These are the kind of nasty little services you see in Asian countries where people are working 12 hours a day 6 days a week.

Basically you don't have time for anything so at some point if you have an errand you need to run you end up having to pay somebody else to do it even if it's something as simple and stupid as this.

You justify it by saying that you're getting paid at your job enough to cover this but you're actually massively overworking yourself and you will eventually burn out. Meanwhile the company you work for is using you up and eventually when you're dried up they will throw you out like used toilet paper.

When you see stuff like this it's a sign of a failing system.

There's a huge number of small business owner types that desperately want to run their own businesses and will do anything and risk anything to do it.

I've got a buddy of mine that I've kind of been out of touch with just with work and such but I remember that he absolutely killed himself in a desperate bid to avoid working for somebody else. He used to run a local car audio place but couple of his employees basically poached all his customers and then a minor economic downturn finished the business off. After that he spent decades doing little tiny computer stuff for just enough money to keep his trailer held together by tape and glue. His wife also worked full-time as a waitress.

So you find somebody like that and you dump the franchise on them. Let them work 90 hours a week trying to make it profitable. Most won't but there is a nearly unlimited supply of those guys and you can just keep cycling through them. Usually they've got some savings kicking around or maybe a relative died and left them some money.

It's one of the many ways large corporations extract wealth from the working class. Basically dangling the dream in front of people with the full intention of scamming them out of money

I doubt those stores have more than five or six people so that's probably not very many of the 15,000 that are getting shit canned.

Even if a store has 20 or so people that's still only 4,000 out of 15,000. I don't use Verizon I'm on T-Mobile but at any given moment there's usually only two or three people even in the bigger stores and those stores are only open during regular business hours.

The company that makes the prescription antihistamine I'm on fired the staff responsible for making sure that I get my prescription.

It took me about 4 months to sort that out during which time they lost about $400 in revenue.

The thing is they just don't seem to care. In the past there would be competition. But there just isn't any anymore anywhere. Like not too long ago my doctor would have just put me on a different drug that was easier to get and had the same effect. Those companies have been bought out and they just don't exist anymore.

It's an entirely new kind of economy. Capitalism without competition. They can keep raising prices and screwing us over and firing us and making us work longer hours for less pay and there's basically nothing we can do about it.

He's upset that he gave up a treasure trove of incredibly valuable data for nothing more than some help raising money and a few contacts.

That data was worth billions and had he realized it back then he'd be part of the billionaire club.

Basically he's upset that he's not going to be the one getting to screw you over using ai and llms.

I'm all for it if it actually happens but I'll believe it when I see it. I think all Microsoft wants to do is stop subsidizing the hardware which would defeat the purpose. At that point I can just buy my own gaming PC.

What makes steam stuff interesting is that they just kind of focus on getting it right with medium level performance and a decent price and I don't think Microsoft can do that so they're probably just going to put out a $1,200 gaming PC. That's assuming they actually pull it off and it doesn't get shot down by other people from company and fighting.

So who knows what's going to happen with AI bullshit devouring everything

C is another static language, so the IDE can give you a good autocomplete without relying on AI. Why haven't you switched to Rust? I hear it's better at everything.

Why do you think that?

Toyota makes cars that last in factories that last. They're preparing for January 2029 when the Troll-in-Chief leaves office.

Of getting a battery for. You can get a cheaper off-brand Chinese one but good luck getting a replacement battery when the battery inevitably goes. You basically have a slab of ewaste at that point unless you're going to play around with the electronics of it and wire up your own power supply.

As far as the rest of it make sure you have at least 8 GB of RAM and they're all basically the same at that point. You might want to get a high density display which I think Samsung has a model for if you're going to do stuff like play vector games on it

Developers of iOS native apps have to know what TLS is because the App Transport Security policy of iOS requires all web APIs used by the application and controlled by its developer to use TLS since 2015.

A good point, but thinking on the marginal transactional costs to process a sale of additional items after one, people deliberately buying two items to 'stick it' to the business and get maybe 5 cents off their purchase is actually benefitting the business, and the customer spending more time figuring out the exact cost before checking out than the five cents are worth.
Basically, I figure that the business could outright discount every item after the first by 5 cents, and still profit more per item when people are buying 3-4 items at a time rather than one.

I doubt that, especially with varying sales taxes screwing with things.
The draw to price everything in .99 is too high. Or even .95 or .97.

A lot of studies of paper vs plastic bills are looking at paper bills using scrap cotton and linen fibers and still having wood pulp.
US bills use the premium stuff and are 0% wood pulp. As a result, our paper money lasts as long on average as the plastic bills.
The math changes when one considers that we don't have to import our fibers into the country and can thus get the good stuff for less than other countries pay for scrap.

So it's not a thought terminating cliche numbskull.

A thought terminating cliche exists to end debate by dumping a simple and wrong statement.

You are already thinking about the implications of whether or not it's possible to be happy with a 40-hour work week. That's thinking you're doing is why it's not a thought terminating cliche. And if you had any self-awareness you would have figured that out all on your lonesome