OpenStars

Too many people treat drinking like it’s some kind of contest imho - like, if you don’t enjoy the flavor, then why drink it, and if you do, then why … ah… quaff it?

He was…thirsty

Do I really want to know what “quaff” is?

he quaffed pint after pint of good, good juice.

No, methinks I doth prefer mine earlier ignorance. :-P

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

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Hehe, nothing to see here, these are not the stories you are looking for, move along :-P

“Midnight Mass” on Netflix, I’m just saying…

On the bright side, Kbin is showing a picture of absolutely gorgeous cherry blossoms 🌸 in the snow for this post. :-P

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

Joke’s on them - I got stupider all on my own, didn’t have to go nowhere or nuthin. :-P

Just at a guess, people who say that surely must be factoring in medical healthcare costs, to deal with the consequences of obesity and such.

B…b…but are you saying that you could not love such a homely creature?

Actually, I jest but if you had like a barn it could still catch mice, plus would scare away any human “visitors” really quick! :-P

Principle of equivalent exchange, check:-)

Welcome to late-stage capitalism, where companies sell what you do not want to buy. e.g., no wired connection has ever once had this problem, but they had to sell more thingies, so now everything is bluetooth, whether it should be or not, plus it seems like nobody ever bothered to finish implementing bluetooth - e.g., this exact issue you are having, which surely could be fixed except… why bother, when you (& your neighbors) have already bought all the thingies?

But once you pay farmers to grow corn, they have to sell it somewhere. Hence HFCS, and corn oil, and corn gas, and ofc corn corn, and… The then-head of NIH Francis Collins was once asked what single thing Americans could do to be healthier - he said to eat better, especially less sugar, and Congress could remove the farming subsidies, or at least expand them from beyond corn & soybean to include fruits & vegetables. They laughed in his face. Ain’t nobody got time for 'dat!

The single worst part of it all is that those subsidies were put into place when a huge fraction of aspiring volunteer soldiers were turned away in WWII due to “malnutrition”. Thus the campaign was born to literally fatten up America. It worked!!! And it will continue to work… forever, bc once you create a voting block, ending it or even redirecting (towards a healthier end for us all, but lower profits for Monsanto in the short term) seems next to impossible. It actually is a good argument against socialism, at least in the USA where the government is so enormously susceptible to special interest groups (although there are even better arguments against capitalism so I don’t mean to say that it PROVES that socialism is bad, just that it is one example of its misuse, when the government is in charge of something and also the government is stupid; and before anyone says it, yes this situation is an argument against both at the same time:-P).

An excellent documentary about it, most of what I’m saying here is from part 4: https://www.hbo.com/the-weight-of-the-nation/season-1. I know, filmmakers can be… uninformed some(MANY MANY)times, but this was done as a joint venture between the FDA and NIH, so this is highly credentialed. Also trigger warning; it will make you very very sad watching this, bc facts in this era of end-stage capitalism tend to do that, so if you do not want to see things like mothers feeding their 300 pound 10-year old an enormous meal of pasta - literally killing them right before your eyes, slowly and painfully - then… well, I did warn you at least.

Well that escalated quickly!

I would love to see where it would go forward from there, but our puny human minds surely could not handle the Eldritch strangeness that would entail… (or rather, we could only do it once, then go insane forever afterwards - sign me up!:-P)

fallen angels, ftfy :-P

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

Sadly, that part comes later as well:-(.

The only bright side is that after the adjustment period, Earth is going to be just fine - no lie! (Humans living on it though… that’s a bit of a different story now…😞)