The system will be dead in less than 5 years. Samsung will change the terms of service and you will be left holding an empty bag having bought a pig in a poke. Not even a pig one can put lipstick on.
And Louis Rossmann will have to make yet another video about how wrong it all is.
It is almost like nobody pays attention.
Boomer here, get off my lawn. Yes, I've become the greybeard I used to make fun of 40 years ago.
If you're in the United States at least, the existence of neighborhood grocers, bakers, or butchers, is
There's no longer much of a tradition of local bakers or butchers, though quite a few grocery stores have pretty decent butchers attached. I do most of my shopping at coop grocery store with a butcher (though I'm told "meat cutter" is the preferred term today) who I'm on a first name basis with, and I'm not going to say anything bad about it, other than the cost! They get fresh baked goods from a few local bakeries and another local coop grocer that also specializes in baked goods and other prepared foods.
What would I say about Costco? They have good price on gas. I will often buy 20+ lbs of flour, big bags of sugar, etc there. The butchers at Costco are quite good, they have a very good and wide meat selection, they will custom cut things for you, and they often have good sales. They also often have great prices on electronics, computers, video games and system, etc., and Costco is very well known for their very generous returns policy. I very rarely buy any prepared foods from grocery stores, but Costco does have a taco tray that's pretty tasty, affordable rotisserie chickens, etc. I'm fortunate to be able to cook large meals for my family most days, but if my circumstances were different, I'd feel pretty good about eating food from Costco.
I get feeling grumpy about Costco as a kind of icon of American mass consumerism, but compared to most of the other big box stores (Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, etc.) Costco is my personal favorite for quality.
Guy Gavriel Kay (who was hired at a very young age by Christopher Tolkien to complete The Silmarillion) frequently writes on the theme of memory. His most famous novel is probably Tigana, which is literally (avoiding spoilers) about the unreliable nature of memory. Kay wrote in an afterword:
There exists a photo – I think I saw it first in ‘LIFE’ magazine – from Czechosloviakia, in 1968, the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ when a brief, euphoric flicker of freedom animated that Iron Curtain country before the Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed it brutally.
There are actually two photographs. The first shows a number of Communist Party functionaries in a room, wearing nondescript suits, looking properly sombre. The second is the same photo. Almost. There is one functionary missing now, and something I recall to be a large plant inserted where he was. The missing figure – part of the crushed uprising – is not only dead, he has been erased from the record. A trivial technical accomplishment today, when the capacity we have for altering images and sound is so extreme, but back then the two photographs registered powerfully for me, and lingered for twenty years: not only killed, but made to never have been. Source
Photographic manipulation, and propaganda, and the manipulation of people and their memories, has been going on for a long time! The difference now, as others have said, is the ubiquity, capacity, low technological barriers to entry, and realism.
It was meddling by both D and R in our economy, both were scared of invisible boogiemen of "something bad might happen".
Fear is a great motivator. Courage is standing in the face of danger understanding the risks might be worse doing nothing than doing something. This is a calculated risk and ought to be rewarded in the marketplace if it is correct.
Conglomerates are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. The good is they offer efficiencies in the marketplace. The bad is they take advantage of those efficiencies and often get "too big to fail" (a lie).
People guessing who have no stake in the market are making bad choices, because of other reasons. Both D and R do this. I call it the "There ought to be a law" reactions. Nobody stops long enough to say "no there shouldn't be".
That's really not true. There are many companies, such as Costco, that have tremendous stock returns and that also, by all accounts, treat their employees and customers very humanely and well.
MBAs = enshittification.
I encourage all kids and college students I speak with to start their own businesses. I've found more and more over the years that starting businesses (perhaps outside of food services) is just incredibly far from most people's minds. If you are a business owner you are going to have to put in a lot of sweat equity, you may not make much money for many years, and you may fail entirely. But, if you succeed, you get to control your own destiny in a way that many people, even highly paid people, cannot. You also get to make decisions like deliberately avoiding enshittification of your products and treating your customers and employees in a way that you feel is just.
Do Two parent families vs single parent families.
Making it in this world is about making good choices consistently. Constantly telling people the world is stacked against them (it's true, but for almost everyone) and that trying is a waste (it isn't) is a huge mistake. Citing your skin color for success or failure is simply a crutch.
Do 4 things, consistently leads to above average outcomes, on average because most people can't do those four things. Life does not have guarantees but it does reward good choices over time.
See Poker (and not sports betting) for example. Also, Poker doesn't care what color your skin is.
You'd be amazed at how little effect firing execs actually has over the option of firing a bunch of low level worker bees .
Fire 1 exec for 12 Million salary
OR
Layoff 250 worker bees and save 25 million in salary expenses .
Nobody cares about workers at the level where these decisions are made.
Filed Under: "One is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - Stalin (allegedly)
That's rarely the case in most universities. The instructor may have a very good understanding of the subject material but no idea as to how to convey it. Many of my instructors could barely speak english. You learn from the textbooks or you fail.
