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Would you be willing to share advice on how to dress up leftist talking points in business language? Seems like a useful skill to have.
An electricity company puts emphasis on how profitable projects are in the next 1.5 years. Most of the employees treat climate change like a joke because there's no way to maintain profitability while addressing it.
Honestly, Planned Obsolescence is one of the shittiest aspects of Capitalis * for the normies* . Everyone gets mad when you mention that Planned Obsolescence is literally an integral part of Capitalism, we should probably tell libs more about this.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Me mum treated me to a pair of work boots when I got my first full-time job, as a landscaper. I picked what were called "lineman's boots" because they looked cool as hell. I have no idea what they cost.
I worked for years, and nailed the heel back on one after trying to kick a stump out of the ground with it. Then I moved on from landscaping, but wore them in my band because they were still cool as hell. Swam called them my "mentally challenged boy" boots, only he didn't say it that way. Still have them, still wear them when there's dirt to be moved. They'd be in a lot better shape if I'd bothered to polish them regularly, but yeah, this is a real thing.
where did the soviet makes shoddy goods meme come from? it sounds like they were higher quality than US
There is an old joke in Eastern Europe: "What is big, red, ugly and doesn't kick you in the butt? A soviet buttkicking machine". Depending on the goods you would get either something that is engineered to survive everything, or something so shoddy it falls apart before the first use (and of course everything in between). The reason for shoddiness however is different than the reason for the same in capitalism. Of course desire to cut costs is important in both systems, but in one case the major limitation is the lack of resources and technological know-how. On the other it's an artificially imposed lack of resources, cause profit must be maintained and costs cut. The upside is that tinkering and DIY was a very big part of culture, so you could repair everything.
i would always call attention to it when i worked pharmacy, i genuinely liked my job when we were full staffed. My slow descent into constant bitching grated everyone around me lmao**___**
I thought there must be a nugget of truth so thanks for clarifying:)
Soviet watches were solid for the most part. Big tolerances so it could be oiled and repaired easily. Not fancy but reliable and durable.
I like repairing and restoring old vostoks and they're so cool. They basically make a fool of western watches by making a similarly capable diving watch that use's water pressure as an advantage rather than something to fight against.
The designs are also genuinely unique and interesting to look at. When people say that in communism you don't have any personality or self expression, I just think about the 100's of design variations built around the same 3-5 movements.
True Soviet models have a "CCCP" in small print by the 6 o'clock marker, as well as printed on the movement. The automatics have it printed on the winding bridge which is usually easy to spot in pictures. Post soviet movements will say "RUS".
I forget where the manual wind movements have it at the moment. I used to know all the movement numbers by heart.
American products used to be decent I thought. Planned obsolescence is a more recent thing.
Well iPhones are one of the only things that noticeably haven't been decreasing in quality. It appears more often with appliances and other things (I suppose even housing now). It's also one of those things that would probably decrease if there was another Soviet Union. There's no "threat of a good example" for people to see. There's no "competing product" (lol) in terms of socioeconomic systems that would force actual improvements.
iPhones are a special case I think by nature of how they're a Veblen good and people will continue to buy new ones they don't really need even though Apple supports old ones (everything except the battery) such that they have a lifespan of close to a decade at this point.
Yeah I'm still using my iPhone 5s. Though phone calling is going to stop working in a couple months because carriers will require VoLTE or something like that lol.
Computers mostly do last for decades. I'm typing this on an eight-year-old Thinkpad, and most of the other hardware in my house is from 2010 or earlier.
The problem is that software stops supporting it, or new software has vastly steeper requirements. Think about laptops from the early 90's - black and white screens, floppy drives, network connections were built-in phone modems if you were lucky. Most of them still run! There's just nothing to do on them anymore unless you're a retrocomputing geek or want to use them for a tiny number of very specific use cases, like running some very old word processor or something.
Don't knock the utility of Word 2003 and it's perpetual license vs. Office 365's subscription model.
I'll knock both of them when sane alternatives like LibreOffice exist.
