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That makes sense, because I was wondering about that too. Here in CT you can easily find retail jobs that pay above $10/hour and that will even get you somewhat reliable hours, but you're still going to be flat broke all the time if you're working 35-40 hours/week on something like $11/hour.
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Dec 2, 2017 19:39
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Blut posted:I find the sentiment is far more common in America, where people tell themselves it to help justify their horrible work/life balance. In Europe when you're guaranteed 6 weeks+ a year of paid leave people tend to appreciate leisure time a lot more because they actually get to experience a reasonable amount of it. Part of this is that our educational system is actually pretty bad at teaching kids to be independent and curious. Knowing how to be productive and fulfilled without someone telling you what to do is a skill that needs to be learned and developed over time, so it's not surprising that a lot of people in the US aren't very good at it. Whenever this topic comes up, I always like to bring up my neighbor. He's in his early seventies, but he's been retired from full-time work since his late forties. He is without question the busiest person that I know. Every now and then I'll catch him out on his porch on a day that he's decided to just relax at home, and talking with him about what he's been doing for the last few weeks is just insane. It's kind of depressing to know that this guy does more in a single year than I'm likely to have the time or resources to do for the rest of my life.
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Dec 4, 2017 00:53
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Cicero posted:This belongs in the BWM thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3819120 This has got to be somewhat common. I know at least two people who do this every year. It might be more for all I know, but these are the two who I'm close enough with that they're comfortable blabbing about their finances to me. One guy routinely pushes himself to the point where he's stressed for months after Christmas about the possibility of an unexpected $100 expense completely destroying him.
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Dec 5, 2017 05:13
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skooma512 posted:I mean, I'm sure everyone figures Amazon is holding the smoking gun, but Amazon was just as big of a force last year. If it's true that people don't want to buy books, then it's a new trend. Younger people read more than older generations, so if there's some overall decline in reading that's happening then it's something unique to the last year or two quote:Some 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79 percent of those older than 30. At the same time, American readers' relationship with public libraries is changing—with younger readers less likely to see public libraries as essential in their communities. So people are both reading more and more likely to buy books than borrow them from a library.
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Jan 6, 2018 08:53
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boner confessor posted:stores that only sell books are done. barnes and noble already has a media section, but really the more likely future are physical media stores that sell books, movies, music, etc. for folks who want to have tangible media vs. digital media No disagreement here. I was just saying that B&N isn't in trouble because there's some overall decline in readers. People are reading books (whether physical or digital), they're just not buying them at B&N.
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Jan 6, 2018 09:06
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Yeah, ebooks are relatively cheap and ebook piracy is non-trivial unless you're looking for something so popular that you can find it just by searching on Google. You basically need to use IRC or have access to one of a handful of really good private ebook trackers. It's more trouble than it's worth unless you literally can't afford to buy what you want or you're a digital hoarder that needs thousands of ebooks in your collection to feel satisfied. The last time I seriously bothered was years ago for college textbooks because gently caress the prices on those things.
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Jan 6, 2018 20:19
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fishmech posted:This is, again, completely untrue. It's weird that you cut out the part of my post where I say that pirating popular books is relatively easy to tell me that pirating popular books is relatively easy.
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Jan 6, 2018 21:46
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fivehead posted:Is amazon basics ruining retail? I haven't been let down by the cheap cables they I haven't bought a ton of Amazon Basics stuff, but the stand out for me will always be the $15 laptop bag I bought maybe three years ago that replaced a $200 messenger bag I'd been carrying around and that's now gathering dust in my closet. It started falling apart after around two years of daily use, but it was $15 so who cares? I just ended up buying another one to replace it.
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Jan 23, 2018 02:17
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Panfilo posted:I dunno, we've had freight rail for centuries yet you would think they would automate that before trucking, but it hasn't happened yet. The labor costs of freight rail are way, way lower than trucking and, unlike long distance trucking, there aren't a pile of safety issues that are difficult to address without making it even more labor intensive and slower. There's just no good reason to do it yet, although some companies are trying anyway. You don't hear about it because it's not as sexy/scary as automated trucking.
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Jan 23, 2018 15:50
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learnincurve posted:hotel owners work absolutely batshit hours. My brother is head chef at his friend’s hotel and once covered for him for a week and it drat near killed him. Up at 6am to start dealing with breakfast, work right through to midnight and repeat. Why even bother at that point? I guess it's understandable if it's a short term thing and you're working towards some extremely near term goal, but as a way of living over the long run this is just miserable. No one lies on their deathbed wishing they'd worked more.
