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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 25th, 2024

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  • I’ll do you one better: The 2 monitors I bought from the same brand a year apart are different in many slight ways, one is capable of like 24hz higher refresh rate, the other has more options in the settings menu, etc.

    They have the exact same model number and documentation, the manufacturer just replaced the old one and documentation with a new one without specifying anything had changed.



  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.world"Politics"
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    12 days ago

    I’m genuinely not sure if I’m being too sensitive or if this is genuinely behavior that shouldn’t be supported.

    There’s nothing inherently wrong with that content existing, and being something people can pay for, but you’re also not being too sensitive for not personally wanting to pay that artist, if your surrounding circumstances would make the access to explicit content then seem a little unsavory in your particular case.

    Ideally, that artist would let you pay for just the non-NSFW content, or simply send a tip/donation directly, instead of requiring the NSFW content to be bundled with any attempt at payment, but that doesn’t mean that offering NSFW content itself “shouldn’t be supported,” even if it’s not desirable in your case.


  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldDevils Panties 02/28/2025
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    14 days ago

    but literally no one knew about it today

    Again, see the part of my post where I specified:

    And if you want to say it won’t work, then I’ll tell you that as a cashier at a smaller local grocery store, today I saw nearly half of all transactions done in cash (usually it’s 1 in every 5-6) to avoid giving credit card companies money, an older woman explicitly mentioning that she was disappointed she had to use her Visa card because she didn’t have cash on her, and on top of that, I also saw a reduction in purchases of non-necessities (about a 20-30% overall volume reduction in total purchases) on top of people swapping out brands I’d usually see purchased like Coca Cola with smaller local drinks instead.

    This was, by my estimates, maybe 30-50% of all the customers in the store. I’m not saying this is the rule, or that it’ll be identical across America. I think my area is probably much more likely to engage in this blackout than others, but I personally think this movement actually caught a lot more people than you might think at first glance.


  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldDevils Panties 02/28/2025
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    14 days ago

    Businesses seeing a drop in revenue as a result of a random patchwork organized online effort for a temporary boycott won’t have any effect?

    Of course it can. If businesses see it’s possible for people to exercise economic control against them, it makes it just that bit harder for them to expect no resistance going forward. People see the result of their actions and are more likely to engage in other boycotts going forward, and businesses then have to be afraid of future targeted boycotts hitting them harder.

    You don’t successfully get a company to back down on anything with the threat of a boycott, if that company has no reason to believe you’re even capable of boycotting them. Doing something like this makes it abundantly clear that it’s possible, and thus increases the likelihood of businesses taking future boycotts seriously.

    And if you want to say it won’t work, then I’ll tell you that as a cashier at a smaller local grocery store, today I saw nearly half of all transactions done in cash (usually it’s 1 in every 5-6) to avoid giving credit card companies money, an older woman explicitly mentioning that she was disappointed she had to use her Visa card because she didn’t have cash on her, and on top of that, I also saw a reduction in purchases of non-necessities (about a 20-30% overall volume reduction in total purchases) on top of people swapping out brands I’d usually see purchased like Coca Cola with smaller local drinks instead.

    If this is what’s happening at the small local grocery chain, then you might be able to imagine what was happening (or rather, not happening at all due to people staying home) to the large big box store down the road.


  • A few reasons:

    1. Market prices are more often determined by speculation than actual intrinsic value. People will say that the market is “efficient” in the sense that everything is valued efficiently based on the value it’s worth, but take one look at meme stocks and you’ll see that prices can easily be influenced by large volumes of purchases instead of any actual intrinsic value in the corporation being invested in. A lot of money being funneled into index funds can lead to the price of stocks continually increasing without actual value of the underlying companies being taken into account as much as you would think.

    2. Fascism is supported by, and continues to support capitalism. Corporations benefit from capitalism, especially under a system where safeguards are removed and businesses can make larger profit margins as a result.

