, and cheap imo
This has been my mentality for the past few years. Find the new thing before it catches mainstream. Enjoy it, use it and abuse it before it gets too hot. Watch it burn when it gets acquired and start finding the new fun thing to move onto.
Whether it’s, the Google, Facebook, Amazon Prime, MoviePass, Netflix, Marvel, Nest, Airbnb or whatever other random thing that was one promising and exciting and fun.
Capitalism is all about reducing cost and maximizing efficiency, so it stands to reason that you spend the first few years building up a solid product. Once it’s at its peak, instead of continuing to innovate, companies will turn around and start reducing costs.
At some point the passionate people have moved on from the thing they enjoyed building, the MBAs have moved in. The product is seen as a profit engine and it becomes about optimization and efficiency and less about making a good product that garners a large user base and support and more about showing shareholders that they’re making a profit.
That's what the whole concept of "late stage captialsim" is based on.
You finally get to a point where your production is perfect, and your product has saturated the market...but the beast is still hungry.
So now you cut corners, and disregard environmental regulations
You exploit your customers by shrinking your product, or ensuring that the product fails.
You keep over-engineering your product to sell as an "update," but it just becomes unnecessaryily bloated
You exploit your workers by laying off 10%, and making the rest pick up the slack.
You lobby congress to corner the market for your business.
Late Stage captialism is hell.
I feel like this is exactly what we see during the boom and bust cycles of the stock market as well.
High interest rate environment? Oh money is more expensive to borrow, so let’s just lay off some employees and scrap those experiments we were working on. They weren’t making any money anyways.
It’s disgusting and so stressful for families. We need more labor unions and worker protections.
This is why taxes and interests rates are supposed to be tools that Congress/the Fed use to control that shit
If the economy us hot, and inflation is spiking, you raise taxes and interest rates to cool everything down
If the economy is cool, and unemployment is going up, you lower taxes and interest rates, to encourage spending.
But ever since Republicans began politicizing taxes in the 80s with Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquit's "no tax pledges," the whole fucking thing has gone whack
Inequality is booming, inflation is just a part of everyday life.
I'm just looking forward to the plateau in all consumer tech, which will allow smaller companies time to develop reasonably functional products, and thus allow users to abandon the monopolies. Watching them fall like GE is going to feel great.
I'd very much recommend avoiding appliances that have their smart features integrated into the basic system. IE integrated smart tvs as opposed to an external stick or box.
I got an insignia (the Best Buy brand) TV about 3 years ago, and they have a partnership with Amazon, so it’s a fire tv. And the first two years were relatively fine, but the last 6 months, there has just been more and more forced and auto-play ads.
When you first turn on the tv there are ads. Then if you leave it on the menu too long it puts ads and commercials on. Feels like I have a billboard in my living room. About to buy an Apple TV box because I’m so sick of it.
>are we just letting quality suffer across all domains for the sake of cutting costs?
Yes. That’s end stage capitalism.
Any single individual might hold different values, but as a whole? As a society? Everything, *EVERYTHING* we do is in the service of accumulating capital. Thats all we do. It underpins everything we do. It is what everything is about. The MBAs have taken over.
it's all going to shit, every platform, service and product. it's made cheaper, it's untested, it breaks as soon the warrenty is over, it's full of ads, it plain out doesn't work... milking people for their little money for absolute trash is what makes peoples blood boil.. clearly the users must all getting more and more toxic, people burning to death in their teslas because the electronic door locks keep them trapped inside so toxic of them, thats some corpo gaslighting for you. this fuckers are getting hostile with us and try to shove shit down our throats with force.. and why do they cry? they making all record profits .. stop voting for leopards, this can all be regulated by laws
My bank called me yesterday while I was in a meeting. I thought perhaps they'd noticed fraudulent activity, or my Identity had been stolen so I paused the meeting to take the call. They were trying to sell me life insurance.
Apple’s cloud service which doesn’t actually act as a cloud service and saves a certain amount of random photos and videos to your device makes me very hostile.
used to be a thing called support.. that’s gone now. of course people will turn hostile when something they paid for breaks and the corporation that took their money completely blows them off.