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Jan 25, 2018 23:23
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Cicero posted:I actually do have a kid, which is good social cover against judgmental asshats, but you shouldn't need one to be able to play with toys, because toys are rad. I have a buddy that I've known since high school who never stopped being really into Lego. Not collecting, but just actually building stuff. I always thought it was a cool hobby, but over the years I've seen him take a ton of legitimately mean spirited poo poo over it. Of course, now that he has a kid who's old enough to enjoy his toys with him everything is fine.
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Mar 20, 2018 22:59
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mandatory lesbian posted:I know this might be hard to understand, but some of us don't really have a use for online shopping when we can just go to a store to get it now I feel like you've posted something along these lines in this thread before (or maybe it was someone else), but this is really, really unusual. I'm not trying to be a dick or anything, but it's not common at all to largely abstain from online shopping at this point and I honestly don't know anyone who does it. Not coworkers, not friends, not parents, not my parent's friends. If no one in your social circle routinely shops online in 2018 then your social circle is an outlier.
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Apr 19, 2018 14:32
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Yeah, I wasn't posting that as a judgment or anything, it's just legitimately unusual nowadays. All the way back in 2016, 43% of US adults were shopping online several times per month or more. 79% were shopping online at least some of the time. In 2017, 45% of US adults did most of their holiday shopping online. It's probably going to be a majority or close to it this year. It's worth pointing out from that second link that the percentage of people shopping at locally owned stores is actually declining more rapidly than the number of people shopping at big box, outlet, or department stores.
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Apr 19, 2018 14:47
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boner confessor posted:it's really a function of how much poo poo you're buying Maybe. That first study I linked to found that the primary driver for online shoppers was price. Even heavy online shoppers were more likely to purchase something in store if they could find it cheaper. This seems to track with big box stores being the most popular place to buy things by a large margin after online shopping. People are just buying their poo poo wherever they can get it the cheapest.
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Apr 19, 2018 23:03
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I'm really surprised at how many of you guys are saying that Amazon Prime takes longer than two days. I buy a ton of stuff from Amazon and I can't remember ever having something take longer than two days to reach me. Most of the time I get my order next day. I wonder if there are particular regions that are especially bad for some reason?
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Apr 19, 2018 23:06
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baquerd posted:Plenty of fast food restaurants close, even the big ones. From 2015: https://www.wpxi.com/news/mcdonalds-close-900-stores-amid-falling-profits/46306821 Wasn't this from before they went to their absurdly popular all day breakfast menu? Plus, I don't think bc's point was really that McDonald's can't fail ever.
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Apr 28, 2018 22:25
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Cicero posted:Can't wait for people to explain how the USSR's disastrous ecological record is also the fault of the decadent kkkapitalist west I mean, even ignoring the giant tu quoque fallacy plastered all over this post, you're kind of missing the point by several miles. Climate change isn't really an environmental issue so much as it is as a massive, global example of market failure. The USSR's policies being ecologically disastrous is completely irrelevant because just being environmentally unfriendly isn't really the same thing. It's not even in the same ballpark. The reason market based solutions all rely on non-existent, future technologies is because there's literally no way for markets to solve this problem on their own if there doesn't happen to be an economically efficient technological answer.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:56
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gaj70 posted:The bottom 4-5 billion aren't going to voluntarily stay where they are, and it's morally unjust to ask them to do so. Project that trend forward...if you want to save the environment, you need to speed their transition to the point where they'll be willing to spend scarce resources on things like sewage treatment facilities, garbage collection, catalytic converters, insulation, nuclear/solar power, wildlife preserves, high intensity farming, etc. This comes up in the climate change thread all the time too, but the problem is that climate change is actually a much different problem from "environmentalism" in general and lumping it in with other environmental causes never works. The reality is that there's a finite carbon budget and we (first world nations and China, basically) have already used a lot of it up. The real world effect of seriously exceeding that budget - aside from, you know, death and destruction - is going to be a massive drag on the world economy. This isn't a moral judgment. As a real, practical matter there is no way to speed development of the less developed nations except through means that won't emit CO2. Doing anything else is like slamming the accelerator to the floor when you're already running on empty. Most of them won't actually make it before the effects of what we've done take hold, those that do won't be able to economically transition away from emitting technologies, and ultimately the negative economic effects of climate change will undo their growth anyway. It's really hard to overstate the depth of our gently caress up here and just how much it's going to affect every kind of economic/development policy going forward.
