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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • they’re just mad because they didn’t think to do what Uber is doing and now they’re dying.

    That and they’re mad because their virtual monopoly status didn’t protect them from market disruption. They just sat back, assuming that there was no way these rogue taxi services were going to evade the law for long. The fact that an entire industry acted on such a bad take suggests, to me, a lot of anti-competitive bullshit behind the scenes.

    Anyway, I agree. All they had to do was either add rideshare-like features to their service, merge with rideshare services, or become one themselves. The investment capital was clearly there, and making a modernization pitch with brand recognition of an established taxi company would have been a slam-dunk.









  • Some of these kinds of things […] are actually intended for people who are partially or wholly physically disabled.

    After I learned this, I immediately felt bad for poking fun at these kinds of products. Normalizing their use by the non-disabled, and depicting the products likewise on TV, makes it that much more acceptable to the intended audience. If this wasn’t the case, it might sting a bit as a gift for someone that really needs it. And then there’s the economy of scale effect you mention; nobody would get a Snuggy if they cost $100 each.





  • Jumping on the “don’t use flushable wipes” bandwagon. Seriously, they can screw your home’s plumbing up.

    For anyone doubting this is even possible for a product that is mass-marketed and available everywhere, look back a little over a decade. For a hot minute we had scrubs and soaps that had tiny little plastic beads in suspension to provide some grit. All those microbeads got flushed down the drain and wound up who knows where. That is until it was made illegal.


  • I’ll preface this by saying this shady shit gets all my hate.

    It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.

    The overall problem here is that human psychology tends to frame this difference as a loss not a gain. Given the choice, people will see the cheaper option as the baseline, and then ask “can I afford to pay more for privacy?” instead of affirming “my privacy is not worth this discount.”

    Also, those of us that have paid for insurance without such a “discount”, are likely keenly aware of the difference. For new drivers, from now to here on out, the lack of past experience presents a new baseline where this awfulness is normalized. Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since the “privacy free” option is still profitable and is enticing for new customers (read: younger, poorer). So it’ll take some kind of law, collective action, or government intervention to make this go away.

    Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record. […] If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.

    I think this is the bigger problem. If someone has the data an insurance company wants, you probably agreed to an EULA or signed something that makes their ownership, and its sale, legal. With the “yeah go ahead and use my data” option on the table, the machinery to do this without your knowledge is already in place. All the insurance provider has to do is buy the data from someone else. When the price is right, 1st party spyware isn’t required at all.



  • Never understood the appeal honestly.

    Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:

    • Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
    • Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
    • The game has a dozen or more such heroes
    • icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
    • at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever


    From this I could deduce:

    • There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
    • Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
    • Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
    • League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
    • Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times


    I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.