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coffeeseed

God, I can't tell you how much the "there's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "Your head gets screwey when you're apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit? The tiger? I've gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.

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having a soft small pet is like, you are so vulnerable, you are biting me, I am responsible for your fragile life in almost every way, your knife hands are in my stomach, I love you more than anything, stop eating plastic you heathen, I cannot save you from the slow march of age or explain to you the divergence of our life spans which consumes me

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ladylingua

I keep seeing people being shocked and bewildered about airbnb being so crappy to use now

and it’s giving me the impression not everyone knows that is by design- all of those “disrupter” startups operate exactly the same way. So let me lay it out:

First the company starts with an enormous amount of seed money, and they enter an established industry offering the same product but dirt cheap and with the feel of luxury. They operate at a loss for years. They offer their product at such a reduced rate that they literally cannot profit off of it. They rely on their seed money and investment from other wealthy friends to get by. They do this until the other established companies in the industry are on their knees and begging to be bought out. Once all of the competitors have either collapsed or been bought out, the new disrupter company is safe to jack up its prices and reduce services/perks to get to a level that is profitable. It might end up being much more expansive than the industry was to start with, because now that competitors are gone the disrupter business has more room to squeeze customers dry without fear they’ll go to another company instead. The “we’re shaking this industry up to bring high quality products direct to the consumer” pitch has nothing to do with consumers and is entirely about eliminating competitors, particularly long standing well established ones.

This is how uber works, airbnb, all of those. It’s the same game the laundry mat chain in my neighborhood who offers free drying is playing- driving out competition so they have more freedom to price things higher.

Individual consumers often don’t have the luxury to be so choosy about what companies they buy from, but just be aware going in and don’t get taken by surprise later on.

By the way, Amazon is absolutely playing by this handbook, and so did Wal-Mart before it. It's very, very, very predictable.

This is why this kind of thing is best dealt with at the regulatory level, and why you should think really hard before being on the disruptor’s side when they try to get that regulation removed or loosened.

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goldensunset

y’know for me it straight up doesn’t even occur to me to unfollow someone when they stop posting whatever it is i followed them for. unless the thing they’re posting about now is somehow actually actively upsetting to me i just accept it as a part of my life now. i’ll just scroll past it like i’m driving a car and dodging an obstacle on the road. and that part of the road is my daily commute and the thing stays on the road forever and i swerve around it every day for months instead of ever taking the initiative to get it removed. it just adds flavor i guess

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k-dhd
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crystaltoa

Even saying ”I’m so sorry, I completely forgot” sounds marginally better than ” I’m so sorry, I didn’t completely forget, I actually completely remembered. I thought about it the whole time and it stressed me out so much my brain built an insurmountable wall around it.”

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That’s such a fire fighter thing to do.

“You know what? That’s a good question. I’m gonna put you on hold while I find out”

My dad used to design kitchens at Lowe’s and one day he got a dude from one of the national labs looking to buy a countertop. Dad sent him home with a sample of a quartz-composite countertop to make sure the color will look good with his existing cabinets. The dude asks my dad what the composition of the countertop is and whether it’ll melt if he puts a pot on it (since it’s a composite and not pure stone) and Dad gives him some rough numbers and reassures him that it won’t melt if he puts a hot pan on the counter. The dude comes back with week later without the sample. The dude gives dad a detailed list of the countertops composition, to the nearest hundredth of a percentile, and the exact temperature it melts at, because he took it to his lab and melted it down. tldr, it’s not just firefighters.

Imagine giving someone a sample of the granite you use to make countertops and they come back a few days later just to tell you they fucking dematerialized it

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