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Jun 6, 2018 04:39
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BarbarianElephant posted:Playing sport *is* better than watching sports. I don't really like either, but at least actually playing sports gets your blood pumping. Watching other people get fit is about as much point as watching someone else eat a salad. This is a super weird interpretation of watching sports. Nobody playing professional sports is "getting fit" as a result of anything that you're watching, unless for some reason you're watching a ton of training. Hell, most professional athletes only need to be in good shape in really odd and hyper specific ways that are meaningless or even counterproductive for everyday health. People watch sports to watch the game, which is exactly why esports has taken off disturbingly quickly. Sports and esports are basically interchangeable when it comes down to the reasons that people actually watch them. I mean, people watch bowling. People watch golf.
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Jul 15, 2018 06:45
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Noctone posted:At least a couple of times it was my debit card tho. They shut the card down, sent me a new one and cancelled/refunded all the fraudulent charges. Yeah, my experience with Wells Fargo is that they’re actually hyper aggressive in the opposite direction with both debit and credit cards. They’ve gotten better, but I used to have my debit card cancelled and a new one sent almost every other year because of Wells misflagging suspicious activity. The one time my debit card actually was used maliciously they locked it down before I even knew anything was wrong.
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Aug 3, 2018 01:01
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HEY NONG MAN posted:I love shopping like it’s a lovely freemium game. It’s so fulfilling. It’s pretty much Kohl’s whole model. I’m sure they make a ton off of the suckers who walk in and stupidly pay full price, but coupon/cash abuse is basically their gimmick. You can stack enough discounts on certain items that they have a legitimate and kind of widespread problem with bulk eBay resellers.
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Aug 20, 2018 01:08
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FBA is riddled with problems, but most FBA sellers face the same dilemma as big Ebay sellers: no matter how lovely it is, it's still a model that you're wholly dependent on and the only options are to either deal with it or get out entirely. A competitor can't just sweep in and outcompete Amazon in the third party seller biz because the entire draw of FBA is that you're selling your products on Amazon and Amazon is handling the logistics side of things for you. A competitor would have to first beat Amazon at being Amazon, and that sure as hell isn't happening any time soon.
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Sep 6, 2018 03:25
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Liquid Communism posted:"You're actually better off by this statistical measure that has nothing to do with your actual quality of life! Praise me, for I am technically correct!" The really frustrating thing is that this kind of argument is universally a transparent attempt to reframe the conversation into something that's winnable. Sure, poverty is a hard problem that would probably require some real, fundamental changes to solve, but let's go ahead and just ignore that to talk about how being poor is marginally less lovely now than it was 50 years ago. Let's also conveniently ignore the fact that we're talking about incremental changes over generations so that we can pretend that we aren't actually telling poor people that their lives will never improve and the best they can hope for is some more marginal improvements for their children. It's telling that these fact dumps are almost always made in a vacuum rather than as part of a larger argument, because the only argument these statistics actually support is "shut up and maybe several generations from now being poor will be a little bit more okay."
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Sep 27, 2018 15:28
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Cicero posted:No it's not, it's a transparent attempt to keep the conversation grounded in reality. People who think the poor were all better off 50 or 100 or 150 years ago are living in fantasy land. The only reason this conversation spiraled into a big "thing" is that some idiots are so stuck on "capitalism always makes things worse -> therefore if we've had capitalism for the last century then things must have gotten worse in every way" that they reflexively deny basic facts. No, this kind of bullshit is exactly what I'm talking about. You aren't saying anything or adding anything of value to the discussion. If the argument is that the healthcare situation for the poor (or for anyone, for that matter) is bad, then by itself it adds absolutely nothing to say that it might have been even worse 50 or 100 years ago. This doesn't ground the discussion unless your intent is to imply that the current situation is more acceptable than it used to be, which is going to be a major point of contention for anyone who thinks that it was both unacceptable then and now. The problem with idealizing progress as a statistical change over time is that it ignores the fact that there's a certain threshold below which things are just bad, and improvements below that threshold are not necessarily indicative of an approach that's working eve if things are objectively better for some number of people.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:25
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is no "threshold" where things are bad. It's always relative. In the future if everyone lives to 800 and your poor and live to 145 you are being hugely cheated, despite you receiving a longer life than literally anyone at this point in history ever has. You can have objectively more than other people and still be cheated. Come on, dude. It is entirely possible to set policy goals (which, yes, would be essentially arbitrary) for major issues like healthcare, employment, poverty, etc. It is entirely possible to define what an acceptable healthcare system might look like and judge whether we are there or not. The problem is that we aren't necessarily going to get there by incremental steps because many of these problems have specific causes that are going to be addressed by specific changes in policy. This is why data can be deceptive: an improvement in a single data point (or even data in aggregate) over time means nothing by itself and can just as easily be indicative of duct tape being slapped on a leaky pipe that's about to burst anyway. I have no idea why you think I want to go back to anything, so I'm going to assume that's just some weird non-sequitur.
