Up until about 6 months ago or so, in my area FedEx was the best of the delivery services in my area by far. Granted, I know that whichever service is best tends to vary from region to region. But, whenever I saw that my package was getting delivered via FedEx, I was generally glad to know it.

In my area, UPS is the shady shit-show that would totally pull some bullshit like this. UPS will open my mailbox and put packages in there (which is illegal in the USA). UPS will claim my package is delivered and then 3 days later, USPS delivers it. They have some kind of agreement with USPS to deliver the last mile, but UPS tracking literally shows the packages as delivered the moment they turn it over to the USPS. UPS will furiously beep the horn outside my bedroom window until I go to the front door to see what’s going on, and then have ME dig through their truck to find my own package. Anyway, I’m ranting now, as is the custom for men my age and in my condition.

USPS is just a whole other paradigm of unfathomably terrible shit show. Okay, I’ll stop. I have a problem.

Point is, FedEx used to be the best of shitty lot, so I wonder why they’ve suddenly and drastically gotten so bad as of late.

I’m glad to see you mention that, I was going to make a similar comment. I figure it’s a message that’s probably well understood here on the fediverse, but outside of this space not so much.

I think there’s also an argument to be made for charging subscriptions based on overall maintenance needs. Upgrades, updates, bug fixes, and things of that nature take time and can also cost money.

However, overall, there are way too many subscription based apps that just don’t seem justified. If I buy version 2.3 of AppXYZ, and as long as I stick to that version nor need any online functionality, I just don’t see a valid excuse for a subscription, other than pure greed on the developers’ part.

Normally I would respond to the already posted top reply with this same message, but this is a topic which deserves multiple replies with the same answer to reinforce the idea that it is correct…

Remove any diseased or damaged strawberries from the container.

Soak the rest in a vinegar solution for a few minutes.

Rinse with fresh water.

Allow to completely dry.

Keep refrigerated.

Those are the steps. Works with lots of produce, but seems to be especially good for things like blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

But also, at least in the USA, shit’s going down with our produce right now and it seems like the shelf life of almost everything as of late is super limited. Not sure if it’s due to the tariffs or what.

I’ve seen Pig mentioned before as one of the good ones, so maybe I’ll give it a go one night when I have nothing else to lose. My favorite of his recentish movies is Renfield. Probably because I went in with low, low, low expectations and limited research, but it was much better than I was expecting.

Good grief, another one I was going to mention that’s already covered.

His movies are mostly bad, I think you and I might agree on that.

But the other aspect of it is that a lot of the people I knew who liked his early movies were just really shitty humans. So by association, I think that affected how I saw his movies. Just seemed like a magnet for terrible people and it was hard to separate those two things for me. Not to mention, the movies themselves were objectively somewhere between awful and just not that great, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out much.

Oh, and I got “dragged” to that movie I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry IN THE THEATER. And that reasserted everything I already knew to be true about Adam Sandler movies.

You beat me to it. I like(d) him in his early career, then it got to the point where pretty much everything I saw that had him in it sucked, so if he was in a movie, it was a sign to me to skip it. I have had a bit of a change of heart in some of his latest stuff, I’ll at least consider watching it if there’s a modicum of evidence that there are redeeming qualities to the movie overall.

The other aspect of it is that I used to think he was good looking when he was young, and then sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s he just seemed to turn physically repulsive to me. Part of it is his hair. I think if he ever got a good hair cut or played a part that involved wearing a decent hair piece, it might not be so bad.

I need to bookmark this for when I have time to read it.

Not going to lie, there’s something persuasive, almost like the call of the void, with this for me. There are days when I wish I could just get lost in AI fueled fantasy worlds. I’m not even sure how that would work or what it would look like. I feel like it’s akin to going to church as a kid, when all the other children my age were supposedly talking to Jesus and feeling his presence, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t experience any of that. Made me feel like I’m either deficient or they’re delusional. And sometimes, I honestly fully believe it would be better if I could live in some kind of delusion like that where I feel special as though I have a direct line to the divine. If an AI were trying to convince me of some spiritual awakening, I honestly believe I’d just continue seeing through it, knowing that this is just a computer running algorithms and nothing deeper to it than that.

Faustinus: Corn for dinner last night, Octavius?

Octavious: No, what’s corn?

That’s basically my Pandora experience. They’ll have ads where if you click to watch a video, you’ll get X amount of time, usually an hour, ad free. There’s about a 50% chance the ad will cause the app to crash, but only AFTER the ad finishes playing. And once I start the app up again, it doesn’t remember the offer or that I watched the ad. Same thing if I close the app, accidentally or otherwise. If I start it back up, that ad free hour is gone.

I’m drawing a blank and I definitely don’t recall anything along the lines of what you’re talking about.

