i for one am not impressed when a company says some shit like "we will be carbon neutral by 2050" that is a long time from now and it is 80 degrees in october

Found at: http://geocities.com/Tokyo/Teahouse/1924/pokemonimages.html

I don’t want to end Amazon, because it provides an incredibly useful service to the disabled community, the elderly, and those who simply don’t have time to go shopping due to working three jobs and the like. There currently isn’t a major alternative on the market that is the same level of cheap and accessible.

What I do want to do is enforce some goddamn antitrust laws on major web-based companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook, and roll back their attempts at monopolizing entire industries, and make them pay their lowest-rung workers a fair wage and stop running their warehouses like a scene from a dystopian nightmare.

Also, let’s be frank, just from the standpoint of time-saving and accessibility, looking at any given Amazon search results page makes me want to cry. I thought capitalism was supposed to breed greater efficiency? How is it efficient to have 50 listings of the exact same product from the same factory sold under 50 different brand names with 50 slightly-different prices? And how is that better for the end customer who has to choose?

Before everyone and their grandmother started up dropshipping companies to get rich quick, Amazon was really fucking great for finding what you wanted, actually, but they are caught in the same irrational trap of Stonks Must Go Up Forever that’s ruining everything else. I think they might have originated it.

"SURVIVING"

Oh this isnt normal, huh

Scott pilgrim is so funny because apparently when scott kills someone they just respawn back in their hometown. Imagine waking up on your moms couch and having to explain to your sweet mother that some canadian twink fucking decked you over a girl and it killed you

#wait they don’t die

yeah I’ve also been going around assuming scott pilgrim killed seven people and everyone was just like…..cool with it

All of us learning that “defeat” did not mean “kill” has the same energy as Scot discovering why Ramona kept correcting him “exes” when he’d say “exboyfriends”

i know she's talking about tech in video games but honestly isn't this just the millenial mindset

I know this is very funny and all but I need you all to know that this is genuinely how this is done in the fucking speedrun

Canonical enshittification

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

Next will be: "We block links to other sites because they might be malicious."

Then some kind of "pivot to video."

Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).

Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.

I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."

That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.

All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.

If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.

This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.

I've written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Shout out to trans women who aren't computer scientists or musicians or avant-garde artists or whatever.

Shout-out to tgirls who work at Taco Bell. Thank u queen, society would collapse without you

Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the "gay Taco Bell", but since I was coming from the "gay Howard Johnson's" I wasn't shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they'd worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the "gay Taco Bell" on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven't changed much in 20 years. I'm still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city's version of the "gay Taco Bell" is key to survival.

Thank u for sharing this with us

Rich people openly brag about intentionally choosing to live off of other people's hard work, while they shame poor people for receiving financial assistance that they need to live.

happy werewolf transgenderism wednesday

happy werewolf transgenderism wednesday

Giles said nonbinary werewolf rights.

Diversity win! The werewolf who mauled you to death and ate you is non-binary

today on the train home the guy next to me was on his phone and at one point i saw him go on tumblr and he just had like. a normie dash. like it was all photography. of nature and architecture. he was using tumblr the way a heterosexual landscaper for rich people might use instagram. i actually had to watch his screen for a few seconds to be sure it really was tumblr because i was so taken aback by the content he was viewing. this is why algorithmless websites are so beautiful btw because i genuinely didn't know that this side of tumblr even existed. he didn't even so much as scroll past any text posts.

Me: So yeah, casual english has completely changed since then. Nowadays instead of 'There was a crying baby on the bus today' you would say 'Me when I'm in a being loud and annoying competition and my opponent is crying baby on bus.' And then you'd post this picture of Squidward. Oh, uh, Squidward is a guy from a cartoon-"

Reanimated Corpse of John Wilkes Booth: *Has been staring angrily at a penny for the last 15 minutes and not listened to a word I've said*

cats are small and you can pick them up

I didn’t know he was Jewish.

Mothltav

added the text under the images last minute because I remembered that not everyone can easily tell which season each of these screenshots is from

I know everyone is dying to know my reasoning so here it goes:

season 2: ten has no thoughts in his head, only rose. doesn't even need to know what sex is.

season 3: he still hasn't grasped the concept of sex. not that it matters - he is such an asshole this season, so no one would do it with him anyway.

season 4: donna finally gave him the talk...

specials: ...and he will use this knowledge. for evil.

why none of them got into The Good Place

What I love about this is its acknowledgment that Jason had no intentions at all

this is all 100% true but it always made me really mad that Chidi’s “crime” was having a severe anxiety disorder like he needed understanding and therapy, sending him to the Bad Place for something he had literally no control over was incredibly fucked up

I feel like a less-surface theme of the show is that they’re all in a situation where they have been forced into bad patterns by forces outside their control - Chidi has SEVERE anxiety; Eleanor was forced by abuse and neglect to adopt a self-centered attitude from early childhood and, like many people with traumatic pasts, responds by not dealing with difficult emotions; Jason was very overtly raised in an environment where he got no education and all his models for behaviour were criminal and/or self-destructive; and Tahani has been raised in an environment where everything is performative and she is shot down for any genuine expression of unhappiness or non-material want. Just as Michael and Janet are made one way but changed by their experiences, the moral of the story is that things outside your control shape you but you can move away from them. That could easily be really insulting, in a sort of ‘just get over it’ way, but the idea isn’t that they change solely because they decide to be better - all six of them change because their circumstances change and give them the OPPORTUNITY to be better, because they’re finally given the support system they lack.

I like The Good Place because the whole show has since day 1 been predicated on the idea that black and white moral judgements made in a vacuum are bullshit, and that moral choices are informed by things outside our control, whether that be education, behaviour modelling, unfair treatment or mental health issues. That doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for our actions but it DOES mean we have to understand morality in the context of people’s varied experiences AND asks for the possibility that if their environment is improved, their ability to function as moral agents also improves.

“sending him to the Bad Place for something he had literally no control over was incredibly fucked up” yea it was fucked up that was the entire point they made in the show. thats why they spent multiple seasons fighting to change the system of the Good Place vs. the Bad Place.