just like every other drug on the market.
I agreed with you up till this point. Not sure which market you mean here. The nitrous oxide I referred to is the food market. There is also N₂O in the car market and dental markets. Only dentistry has other drugs but I doubt that is what you are referring to. Assuming you meant the black market of recreational drugs, no they are not all equal. N₂O can permanently damage the nervous system after copious use, but not really mj, lsd, or shrooms.
shoplifted goods are paid for
It’s not just the maker that is a problem. I boycott the whole supply chain. Indeed I know the shop in the end of the chain loses, which is good enough. Everyone in the supply chain is part of the problem. I’m not going to fly to Israel to sabotage their factory.
it’s literally factored into the price and claimed against insurance.
That factor counts. Of course only in situations where the insurer does not exclude “mysterious unexplained disappearance”. Either way, the effect is favorable:
on your other point, I don’t believe you need to use the branded drink mixes
Sure, but for me the trouble and space of having a single-purpose appliance would calls for local generic ready-made concentrates of cola and immitation dr.pepper-like stuff. If limited to experimenting with molassas and limes or whatever, it becomes a hard sell.
No lock-in (adversarial interop is fine)
I didn’t realise Sodastream had a lock-in mechanism, which means buyers not only support Israel w/the purchase but they are in fact forced to continue supporting Israel. The DiY page you linked says this:
It uses no electricity (no microchips, like some Soda Stream systems).
Oof… so IIUC, Sodastream needs electricity for the purpose of powering a vendor lock-in mechanism. yikes.
In my area, the streets are littered with N₂O tanks because making whipped cream is /very/ popular (particularly around university campuses). I wonder if those tanks can be repurposed for fizzy drinks. I heard they are spec’d to handle around 100 bar, which is far beyond what would be needed.
I was going to mention that as well but you beat me to it.
The only way I would have a Sodastream would be if I pull one out of a dumpster and fix it, or if it were shoplifted. But then there’s the next problem: I boycott Coca-Cola and Pepsi both, and I have never seen consumables by other brands (at least not locally).
As a Tor user, I will not patronise an anti-Tor establishment.
In light of all of Amtrak’s other problems, they have a looong way to go.
I would be tempted to try train-hopping on freight trains.
DRM comes in many forms. I once heard of a granny looking at DRM book permissions, one of which was “read out loud”. She was annoyed: “you mean I cannot read some books out loud to my grandkids?” Of course what it really was was a control on the use of text-to-speech.
I have also heard:
Some books I would read cover to cover and be done with. But I often inadvertently tune out because of my own mental distractions, and realize I have zombie-read 2 or 3 pages without absorbing it, and have to go back. DRM would probably screw me over for that. I usually need to return to previously read pages many times with cookbooks and motorcycle service guides. I don’t think I even want to be aware of all the various different DRM-imposed restrictions. Apart from restrictions which may potentially be tolerable (not tried it), what about the privacy? DRM is likely coupled with a bit of snooping, no?
The only way to cancel this subscription fee is to lose access to the books,
Or move outside of Manhattan.
All paper books are DRM-free. Isn’t it a hassle to try to work out whether an e-book is DRM-free before buying? Or is the presence of DRM transparently prominent? And when there is DRM, how easy is it to find a DRM-free version?
Did you ever discover a book has DRM after buying? I wonder how many people get stung like that.
If an artist would add a bracelet or cuff link to the robotic arm that says “🐘We support family values --GOP”, that would do the trick.
The links are there. I followed one of them to this:
“State legislatures across the country are actively working to protect their communities from the dangers of ESLs, introducing bills banning the use of electronic shelving labels and the practice of dynamic pricing in our food and drug stores.”
Corporations are run by people. Those people potentially have empathy. But often CEOs are psychopathic. It’s no coincidence. IIRC, research found that psychopaths also lack empathy for themselves, which means when they fail they do not dwell on it or give a shit about their own pride. They just refine their skill move ahead like a learning machine. It is because of that propensity for psychopaths to shed emotion and be successful in business that they often end up as CEOs. The ideal CEO for shareholders to get max profit is one who robotically makes the best most calculated decision for profit. So it’s sensible enough to think of a corporation as human with malfunctioning empathy. The main difference is that the malfunction is desired and deliberately selected by the shareholders.
BTW, for some reason I did not get a notification of your reply. I just happened to be back in this thread when I saw your reply.
(edit) I wonder if it’s because your msg was tagged as français that I did not receive a notification.
(edit 2) I had no language selected, not even the “undetermined” language choice. After setting my language to undetermined, I was able to see notifications of your reply.