    3. A lot of the changes Trump is making hurt working people, but don’t hurt corporations. (and often even help corporations directly) For instance, he’s making union busting easier, knows that any tariffs can simply be passed on by the companies without shrinking their margins, (just costing you more), is cracking down on legal immigration to the point that illegal migrant workers are even easier to exploit with the threat of deportation, etc. A lot of the bad things Trump is doing will only affect us, not corporations or the capital owning class.









  • Possibly, but in my view, this will simply accelerate our progress towards the “bust” part of the existing boom-bust cycle that we’ve come to expect with new technologies.

    They show up, get overhyped, loads of money is invested, eventually the cost craters and the availability becomes widespread, suddenly it doesn’t look new and shiny to investors since everyone can use it for extremely cheap, so the overvalued companies lose that valuation, the companies using it solely for pleasing investors drop it since it’s no longer useful, and primarily just the implementations that actually improved the products stick around due to user pressure rather than investor pressure.

    Obviously this isn’t a perfect description of how everything in the work will always play out in every circumstance every time, but I hope it gets the general point across.


  • Don’t ask me, I’ve been asking the same question myself 😅

    The only things that had originally come to mind were my accounts on those stores being new (but who makes an account there then just lets it sit for like a week), me using virtual cards to avoid using the same payment info across different sites (but many other people do that with no issues), using my non-gmail email (but other people also do that with no issues), ad & JS canvas blocking (but as needanke mentioned earlier, they don’t seem to have problems), or possibly just something with my address itself making its way onto some shared-around list of addresses not to ship to for some reason, but none of these explanations really seem to make sense.

    I’m genuinely just as stumped as you are.



  • I try to when I can, but I tend to have major difficulties doing so.

    I tried Ebay, they restricted my account and said the only way for me to get it un-restricted was to buy a product from a limited set of brand-new partner suppliers (e.g. Logitech, HP, etc) that were all over $100, and nothing I actually needed.

    I tried buying some chargers from Anker and they also restricted me and said they wouldn’t let me make a purchase because my email seemed suspicious (I don’t use Gmail), so I had to go back to Amazon and buy it there instead for practically the same price, even though it would have actually been cheaper on Anker’s own website since they had a discount code that would have worked for my order.

    I bought something on Target because I’d been given a Target gift card, Target cancelled my order 3 times and made me contact customer service to remove an invisible hold on my account.

    I frequently try checking third-party sites for the same products, and the prices are way higher (e.g. A product I plan on purchasing is $80 on the manufacturer’s site, and $58 on Amazon, with the price frequently dropping to $38) because Amazon literally mandates that the cheapest price must be on Amazon. Often times, these price differences are so drastic that I could end up paying double for the same product.

    I also tend to get Amazon gift cards from relatives even though they already know I dislike using Amazon when I don’t have to, so it’s often somewhat unavoidable.

    Don’t get me wrong, those are just the worst instances so far. I’ve bought quite a few items from elsewhere before without issues, it’s just that I tend to have the occasional issue that makes it practically impossible to buy elsewhere.

    Believe me, I do my best to not have to spend money on Amazon, but it’s either so drastically more expensive that it’s simply not reasonable to buy elsewhere, or for various reasons I mentioned before, I’m not even capable of placing an order in the first place.




  • ArchRecord@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldOmnipresence
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    2 months ago

    Debt can have its benefits depending on the use case.

    Expecting the average person to save up the full price of a house before buying it is simply an unattainable standard for most people to meet. The same can go for cars, too.

    Sometimes, debt can just smooth out uneven pay periods. If you need to spend $200/mo, and in 2 months you get paid $150 and $250 respectively, you’ll need $50 of debt in that first month to smooth out your varied income, before paying it back in the 2nd month.

    It’s primarily the predatory practices and systems (high interest, encouraging it where it’s not needed, hidden junk fees, etc) that make debt so harmful, not the fundamental concept of debt itself.

    And oh, just a random fun fact you might actually find quite interesting, did you know that debt existed before money did? It was actually the primary thing that allowed individuals to engage in trade, and money only came along later as a means of tracking debt.