Motorcycle airbag vests that will not work if you aren’t up-to-date on the subscription payments when you have a crash…
I mean, it kind of makes some sense. Part of what they’re doing is checking your location, speed, bearing, etc., and–IIRC–using cell signals for some of that. That’s bandwidth, and someone has to pay for it, even if it’s not very much. OTOH, Helite makes a vest that uses a tether, and that’s going to work well enough in most cases.
I think that there might be some that have options to pay for it all up-front instead of having a subscription, but I’m not positive; I just rely on leather and Knox inserts.
I don’t have any direct info on how it works, but I would have assumed it could be done completely offline with some sort of accelerometers. But I am a Lay Person so…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Accelerometers don’t work that great with motorcycles; when you go into a hard turn, the accelerometer still thinks that you’re straight up, due to centripedal force. You’d actually need gyroscopes. (…Which is why adaptive headlights for motorcycles end up being so expensive, and why only BMW specs them, and only on one or two touring models.)
That person who was in a car that ended up crossing three lanes, hitting a pole and then hitting a tree. They declined an ambulance because they were scared of the ambulance bill - then got a bill for $150 for refusing the ambulance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The purposeful degradation of repair.
My boss once said to a group of new joinees including me," Eventually you will be able to afford subscription to all the streaming services."
Well, that was a lie.
My brother used to work for an SEO company. They charged clients to have their web sites on directories which would improve their Google pagerank… until Google updated the algorithm to penalize sites listed in these directories. The company quickly pivoted to charging the same clients to have them removed from the directories they had just charged them to be listed in.
As much as I hate SEO companies, people who hire them are even worse, so I can only approve of this.
suppressing wages and social housing so that starvation and homelessness make labour cheaper
Here in Sweden we currently have the problem that hospitals are understaffed and keeping wages of nurses so low that a lot of nurses quit and leave the others with an even crazier workload so the hospitals buy nurses semi permanently from temp agencies that cost multiple times more and the rental nurses have better pay and agreements of overtime and such. We had a well functioning health care but then the privatisation of everything and selling out communally owned services to private profit making schemes since the 90s. Because our government has been dominated by right wing market liberals and “sossehöger” - social democrats that jump on right wing populism to stay in power when they can rather than being consistent in left wing ideals.
Fucking end the market liberal experiment already. “The market solves all problems” - yeah, of it’s own interest which is how to squeeze out more profits regardless the how and how low it stoops.
EVERY instance of ‘public-private’ healthcare goes that route, touted as the wave of the future and a seamless melding of public interest and delicious capitalist pork, and then every single one of them gets drunk on the cash and goes toxic like this.
It’s happening to Canada too. And France. And London.
Thats fucking sad
Damn, I didn’t know America was contagious…
It’s been the strategy of the right wing here since forever to get in power - sell out as much they can (and for some unfathomable reason for discount prices), fuck things up in general, leave it to a left wing government to salvage what can be saved while blaming them for public service being garbage so they can motivate selling out more when they have power again. It’s a mix of blind idealists and profiteering scum that are in liaison with the right wing nationalist party with former nazi connections and obviously the Christian democrat leader that models the party according to the republicans is the most buddy-buddy with the fringe right.
And the populist right wing of course romanticises about the good days when everyone had housing and was safe and provided and so on - that was built solely by the left and the right wing fought them every step of the way and that they have since then torn down. Blatant lies and disinformation all the way.
But it is what people vote for. We get the societal break down we deserve.
Same happens in Italy. It’s probable the govt will collapse before 2027 and they won’t campaign as much for the new elections, so the new govt will be blamed for all the problems these fuckers caused
Whoa, I thought that just Australia was following American economics. The descent into privatisation on everything. I guess there are greedy and ignorant people everywhere. For some reason knowing Sweden is also going down the neoliberal toilet it makes me feel better and I dont know why. I guess its a feeling of inevitability.
Reminds me of John Stewart stating that to combat vested interest takes energy and effort every single day.
There are so many groups taking advantage of our overworked lives combined with the over abundance of useless information that distracts us from the real issues that impacts us. Its very difficult to know how and where to direct our energy. Of course thats my view as a social/environmental person. However, if you love the conservative/neoliberal view of the world. Then congratulations, things must seem pretty great right now.
Your mom always expects me to leave money on the dresser in the morning.
Mandatory “hide the opt-out if there’s even an opt-out at all” “AI” trash that is shoved into everything from operating systems to browsers. It’s less than useless, outright malicious in both intent and practice in many cases, and dumps more carbon into the air just so the “AI” trash doesn’t seem like a sunk cost investment for venture capitalists.
Federal Circuit court blocking the ban on noncompete agreements
Today I heard Meta has laid off workers because they brought their own food for lunch instead of buying it from the company cafeteria.
Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee’s part.
Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.
You see, I at least buy food from my lunch stipend, although it’s usually my grocery trip and not necessarily my lunch of the day. And I only get about 7€ lunch stipend per day, not >40€.
A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org
We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.
An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.
You can finance a pizza
Ugh I dunno if I just noticed it but the spread of “only x small payments!” financing for the smallest purchases can’t be a good sign
Did OP ask an LLM for the “most Lemmy question to ask”?
