Just a guy, doin’ stuff.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • There was an interesting CBC podcast called Fridge Light, and in one episode the host followed people who had their recipes accepted for commercial sale. Apparently, a big issue is making those recipes generic enough so that they are acceptable to the widest range of consumers. This often means toning down the flavors. So for example, a spicy recipe gets dialed back to the point that even people who find yogurt offensively spicy can eat it. Basically, they bland everything down. There’s other factors as well, like the taste from the can, etc.



  • My dad spent, I believe, 3-4 years where every single meal he would gagging on the food and end up throwing up. Initially, they thought it was from the severe and chronic throat infection he had and because of our health care system it took them that many years to get his tonsils removed and at least rectify the infection issue. That didn’t solve the problem though, and eventually it turned out there was damage to a nerve in his throat that was causing it and he needed another surgery to fix that.

    Watched him go through hell all those years, so I definitely feel for you and hope you get this resolved!


  • She has a ton of overtime hours from her job. She hasn’t had to use her banked vacation time in years. I only get 3 weeks and if I accumulate more they start trying to force you to use it. My family/friends live across the country and I just went to see them recently, so I don’t have the vacation time to travel. It’s not malicious on her part, she just loves to travel and I just can’t go this trip. More jealous that I’m stuck not going, but I don’t mind the alone time.


  • Lost my grandmother a few days prior, got bumped out of my shitty job to a lower paying even shittier job, and have to pass on a good job opportunity bc it would mean a big move and my partner refuses to move with me. And shes going traveling for 1.5 months on vacation right away without me. We have a house together and have been together for almost 14 yrs.







  • When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

    In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

    Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

    But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

    Edit: spelling.



  • I’ll assume that by normal, we’re referring to him not being wealthy. In that regard, I’d disagree. I think he’s a real narcissist, and even if he didn’t have all his wealth he’d still have similar issues, just on a much smaller scale. He wouldn’t have the large audience he currently enjoys, nor all the attention he gets without his money.

    In other words, without his money we would just view him as another kook espousing whatever idea he happens to find interesting that day.