If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.

All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.

Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.

A pretty good number of these are just pointing out differences between colloquial language and specific language.

Botanical language is useful for botanists to communicate with each other but I’m not putting tomatoes in the fruit salad. Thinking of tomatoes as veggies in your kitchen isn’t some MYTH! Calling a tall plant a tree is useful for you and I to communicate. That does not mean we are deceived or attempting to undermine the work of our botany friends.

The sugar one drives me nuts. Like yeah sugar doesn’t cause DSM-5 “hyperactivity”. Like of course not! It does give a little energy boost. And the rugrats will use the highly available energy and become a hilarious unmanageable dufus for a half hour or so.

If you actually thought that candy was going to give your child a diagnosable psychiatric condition… you’re a huge fucking idiot. If you haven’t ever noticed that giving a kid a bag of sour patch kids gets them riled up, you haven’t spent much time with kids.

This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.

Nvidia is making a thing and selling it. No matter what happens with AI tech, they are going to keep their winnings.

Everybody else… well they borrowed/raised and spent a FORTUNE on R&D, chips, and electricity to make a product that has no realized commercial value (yet?). They are either going to figure out where the money comes from soon or the bills gonna come due. The next 12 months are going to be popcorn worthy if you like watching the tech industry.

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

“Privacy” means two different things depending on the audience. For me privacy means that my information is not being used to advance some organizations commercial interest. For others it means that my information will never be shared with a government.

Don’t advertise to me

Or

Don’t narc on me

I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf. Especially if I have been using their service to commit crimes in my country. If you are doing things your government would prefer you didn’t, hire a good lawyer and consult with them about what should be sent via email (spoiler, it’s nothing). The mafia doesn’t send emails, or put anything in writing, if you do crimes, you shouldn’t either.

My dude, never underestimate wall streets ability to ignore tsla failing. They will hold that stock. Shorting tsla is a fools errand. The people who own tsla are immune to reality.

Everything good that tsla owners were banking on has already happened. The gravy days are in the past but… the insane valuation persists.

You cannot short stupidity.

It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?

A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.

Oh wow, that sounds like a cool project. I will look into it.

I ended up making an awesome esphome rig for my garage door. An esp32 board, a magnetic switch for position detection and a little relay that closes for .5s connected to the wall button wires.

Super simple and it works crazy well. It also cuts out all the proprietary shit the manufacturer would prefer I use.

This joke is both very good and EXTREMELY local.

The never ending growth thing is complex. But set all of that aside, if your company doesn’t peruse the growth, somebody else will. There is no future where nobody bothers to try and sell to a market that is begging for a product.

Nobody needs Microsoft to exist, but people want free software and services (windows is functionally free, the last time I paid for it was win7). They can take a privacy purist route and change $3-400 for a license w/ an update every 5yrs but the product will die and everyone will switch to chromebooks.

Microsoft can “be better”, and then they would stop being relevant. If you want a little better, pay the Apple tax, if you want A LOT better pay the time tax and use Linux.

First the money was in the hardware. Then, the money was in the software. Then, the money was in the services. Now, the money is in the data you can harvest from the users.

If being a sponge for ads, and a source of data to sell and use for training LLMs, is not your thing, using computer systems produced by for profit companies is probably out.

Enshitification isn’t driven by some new and unique greed. It’s the only way left to earn money in the space. Customers WANT subsidized hardware running free software and cloud services. If MS doesn’t give them that somebody else will and that will be that.

I don’t want to blame customers for all this. But to most folks trading something they didn’t know had value (their data and attention) for something that they know has value (software and services) seems like an awesome deal. The corps are following the customers to some extent, and we have to acknowledge that.

It’s such a silly concept. This massive superstructure of division to replace the simple idea that “I have a lot in common with peers in my age cohort”.

As soon as somebody says “technically you are a member of generation___”, you can ignore them. Anyone who puts a generation label at the center of their identity probably doesn’t have a lot else going on.

The wired Nic on mine is dead, WiFi only now. one time modeled and 3d printed a part to fix the feeder. I will keep this fucker running forever.

I mean I was able to save almost 15k during that year which was a suitable down payment on a 100k ish house. which wasn’t hard to find in the city I lived in circa 2005. It wasn’t anything to crow about but it beat renting.

I have received a somewhat unusual vaccination and my antibodies were valuable to a drug company for a while. They were paying 120$ for plasma for a while and you could go 2x a week. The plasma center, like most, wasn’t in the best neighborhood and the cash was doled out be an ATM like machine when you were finished. Well 120 took a hell of a lot more “kachunks” that 15 did and by the time you got your cash there was a whole room full of pissed off desperate folks staring at you. Not that fun.

I have had to sell plasma to make ends meet in my life and I know what those people must have been feeling watching some kid in nice clothes get paid 10x what they were for the same unpleasant procedure. Fucking rough. I used the money to buy a house. They would be lucky to get a groceries out of the deal