Yardy Sardley

This reminded me of Long Long Man

Ads are a bigger business than you might expect. Get enough eyeballs in one place and brands will be tripping over themselves to give you money just to mention their name. Take the superbowl for example. It’s usually the most viewed event every year in the US, so naturally there is a tradition of advertisers pulling out all the stops and making high-budget bombastic commercials for that specific occasion. You can imagine how attractive it is for brands to want to put their ads on big social media sites, where psychological tricks are used to capture as much attention as possible at all times, instead of just once per year.

Then there’s the user data angle. The big sites all have millions of users who constantly give away personal information without even being prompted, and that makes it really easy for the companies who run them to analyze what makes each user tick and serve ads to the people who are most likely to click on them. This elevates the rate brands are willing to pay even further.

Those two things, along with a suite of anti-competitive practices, are enough to get sites to the point of being mostly profitable. Venture capital and hype-based market speculation get them the rest of the way.

I love Jon Stewart but I think he’s a little off base with this take. Are we supposed to not call out the overtly fascist stuff the government is doing? Will that get more people to listen the next time we have to call out an overtly fascistic act or will we have to hold our tongue then, as well? How many grannies need to be eaten and impersonated by wolves before we’re allowed to move past the “ooh what sharp teeth you have” crap?

With fascism especially, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. The people going through life like everything is fine are implicitly supporting the fascism. I’m not going to stop yelling about how a pack of wolves has taken over the government, just because some people think the word is overused.

My brain accepted this new piece of information and immediately tried to recalibrate my sense of wellbeing based on how much time I spend playing cozy games.

So there was a bizarre moment where I felt positively dandy.

Did anyone else get a mental health buff just from reading this headline?

Either way, the policy is working as intended; there are fewer superfluous car trips being made to lower manhattan. If people are deciding not to go over a $9 fee, I don’t think they really needed to go that badly.

I do not understand where they are making a profit

I think you’re overestimating how much money it costs to produce this stuff. Economies of scale and certain other practices in this specific industry allow retailers to sell stuff at a significant markup even when it seems like they’re giving customers a heavy discount.

But even with relatively large markup percentages, the low price point means retailers have to move incredible volumes in order to make enough money to stay open. So they end up using aggressive marketing tactics to get people to come in the door and start impulsively buying stuff.

My intuition is that those shirts are simply from last season and didn’t sell well enough or they’ve gone out of fashion. The store is using it as an opportunity to put a big 80% off sign out front and whip potential customers into a frenzy. Could also be a scheme to recover costs from online returns. But I really doubt there is anything wrong or even different about those shirts.

Source: worked in clothing retail for a several years

Did cats domesticate humans, or did Toxoplasma gondii domesticate both of us?

It always amazes me that French politicians have the gall (pun not intended) to even attempt stuff like this, considering the last 250 years of political context in the region.

In case you’re actually, seriously asking and not just trolling, having privilege and success under capitalism does not disqualify a person from being a leftist. You can’t really criticize a person for participating in a system where if you don’t participate, you starve.

He’s using his influence to organize the working class and advocate for collective action, which is the one tool workers have in the fight against their own exploitation. Even if you don’t like him personally or don’t think he’s part of the working class, he is a very strong ally and has undeniably strengthened the movement.

Vulcan, Alberta.

Famous because of a spaceship that landed there once, I think.

Some people with pointed ears may have also been involved, but I would replicate that with a grain of salt. I haven’t really looked into it.

I used what known as 2’s compliment. Take the complement (flip all the bits - here that would give you 01110 which is 14) then add 1.

Or -15 days

Buddy didn’t sleep tight enough

safer for all parties

If you were a pedestrian who had to walk through one of those designs, I guarantee you would not feel very safe.

The problem with traffic engineering is that it’s solely concerned with vehicle traffic. Making roads safer and easier to drive on for cars actively makes them worse for everyone outside a car.

Arrows are more descriptive. \vec is better.

GNOME spawning 3 new DEs every time they have a major version update

Rauschenberg’s white painting was the OG placebo meme.

Probably have a few cards running the displays and the rest of them mining some sphere-themed memecoin

That’s an interesting comparison and something I’ve wondered about quite a bit. I would be surprised if machine drivers were not categorically safer than human ones, and if safety is (rightly) a priority in the cost-benefit analysis of driverless car adoption, then it’s hard to imagine not concluding that we ought to proceed in that direction.

But I think this specific incident illustrates very well that the human vs. machine driver debate is tragically myopic. If an infallible machine driver adhering perfectly to traffic laws is empowered to accelerate from a standstill directly into a violent collision with a pedestrian, then maybe it doesn’t matter how “safe” the driver is. I take it as evidence that car travel the way we have it set up is inherently unsafe. Our traffic laws emphasize the convenience of car traffic above everything else – including safety – and only really serve to shift blame when something goes wrong. Despite its certainty, there is very little builtin allowance for human error aside from the begrudging mercy of other parties.

To be fair, human drivers are an unmitigated disaster which we really need to do something about, but I think if we’re going to go through the messy process of reforming how we think about cars, we might as well go farther than a marginal improvement. We could solve the underlying problem and abolish the institution of car dependency altogether, for instance. Otherwise it just amounts to slapping a futuristic band-aid on a set of social and economic issues that will continue to cause unimaginable harm.