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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Often times the services have a fleet of accounts, they have them do reposts of old popular posts with titles and some content rephrased, then some of the rest of the fleet copies the top comments and rephrases those and posts them below.

    This builds a history of realistic and semi popular looking posts in a way that is fairly easy to automate . Anyone who looks closely could potentially figure out a given account, or even cluster of accounts, is farmed, but it takes effort and time to prove it, more effort and time than it takes for them to spool up another batch of bots.



  • For me, I try to focus on buying stuff that will keep well, things that I can use a lot of ways, or things I have an immediate plan to use all of.

    Or multiple of those things at once. Like if I get a crown of broccoli, it will only stay good in the fridge for a week or two, but I don’t need to eat it all at once, I can just take a bit at a time and add it to other things, like a soup or a pan fry, to get some green in. Frozen veggies solve the only lasting a week or two thing also.

    On the other hand there’s things like canned tuna, there is only really one way I’m gonna use that, but it keeps forever in the cabinet, so no wasting fridge space, and the cans are usually small enough I can use it all at once.

    Like, if it doesn’t keep well, you you wouldn’t use it all at once, and you’d probably only use it for one thing, just don’t bother.

    Also, like, look in to how certain things should be best stored, some things can last a lot longer if you figure that out.









  • It’s a fundamental and inevitable outcome of how these businesses are structured and run. Were the decisions to chase larger more premium vehicles short sighted? absolutely. Was the pursuit of Financialization in car sales to make up for pricing out lower income buyers obviously a bad idea? Without a doubt. Could they have made any other decisions? Not without being replaced by shareholders.

    The solution to this problem is not just to “kick the bums out”, these companies need to have their management and ownership restructured in a way that generates incentive structures to maintaining a stable long term market rather than quarterly revenue growth.

    Some companies, like Nissan, didn’t pursue the big premium trend and they got burnt as well, largely because the trends of the rest of the market and surplus of used cars is undermining their new sales. To some extent their choice to so heavily pursue sales to fleets like rental companies didn’t help.


  • The interesting thing is, Tesla is perhaps the most obvious and extreme example, but they’re not the only auto manufacturer this is happening to right now. Nissan is in a bit of a tail spin as well.

    There are so many problems slamming in to the auto industry right now. Even beyond the tariff instability.

    In the US in particular, As cars have gotten more reliable and longer lasting, the market for new “budget” cars has dried up. Car buyers who might have once bought budget are now buying used cars that probably have a good many years left. The sales of new cars have been declining since 2016 but new car price have been skyrocketing, keeping up revenue growth for automakers.

    This seemed ideal for automakers as it meant they could drop the lean margins of cheap cars and focus on higher margin markets, which looked much better to shareholders. Those companies that focused on this budget market have suffered, the best example being Nissan. The ideal for automakers is that people will buy “up” the value chain over time, buying higher end or “less used” vehicles when they trade in their old vehicle, going from a twice used, to a once used and eventually to a new car.

    This kind of came to a head during the pandemic. Not only was the supply of lower end used vehicles dwindling as less and less entered the market due to less being made a few years back, there was also a shortage of new cars due to supply chain break downs and an increase in demand. Many people were taking out insane financing on massively over priced cars, both new and used. Now a lot of people are underwater on those auto loans from the pandemic because the trade-in/sales price is less way than what they have left on the loan. Many are also defaulting on those insane pandemic auto loans and their repossessed cars are ending up back on the market, increasing supply in the used market.

    Many who are underwater on their auto loans but can still make payments can’t afford to make even larger payments, so rolling over the principle from the last loan into a new loan on another car is impractical. So they aren’t buying, let alone moving up the market to buy new or higher end. The demand being suppressed in the used market and the supply being bolstered by repos means used prices are massively depressed. This depressed used market carries over to the new market in turn, as most people buying new probably couldn’t afford to do so without trading in their old car, so a depressed used market hurts their purchasing power. Why would someone buy a new car when the only new one the could afford is probably worse than the existing car.

    Tesla is getting a lot of focus because of the political entanglement of their high profile CEO, but the whole industry is under strain. Nissan is frantically looking for buyers to help them out of the debt hole they’re in, and groups like Stellantis (owners of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Ram and Dodge) are desperately chasing new revenue streams as absurd as ads in the central console.



  • They’re lying about using AI to write software, they probably have required all their programmers to have an AI plugin installed, and are thus counting any code they make as “written by AI”, and then are counting any minor edit to existing code as the entire thing being “written by AI”.

    The software is bad because it’s written to serve the infinite growth imperative. The reason they claim they’re writing code with AI is because that being true is the only hope that they have for achieving the infinite growth imperative. It’s a con, it’s a cult, they are extracting as much value as they can before everything falls apart.