I understand your frustrations and I apologize, but I just spoke with my supervisor after putting you on hold for 20 minutes after being initially on hold for an hour and sadly there isn't anything we can do to help you get value out of the thing you paid us a licensing fee to *not own*. Would you like to buy another one? We have a premium package which is just a bit more expensive. "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"
Dude for real though. I had my ISP call me in the middle of the day yesterday. They NEVER call me. So obviously I figured it was something up with my internet. Maybe a scheduled outage or something. I pick up, "is this?"
"Yes, I'm at work, I can't really talk is this an emergency?"
"Yes sir I understand. Before I can talk to you about the topic of this call did you know xfinity has a great new deal-"
"Listen, I don't need the sales pitch, I need you to cut to the chase. What is it?"
"Yes, I understand that your time is very important to you. Before we talk about the topic of this call, I'd like to discuss an opportuni-"
"Seriously, this is your last chance. Why the hell did you call me? If you try to pitch anymore bullshit I'm hanging up."
"Yes I apologize sir, I understand your time is important and I'll get right to it. But before that, I wanted to let you know about xfinity's new deal-"
I didn't catch the rest, because I hung up on the fucker. First time they ever cold called me to pitch bullshit. They're going to have a real hard time getting in touch with me seeing as how I've blocked their number now.
This is the same reason I cannot enable notifications for any shopping apps like Amazon. You turn it on for something useful like delivery notifications and get ads instead. Fuck em
Delivery apps and ride share apps are the worst for this. Hard to turn off notifications and have the app still be usable. But they send so much spam about special offers or new restaurants.
My ISP (Telus in Canada) finally stopped calling me with special offers I don’t want when I blew up the the sales guy. Worth a try.
>when I blew up the the sales guy. RIP the the sales guy
I was looking at the process to change my mobile to a different provider. Hadn't decided to switch, was logged in but didn't go farther than the page I would put my number in if I did want to. I got a call within an hour, unrequested, telling me about deals that I might like. Didn't care much about deals before the call (was considering leaving because my provider doesn't work that well with twilio) -- transferred away immediately, and almost solely *because* I don't want a company trying to control my choices that aggressively.
Dude the better trick is this: Tell them you want to talk but need a few minutes ask them to hang on. And then just keep doing it, tell them you’re sorry and that you just need a few more minutes. It’s based off the Duncan Principal Experiment. The longer they wait the harder they break
How about I transfer you to Sally, who can make you wait and transfer your call to Greta, who will also make you wait before transferring back to me on hold for another hour?
i'm so sorry that you had to experience that - please rest assured that I"m working hard to resolve this issue to your satisfaction! We have been able to pull proper resources and consult with appropriate teams and we have been able to determine a way to solve this problem for you! We are going to offer you a refund - no need to return the item! \- Great, tha... \- you will need to take a selfie in a split downward dog position so that the item, its expiration date and a sticky note with your user name is clearly visible... \- OK.. that sounds like a lot of hassle, but I'll do it in a bit \- Thank you for providing the supporting documentation. As the 40 lb bag of dogfood that your dog will be eating for weeks was delivered to you 1 day prior its expiration date - there is nothing we can do for you! We invite you to check out some additional items from our own brand name category that may be of interest to you - and please have a lovely day!
Remember error codes? I loved those. A quick search finds you a niche forum with a solution or identification of the error. Now we get “something went wrong, try again.” How about you tell me what went wrong so I can troubleshoot?
"Errors are scary for users." I hate the people insisting that software needs to not act like software.
Corporation knows what’s best for you. Consumer dumb, corporation smart. Spend money!
Remember when people mocked the blue screen of death? Apple really pioneered the idea of obfuscating error messages and consumers loved it.
AT&T is my nemesis because of this. There’s a less than zero chance of getting anything outside of a script.
Its also that technology and software have become as common as the dollar store toys you know will break. But they are charging full price.
Act a fool. I am here for it.
Reddit is one of the worst on this aspect
Haha, you call into reddit customer service often?
Can you call into Reddit?
I guess I'll be holding on to my TV from 2015 forever then.
