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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • Because 2 of those seats bring in more revenue than 6 of the economy seats, but you’d never fill a plane of only first-class seats at that price point and the benefits compared to the cheaper seats make them more desirable for those who can afford them.

    As for shrinkflation, maybe it started earlier with airlines when they started nickel-and-diming people for everything and cutting out in-flight meals and the like. It’s crazy to see how the luggage fees and such effectively increased their gross profits by about 33%.



  • 10-hour shifts are very common in the US. Working 50 hours a week is fairly common, though sometimes people work four 10-hour days instead of the usual five 8-hour days that people know as a “9 to 5 job.”

    I was recently looking at a job listing where they were hiring for 2 shifts of the same role. The first was 50 hours a week working 10-hour days from 7am to 5pm, and the second shift worked 42 hour weeks with four 9-hour days where you worked from 3pm to midnight and then a shortened 6 hour day on Fridays. These kinds of schedules are the norm in manufacturing and logistics jobs, and in my experience, the higher your salary and the more senior your role, the fewer hours you’re expected to work. And you might even get benefits like vacation time and sick days/pay!


  • And local colloquialisms as well. I can tell you the secret to a Boston accent is to replace the r after a vowel with an h, and that’ll help you pahk the cah at Hahvahd yahd, but won’t do a damn thing when somebody tells you the food at a restaurant is wicked pissah, but warns you that it’s rainin’ feckin’ hahd out deyah so yeh better off takin’ the T to Southie.


  • But the fear isn’t so rational. It’s like a fear that the cocktail in your example will replace the original vodka whether they want the cocktail or not, or that the vodka will be so diluted by seltzer that it will functionally cease to exist.

    It’s like a fear of gentrification of the country as a whole.

    It’s also important to remember that the US is a huge exception in this regard as well. Most other countries are like 90%+ native population, and immigrant populations tend to be sort of isolated from the wider national culture due to things like language barriers, and they often set up little “bastions” of their native culture locally wherever they live. We even see plenty of that in the US as well. While there are many distinctly US cultures across the country that are derived from a variety of backgrounds, there are tons of “enclaves” of European culture that make it blatantly clear where immigrants from certain countries settled. In Boston, the culture of Chinatown is distinctly unique and separate from the wider culture of the city, which largely has ties back to Ireland (and is very proud of it). And both of those are distinctly different from where the Italian immigrants settled, who effectively have their own districts of cultures descended from Italy regardless of where they immigrated to.


  • Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.

    The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.

    This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.



  • Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.

    The moral of Harry Potter is that the status quo is correct and should never be questioned, and nobody should ever try to change anything.

    Harry doesn’t defeat Voldemort or change any of the issues inherent in the bumbling bureaucracy of the wizard world. Voldemort kills himself on a magic technicality, Harry becomes a magic cop and helps to ensure that magic is never used to help the undesirables of society (Muggles), and Hermione is ridiculed for being a girl with blue hair and pronouns who tried to end the chattel slavery system before she “grew up” and became a much more sensible person who realized that the slaves actually want to be oppressed, and it’s for their own good.

    You can see Rowling’s morality change practically in real-time as the books go on, from criticizing the system to defending it as she began to benefit from it as her wealth grew. And underneath it all, you can see her discriminatory opinions of people. That was always there. When she wants you to hate a woman, she makes them fat or gives them masculine features. If I have to read the phrase “mannish hands” one more time, I might vomit.





  • We don’t even need to build new cities. We just need to let our cities increase density like all cities did for hundreds of years before the 50s. More multifamily buildings, midrise apartments, and mixed use buildings would go a long way towards helping everybody.

    Besides, much of that land is either already owned by somebody or empty for a reason. It would be a logistical nightmare for sure. You could send them to all the dying towns in the US, but I don’t think that would help either - apart from the locals being rightfully angry about large groups of new people coming in and eroding their local culture, those towns are dying for a reason that runs much deeper than just people moving away.




  • I really need to go back and watch the whole thing, but I remember in one of the first two seasons there’s another point where his wife discovers some duffel bags that he’s stashed that are just absolutely stuffed with cash. Like, tens of thousands of dollars, if not a six-figure number. And when she confronts him about it (I think she knew what he was doing and he had promised to stop?), he says that he wants to make sure that she and the kids are taken care of after he dies.

    But he was lying through his teeth. What started out as a desperate attempt to save his life quickly spirals into a power trip, and his ego can’t let him stop even when he has no need to keep going. The money is just a side benefit at that point.


  • I agree, you shouldn’t expect people to understand every reference you make. My statement was more about how the quote in the pic and, to a much lesser extent, the comment above both seem to view being introduced to a new thing by someone you like as sort of a bad thing. The quote in the photo especially is a red flag of not caring about the things the people you care about are into.

    Obviously not everybody is going to be familiar with the same media as you. But if somebody gets upset with you because you quoted a joke from a source that they’re unfamiliar with, that’s on them, not you.


  • I mean, how is it any different than referencing movies, music, TV shows, stand-up comedy, or any other piece of pop culture?

    Would referencing a movie somebody hasn’t seen before make you terminally in-theater or something? Though, having said that, I am now going to take every opportunity I can to work the phrase “terminally in-theater” into my daily life anytime somebody mentions a Marvel movie or something.