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At this point I can only assume that Microsoft is actively trying to punish me for using their products.

No. Not really. They’re different things. Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how previously good tech companies break their own platforms to maximize short-term profits. The AI bubble is just a regular investment bubble where people are throwing too much money at a product that can’t deliver on its own hype.

A good example of enshittification is why Google search sucks now. A while back they noticed that the number of search queries was hitting a plateau. It hit a plateau because Google controlled over 90% of the search market, there are a finite number of humans on Earth, and there’s a limit to how many things a person needs to google in a day. But Google is a publicly traded corporation and line needs to go up. So what Google did was to make their search engine worse at searching so that people would have to perform multiple searches to find what they’re looking for. More searches = more ads delivered. More ads delivered = line go up. Their flagship product doesn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do now, but the shareholders got a bigger return on their investment that quarter.

The AI bubble is the tech industry promising a fantastic blowjob machine, and selling investors on the vision of a future of unlimited bespoke orgasms where you’ll never have to foot the bill for taking a woman on a date, or pay a prostitute, ever again. Everybody started throwing money at that because, duh, it’s a magic blowjob machine. But now that people are using it they’re finding out that, yeah, sometimes it sucks your dick, but a lot of the time it just punches you in the balls, or it hallucinates that the definition of “blowjob” is anal penetration with a leaf blower. And sometimes it randomly turns into a nine-legged spidergoat that vomits acid on your crotch, and nobody really knows why. Also, it seems to be burning through a crazy amount of energy and water just to punch me in the balls. So now people are getting less and less enthusiastic about throwing money at it. And when the market can no longer buy into the hype because of all the testicle punching, the big investors will dump their holdings while they can still do so at a profit, and the bubble will pop.

Slackers used it, but that story is an urban legend that goes back long before that. When I was a little kid in 80s my dad told me that exact story about a guy who supposedly did that at his college, and he went to college in the 60s.

Big difference between having cops, and having cops that you can trust to protect you.

Also, even if for argument’s sake we assume that the police will act in your best interest when they show up, not everyone lives in a large city where you’re never more than five minutes away from a cop. The US is huge, and the vast majority of it is rural and isolated. If you live in one of those places help from police might be hours away rather than minutes. You’re on your own until they show up. If they show up at all.

Man, it’s been a heck of a year for Tren De Aragua. Just a few months ago they were completely unknown, then a single slum lord in Aurora Colorado uses them as a scapegoat for why his tenants have to live in filth and squalor, and they’ve managed to take that clout and spin their organization up into an Escobar-level international drug cartel in an implausibly short amount of time.

Say what you want about TDA, but you’ve got to admire the hustle.

/sarcasm

Almost certainly fly as in birds came first. Trousers with a fly are a pretty recent fashion development, like within the last 200 years or so, whereas people have been watching birds since before the invention of language.

No, Walmart is kind of an outlier by having a greeter. In other places that have a “greeter” it’s usually an extra layer of security/theft prevention, or it’s a place like Costco where you need a membership to shop there. That said, it’s basically standard for an employee to seek you out and ask if you would like help finding anything fairly soon after you walk in the store. It’s generally seen as good customer service, and in larger stores it’s not uncommon to be approached by several employees asking if you’d like help finding what you’re looking for over the course of your time in the store.

American customer service culture tends to be a little extra. There’s a premium on going the extra mile that’s tied into America’s self-image of the “land of opportunity,” and the hustle culture that goes with that. But when that’s what you’re accustomed to dealing with, the customer service cultures of other countries can be kind of jarring. I know from my own travels through Europe that shopping in some countries can range from feeling cold and indifferent, to feeling actively hostile.

That said, most Americans wouldn’t think of complaining to your manager about it. It’s only a specific kind of over-entitled asshole that does that. Sounds like you had a real karen on your hands.

On the plus side, considering the average lifespan of Samsung appliances, you probably won’t have to put up with it for very long.

Oh, it “has ties” to Tren De Aragua? Given Trump’s track record I have to assume that means they accidentally merc’d a random fishing boat from Guyana and are saying it was a Venezuelan drug boat so they can be like, “Um, it’s actually good that we murdered those people, actually.”

It’s supposed to blow through the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act and normalize military violence against US citizens; or against anyone who disagrees with, or tries to resist, the Trump administration.

Ibuprofen.

Or did you think people were just like, “Well, my knees were kinda sore going up the stairs today. Guess I’ll go slash my wrists?”

There are huge sound effects libraries that have been continuously built up and added to since sound in movies became a thing. Foley artists dip into them constantly. If you watch enough old movies you can pick out some almost 100-year-old foley effects that still get used in modern tv and movies. A lot of the time foley artists will toss them in as a joke or reference that mostly only other foley artists are going to catch.

But yeah there are a lot of foley effects that get used a ton. I hear the exact door opening/closing sound from the old AOL instant messenger used in a movie or tv show at least a couple times a year. There’s also a specific cat noise that gets used constantly which people who played Postal 2 back in the day will recognize instantly.

Just throwing up any kind of chaff they can find to distract from Epstein.

Hate is probably a strong word, but I don’t really care for their music. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, they’re competent musicians, but it all feels boring and generic to me. It’s bland and inoffensive, like it was written to play over a grocery store PA at a barely liminal volume for a middle-aged housewife to absent-mindedly hum along with as she compares laundry soap.

Because one of the many things shoe-horned into this bill was the removal of suppressors and short-barreled rifles from the NFA, this has been the subject of conversation in a lot of the gun subs on Reddit. It’s been fun watching some of the boot-lickingest right-wing gun owners absolutely shitting all over this bill on account of how bad it is. Even the AR15 sub, which doesn’t usually allow political threads, was like, fuck it, we’re leaving this one up because everyone needs to know what absolute garbage this bill is.

Weed whackers and weed eaters were used fairly interchangeably where I grew up in the US southwest and mountain west.

If the process and tradition of it appeals to you, then sure. You can find a cheap matcha set for under $20 (I think I saw one on Amazon a while ago for $10), so it’s not like you need to spend a ton of money to try it out.

I’m kind of lazy so I use one of those electric milk frothing whisks instead of a traditional bamboo one. But if you use that type of electric frother just be sure to use it in a vessel with high sides and a fair amount of extra room otherwise you’ll be wearing your matcha instead of drinking it.

“We were going to win this,” said the former senior ATF official. “These things are not like bump stocks."

Forced reset devices are actually exactly like bump stocks in that they’re legal because they force a distinct action of the trigger for every round fired. The legal definition of a machine gun is a firearm that fires more than one round per single action of the trigger. They haven’t bothered to amend or expand that definition, so these types of devices keep skirting by on a technicality.

I suppose the argument could be made that forced reset devices work in a very similar way to a machine gun’s auto sear, the difference being that they act on the trigger of the gun rather than the hammer, but it still doesn’t meet the government’s own definition of a machine gun.

Gonna be even more fun when all the empty trucks leaving from the empty west-coast ports I’ve been reading about for the past few days become empty shelves over the next few weeks. The real pain hasn’t even started yet.