Burning waste qualifies as recycling.
I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.
How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it “put ads here, here and here”.
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes “I know this guy, they’re an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I’ll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face”. Someone else yells “I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn’t bought one yet.”
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That’s extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
And how you’re tracked online. I’ve worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don’t see you,the user, and your data.
I just click “female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone” and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they’re super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that’s advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won’t even get into the audience side of things and they’ll stick to keywords: they’ll show you an ad because you searched for “autumn home decor” and that’s all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don’t have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don’t understand it, and it’s true, they don’t have time… so then Google takes your “autumn wreath” keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for “Christmas trees”, because they’re both seasons and they’re both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn’t interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn’t fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren’t there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It’s fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it’s bad for everyone except Google.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
::hugs my PiHole::
Oil and gas workers are normal people with children and dogs that care about the environment and they do a pretty good job on average of protecting the it. But accidents do happen in the industry, and when they do, it’s sometimes not a simple “cleanup on aisle six” scenario. I’ve seen grown men on their hands and knees mopping up drops of oil in a cow pasture more than once.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe.
That’s why you never live nearby a freeway or major highway.
People brake less often on highways?
Have you seen a highway in Los Angeles during rush hour?
…Have you seen almost any other highway in the U.S. ever?
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
I mean, people in their 20s have done some pretty amazing things.
Yeah but most people aren’t Alexander the Great or Mozart. And even if you are, you’re probably not working in congress, hah
Alexander had Aristotle to tutor him. If you find yourself young and in power, you better hope your elder advisors are that good.
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%
Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.
IMO, for the average, healthy customer, the sanitation requirements are overkill. But not every customer is, so the rules help protect the less healthy customers.
The biggest thing about food, is most of it is pasteurized by the cooking. Raw foods like salads are the ones that need a much higher standard.
I can guarantee you that many of the rules keep even healthy guests with solid immune systems from getting sick or even dying. The FDA Food Code is like 700 pages. There are A LOT of rules. Many seem overkill from a layman’s perspective, but they protect against unlikely but serious consequences. There are a ton of ways that contamination can occur, even after the food has already been cooked.
That you don’t notice is just a good sign that you’re eating at safe places.
Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.
At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).
It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.
The worms in those strawberries are just some extra protein.
And that is why the Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries!
Not worried about that as much as things that scurry. Barf.
If you want to feel the thrill of hunting some scurrying critters for extra protein, you can get the protein activity package. It’s normally only 17.99 €, but if you also bring a friend, you get a -50% discount.
Wow on sale! Sign me u— waitaminit…
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
I’m not sure I understand what happened here. Was this all just because the receptionist didn’t want to ask for approval because it seemed like a hassle?
Yep… at least that was my guess. Didn’t want to pull the specialist back out of what she was then doing/didn’t want the hassle. But I was adamant that we weren’t going anywhere until she checked.
Some people are just finicky and I can’t really say for sure what her deal was, but her demeanor was just rude and like she didn’t have the time of day to give us…
What a fucking bizarre attitude to have when working in healthcare. Laziness in that area can cause deaths.
It’s more prevalent in the industry than you’d like to think… Burnout is often linked with lack of empathy.
I worked exclusively with adults whose illness was severe enough that they were residing in various residential care facilities (RCFs) and assisted living facilities (ALFs) in my region.
I was a 3rd party and a mandated reporter and I can’t tell you how many times I hotlined facilities and did internal/DMH/DHSS reporting/assistance with investigations. Misallocation of Client funds was a common problem (especially at specific RCFs), medication errors/stealing Residents’ meds, neglect of facilities/cleaning, improper nutrition, and abuse and neglect were all too common…
At first I thought the same thing when I started that position, wondering why someone like that would even take those positions. But people are complicated and often shitty. Some people like to power trip, some people want to take advantage of the disadvantaged, some people’s self-care is so neglected by being over-worked that they no longer have the capacity, and some people are just assholes…
I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
You didn’t talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.
While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.
The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.
You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.
You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.
The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.
Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.
And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.
I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.
Accounting, just like economics, likes to pretend it is a hard science when in reality is it close to reading tea leaves.
So basically, everyone is full of bullshit and lying to keep the system working.
Why am I not surprised?
Social security would be a ponzi scheme if it wasn’t done by the government. System only works because new younger people are “convinced” to put in money to pay the old in hopes that new younger people will pay them in the future.
The social security liability is currently 23 trillion. If no new people started paying in and everyone wanted to cash out, they couldn’t get a dime.
We are 33 trillion dollars in debt. 33 trillion.
If we as a country ever tried to cut spending and save money to pay that down, our economy would collapse so fast.
Social security was designed to be that way, it’s not a secret or anything. It’s how the system was set up and it’s how it is supposed to work. Today’s workers fund today’s retirees.
