Doug @Rushkoff says that the ethic of today's "entrepreneur" is to #GoMeta - don't provide a product or a service, simply find a way to be a predatory squatter on a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who use those things.
cory doctorow discovers capitalism
How to convert STEM majors: Do what Marx wanted and call it "scientific socialism".
Have you come across the Marxism is Thermodynamics boon posted here about a month ago? Sounds like you might get a kick out of it.
I gave it a pretty thorough skim because I was bored at the time, and his basic premise is fine but he definitely gets further and further into the conspiracy basement as it goes on. eventually gets really radlib about revolution.
Given the way most STEM grads behave I really wonder how many of them actually understand the scientific method and how science works conceptually. I've been having bad experiences lately and doing a lot fo angry lecturing.
The current one is did you know that medical doctors continue to reccomend "diet and exercise" as the only reliable way to lose weight, and in fact routinely refuse medical care to fat people and treat fat people with contempt, when it is provable by overwhelming evidence that "diet and exercise" fails to reduce body weight for 90+% of people? That's not bad medical advice, that's an entire culture of deliberate malpractice.
There's also evidence that people who are fat but not extremely obese have better health outcomes and live longer, despite conditions like diabetes, that skinny people.
Doctor's hate this one weird trick that's supported by evidence from numerous studies because they're superstitious bigots.
yeah he seems very reluctant to embrace state power
Maybe I should start sending him a pile of anthropology books explaining how states reproduce by forcing adjacent people to either form a state to fight the state or else become enslaved or destroyed.
Refusing to create and use a state sounds good on paper but in practice a state is the most efficient economic and military organizational technology yet devised and so far no one has managed to devise any non-state method of organization that can resist a state, let alone survive one, let alone defeat one.
Maybe not explicitly Marxist, but I've heard him use the phrase "socialism or barbarism" multiple times.
He did a short story about a MMO game where a guild of white upper class teens took to protecting South American gold farmers who sold the gold to feed their family.
Honestly that story was one of my biggest political awakenings as a middle class white teen
The next one after that is great, too:
These parasites have turned themselves into landlords of someone else's home, collecting rent on a property they don't own and have no connection to.
I think I've clicked on a sponsored result maybe one or twice in my life. Most of the time it's garbage with little relevance to what I'm looking for, and the rest of the time I just don't trust it
More than a decade ago I taught my dad how to remove sponsored results from google. Within a few days his wife removed the adblock filters and they were seeing sponsored content again. Because she went out of her way to tell me how helpful that shit was - I knew she was lying. My dad passed away a few years ago. I hope she clicks the sponsored shit and gets totally scammed. And more than once.
She's a real piece of work. I never used the term "my stepmom" for my dad's third wife. I always used her name or called her "my dad's wife".
Edit: I fixed a mistake.
It’s hard for me to conceptualize a person who’s computer literate enough to remove Adblock filters but also wants google sponsored results. Who the fuck is this woman??
She was petty and awful. She's the sort of person who is sure she's right 100% of the time. Anyway - she's out of my life so please don't get me started.
My dad's last girlfriend once tried telling me that Cozumel, Mexico was not an island and when we looked at a map declared herself correct because it's a couple miles off the coast of the mainland, practically a peninsula.
declared herself correct
It's so nice to never have to deal with my dad's second wife's bullshit. Her go-to phrase to lecture me was "You said...". I tried to have a smile and expression that said "Oh, really. Are you fucking kidding me with this shit again?" I don't think she even noticed. My dad did though.
I once got into an argument with her where she devolved into unintelligible shrieks, I look back on it fondly.
I envy you. My nemesis didn't lose her temper. She liked to get her revenge cold. She'd wait and then display her fangs with "You said..." And I'd have to be the one not to lose my temper.
She once had a job review where her boss told her she was an overly emotional control freak as anytime she got comfortable at a job she'd start acting like she owned the place and would get in petty power struggles with other employees.
My nemesis was an "artist" so - for example - she'd make a two foot high metal elephant-shape sculpture by welding mostly rectangular pieces of metal and painting it a sold bright color. She called it lawn art but I called it crap. Somehow she sold stuff fairly frequently at local galleries.
I don't understand people. I really don't.
To force the hand of someone like this and reduce them to a banshee is always viscerally satisfying and entertaining
Ha, reminds me of growing up my mom would always refer to her brother as "my mother's son."
Hey that's what we do with my late grandad's second wife! Good times :yea:
I was going to say "I wish her ill," but that's way too much effort on my part.
I thought this was one of those AI generated scams, but whoever took out that domain didn't pay the $5 to anonymize themselves, and left their full name and address linked to the record
They also allowed a website without SSL encryption into their sponsored results which should honestly be one of the first checks they make.