People won’t buy higher quality and thus determine what is “good enough”, because good stuff that used to cost $10 is now $100
Inflation is only relevant for exposing more clearly the low quality bar of acceptance. You can test this by going to a rich area where consumers are flush with wealth. When the splash large amounts of money without restraint, your judgement of what quality is being tolerated is clouded because they are indulging and may not even give a shit about quality because they will be happy to have an excuse to upgrade again in a year anyway. It is precisely when inflation has impact that you can see the level of quality being accepted. Your past/present comparison is clouded by that same difference.
There’s no self-correction in the market because people don’t have the disposable income that would drive said correction.
The lack of money to waste is precisely what reveals what quality is being tolerated.
The $10 piece of crap, say, a pair of shoes or a backpack, will still sell, BECAUSE PEOPLE CAN’T FUCKING AFFORD A TENFOLD INCREASE FOR THE SAME QUALITY.
This doesn’t obviate the point that they decide what quality is acceptable. If they buy it, then they have sent a clear market signal that the quality is accepted. Full stop. That’s how capitalism works. We can hate capitalism all we want – just as we can hate facts.
In my neighborhood, shoes and backpacks litter the streets, literally. Low quality is gratis. I now have a collection of functional backpacks that I paid /zero/ for. The shoes get rounded up by scavengers and sold at the local street market for ~$1—5. Wealthy people are content to spend absurd amounts on new shoes. Either way, when people spend money, they signal that the quality is good enough.
I have a high bar for quality on my everyday backpack. So I paid 3 figures for a good one. When I need another, I will just use the best of my scrounged collection. When I need to buy one, whatever I decide I will be sending a market signal indicating my quality tolerance. Which very well could be no transaction at all if the quality is too poor.
Sometimes I enter the marketplace for something and see garbage all around. I don’t even see sufficient quality in the highest budget stuff. In that case, I walk. That’s right. I choose to boycott because the quality is unacceptable. All recent washing machines are garbage now. I have been washing my clothes by hand for years now. Not all consumers are pushovers. But too many are and that’s the problem.
BECAUSE PEOPLE CAN’T FUCKING AFFORD A TENFOLD INCREASE FOR THE SAME QUALITY.
We are perhaps living in very different parts of the world. I’m surrounded by people who blow 3+ figures on a shitty new proprietary smartphone designed for obsolescence every couple years. Buying shit like smart watches, smart speakers, smart TVs that idk give them a few more pixels than before, … lots of garbage they don’t need. Buying EVs instead of bicycles. That’s not an affordability problem. It’s consumerism with reckless disregard. This crowd sends a clear market signal that there are plenty of fools happy and waiting to be separated from their money for some low quality junk. And they ruin the marketplace for everyone else.
The ruin the consumerists cause when buying garbage in my part of the world also impacts your apparently poverty-stricken part of the world due to globalisation. Producers are getting a clear signal that their garbage is accepted.
It should, because it should improve in enshitification that visitors experience. There could be a door to enter a room that refuses to open unless you solve a CAPTCHA.
There is in fact a real world similar case. I went to visit a law office which was on the 5th floor of a building. I had to pass through a security desk in a lobby first. The security staff said all visitors must register first. They pointed to a touch screen. The interview process on the touch screen demanded an email address which was a required field. The guard said entering an email address is mandatory. So people without an email address are unable to physically meet the lawyers in person (which is what offline people often do).
Yeah, rotating sounds good. If several big cities have their own museum, the shit can rotate between them.
If anti-consumer dynamic pricing is in play with medicine, as you suggest, the shenanigans should be controlled independant of whether the tags are electronic.
So many other options.
To properly cover the enshitification topic it needs to be a “mega museum” covering thousands of square meters. There is almost no limit to the quantity of exhibits.
Real estate is the only cost that would be hard to control. The products that fill the space would be infinitely vast and could all come from donations by their angry owners.
You can’t taste an exhibit.
An exhibit with samples to taste is the kind of exhibit that’s less forgettable and has more impact.
The walls could be covered with pics like Snickers bars… and levels of heat peppers measure up to showing whatever standard heat scale is prevailing.
Things in museums have to be astonishingly on the nose for the average person to get it. How would you convey through glass that one pepper is hotter?
I’m not sure why you think exhibits must be in glass. If you tour a beer brewery, there is sometimes a box of hops for visitors to try.
Also if someone likes mild peppers they think “well this suits me, it’s not all bad.”
Not everyone has to react to all forms of enshitification. They should experience enough enshitified instances in the museum to walk away feeling enlightened.
It’s a good start but a bit trickier. I guess we also need to ban personalized pricing. If the shop is empty and someone approaches, we would not want the prices to update for that person just before they enter. Also, the price of allergy meds could still jump up just before they open the shop on a day with a high pollen count.
unreasonable to anthropomorphize
I agree, but exceptionally I also agree with RMS who said something like “all corporations are psychopathic”.
I appreciate the tip but that’s a tor-hostile Cloudflare site. So I would not patronise them.