aquafunkalisticbootywhap

shoutout to USAA banking app that detected my root, but just showed a warning and allowed me to continue. that’s how it ahould be imho

because workers don’t collectively own the means of production.

not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.

buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label ‘artisan’. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.

The DEA’s administrative law judge already said it shouldn’t be Schedule I, after a lengthy review, and (surprise!) the DEA administrator ignored them. What a genius system; leave it up to the person wielding power to be the one making the final decision to wield less power 🤦

D.A. and sheriff have argued their positions provide them immumity from civil lawsuits.

No! No, no, nonono, NO! FUCK YOU. “I’m just doing my job” is not a “get out of jail free” card, and certainly doesn’t excuse you from defending your actions. You use the courts to ruin other people’s lives when you deem it appropriate? You’d better damn well believe your conduct while doing so is subject to the same processes- criminal and civil. Forget the sheer arrogance of thinking differently -

if you’d think about it for half a second, you supposed justice system experts -

the whole damn thing doesn’t work otherwise! Who is going to bother listening to you, holier than thou police officers, when you say the rules don’t apply to you!? Are you somehow fucking stumped why people just mysteriously don’t like cops? THIS KIND OF BULLSHIT IS A BIG REASON WHY. When you plainly act like the expectactions we hold for each other don’t apply to you, you sound like you think you’re above the law. You’re not royalty, you’re not nobility; you are citizens, just like us.

these were choices y’all made. choices have consequences. own your shit. we DO NOT pay you to be mindless law enforcing robots- exercise better judgement next time. you want respect for the difficult job you do? rationally defend your actions OR as you’ve somewhat tried to do, apologize, and then show you’ve learned from your mistakes. this “I can’t deal with/the system can’t deal with the idea that people make bad choices so lets just act like everyone is infallable” is ruining, just RUINING any hope we have of continuing to be a functioning society pulls hair out in frustration

remember, it’s not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it’s about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.

then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data

it’d be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that’s before any income from rental

can’t labels and artists pay for some kind of premium placement in discover weekly, release radar, and playlist recs?

ok, after some research, found this:

In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active (Discovery Mode is not active in our editorial playlists). This signal increases the likelihood of the selected songs being recommended, but does not guarantee it.

so, at the very least, the recs you get are definitely not organic, and favor major labels, rich folks, and if Spotify can make any money off streaming the track in the first place

not saying the algorithm doesn’t get it right most of the time (they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if it was all sponsored), but if it’s favoring big labels and drowning out everyone else in the name of revenue for Spotify, I prefer to choose other ways to find new stuff. if Spotify needs more money to pay the bills, imho they should plainly be asking the consumers up front

whoops. maybe I should read the entire thing next time

downvotes are not to express disagreement!

so many comments here about adding regulations and “this should be illegal” and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior

but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior

just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn’t make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn’t mean it is the only effective check & balance

The way I understood it is a commercial for McD in the US isnt required to have real food; a commercial for McD’s “whatever” has to have the actual item being advertised, but can be so meticulously crafted, you’d never see one like that in the wild. A commercial for a grocery chain, for example- most/all of of the food you see is props made to look like the most appetizing food youve ever dreamed of.

Who knows if this is enforced. NPR and PBS stations are specifically prohibited from “sponsorship” messages mentioning a specific product or service, and they’ve been ignoring that for decades.