That said, productivity software sucks. It hasn't meaningfully advanced in UI since the 90's, and hasn't advanced in features since online collaboration appeared in the late 00's. Development on FOSS alternatives is wasted spent chasing compatibility with Microsoft's broken formats. It performs poorly, uses absurd amounts of processing power and RAM for relatively straightforward tasks, and the plethora of supported document formats are dreadful from a portability, programmability, interoperability, or user friendliness perspective.
The issue, then, is two-fold: productivity software is trapped in a document format hell, and the lack of code re-use across development houses prevents the software ecosystem as a whole from advancing. If it were possible to have a standardized core - a rendering engine, a math backend for spreadsheets/etc., a database format, a standard set of document formats that are extremely easily edited by humans and machines, scripting and markup languages - and re-use that core across industries, with different frontends for different purposes, the software would stop sucking. Improvements to the core would benefit everyone, and UI developments could be shared in a collaborative effort instead of a competitive environment where copying is forbidden.
tl;dr: do a free software socialism to productivity software, rebase on web technology to benefit from a wider swath of developers and greater software maturity
nothing makes my blood boil more than the fact I have to use calibre now. I HATE IT SO MUCH. fucking subscription fuck
Tips on collecting unemployment for 2020: Use Times New Roman font for your resume to guarantee HR throws it in the trash.
Same reason they don't like one page resumes in even years and two page resumes in odd years. It's all about chasing the latest trends.
Or it's ageism by any other means.
excuse me i think its libre* not calibre. i use both 😅 I only use it when typing work or college applications stuff and so i cant justify buying word but god i hate when i have to use the non office stuff
If you hate LibreOffice so much why don't you just use Google Docs? Smh my head liberal DESTROYED.
docs has serious issues and lack of features. Use libre office.
LO Writer is cool once you get used to the ugly interface. But did you know that there's a free version of Word online? You just need a Hotmail/Live/Outlook account. Have you tried that? It works like Google Docs but without an offline mode.
I know I have a billion complaints but when I used it, it would lag and glitch up where I would type faster than it could keep up and I would get word jumbled. I think next time I need it though Ill use that over libre though 😅😅
I hope you're using Linux, the latest version of OS X supported by 09-era Macs is pretty fucking old at this point, isn't it?
yeah arch with the LXQt desktop environment and bunch of other lightweight shit better for older hardware, the mac os x is 10.5 or something
My gaming pc is still working with only a few parts swapped out and it'll be a decade old next year.
My computer probably will, though I will probably upgrade it overtime.
Another example: Samsung Galaxy S5 was waterproof and had an easily user-replaceable battery (back cover designed to be removed). Galaxy S6 was neither waterproof nor had a user replaceable battery.
Yeah my desktop is still fine after 6 years. Only upgrade i got was a free 8 gb of ram from a friend who built a new pc. I've also gotten SSDs as I've upgraded OS's. My coworkers don't understand why I haven't built a new computer yet but the fact is I haven't ran into anything that it can't handle comfortably yet, so why bother.
With laptops we still are at that point, partially due to horrible software. Battery life is still really bad on laptops, and it keeps getting better as tech improves. It would already probably be adequate if it was not for the fact that nearly all software is horrible, and literally every PC operating system is deeply flawed and horrible on laptops.
Battery life in modern devices would be phenomenal if they kept battery sizes the same while reducing the power consumption of all the components, but they decided cutting battery size was acceptable in order to make a smaller/lighter laptop. Where’s the 96Wh, 9-cell battery in a <15W ULV notebook? Oh right, best we can do now is like 45Wh non-removable.
Linux is terrible if you aren't super into software. I use computers way way more than most people because they are extremely useful tools for my work and several of my hobbies, and I despise how often stuff breaks in Linux. Some of the more bloated distributions aren't as bad in this respect, but they have issues on laptops because of the bloat.
I already have a desk top pc that I use for gaming and stuff and just need a laptop that can handle internet and word processing. How is Linux for the simple things?
It depends on how simple. If all you wanna do is watch videos, type stuff up, and do email stuff, it's easy. But if you wanna do something still simple but slightly less so, like plug in two microphones at once, or install a free lightweight game, or record your screen and then edit what you recorded to show someone how to do something, or edit audio beyond what is easy in Audacity, etc, it becomes annoying and complicated and nothing works without hacks and workarounds for every step of the process.