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Sep 27, 2018 17:47
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Cicero posted:It's pretty obvious that a lot of people don't want to acknowledge that things are better because they feel it undermines their argument about how bad things are. If you were participating in, say, a televised debate for an election watched by normal humans who are very easily swayed by catchy sound bites, that'd probably be true, but here in D&D where everyone's an obsessive political news junkie? Not so much. What do you believe that it says about the status quo and/or the current direction of policy in the US (or the west in general, if you prefer) that "things are better?" What argument are you supporting with this data?
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Sep 27, 2018 18:06
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Cicero posted:I'd like to believe this, but I've seen some poor rear end parts of the country. It can be hard to imagine setting the wage floor that high for areas that just don't have that much going on, economically. Even if this were somehow true (and I seriously doubt that it is), what percentage of the country are we talking about? How many people live in these areas that are somehow so economically turbofucked that a $15/hour minimum wage would destroy them? Federal policy that is almost universally beneficial shouldn't be held back by weird as hell edge cases. If they do exist then you find a way to provide aid to those communities, because their problems clearly have nothing to do with the affordability of a minimum wage hike.
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Oct 2, 2018 23:16
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QuarkJets posted:But it's even worse than that: even if it's actually more profitable for everyone to change behavior, many businesses still won't, and they'll somehow justify to themselves that doing nothing is the more profitable path (either denying that an alternative path is more profitable, or assuming that others will change enough that they'll be able to get away with doing nothing). Markets are irrational. Markets certainly don't act rationally, but the problem with businesses is that acting "rationally" doesn't really mean anything. It's totally rational to act in a way that favors short term gains if the people making those decisions will never have to suffer the long term consequences of their actions, and climate change will literally never be a short term problem. No matter how bad it gets, even if all the cities are already underwater, actions in the here and now will always be about changing things decades into the future.
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Nov 7, 2018 15:45
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Invalid Validation posted:Is it a problem if they aren’t forcing higher prices for consumers though? Yes, because the potential to do so by essentially creating and controlling their own market is the problem. Whether or not they are currently taking advantage of that position or even intend to do so is almost completely irrelevant.
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Dec 27, 2018 00:48
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Invalid Validation posted:They tried doing the app purchase thing at my Walmart and while it was great for getting in and out they stopped it within 2 months because of all the theft it created. Between theft and dumb/old people that can’t figure the machines out I can’t imagine it lasting very long. Here's a fun anecdote for you: an acquaintance is a manager at a nearby Target, and they actually doubled their number of self check-outs because the lines had gotten out of control. Not because people were slow, but because people would literally ignore manned registers with nobody in line to queue up at the self check-out instead. The Lowe's near me no longer keeps more than a single register manned at any given time as a matter of store policy. People in D&D have been proclaiming the death of self check-outs for a decade. They aren't going anywhere. And, like essentially all other forms of automation, they aren't about replacing so much as augmenting. The point isn't that you get rid of cashiers, it's that a single cashier can now man four or more check-outs at once. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Mar 5, 2019 |
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Mar 5, 2019 06:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What are you even talking about? Are you running basic government services so crappy that you think of "as nice as walmart" as some absurd standard of customer service? It is absurd that you can’t understand that the forced friendliness under almost any circumstances that exists in the retail space doesn’t really apply elsewhere. Try being a dick to a contractor that’s working on your home or to someone at the DMV and see how far it gets you. Retail and lower end food service are basically the only places where this mentality flies and it’s almost certainly because of how easily replaceable those employees are.