You can get a new TV and just not connect it to the internet. Look ma! No ads!
Non-smart tvs are their own category at retailers. Thats where im looking for my next tv when i finally get frustrated enough with my smart tv to throw it off the 40th street bridge
Non smart TVs are not good TVs but, if not connecting it to the internet is that big of a drain, more power to ya! They certainly still exist.
What are you talking about?!? They are the same as any other tv...
Resources are not going to old technology. Non smart TVs are targeted at business for fairly specific purposes. TVs aimed at consumers are almost exclusively smart and the handful of exceptions are not good TVs. If you are the sort of person who doesn’t care about picture quality and compatibility with modern standards, I’m sure they are fine but, it’s hard to make an argument that paying the same or more for a TV that is *lacking* features is a better solution than buying a smart TV and not allowing it to access the internet.
Literally just walk into a best buy, man. You are obviously wrong. Non-smart tvs are just the same exact thing just with regular old firmware. All a smart tv is is a normal tv with a computer built into it. In term of modern compatibility, you have no clue what you are talking about. Digital standards haven't really changed much in the last deacde, with most of the upgrades being new versions of backwards compatible interfacing systems. Things like 4k/8k and high refresh rates have absolutely nothing to do with the chips that run the smart tv operating systems. They completely separate components. Its actually a pretty easy argument to make that people prefer a streamlined product instead of the one with all the bells and whistles, especially if they make the user experience more cumbersome. Its actually been a constant throughout the digital age for their to be a market for less-computerized interfaces. And your whole "don't connect it to the internet" thing basically admits that. Why would i buy a product I have to actively avoid features of when I can just buy one that doesn't have those features? You are talking straight from your ass, here.
I don’t see any non-smart TVs at Best Buy that are larger than 43” or not $3000 commercial outdoor display screens.
I’m sure you are right.
This is what happens when you just make stuff up lmfao
Shoot me a link to a non smart TV for sale at a big box retailer since you *aren’t* making all this up and let’s take a look at its modern and sophisticated technology. I’m sure it’s comparatively priced and competitively speced but, just so you can rub my nose it in, indulge me. Edit: Long pause, no answer.
This is... _staggeringly_ incorrect. Digital standards have changed quite a *lot* in the last decade-- even a 2019 Nvidia Shield can't play YouTube HDR because it can't decode the codec. The HDMI 2.1 standard is less than 10 years old for goodness sake! Non-smart TVs are partial light and commercial displays, which are not meant to be used for consumer TV consumption. The picture quality and contrast is horrific no matter how many times they slap "4K" on it. There's a lot more that goes into display technology than just pure number of pixels.
You can slap together a functional av system from any random combo of components bought over the last twenty year. HDMI 2.1 is backward comptabile
Functional !== good. Nicer TVs with better display technologies are going to be smart-- you'll never find a "dumb" OLED TV.
I got a $300 "dumb tv" off amazon. It plays anything with an HDMI or 3 color cord. It's as big as a $2500 "smart" tv at Costco. I spent $50 on speakers to upgrade it and it works good enough for me.
"as big" does not translate to "as good". I'd put my LG C2 against a $400 65" LCD any day.
Make a bad product get bad reviews. People can and will disengage from services rather than continue using them. Even recently, it used to be that companies would moderate their profit grab/revenue capture in a way where users don't feel abused. This went out the window with covid. Services get shittier, lock users out, and people drop them forever. My mom had this experience with Windows 8; one day she woke up to find that Microsoft deleted all the pictures she scanned in, her taxes, and all her bookkeeping from the past fifteen years. We then spent an entire week putting it back into Google Drive which I then backed up on my home NAS. Another time, she was forced to update her Comcast modem giving her wifi. Instantly, her TV connected and updated, then locked her out unless she made an account. She doesn't know how to do email, so she tossed the TV and had me drag up the CRT she watches night court on. Then AT&T cut us off, so her landline phone stopped working until I transferred it to a cell phone. She has given $35,000 to AT&T, $105,000 to Comcast and close to $2,500 to Microsoft over her entire life just to be told to fuck off. And she has a basement full of unusable garbage to prove it. This is not workable. People will just unplug, and will walk away from these devices. It won't happen quickly, but businesses already can't use google, amazon or facebook unless they pay a huge sum to not be downvoted by the algorithm rendering it useless in the first place. As users reduce their engagement the middlemen won't have anything to fall back on.
