I pass by two schools, right next to each other, during my commute to work. There are School Zone speed limit signs that also you your own speed in warning. I always slow down to at least 30 (zone limit is actually 25).
I usually stick to ~30 because I’m on a motorcycle and I have cars ride my ass, clearly pissed off at my slow speed. To my amazement, they then proceed to angrily pull into the school parking lot and drop off their own kids.
the same process
It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.
Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.
I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.
A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.
Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:
Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.
I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.
To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices
Assuming you are in the USA, it’s fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The “haves” spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the “have nots”. The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.
The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow “have nots” are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to lose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing health insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.
how can we change this?
Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.
How does one person even start to address these issues?
Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.
Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It’s much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.
I think perfect competition is impossible. The incentive is not to compete fairly, it’s to maximize profits and the most effective ways to maximize profits are anticompetitive, exploitative, or both. Anyone arguing for a society built around such a system is either naive or trying to buy more time with false hopes.
Virtually every condition in the ideal scenario is a barrier for profit, and I don’t think any civilization has managed even a single one of those conditions. There will always be actors looking to take advantage of any loopholes or create unregulated markets.
It’s just not a system that is sustainable. The incentives are simply wrong and the society built around those incentives can’t maintain a system of perfect conditions even if one were to exist.
Demonstrating the inherent contradiction of capitalism in practice.
Capitalism is allegedly the only fair way to price things, via the “Price Mechanism”. However, capitalists have simultaneously been creaming their pants at the idea of charging specific people or people in specific situations more, because they can get more profit, in service of Profit Maximization.
I’m sure I’ll get a lecture on how they are not at all mutually exclusive but I don’t care, honestly. It’s either going to price gouge when the customer is perceived to be in more need (low battery pricing for taxi apps) or have a price based on the customer’s ability to pay… at which point why not socialism?
Essentially, the capitalist will support what is best for themselves and make up reasons why it theoretically might benefit consumers (but not really).
Honestly, that was my first hope.
Apparently our typical installer for Visio 2016 and our 365 license use “incompatible installers” so it is going to be a pain in the ass for me to have both installed at the same time. Thankfully I’m trusted by IT so I might be able to just do it myself.
Edit: Looks like I’ll need IT after all. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/use-the-office-deployment-tool-to-install-volume-licensed-editions-of-visio-2016
Now if only it would stop dropping leading zeros unless you ask it
That appears to actually be a feature.
Fucking hell. Some highlights…
90 labourers removed from site by US federal agencies. In lawsuit, 6 workers alleged they were paid merely 10% of hourly minimum wage, forced to live in gruelling conditions… They allege that they were paid $1 per hour for their work when the minimum wage in New Jersey is $12 per hour… the workers were allegedly brought to the US on R-1 Visas that are applicable for clergy and religious workers like missionaries. The labourers were presented to the US government like volunteers… the workers’ passports had been confiscated, they were given lentils and potatoes for meals and that their pay was cut for the smallest of violations such as being seen without a helmet.
I think they actually want to inspire Fitbit Premium subscriptions with the watch. Not required, but recurrent user spending…
My local public school district takes student privacy seriously. They make an effort to track which students they have consent to feature in any media in order to avoid this and, as a district policy, ask for consent every school year to make sure consent doesn’t change.
Assuming you are a minor in the US.I would be very surprised if you or your guardians ask for your photos to be removed and the school didn’t cooperate.
There have been historic instances of corps going against the spirit if not the rule of net neutrality if we have ever really had such a thing in the US
The most open move I recall was made by cell carriers that also owned media companies -AT&T? They would use their cell service to punish or hinder usage of non-owned media. They’d limit the resolution of or throttle the speed of competitors services to their customers. Ex. watch our content at 1080p, but competitors are limited to 480p. That or they would “zero-rate” (not count usage against your data limit) their own services. Ex. watching our content doesn’t count against you 1GB limit, but watching our competition’s does.
I don’t know if it still happens though. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t just more subtle now.
It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.
I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the race of the band director did place a part, but I’m pissed at what happened either way.
By some more nuances definitions I’ve heard it may be technically true that the black cops weren’t racist. However, it is possible to treat someone poorly because of the color of their skin even if it matches your own. Maybe the cops consider themselves “one of the good ones”, maybe they just believe that they are able to power trip a little harder against certain races because it’s more socially acceptable, or maybe they don’t want to stand out against their white peers and just do what they do.
I honestly didn’t watch the video either though - maybe a black cop was the first to escalate it so the last hypothetical isn’t a strong one. I’ve just seen enough videos like that this week and don’t want to get more upset by watching one more.
After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.
Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.
I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.
Or people could just be upset that cops of any color feel justified in using tasers when civilians don’t comply with unusual, unnecessary requests. I don’t care what color the band director is or what color the cops are. I’m continually disgusted at how many videos there are of cops losing their shit when a civilian doesn’t immediately respond “how high?”.
You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.
If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.
If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.