Automated phone systems have been a thing for decades. They are notoriously shitty and adding a layer of “friendly AI” on top of that shitty system doesn’t bode well.

We’re Costco guys, of course we get the ice cream with our giant slice of pizza and soda!

“Suck my tongue” Dalai Lama to a young boy

Shipping/Receiving at a custom print shop

That’s great! Competition in this space is working to improve both.

Instead of this stupid fanboy shit of Android vs iOS, we should celebrate an actual success in development.

This is true for the US as well. It’s why legal immigration into the US isn’t as easy as people would try to pretend. Other than a student visa, you are required to have a sponsor. Whether that be a family member or significant other that can support you, or a place of business that is going to be paying you a salary so a person can support themselves.

There are also limitations based on country of origin. Some countries don’t have that much “competition” when it comes to people applying for citizenship, so they can get through the process quickly. Other countries have huge populations of people attempting to immigrate, causing year of delays on processing paperwork. That is why “illegal” immigration is so common in the US. The process is bogged down in bureaucracy and paperwork, all of which generally require time/money/legal representation. Something a majority of US citizens could not afford if they had to do so to stay in the country.

Can anyone explain why Apple is such a target when there are several other companies that truly are a Monopoly, not just popular? They might not have super great business practices, but under capitalism that it not only okay, but it seems to be the default.

There isn’t a single product they sell that only Apple sells, there is a huge market for smart phones, smart watches, home computers, tablets, headphones, chargers, etc. Being a popular product does not make a company “a monopoly” and if we wanted to just go off market share, Microsoft needs to continue to be pursued, as does Amazon, Google, Disney, Comcast, the single other ISP in your region of the country, your power and water utility companies, every chain restaurant, most places that cut men’s hair.

Why go after Apple specifically when there are many companies to go after? Because people don’t like them? Do you like your power company? Tough shit, they are the only game in town. Do you like your ISP? Tough shit, you have two options and one is the worst DSL connection you’ve ever seen. Did you like any of the 20 streaming options in 2018? Tough shit, 12 of them merged into 3. Want to buy a computer in a store? Better like Microsoft or have the ability to install and maintain a new OS (is Linux the only other option?)

I’m not saying Apple is amazing or they have good business practices. But there are far more insidious companies where there simply isn’t many or any legal alternatives.

An old fashioned meme but it checks out

I agree that if Google is getting the content for free they should, at least try, to keep it ad free for the consumer. But I don’t know if Google has to pay licensing for stuff like PBS. PBS does technically have ads, but they are unobtrusive, shown at the beginning or end of a show and are presented as “Brought to you by….” Less of an ad and more recognition that a company has paid to support bringing PBS to you for free.

I’ve never uses this service, so I’m not aware of how they might insert ads either. Between shows? Typical ad-breaks times every 8.5 minutes of broadcast time? More?

Isn’t that the agreed upon consolation for free content? Was nobody alive when TV was the primary means of content consumption?

It always irked me that people are upset over YouTube running ads. Like, of course they had to start running ads, hosting/programming/daily operating millions of videos isn’t free for them. They need to make money some how, even at “break even” which prevents the idea of profit seeking would mean running ads.

Hate to sound like a “kids these days” but seriously, absolutely nothing in life is free and if there isn’t a direct cost, advertising is going to be present.

HP is the one responsible here, Windows is just the delivery service HP uses to deliver their updates.

I’m all for hating on Microsoft, but you don’t blame the UPS driver for delivering a bomb to your house.

Not gonna lie, a few years ago it worked on me. Paid for the Premium, but didn’t get any better results. The gamified dating scene is bad but meeting people organically just doesn’t seem to happen as I get older.

I find that this isn’t actually a successful way to filter or get the “algorithm” to recognize people you might be interested in. Those features are built in, but you need the premium versions of the apps to do the filtering.

I hopped onto Bumble after a few years and nearly every one I get doesn’t match my values or how I swipe. I thought it might work like that, but I get Christian Conservative more than any other demo and my profiles and swipes do not match that type.

And do you have plans to resolve them? I didn’t just make that all up to make veganism sound bad. They are realities that need to be dealt with if we made the ethical decision to not consume animal products anymore. With 80% of the grocery store, currently, relying on animal products, how do we replace them? With agriculture. Those problems now only don’t go away, they get exacerbated. Not to mention all of the pollinator populations dwindling.

I don’t have the solutions, I’m just some fucking guy. But if we don’t want more and more people suffering while reducing or removing animal products from our diets, we would have to take many steps before doing so.