I used to know a guy who was going bald and could not accept it. He was using two different drugs, Propecia and Rogaine, but decided to buy some of those “hair loss supplements” he saw on Facebook because they had a money back guarantee. He stopped taking the drugs while on the supplements, and within a few months his hair started falling out even worse than before. And no surprise to anybody but him, he wasn’t able to get his money back. Those supplements cost several hundred dollars (USD).

And since some of the other comments are going for systemic things (i.e. government, religion, etc), I’ll add higher education in the USA. It’s FAR too expensive and pushed way too much, even for kids that have no business going to college. Young people can quickly and easily end up in six figure (or near to it) debt that takes decades to pay off, with little or no benefit.

Got dayum and on an Sunday. You are brutal.

My new corollary: If your online e-commerce site asks customers to add a tip, even if $0 / no tip is an option, I’m not buying shit from you.

And the icing on the cake? If we had 13 months, essentially every month could have the same number of days, 28.

The main problem I have with USB-C is that the “U” is a lie. Always has been to some extent, but seems like it’s particularly true with USB-C. This is closer to that meme that’s like “There are 12 competing standards. We created a new universal standard to replace them all.” Except instead of there now being 13 competing standards, USB-C is a fractured mess so instead it’s like there’s now 20 competing standards. This cord supports passthrough power, this one doesn’t, but even the one that does only supports 20W so you have to have a special one to deliver 65, and that USB-C power brick only gives 15W, so you have to buy a special one that does 80W, and this USB-C port on my phone doesn’t support the USB-C to Aux jack adapter I bought, so now I have to buy a different adapter. It goes on and on and on and frankly I’m old and tired.

Not that I plan on going back to Wendy’s, certainly not any time soon, but is that $5 deal a relatively new thing and/or a national thing?

When I was a poor college student working multiple jobs and having to do a lot of driving to get from one place to another, Wendy’s was one of my go-to places. For about $4 I could get 2 burgers that had real, fresh lettuce, tomato, onion, plus a drink. I went to Wendy’s a year or two ago and the same exact thing was a bit over $11. For what it’s worth, if they had some kind of $5 special, I didn’t see it on the menu.

Taco Bell was the same way. Back in my college days, I could get a couple 5-layer burritos and a drink for $3 and some change. Last time I went and got that order, it was $9 or $10 and the burritos were missing a few layers, not to mention just absolutely gross.

Most national/international fast food places seem to have looked at the “good, fast, cheap” principle and decided the answer is D) None of the above.

Have they been getting by on inertia and nostalgia in recent history? I could be an incredibly unlucky person, but all my experiences with these places have just been bad, bad in the past 5 or so years. I excused it a bit during the height of covid, but there’s been time to work things out and they just haven’t even bothered.

I’m not exactly their target audience, since I rarely get food at fast food places, but as it stands, if I were going to get fast food, the whole Trump McDonald’s circus show has turned me off to that brand entirely. Burger King is a no-go after getting incredibly sick from their food. Taco Bell just completely gave up on themselves. Wendy’s is so expensive now that I can’t justify it anymore even as a guilty treat while traveling. I’d rather pack some ham sandwiches in a mini-cooler and make do with that.

This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!

Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.

AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.

So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.

You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.

You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.

And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.

On the other hand, it’s amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you’re talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn’t even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That’s not to say that some app isn’t or hasn’t done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.

Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam’s Razor.

I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they’ve only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.

As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.

Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there’s limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we’re all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn’t specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn’t we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach’s? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.

It just seems like nothing works the way I expect it should these days, and I’m happy to be wrong, but I don’t think my expectations are that high.

I make an appointment at the driver’s license office for 10 a.m., I kind of expect to be seen around that time, especially since they tell you to show up at least 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment. Certainly, I don’t expect to have to wait 2 hours to be seen.

I go to the store to return an item that was missing parts, I don’t expect to be turned away completely because the “printer is down”. I have the receipt, can’t you just make a copy and refund the very small amount of money or let me exchange it?

I go to the bank to withdraw a few five and ten dollar bills, I don’t expect to be told “I don’t have enough”. I especially don’t appreciate being treated like I’m the first human in history to want specific denominations for a withdrawal.

I get told to return my internet equipment to any of your locations, only to be told you can’t accept that at your store. Why did the customer service person I talked to on the phone say any location, the company website have your location in the list of locations available when I filtered by “returns”, and my final bill state “return equipment to any location” if your location doesn’t accept returns?

I go to the doctor for a specific health concern (that unbeknownst to me is a red flag for a major problem), they give me a medicine that actually exacerbates said major problem without ever mentioning it or testing for it first. You’re the expert and professional, not me, and I guarantee if I’d asked about that major problem because I saw something about it online, you’d have made a snarky comment like “don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree” or similar.

And all of this, plus much, much more, in just the past month or so.