• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • This is an unfortunate situation when large scale suppliers dont play ball with smaller stores and when predatory chains like dollar general play the price wars game to drive away better options.

    Unfortunately the kinds of people who live in food deserts tend to be the most price conscious and they will take the longer trip if they need to in order to stretch their dollar out more.

    As an aside I think the article focusing on Cairo, IL of all places was such an unusual choice and I wonder how much of the problems that they had were unique to their location. Cairo is a town who’s population has been declining and whos buildings have been abandoning for the better part of the last hundred years. This is a trend that a lot of rust belt cities share, but Cairo was a small city of under 20,000 that has shrunk to under 1,000. What few people remaining there got a further kick in the rear by the fact that the area has gotten some bad flooding as well.

    Cairo is a relatively remote town that is being steadily abandoned, and has a propensity for flooding(which accelerated the slow process). That isnt to say that they arent a food desert, or that the remaining people there who likely cant afford to move dont deserve better, but I feel like they are an example of a town who’s got more stacked against them than what we usually think of when we think of food deserts (like a poor neighborhood in a city). Honestly I think its not unrealistic to believe the town as a whole will be abandoned in the coming decade.




  • Yeah. I know why beehaw defederated and is inevitably leaving and I understand why they dont want to deal with the usual crap, but I feel like early on when it was one of the bigger instances there was a bit more influence on tone and when they abandoned ship it just lead to the .world and other instances to stew in their own nasty juices.

    But yeah I left most of the reddit front page literally more than a decade ago and as reddit exploded a few years ago it got substantially worse. Occasional forays into them are exhausting. Unfortunately the civil people already dugg into the depths of smaller more civil reddit are already in a happy place and the ones who left for greener pastures are clearly those kinds of internet guys. Downvote innocuous comments, go on the attack when discussing things that arent that serious, act smug and superior, and of course just generally be abrasive and nasty.


  • I dont know if its because I originally just had a beehaw account before migrating to check out some other instances so maybe it was always this way and I was shielded by the de-federating, but holy cow are there a bunch of abrasive sniveling dorks in a lot of discussions. All the while bragging about how much smarter they are than those who left reddit, and yet when I check my old niche reddit subs it’s quite a bit more civil.




  • Yeah and AI is pretty useful for doing certain things. For example my pixel can turn on subtitles for any video or audio playing and even translate it for me on the fly. AI isnt blockchain and it isnt all chatgtp or making images with too many fingers. People are talking about improving web standards as if whatever ai stuff google,MS, and apple are cooking up wont be used in order to enhance various web features.

    Likewise firefox is currently a good browser and does keep up for the most part. I’d understand the criticisms if firefox was suck in 2009, but modern day firefox is fast and works well and they will likely continue keeping up with standards while an independent team works on the open source AI stuff


  • One of the issues I have with non alcoholic products is that because they are meant to be a drop in replacement for alcoholic they wind up being comparable in price sometimes even more expensive.

    For what is effectively a softdrink you wind up paying almost 14-$20 a 6pack and a mocktail at a bar can cost $10+ a cup. Compared to something like soda, flavored seltzers, or a malty brewed softdrink like malta the prices are so high. You can get 12-24 packs for what theyre asking. Some mocktails actually take quite a lot of effort to put together to justify the pricetag, but most Ive seen in the wild tend to be simple to make and in terms of labor not much more than a late or milkshake despite being priced way above them.

    That said there’s nothing wrong with giving people more options to drink while out and about and if you do enjoy the taste of beer to be able to enjoy it without having to get buzzed(even if for some even a mild kick is part of the point)


  • people have been asking for imessage on android for years now and i really don’t know what the issue is.

    Apple wont until somebody makes them.

    The default text messaging app on ios is also stealthily a fully featured chat app that means that less tech savvy iOS users just think their texting is better.

    The blue bubble green bubble issue isnt because ios users hate android users and the color green as much as it’s bad, it’s because big group MMS chains are TERRIBLE. I remember having a friendgroup in the 2010s that had a big mms group chat before we switched to groupme and then eventually telegram(we would have done google messages if google hadnt abandoned it began its not infamous chat sabotage). It was bad. Low quality media, the protocol updated in batches so sending and receiving wasnt as smooth as a chat app, and also you technically could just leave. We eventually switched to a platorm agnostic solution because we had diverse devices.

    Now in the US iphone ownership is like 60 percent. I imagine the ratio is even worse for younger users. So for these users they use default messenger with most people and get feature rich multimedia chat app without even looking for an alternative provider. In some cases I imagine there are users young enough to not even realize what actual text messaging is or if they do there are chunks that think apple just texts better. It gives a perception of quality.

    Then they invite Johnny Android and suddenly the chat degrades back to 2005 flip phone quality SMS/MMS. Now this is entirely apple’s fault and the inability to chat with android users is technically their problem. Or it would be if iphones werent so popular. From their perspective they were having a good time using their default cell phone messanger and the android user broke it. Likewise unless Johnny android is particularly popular or charismatic it’s likely they wont switch to telegram/signal/whatsap/line/etc. They might just leave Johnny Android out of group chats because his presence isnt just green it makes chatting clunkier and worse.

    Johnny android might feel left out even if he isnt being outright bullied and may want to switch to an apple device. Likewise the iphone users may not want to leave the ecosystem and then not be able to easily communicate with their friends.

    SMS fallback I believe started more or less as a way to deal with inconsistent data in the early smartphone days but the unintended consequence of killing off the appeal of third party chat apps on their platform and creating a weird social bubble was a happy accident and apple is never going to give that up.

    Kids beg their parents to buy them iPhones and parents do it so their kids dont get left out or bullied. Even adults are pressured into this and it can be a factor when online dating.