Bruh this isn't planned obsolescence, you simply bought a shitty cheap coffee maker from Walmart.
Personally I'm a fan of a pour-over cone. Supposedly, coffee is bad for your heart when you don't run it thru a paper filter, so I've stopped using a press. Plus, presses are kind of a pain in the ass to clean, whereas with the cone you just toss the filter and rinse.
I'm not trying to shit on ya, just to be clear. Apologies if it felt that way.
its a well known tactic to trap poor people in endless cycles of buying shitty products over and over again. I think it is close enough to the concept of forced obsolescence to count.
A big reason aside from cost why I tend to buy from thrift stores. If it managed to make it to a thrift store than it most likely it survived the first couple of months of use. It's not perfect because you don't always find what you want and sometimes things come missing but a quick search on ebay usual can find you the part for cheap. Even if it's a wash the price is good.
Don't buy a percolator seriously they make really shutty coffee, get a French press, it can make decent coffee even if your coffee beans are shit and you're not good at it.
Yeah, the Aeropress designer has a weird belief that oils are unhealthy which is apparently why Aeropress don't sell one. Luckily third parties make a wire mesh filter.
Not to be a hipster or anything, but whichever you can find on a thrift shop that's in working condition. I'm sure there's more to it but I don't know enough about coffee to talk about that.
I like that the coffee tastes closer to the coffee from an espresso machine than the French press.
Do you mean like a Moka Pot? I'd agree that it's the best option for cheap, makes strong coffee and has no moving parts.
For real espresso, I've got a 100% metal, manual espresso press and it's great. Does cost a lot up front, though.
I thought moka was the name of a brand but yeah. They don't take much space and don't break unless you drop them.
Most ways you might drop them won't phase them either.
But if you forget to put water in, you'll melt the rubber gasket and make your kitchen stink! Luckily the gaskets are cheap.
Get the original Bialetti - still cheap, and a piece of Italian 1930s history. Cup sizes are espresso cups, so the 3-cup is a good size for one person, 6-cup for two.
My mom still has a soviet fridge, 30 years old. Still works! Needed maintenance only once.
get a press? just as easy to use. dump in grounds, dump in hot water, let brew, filter, done.
shit, you can make coffee without the press, just need a container and a filter
never worry about obsolescence again, cause your coffee machine has no breakable parts
absolutely. get them good beans and use the good aguas folks
beyond that, with the less "fancy" types you can much more acurately control temp and brew times, leading to coffee that hits how you like it, rather than how the espresso machine makes it
your coffee machine has no breakable parts
Mostly. Breaking a carafe is like laying down a motorcycle. You think of it as not a matter of if, but when, and plan accordingly.
Because periodic, thorough cleaning is critical for good flavor and reliable operation of the press, I'd also recommend making sure the filter/shutter assembly threads on and is easy to work with.
fair.
i more so meant "breakable parts" in a "this super fancy plastic doodad thats going to snap in six months"
obviously everything is breakable in a "slowly degrades over time if not well maintained" way, whether its a motorcycle or a stick with some mesh on the end for filtering coffee
tell her that drip isnt oldschool at all. its new school and it aint cool 😜
I convinced my dad to get us a press by saying that it saves money. I forget how it saves money, but I'm pretty sure that it really does save money. I think it might be that you have to use less coffee grounds than with a drip machine.
Partner wanted to get a coffee machine (I hate coffee), but I recommended a press instead because we have a tiny kitchen and one more appliance was gonna mean no counter space. They love it.
hey! i LOVE my all metal objects that have a single plastic piece that breaks and renders the whole thing useless
Ending planned obsolescence would probably do so much for the environment.
Percolators are great until you burn your hand one one that's still hot or forget to clean it out for a day while it cools down. French presses are great if you like over-extracted brews and washing out muddy grounds every time you make a coffee. Do yourself a favour and get an aeropress or a pour-over, they make straight up better coffee and you just throw the filters in the compost with minimal clean-up.