If this really is just some college kids doing a scam for beer money that's pretty fucking funny. Like the digital version of selling valentine's IOUs
What do you think the scam is? Their fake site places an order and they upcharge it for the "convenience"?
GrubHub etc already do this for pickup orders lol. Gotta love the modern internet where you have to outmaneuver scammers and rent seekers to do anything.
"there is only one thing in life worse than
being talked aboutscamming google search results for beer money, and that is notbeing talked aboutscamming google search results for beer money."
Fair, never seen one registered to a name and residential address like that though. Even the real website is using the anonymity feature.
Usually for an upcharge, whoever's doing this is not very good at it
Yeah google has become really sketch. I got taken by a hotel booking scam that way. Luckily Amex had my back.
It was literally an algo wrapper for Expedia that made reservations on your behalf and charges a $600 convenience fee
there's no bigger sign of collapse than the rapid breakdown of google search results since 2018
other than covid, and chemical spills, and exponentially crumbling infrastructure and 80F temperatures in the middle of January
the rapid breakdown of google search results since 2018
Double quotes used to golden at Google.
In other words if I googled for
"I want this exact phrase"that phrase had to be in all the search results. Google bought Youtube and that site doesn't work the same way. Youtube's algorithm knows better than you so it will force help you by giving other related results too. So it also gives me stuff like"I want this unrelated garbage"- gee thank you, Youtube.Google understanding of double quotes in searches tends to be good (if not very good) but sometimes it's just like Youtube and I can't disable the fucking site from giving me help I don't want.
I don't even know how to get a complete list of youtube results anymore. It gives me like eight results and then tons of shit I didn't ask for. Idk how to search peoples channels, either. And I had a fucking miserable time getting google to stop including certain words or domains. It's gone completely to hell, it's so much harder to use than it was even a few years ago.
Wikipedia should have a page for "tech company lifecycle". And one stage of the lifecycle should be "When the company starts to actively be annoying by 'helping' you.'
Eventually every executive from the lowest to the highest paid CEOs are going to do the same thing. They're doing to ask their favorite AI app "How can we increase profits quickly?" God only knows what insane and hairbrained stuff will follow.
the other day i was looking to re-purchase a fantastic winter jacket i've had for years. of course, finding 5 year old clothing items is next to impossible, but i had the year of production and item name. the only purchaseable result was from a very sketchy site that happened to have exactly the item i needed, but the site didn't have real About or Contact pages, and didn't have an address. thanks google
Does Ebay have some kind of "roll your own" RSS search that can send an email to you if there's a search hit?
Reverb.com has a great one. In fact - it worked so well and the temptation was so great - I had to disable it. I kept getting emails and the last thing I need is another guitar. It's sad how easily I give in to temptation. But - out of sight - out of mind.
Related...
Last week I went downtown with a few new friends. Some time in, one got a call from her bank. Our town uses an app, ParkMobile, for downtown parking lots. She googled instead of searching on the App Store. The top google result was a phishing scam that stole her credit card data.
Cannot emphasize enough that you should go through the App Store for this kind of thing but it shouldn't be up to the individual for this. Why the fuck is Google allowing this? (We know why)
Also, if you're just frothing at the mouth for more security tips from a guy named Butt Praxis, keep your phones and computers updated. Anytime it says "security fixes" in the update description, that means someone found a bad hack for the old version.
This kind of phishing is incredibly common and google don't care cos ofc they don't.
All these fucking tech companies are a menace. Google is serving fake websites, Amazon is selling counterfeit shit, facebook sells ads for fascism, steam is a single point of failure for the entire games industry, and god knows what else. It's all abusive, it's all corrupt, it's all predatory and exploitative towards it's customers and employees and everyone else. Fuck the internet. Bad idea. Shut it down.
These parasites have turned themselves into landlords of someone else's home, collecting rent on a property they don't own and have no connection to.
"haha the working class does not have a deep hatred and contempt for the lives of kulaks..." :porky-scared:
anybody who clicks on sponsored Google results deserves whatever phishing happens to them tbh
Death to America
You can't really expect much computer literacy from people that don't really care about computers and never received any kind of formal education regarding them. They just want to do their thing, they didn't make these scams happen. They're victims, not idiots to be laughed at.
Especially when the ads are intentionally designed to blend with other results.
Sometimes I'll click a sponsored link if it's the same url just to cost the company some ad money, but only for that. Not that it matters much when in searching with brave on a librewolf browser running AdBlock and a VPN. That uh, that catches most shit.
But why not simply just block the sponsored links entirely? You can't click something that's not there.
![Sponsored Google results might be phishing sites. [thread]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/b8nd98V2uM.png){kind=link}