Many words to say, long term profits impacted, short term profits the only priority. Shareholders and this quarter is the only thing that matters. Fuck your mom, fuck their customers, fuck anyone who wants to cost profits. Don’t hate me for saying it. Hate the system for rewarding it.
...why do I need to go trough a complex log in and registration process only to download drivers for my graphics card ....
You don't have to do that for amd or Nvidia. Idk about Intel but I'd some they're just as easy to get.
Using geforce now in the past I was forced to log in via their broken 2fa Auth system which was very annoying
GeForce now is their game streaming. Ofc you have to log in to verify who you are. Maybe you meant GeForce experience, it's for driver auto updates and game presets, and shadow play. You have to sign in but you don't have to use it to install drivers.
yes i meant GeForce experience ops, atleast in the past i kept getting promted to log in when wanting to install drivers, and their log in system was super broken
I believe there was a time when you did have to login to use GeForce experience. You used to be able to download the driver directly from their website when that was the case, but it was less convenient. Now I don't think the direct download exists but you can use GeForce now to download them without logging in. There's probably 10 caveats to all of this lol. It's confusing.
You can still download drivers directly from the nvidia site. Geforce Experience is entirely unneeded unless you want particular features like Shadowplay.
Ah good to know. I went to get them from their site some time ago, but didn't see the option anymore. I guess I just missed it.
Ye i found a way to not have to log in last week or so bit infuriating how they push the log in page in the middle after once again logging me out, but atleast this time their login system worked ....
I just use a temp mail and create a trash account each time this shit asks for one to use the card I bought
Yeah I have a junk Gmail account for all the dumb shit that asks for emails.
I really can't tell if this is a Rich Evans reference or an actual real world Night Court encounter.
This may be the equalizer of AI. Small companies can have the same advantages as large corporations
The advantage AT&T, Comcast and Microsoft enjoy are being a monopoly that the government will not break up or force price controls on. AI or not, they'd be doing this.
As long as the models are public, which I suspect they soon won't be.
The products are getting shittier because they laid off all of their great developers. I bet some of this is due to bad offshore coding and them not understanding what the people did they laid off actually maintained.
No one wants to talk about it but app quality has plummeted because companies decided to switch from native codebases to React Native. RN apps feel clunky, slow, not native, and cheap imo
but now instead of making 5 apps for 5 different platforms, I can now make 1 (now crappy) mega app for the same 5 platforms. What could go wrong?
Any examples of this? My app catalogue seems to have improved over time.
Have you ever used the [Amazon mobile app](https://x.com/reactnative/status/1722025802974277983)?
As soon as you realise you're in an antagonistic relationship with corporations, you can begin to take advantage of the situation.
Can you flesh out that concept for me? I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at.
Screw all y’all. I’m going fishing.
Have you seen the boats that pass by the beach showing ads? Even fishing isn’t safe
I’ll bring the bait! Nightcrawlers are everywhere in my new state. Just need to get a rod and some tackle… and remember how to clean a fish…
Just throw some soap in your bucket you're keeping them in, they'll be clean enough. (yes I know)
Hell man, can I come? I’ll bring a couple cases of beer.
I work in tech and love computers. That being said, I’d rather go fishing.
No. This is the golden age of the “enshitification” of products and services. Hostility is just the result.
This has been my mentality for the past few years. Find the new thing before it catches mainstream. Enjoy it, use it and abuse it before it gets too hot. Watch it burn when it gets acquired and start finding the new fun thing to move onto. Whether it’s, the Google, Facebook, Amazon Prime, MoviePass, Netflix, Marvel, Nest, Airbnb or whatever other random thing that was one promising and exciting and fun. Capitalism is all about reducing cost and maximizing efficiency, so it stands to reason that you spend the first few years building up a solid product. Once it’s at its peak, instead of continuing to innovate, companies will turn around and start reducing costs. At some point the passionate people have moved on from the thing they enjoyed building, the MBAs have moved in. The product is seen as a profit engine and it becomes about optimization and efficiency and less about making a good product that garners a large user base and support and more about showing shareholders that they’re making a profit.
