Enshittification intensifies.
For those who like me are wondering why folk are sucking sand out of the sea in the first place - the TL;DR bot missed this bit:
"Sand and gravel makes up half of all the materials mined in the world. Globally, 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel are used every year – the equivalent of a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide stretching round the equator. It is the key ingredient of concrete and asphalt.
“Our entire society is built on sand, the floor of your building is probably concrete, the glass on the windows, the asphalt on roads is made of sand,” said Peduzzi. “We can’t stop doing it because we need lots of concrete for the green transition, for wind turbines and other things.”"
Why don’t we take a look at how the plastics industry handled the public? Here’s Climate Town (YouTube link).
Hmmm.
Sega is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings. Sammy is a major developer of pachinko machines.
I wonder where this is going?
Problem is they even with paying the third party app gets an inferior experience (no polls, nothing marked NSFW).
Mine is similar. Arrived, day one in a new team; this one was more high-intensity than the usual - a fast-paced and very hands-on work environment. Noticed the team leader was working in a dysfunctional and unsafe manner; seemed unsteady. As the most junior member and a newbie at that I hesitated to confront directly; thankfully I managed to find a more experienced colleague. Scene was made safe; turned out the guy was drunk as a skunk. Canned within the hour.
I’ve since learned to be stronger and more willing to confront suboptimal or dangerous performance in team members, regardless of their seniority.
That was pretty scary.
Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net) has a number of stories now on the concept of “enshittification”. Basically businesses start off being good to customers but eventually get to a point where, if they’re dominant the drive for endless profit results in them turning to squeezing suppliers, customers, everyone.
Tech enables new forms of exploitation.
I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?
That crab mentality (crabs in a bucket) can be hard to shake but it's got to go. The Boondocks explained it nicely (short SFW extract from an otherwise NSFW TV programme here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipg4EL_JUyE)
That’s the one that got defederated.
Cruelty towards those who are relatively weaker or indeed defenceless - children, the elderly, partners, animals.
Abusing service / customer-facing staff fits in to this as well and is at once particularly revealing and particularly damning. Next time you’re out and about with friends or a love interest watch how they treat (or talk about) e.g. the person at a ticket booth or the person waiting on tables - if they’re nasty to them (or about them), imagine what they might be like behind closed doors (and how they might treat you one day).
People will rip off the headsets if the ads are too intrusive and annoying. Which is why they’ll either be dead subtle, or they’ll offer you paid ways to avoid them.
I don’t think there’ll be mass adoption of this either way, mainly because it’s an expensive gadget coming at a time when folks on median incomes are feeling the pinch.