More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

It is, to a degree.

She’s no billy strings.

I legit wasn’t sure if this was a real thing she did that started as a friendly joke or something.

Actually, I’m still not sure.

Why do you think a different word is needed?

Because the word has been largely washed of all negative connotations, at least across the minds of the majority of the populace in the U.S.

If you are trying to convey what the word settler means in a dictionary by using it in casual conversation, you are likely to find that it is not carrying the full weight of its intended meaning in the mind(s) of the listener(s).

This makes it a FUNCTIONALLY inadequate word despite being a technically correct one.

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

The word that’s the first four letters of a country’s name is that serious of an insult now?

I’m a yank so I’m pretty out of touch on this but I was under the apparently mistaken impression that it was no more serious than calling an Irishman a mick or a paddy (neither of which are awesome but don’t approach the derogatory ferocity of the T- word for Roman Catholic Irish).

Huh.

Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.

You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!

Fahhhhk, thank you.

I swear I remembered dog people from 2nd edition and was super confused when I started playing DDO and they were some kind of dragonkin. Then people who started with 3rd were telling me kobolds had always been lizards.

Somewhere my old 2nd edition books are still around in a box, but damned if I know where.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

they could really tell the IRS to audit 501© and remove their status from the churches and bullshit Republican charities

That would be juuuuuust about the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It would mobilize gigantic swaths of voters who are heavily invested in rhetoric over fact-checking.

Doing away with Roe mobilized many of those voters who could be considered to be fence sitters towards the left. Removing church tax exemptions would move them right back and it would do NOTHING to solve the problem, because while the actual big offenders are happily USING the hell out of that tax exemption, they’re rich enough that they’ll get along fine without it.

It WOULD hurt a whole lot of TINY churches that employ 1-50 people per church and actually do community work, though. All of those would go away. That’s a LOT of rural food shelves.

I’m largely against the religious tax exemption, but that’s a problem we should worry about AFTER we can replace the nationwide infrastructure we’d be dismantling by doing so with something at least as effective as what’s there now.

Holy cow, thank you!

They’re processed, yes. The corn is milled, pressed into triangles, coated with preservative-heavy flavor powder and cooked in one order or another, possibly repeatedly.

What makes it ULTRA processed?

Frickin… most raw potatoes are “processed” because they’re typically not covered in topsoil when they get put in 5lb plastic bags.

A grass-fed organic, antibiotic free, roaming free-range massaged poterhouse steak is “processed” because it’s not still attached to the cow.

I’m trying to understand the definition, here. Almost everything is processed to some degree or another.

Is white flour ultra processed because they bleach and de-hull the wheat berries? Or only when it’s made into cake flour? Or do both of those count as “processed” and only “cake MIX” counts as “ultra processed”?

Am I making sense?

Do they?

I don’t even know what an “ultra processed food” •IS•.

How is it different than the “processed cheese product” that passes for most individually wrapped “American cheese” cheese slices? Or is that ultra processed?

Are Doritos ultra processed or just the regular kind of processed?

Which kind of ground beef qualifies for “ultra”? Only the pink slime or anything that’s been chemically treated?

I’m not being a pedantic contrary asshat, I legitimately do not know what qualifies something to be in this category and why it’s worse than normal processing.

Bpa from plastic tubing used in the processing of Annie’s organic leeched into the food. Is that considered contamination or a side effect of processing?

I heard Jack O’Neill and Teal’c in my head on this one.

J: Well, tell him unless he cools it, I’m going to throw down!

T: Have you eaten something that does not agree with you, O’Neill?

J: What?

T: Is your digestive system experiencing discomfort?

Daniel Jackson: Yeeeah, this is probably my fault, I explained the euphemism “throwing up” to Teal’c last night after Sam’s bout in the infirmary and I’m guessing he thinks the reverse means

J: No!

J: I’m perfectly… Continent.

I think you mis-spelled “biased”.

:)

Safe deposit box?

Everyone who has one, I hope.

It’s called a Bitcoin “wallet”, too. If someone else is holding yours, it’s not your money.

Me too!