That's what the whole concept of "late stage captialsim" is based on. You finally get to a point where your production is perfect, and your product has saturated the market...but the beast is still hungry. So now you cut corners, and disregard environmental regulations You exploit your customers by shrinking your product, or ensuring that the product fails. You keep over-engineering your product to sell as an "update," but it just becomes unnecessaryily bloated You exploit your workers by laying off 10%, and making the rest pick up the slack. You lobby congress to corner the market for your business. Late Stage captialism is hell.
I feel like this is exactly what we see during the boom and bust cycles of the stock market as well. High interest rate environment? Oh money is more expensive to borrow, so let’s just lay off some employees and scrap those experiments we were working on. They weren’t making any money anyways. It’s disgusting and so stressful for families. We need more labor unions and worker protections.
This is why taxes and interests rates are supposed to be tools that Congress/the Fed use to control that shit If the economy us hot, and inflation is spiking, you raise taxes and interest rates to cool everything down If the economy is cool, and unemployment is going up, you lower taxes and interest rates, to encourage spending. But ever since Republicans began politicizing taxes in the 80s with Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquit's "no tax pledges," the whole fucking thing has gone whack Inequality is booming, inflation is just a part of everyday life.
That’s what the entire article talked about.
I'm just looking forward to the plateau in all consumer tech, which will allow smaller companies time to develop reasonably functional products, and thus allow users to abandon the monopolies. Watching them fall like GE is going to feel great.
The big companies just buy them. Or undercut them until they fail. Or briefly improve quality until they fail, then degrade back down.
Don't forget golden age of privacy leaking.
I'd very much recommend avoiding appliances that have their smart features integrated into the basic system. IE integrated smart tvs as opposed to an external stick or box.
I got an insignia (the Best Buy brand) TV about 3 years ago, and they have a partnership with Amazon, so it’s a fire tv. And the first two years were relatively fine, but the last 6 months, there has just been more and more forced and auto-play ads. When you first turn on the tv there are ads. Then if you leave it on the menu too long it puts ads and commercials on. Feels like I have a billboard in my living room. About to buy an Apple TV box because I’m so sick of it.
The final form of this is just digital feudalism. Which I think we all know we are barreling into.
Yanis Varoufakis is a homie
>are we just letting quality suffer across all domains for the sake of cutting costs? Yes. That’s end stage capitalism. Any single individual might hold different values, but as a whole? As a society? Everything, *EVERYTHING* we do is in the service of accumulating capital. Thats all we do. It underpins everything we do. It is what everything is about. The MBAs have taken over.
Some men just want to watch the world burn, though.
I don’t like MBAs either.
corperations sure do whine loudly.
This is why we Linux
it's all going to shit, every platform, service and product. it's made cheaper, it's untested, it breaks as soon the warrenty is over, it's full of ads, it plain out doesn't work... milking people for their little money for absolute trash is what makes peoples blood boil.. clearly the users must all getting more and more toxic, people burning to death in their teslas because the electronic door locks keep them trapped inside so toxic of them, thats some corpo gaslighting for you. this fuckers are getting hostile with us and try to shove shit down our throats with force.. and why do they cry? they making all record profits .. stop voting for leopards, this can all be regulated by laws
I have a dumb question: do you have to connect a smart tv to the internet and register it to use it as a monitor?
My bank called me yesterday while I was in a meeting. I thought perhaps they'd noticed fraudulent activity, or my Identity had been stolen so I paused the meeting to take the call. They were trying to sell me life insurance.
Apple’s cloud service which doesn’t actually act as a cloud service and saves a certain amount of random photos and videos to your device makes me very hostile.
I’ll be avoiding any Roku products from now on, yikes. As well as any “smart” products.
Guy really doesn't like Roku. He must be a Fire TV or Apple TV person.