combatwombat@feddit.online

When sorting by “new” posts are sorted by what time they were posted to their originating server, so if there’s replication lag, you have to either miss posts entirely, or scroll through many of the same posts repeatedly to see what arrived since your last scroll.

It looks gorgeous in the glass. Cheers 🍻

You might think that just because this kind of corporate consolidation and profitization is precisely what economic models of capitalism predict in absence of careful regulation, that maybe this is a good example of capitalism, but actually no it’s “a perversion of capitalism created by our legal system”

Private equity firms are leading the charge in enshittifying your burger experience. Brendan Ballou, former DOJ special counsel for private equity, has described these opaque entities as “a perversion of capitalism created by our legal system,” and they’ve sunk their teeth into a sprawling collection of familiar restaurant names, from big national chains to regional spots you may think of as local. At the food website Ravenous, you can find a list of restaurants affected, including some of the biggest names in the burger pantheon, like Burger King, Sonic, Wendy’s, and Whataburger.

I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of being a call center employee as a ticket to the middle class. I think I see the “call center employees might be trafficked” narrative more often than “call center jobs are an entry to white-collar employment”

The ILO paper calls the underlying risk a white-collar bypass: the office jobs that carried a generation into the middle class in higher-income countries may not fully materialize in today’s lower-income economies. The broader version of that story is not yet visible in the headcount data. White-collar employment in these countries is not only growing but paying well. Nevertheless, the decline in call centers in middle- and lower-income countries may be a harbinger of what is to come, since the occupation that best fits the description of the exposed, entry-level, formal office job is indeed the one disappearing so quickly and so broadly after the release of ChatGPT.

I gotchu fam: https://archive.ph/SuXwX

You can call me a grumpy old man if you want, but the late 2000s are years like 2095, not 2008.

Live a happy life, and then when they ask you what the secret to your happiness is, hit em with the “I haven’t looked at a Grok summary or a Facebook post in 37 years.”

Its quite the opposite in the US, in fact. If I say “I went to the football match last night to watch the Sounders, and they were poor. Pedro finally saw the pitch and stayed tight to the touchline until he came off with a knock,” it sounds like I’m trying to be posh. A working class person would say “I went to the soccer game last night to watch the Sounders, and they are bad. Pedro finally saw the field and stayed close to the sideline until he came off injured.” Soccer’s history in the US is immigrant and working class – the Philadelphia Ukrainians who organized around their immigrant identity, or Bethlehem Steel who organized around their union – and when Americans attempt to affect Britishness, it does not sound working class at all, it sounds like pretense.

We call it soccer in the PNW because that’s what the lumber workers who brought the game here called it when they immigrated. I’m not sure they were particularly posh.

I am reminded of this passage from the Ministry of Time:

“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening. History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”

And I might point out that it isn’t what history is written that is important, but what history is studied and taught.