It was less about the .99 pricing and more about “Sale” pricing and ‘coupons’. Retailers will put a pair of pants on “Sale” for 50% off 51 weeks out of the year and people think they’re getting a great deal whereas when it’s not half off, they just don’t buy.

I’m in the opposite boat. My inlaws are all MAGA whereas my wife and I are very much liberal. This is ‘her’ year for visiting family and she does want to go, but I’ve already warned her that her entire family is on the THINNEST of ice. It’s going to take a miracle for us to actually stay. I’m sort of looking forward to the first comment from them where we can simply scoop up the kids and head out.

Seriously, older than the internet.

This happens once in a while with my washer as well. My determination is that it starts to spin and is so far out of balance that it has to refill and swirl the clothes around a bit, then drain it to hopefully get a more even balance of mass so that it can properly spin. It’s much worse when there are large items, like a blanket that tend to lump on one side.

This makes me sad. I installed a loud as fuck exhaust on my car, but it broke sound limits at the track so I had to get a quieter setup. Mostly I’m sad because of my tiny penis tho.

I took my kids out, one is almost 3 and the other is just over a year. So few houses in our neighborhood had ANY appearance of anyone home, let alone participating that it took nearly two hours to get about 15 houses. In a pretty standard suburb. At least two houses that were heavily decorated had nobody home and no bowl out. Two also had colorful lights but when we knocks on the door they looked confused when there were two toddlers yelling at them. One just shut the door in our face and the other sort of stood there for a minute with his mouth agape and finally said “I don’t have anything”. I mentioned to that guy that he MIGHT want to turn his lights off or there would be kids all night, but walking past at the end of our evening, all his lights were on still.

I left a bowl on my porch and had two small groups of respectful kids each take a couple pieces each (video doorbells have changed the game a little).

*See “Project 2025” for more information.

A robot? SOMEONE has to fill the robots with “meat” “cheese” and “bread” so one more thing to dispense ketchup, mustard, salt and pepper would be easy enough.

It’s a LITTLE more expensive, which is ok, but sucks with kid who will often times waste entire meals… plus generally they don’t have the jungle gym-playplaces. For solo meals I much prefer ANYWHERE else, but with kids they have a built-in (literally) advantage. That said, if they make it annoying enough, I won’t bother anymore and have heard the same from other parents.

My point is that I don’t want to wait for a human interaction. Just let me grab some ketchup from a bin and go on with my day.

Makes sense, except that they won’t get any of this business if they take away the play-place. I’m already leaning away from McDonald’s due to this.

It seems that most McDonald’s are removing EVERYTHING from their lobbies. No more free refills on drinks, no ketchup or salt, even napkins are behind the counter now. Makes for a considerably more annoying visit, especially as they’re woefully understaffed, so you have to wait for someone to be bothered to get a couple napkins and ketchup while your kid screams at you.

Does web browsing count as a “basic” task these days?

So, I have clients that are actively using AI on a daily basis and LOVE it. It is however a very narrow subset. Also, I’m pretty sure that a LARGE amount of Dollars are currently being spent on AI generated political articles.

Maybe they can all go shopping at the SCP Ikea.

So, a subscription with extra steps? Or is the problem that you just can’t find any trustworthy sites?

I think it’s more along the lines of “more people would be apathetic” and just wouldn’t be bothered to vote.

This is a really interesting little project, but there’s no background info available. Making this be a plugin for that ‘other’ site that most of us left would be great. I still surf there once in a while but no longer comment due to their policy changes.

It’s nigh impossible to get many users to read past the headline. A summary is what 98% of people would actually want (and a good news story really is just a summary anyway) so the pay-through-rate would be so close to zero that I can’t see this model working.

That’s easy to say, but when it comes to finding my credit card to type in my info for yet another news website, I can guarantee that I just don’t give enough fucks about any individual news story.