Matytoonist

Ezequiel

@Matytoonist

Bnnuy brainrot(?

19yo argentinian cis guy
Things i like range from art, to software, to DIY electronics, and whatever current project im having

big button that reads "powered by linux" featuring Xenia's left eye from the original drawing om the left
button that reads "bunny browser" parodying the netscape logo with a rabbit siluette

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Matytoonist
@Matytoonist
Tanuki-Computing
@Tanuki-Computing
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

the thing that never stops galling me about Late Capitalism is how nothing's ever enough. just ordered a pizza from pizza hut, and after you check out, it forces you to click through four ads for dumb shit you don't want. just like, coupons for other sites. for which pizza hut gets paid a couple pennies.

paying $20 for a pizza, plus that much again for delivery, is not enough. is that because they're undercharging for everything and the pizza itself is a loss leader somehow? well idk but given that they made 6 billion dollars in profit in 2022, i somehow doubt that's it. no, they don't need the penny for showing me a fucking walgreens ad. they just want it. they just plain want it.

the True Believer / Flimflam Man version of capitalism says that we're all just little children who want everything for free and are just stubbornly crossing our arms and refusing to accept the very simple and obvious quid-pro-quo necessities of reality: a person does work for you, you have to compensate them. but it's never like that. no company will let you pay for a product or service. it's never enough, no matter what the price tag says, no matter how much of it's profit margin, nothing is ever enough until they've plastered every single surface with more ads, sold every byte of customer data, formed all the partnerships they can, and squeezed even more slivers of a penny out of every single thing within their grasp.

you could offer to pay $10 extra per pizza, and they would nod and then put an ad on it anyway, because otherwise they wouldn't have done that. they would be leaving something on the table and that's unacceptable. you can't pay enough to make them not put ads in front of you because it's real estate that they control, and they will never, ever rest until they've extracted every single fucking fraction of a fraction of a cent out of every single resource they can get their hands on, and everything is a resource, from a beating human heart to a single pixel on your fucking monitor. you can't pay them enough to act normal. they don't want the money. they don't need six billion dollars more than last year. they just want to know that they won.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

wildweasel
@wildweasel

The infinite growth mindset: because no matter what, if the choice is between earning an extra penny and not earning an extra penny, the Top Executive will never, ever choose to not make the extra penny, all other factors be damned.

I mean, really, the biggest money makers in this country are exactly the kind of people who would min-max their D&D character and argue with the DM when their weapon should be dealing that one extra HP of damage because they have an obscure feat that, I dunno, makes their sword electrocute anybody of a half-abyssal bloodline. And almost no group I've ever been a part of has ever enjoyed playing with that person. That's exactly what execs are doing with money.

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blit
@blit

Whenever someone goes “what if AI becomes a paper clip maximizer????!?!?” I just sigh.

We’ve built a million profit maximizers, and are watching them eat the world. It’s already happened, weird tech bro. We’re living in it.

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dijonketchup
@dijonketchup

I wonder if that's a location based thing? I've ordered more Pizza Hut than any reasonable human being should and it's never made me click through ads. All it makes me click through is a page asking me if I want dessert or a soda. If I wanted them, I would have added them to my cart, Pizza Hut.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

there's a single pizzeria that delivers to my house that isn't a chain and it's like $30 for an extremely subpar pizza. i could afford it, there's just no point in ordering a treat that isn't actually a treat. and i'm in seattle, so i don't think anywhere isn't like this at this point. there's like 6 non-chain pizzerias here and they're all up in capitol hill because it's the only place with enough foot traffic to scrape up $20,000 in revenue per month to pay the rent

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keithzg
@keithzg

Up here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada we actually have quite a few non-chain good local pizza places. The top example a place called High Dough which is a bit expensive but it's Detroit Deep Dish style and it's HUGE pizzas, insanely filling, if I order for myself it's like three meals I have (and with the thick-ass slices they reheat in the oven pretty damn well unless one has a ton of non-broiler-friendly toppings). And you have to go for a more expensive option like that to get to ~$33 Canadian for a pizza, which is $25 American I guess?

Unfortunately the best of the really cheap and cheerful places are gone, both near-to-me greasy classic pizza places that were vaguely like Pizza Hut in style but much more satisfying in practice and even cheaper somehow are gone. One because it went out of business during the pandemic (it was also a dive bar run by three terrible old greek men, RIP their weirdly good food including the best french onion soup I've ever ordered, and a drink they served in mini-pitchers called Combat Juice that'd get you really fucked up). The other, the guy who'd been running it since at least the late-90s sold it to someone who jacked up the prices and toned down the quality, so now out of spite I don't even order from it despite it being across the street from my office.

BUT, there are a few others nearby that aren't chains or are only local chains (like, two or three locations around town) and the lower-tier ones do seem to have prices not too far off the chains like Pizza Hut and Dominos (though neither of those chains' websites will cough up exact prices right now for me to check against, because they insist on finding my nearest locations and then error out on them being closed now at 3AM). Like to go up to $30 even in Canadian dollars it'd have to be a 14" pizza with a bunch of additional toppings.

I dunno if Edmonton is way better off than average, or Seattle is way worse; maybe both are half-true?

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exerian
@exerian

and i'm in seattle, so i don't think anywhere isn't like this at this point

except for the inverse. out in the sticks where there are no chains. there might be one pizza place that makes a decent pizza at a decent price. i'm lucky. no chains. TWO good pizza places within delivery range. lol

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graham
@graham

Pizza Hut is no longer a company whose product is pizza. That's small cash. Distruptable with the right economics. Low ROI.

What we need is a company like Pizza Hut that finds ways to push ROI up every year so that we beat the stock market. It doesn't matter which company in our portfolio does it, as long as one of them does and as long as our losses are protected

The product IS the ROI. Sell me the opportunity to get 50% growth every year and if you don't, someone will. Also I'm rich enough that I can borrow money from the banks that I never have to pay back and at lower interest rates than you'll ever see in your life.

There's no end to the growth because all I need is there to be an opportunity to 1.5x every year in any sector, and as long as I have enough to bet on every number and make more from my wins than my losses due to loopholes, I will get richer and richer forever

Furthermore capitalism must be destroyed

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literalHam
@literalHam

while visiting my parents for thanksgiving 2022 I absentmindedly opened up a fortune cookie from a take out order a week or so before my visit. On one side was the fortune "In retrospect, it was inevitable!". On the other was an ad for FTX. In November 2022.

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rachelmae
@rachelmae

i was angry the first time i found an ad inside a fortune cookie. like "write a scathing expletive-filled letter to the manufacturer" angry, as if that would have done any good. it feels like an exceptionally criminal thing to do.

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-pegasus
@-pegasus

i don't think they've made "television sets" in like 15 years. everything after that is some kind of scam. the three main ones are "claims to be a toshiba, actually a vestel, breaks one month after warranty ends, no service manual or spares availability", "allegedly has apps but is too slow" and "spies on you". there's probably a fourth one somewhere

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vxo
@vxo

when I got those ad screens following making a purchase on some other site I was very very close to hitting the "THIS CARD WAS STOLEN" button in the bank app and setting fire to the computer i was using at the time. the user experience just felt like pure malware

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