Except it was built with the assumption that everyone would continue to have 2.5 kids, and skilled immigrants would keep making the US home, and the economy would keep growing and growing forever, and retirees would die off a couple of years after they retired.
All the base assumptions on which the system were built were shaky. People are having fewer kids, so there’s less money coming in. Retirees are living longer so they need more benefits. People who paid hundreds of thousands into the system during their lifetimes are requiring millions in benefits at the end of their lives. But, people are having fewer kids and so the bottom of the pyramid is shrinking.
More immigration would help, but we’re just too damn racist
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Are there currently any that are showing signs of imminent collapse? (Twitter, maybe?).
Or what are the signs to look for those who are untrained in this field?
Regarding Twitter: yes.
As a tech person outside Twitter, looking in: Twitter is metaphorically a huge airliner with one remaining engine, and that engine is pouring smoke.
The clown who caused the first four engines to fail has stepped out of the pilot’s seat, but still has the ability to fire the new pilot, and still has strong convictions on how to fly a plane.
That plane might land safely. But in the tech community, those of us fortunate not to be affected are watching with popcorn, because we expect a spectacular crash.
If anyone reading this is still relying on Twitter - uh, my advice is to start a Mastodon account. Or Myspace or something.
Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.
Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.
React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?
This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.
It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
My dad had to stay in his office with a satellite phone over new years in case shit hit the fan.
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and OSX have all already switched to 64 bit time.
Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.
Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.
So they have a year 202020 bug then
I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:
The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.
A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.
That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.
an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.
Omg we are in same epoch as the butlarian crusade.
Butlarian crusade
Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.
Im just glad you got that reference
If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.
How many UNIX machines in production are still running on machines with 32-bit words, or using a 32-bit time_t?
There was not a single Intel / X86-64 “unibody” Macbook in the entire history of Apple that didn’t have a heat stress issue 😂. First unibody was released in 2009, the first w/ “M” chip fixing the problem in 2020 🤦♂️
Teacher - school districts are so afraid of getting sued that unless a kid is physically assaulting another student we have absolutely nothing we can do about it (even then, no guarantees). If your kid goes to a public school, all of your kids classes have one or two students that are allowed to do essentially whatever they want with no consequences.
Cell phone addiction is also huge. A lot of the “learning loss” being blamed on Covid is in part just the fact that students spend class watching TikTok’s or bullying each other in group chats. Don’t fucking text your kid during class. Vaping is as predominant as smoking was in the 80s.
After the staff are done drinking coffee for the night, we only brew decaf. If you want caffeinated coffee close to closing time at a restaurant, ask for an Americano or other espresso drink.
Truth
The past decade of the tech industry has felt very snakeoil-y.
INB4 “It always has been.”
If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.
Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.
I think it started with registry cleaners.
Those weren’t really pushed as a get-rich-quick scheme, which a lot of the hustle seems to be currently.
Oh, you’re thinking of crypto to junk. Nah, Fudge That.
What’s sad is there are plenty of actual problems out there that could be solved with software. Most of the time they’re not that ‘sexy’ and management is so blinded by greed that they throw away all the good opportunities.
Meh. There are voting systems that:
- take your vote electronically
- print out a readable receipt of your selections so you can double check it
- then scan your receipt to cast your vote
This means you can get an instant result, audit the system, and do a hand recount. Not all voting computers are garbage. Both parties should be pushing for audits and hand counts as a safety check.
It is kind of hilarious that airplanes are seen as being safe and reliable, when if they were given the same factor of safety as most other consumer goods, they’d never get off the ground from being too heavy.
I do NOT recommend you do this, but if a ladder says it is designed for 300 lbs, then it should carry 1200 lbs. 4X is a fairly common factor of safety for things like ladders where people’s lives are in jeopardy. Most other items are usually 2X. (I want to point out that there are qualifications to this… static loading and dynamic loading are totally different things. Also a simple point load is not the same as a cantilevered loading condition. A new piece of equipment is not the same as one abused on the job for the last 10 years. All these things will dramatically affect safety ratings for things)
I’d say the difference is that every single part of an airline is carefully rated though. Everything that’s supplied for use on an airline is expensive because of all the regulations.
A ladder may be rated for 1200 pounds, but nobody inspects every single use-case for that ladder and ensures that the entire system always has 4x safety. Once you buy the ladder it’s up to you what you lean it up against, etc.
Regulations and quality checks on aerospace parts is no joke. More so on stuff that goes out into space and on military hardware, but every single nut and bolt and everything in between can be traced back to a supplier and that supplier will be able to tell you when it was made, by who and even where the raw material came from and show you the certs. Regular airplanes not nearly as strict or as much paperwork, but it isn’t that far behind, quite honestly.
Also, you might be surprised by the testing that ladders go through. Not so much the cheapo Chinesium stuff, but safety in all fields is no joke. It is too costly to skimp on testing.