And the person who posted this meme is called “MilitantVegan” and straight up doesn’t seem to understand human evolution or science. I’ve only said things that are true, or what my opinion is based on that truth. It might not be great, it might not be true in 50 years, but just watch a documentary on modern agriculture and you will see that these things are our reality. We farm the soil until it becomes barren, and fix it with pesticides and fertilizers for the sake of commercialization. We can’t keep cutting down natural habitats in the search of usable soil to replace those things without completely ruining the lives of animals…the goal of reducing or eliminating the use of animal products.

I’m not sure if you just aren’t aware or are being intentionally obtuse, but that isn’t what keeps the soil healthy or enables plants to grow. Have you grown plants ever?

Sure, photosynthesis takes in CO2 and sunlight and converts that into sugars, but plants need much more than that from the soil and water, which we have to add using modern agriculture.

Growing food on the scale to feed our population now requires crop rotations, fallow fields, nitrogen, phosphates, potash, insecticides, and billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. You can grow a field of crops once or twice before adding all of the fertilizers and pesticides, but any amount of regular farming requires much much much more than CO2.

None of what I said was misinformation. Turning everyone vegan doesn’t resolve factory farming crops. Chemicals to ensure we can actually grow food, monocultures that are terrible for the environment, limitations of where things can grow.

I’m all for reducing meat consumption, but the utopian world where everyone is vegan has many hurdles to overcome that aren’t just magically resolved. Sure, right now we might be able to reduce land usage for farming, but that is one small aspect of commercial farming under capitalism.

How do people afford food when they don’t live in a place that can grow it? How do we ensure we can continue to grow food when we are so dependent on chemicals to do so? How does a developing country support agriculture without the huge subsidies currently required in developed nations? How do you educate 8 billion people on how to properly get the nutrients they need from new sources of food? How do convince society that GMOs aren’t bad?

These are rhetorical, but moving to veganism requires us to think about these types of things before claiming “but less farm land”

We aren’t carnivores, we are omnivores. An advantage that surely allowed the growth of our brains and allowed us to become the dominant species in the planet.

Our teeth our designed in a way to both rip/tear meat and also grind up plants.

It is great that some sector of the population can be vegetarian or vegan, but it isn’t a realistic option if everyone did so. Farming is destroying hundred of thousands of acres of land every year. Keeping up with a plant-based only diet for 8 billion people isn’t feasible with the current technology and farming practices of today.

I get it, I walked into the den and poked the bear. But I think a reality check for this kind of “Linux will take over Microsoft” is necessary. 95% of computer users don’t care about their OS and would never imagine re-installing it or installing a different one. Just the idea of thinking about an OS puts that person in the advanced user category. It took Google to mod Linux and sell it to every public school in America to get it to a 4% user base. It is clearly not something for everyone, it isn’t even for most people who use Reddit or Lemmy, and those communities are def more closely representative of people capable of using Linux.

I understand that there have been many advances to make it a usable OS for the casual person. But it isn’t. Sure, your mom might be able to use it “out of the box” but it doesn’t come in a box. The two widely adopted versions of Linux had to be heavily modified by large dev teams of Valve and Google, for very limited numbers of devices. Would Valve make a version for a non-gaming focused device, or computer at large? Would Google make a version that wasn’t in direct support of Googles products? I doubt it.

It isn’t just lack of knowledge of Linux that is holding it back. Its main demographic is nerdy computer people who are willing to, occasionally, run a shell command or hunt down the necessary things to get their webcam to work. That isn’t what Microsoft aims for, they aim for the average computer user who wants to watching videos, play games, browse the web and check their emails without thinking about any part of how or why it works.

I appreciate the enthusiasm Linux fanboys have about this. But ain’t nobody but the most tech savvy would even consider it.

Linux is not consumer friendly, it typically involves putting in a shit load of effort to get working with your hardware, the ones that don’t still need a ton of work to make “Windows-like” and compatibility is always going to be an issue.

Yes, there have been a ton of strides toward this dream situation. But without financial incentive, making things user-friendly isn’t going to happen. In fact, much of the Linux community prides themselves on having a “difficult” OS.

Once Linux can, by default, have an easy to use interface, can natively run Android apps and windows applications, and can work with a huge range of hardware, it will never take off. Linux might get a few points of market share due to some business applications finding Linux a better option than updating HW and windows build, but those companies are going to struggle and will be even more dependent on their IT staff for the simplest of things.

Damn millennials and their avocado grenades!