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Mar 7, 2019 07:46
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greazeball posted:25-50% more expensive is competitive for you? Not to pick on Sydin too much, but look at how much in this post is focused on "quality" and "organic." Whole Foods' entire business model is based around using higher prices to convince people that what they sell is better, even though there's strong evidence to suggest that there are probably few (if any) benefits to things that are labeled organic. I'd also point to how much outrage there was over a few studies showing that organic food probably doesn't have health benefits. If you're deep into that kool-aid, it doesn't surprise me that slightly higher prices would seem competitive because you're only comparing to similarly overpriced items and not to actually equivalent items.
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Apr 12, 2019 03:20
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This is pretty far off-topic, but can someone explain how homeopathic bullshit became so widespread and acceptable? It's demonstrably worthless and makes claims which can potentially encourage people to choose it over treatments that are actually safe and effective. It seems like an absolutely massive regulatory failure.
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Apr 21, 2019 23:17
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Yeah, guys, I get why homeopathic stuff is sold and why people buy it. The point I was getting at is that it's a massive regulatory failure to allow its sale given that it's often marketed as something with clinical benefits for real conditions. That's without even getting into the fact that some homeopathic products actually do contain measurable quantities of substances besides water.
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Apr 22, 2019 02:09
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MixMastaTJ posted:As the manager starts explaining how there's no threat, trust corporate, you gotta get back to work, everyone's phones start going off as the warning gets escalated to an emergency. Shortly after, 2 mile wide tornado, moving 30 mph touched down within a mile of us. Gonna say this has more to do with normalcy bias than any kind of unwavering trust in corporate. Odds are that your manager just wasn't mentally prepared to accept the idea that an emergency was actually happening, like, right now.
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May 31, 2019 18:50
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MiddleOne posted:Guess which of these three doesn't have any down-time. Unless you've been very lucky with your office life, that's still not really comparable. In general, CEOs and upper-level management have drastically more freedom to define what counts as "work." This is why fishmech's graph includes travel, exercise, and other personal bullshit as making up nearly half of their work week. The average office worker has an absolutely stupid amount of downtime, but that downtime almost always amounts to a kind of semi-enforced, non-active work day. Very few office workers are free to just go gently caress off and do whatever they want, they're mostly stuck killing time on a computer until they need to do something specific. If you have a regular office job where you can routinely just run off and do errands while you're on the clock, then consider yourself very lucky.
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Jun 20, 2019 17:27
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anonumos posted:American work culture (and wealth culture) is really hosed up. The less your labor costs per hour the more it's scrutinized down to the penny, but as you cost your employer more the more wasteful your labor can be. This is because most professional jobs don't really have 40 hours per week of work that needs to be done on a regular basis. I'm a contractor and my billable rate is hilariously high in part because I'm only actually billing for time that I work. This is the norm and everyone I work with understands that an estimate of 120 hours isn't the same as three weeks of work for a full-time employee. It's an extremely strange and counter intuitive system that we've managed to work ourselves into.
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Jun 20, 2019 17:47
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JustJeff88 posted:I realise that there's a huge gray area within entertainment & the arts, but I frequently wonder how much work is genuinely "socially necessary". I imagine that a lot is absolute fluff because the capitalist machine has to keep a certain level of wage slavery going in order to preserve their power position. There are gray areas everywhere and it's effectively impossible to disentangle our highly connected economy. Like, I'd happily argue that advertising is a parasite on the system and largely a net negative for society, but you couldn't just make all advertising disappear without severely loving society up in the process. A lot of "useless" work exists to fill genuine needs, it's just filling them in the worst, most harmful ways possible because markets are actually wildly inefficient in many ways.
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Jun 21, 2019 02:16
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Even in America where most places you can just put "felt like it lol" as the reason to fire somebody it's usually better to drive them to quit. My buddy's boss recently got "fired" for what was apparently just massive, gross mismanagement and an endless array of deathly serious safety violations and... the company still decided to demote him so he'd quit rather than firing him.
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Jul 24, 2019 02:50
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Isn't pharmacy automation a really huge thing right now? It seems like the future is probably heavily automated pharmacies with a skeleton staff that basically act as fronts for larger online drug retailers.
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Aug 29, 2019 14:28
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