This is VERY different between institutions and levels of institution and majors. I went to a top 20 national university. I had one adjunct professor in 4 years (an English PhD student who taught a small 10-person freshman seminar).
I never had a teacher who was hard to understand. My Calc 3 teacher was German, but that was it. Every single computer science professor I had was native American or 100% fluent and clear in English.
My freshman 101 comp sci class had maybe 60 people, and that was the largest class I ever took. Multiple undergrad professors held parties at their homes at the end of the semester for their students. 20+ years later I am still in regular contact with 3 or 4 professors.
My experience in graduate school was identical. My wife went to a small private liberals arts school and her experience was perhaps even more extreme than mine. She never even had a 60 person class!
This all came with a price tag that has gotten worse since then, of course..
My sister, on the other hand, went to a non-flagship public and her experience was wildly different. I'm not sure she really ever had personal interaction with a professor. It was very much what you said--learn from the textbooks, pass the exam, that's it.
"even one time"
Unless you never use a password, in which case, you log in via all the other available options BUT password. You don't notice it missing. Passwords are so 1980s, get with the program.
I don't use biometrics because
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/
"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black
Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.
Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.
Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. My state is a bit of an outlier, in that our teachers ARE more lowly paid than national averages, but then my locality is one of the higher paying supplements to teacher pay.
Why do I say pay is a problem? I've seen what happens to many good teachers. They get burned out from having to deal with trouble maker kids who if they get disciplined or get bad grades the parents go ape shit with allegations of racism, sexism, abuse, whatever. They get burned out from dealing with helicopter parents. They get burned out from, in most parts of the country, being governed by elected shitty school boards. They get burned out because some miscreant has an IEP and a 504 plan and so his stealing from classmates and being constantly disrupted is considered a manifestation of his disability and everyone else just has to deal with it.
Good teachers have job flexibility. I've seen multiple _great_ teachers go to work for companies like IXL where their starting salaries are always higher than what they were making as seasoned teachers. Others go the administrator route and become principals, superintendents, etc. Others go to teach at private schools where the pay is often better.
What I would propose is basically 3 things:
1. Get rid of habitually low performing teachers--every year get rid of your worst teachers
2. Increase pay for high performing teachers
3. And the kicker that I have no idea how to do--allow schools and teachers to apply standards and discipline without fear of lawsuits.
I think that plays into it too. In many--most--school districts, teachers effectively have tenure--it takes serious malfeasance or illegality to get fired.
Years of bad performance isn't enough.
I think part of the solution has to be dramatically increasing teacher pay but you also have to make the working environment better.
By weeding out the non-performers you can provide the (few?) others who can do the work and learn with an opportunity to do just that.
There is basically no, or very little, support for this position, and even stating it publicly would get you called a racist.
I just don't see a solution.
If you've looked at US PISA scores broken down by ethnic group you know that the US scores near the top compared to countries of primarily that ethnic group. So the whole hand-wringing about US schools being worse than other places in toto is not true.
Pretty much all of the US ethnic groups do better than those from the "origin" countries do. US Asians outperform East Asian Asians. US Euros outperform Europeans. US Africans outperform African Africans (though there is a less data for the continent).
The apparent problem is that the ratios of people at that level does not match the distribution in the general population. asians will be over represented. lacks will be underrepresented (by quite a bit).
The real problem is the expectation that those ratios should match, and that their NOT matching is an indication of "racism" (personal, systemic, whatever).
You chose to post this anonymously. I don't blame you. Even discussing the possibility of this is a hard thing to discuss. I don't see a societal solution.
I have been at parent teacher nights where teachers are proud of their incompetence. The grade 5, 6 and 7 teachers were laughing that they didn't understand the math curriculum, and one of them made a joke (paraphrased) “word problems are difficult to understand, so I get together with other teachers, and try to understand them.” Why? This is primary school math, there is no excuse for any adult to struggle with any of it. If by grade 4, you can't compute 1×1 12×12 in under 1-minute, on a test sheet, you're falling behind, by grade 8, you should be comfortably performing simple variable algebra in your head, without a calculator.
I attended a (public) middle school teacher meeting about two years ago. The 8th grade math teacher said "I am supposed to be teaching XYZ for the 8th grade statewide standardized math test. I can't do it. Around 1/3 of my students can't multiply two numbers. They don't know." (She went on in this vein--it wasn't laughing or flippant, it was a cry for help)
She didn't say 1/3 of her students struggled with some of their multiplication tables, or algebraic concepts, it was that they literally didn't know how multiplication works.
I used to quiz my kids every morning with short "head math" problems starting in K and 1st grade. I started simple "2+2"
One of my kids ended up being an academic high flyer. The other still, to this day, struggles with math. He somehow worked his way into an advanced math class, but he has to work his ass of in there for Bs and Cs.
I am very sympathetic to people who aren't mathematically inclined, but these problems are embarassingly easy.
I am the wandering glitch -- catch me if you can.
