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MangoCats

@ MangoCats @feddit.it

Posts
2
Comments
1000
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • The Protein-Obsessed Fast Food Industry's Latest Innovation: Big-Ass Cups of Plain Meat

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  • It's some better, not a lot if you research most of the sources for those packages that say "freeroaming." The only way the minimum standard for "freeroaming" labeling looks good (and, face it, no profitable operation does more than the minimum required) is by comparison with the factory hell-houses.

  • The Protein-Obsessed Fast Food Industry's Latest Innovation: Big-Ass Cups of Plain Meat

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  • no living creature is harmed in the process.

    Everything annihilated by aerial spraying, and the creatures (including farm workers) dying of cancer from non-lethal doses, would beg to differ.

  • The Protein-Obsessed Fast Food Industry's Latest Innovation: Big-Ass Cups of Plain Meat

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  • This was food waste with a glaze.

    You mean BBQ sandwiches? I worked at a Rax (like Arbys, with a salad bar) - the meat scraps and leftovers were thrown in a tub, covered in sauce, stuck in the cooler and sold as BBQ for the next day or so.

  • The Protein-Obsessed Fast Food Industry's Latest Innovation: Big-Ass Cups of Plain Meat

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  • My grandmother ate Wendys daily, as her only meal of the day, for 20+ years, she lived to 99. She's unusual (and she also controlled her calorie intake so she didn't become overweight.)

    Your mileage will most likely vary, that stuff isn't healthy. Oh, by the way, her mother chewed tobacco to age 96 and lived to 98 - also not typical.

  • The Protein-Obsessed Fast Food Industry's Latest Innovation: Big-Ass Cups of Plain Meat

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  • This reminds me of the "Big Gulp" 64oz of soda for 0.99 days - basically when sugar was replaced with HFCS and the price of soda syrup fell through the floor.

    We've been automating factory production of chicken and pork for a while now, gotta sell it somewhere.

  • Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’

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  • most people just go with ill-fitting off-the-shelf industrial goods instead.

    The age of Amazon has made it so much worse... even poor people went to clothing stores and tried stuff on before buying it.

    Now, if you don't want to pay triple, you get it from mail order and just hope it fits - yeah you can return it if it doesn't fit, but how much hassle is that, if it's "close enough" people generally don't bother, whereas if you were in the store you'd get the right size within a minute or two before buying it.

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • Resisting workers are unproductive, and annoying - you can see their perspective, right?

    Mdme Antoinette, Mdme Antoinette, the peasants are revolting!

    When have they not been?

  • Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’

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  • And what people are excited is the idea of replacing all non-pleasant work.

    So, when do I get an AI to navigate the phone-tree for me (kind of like the advocate in Jupiter Ascending)?

  • Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’

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  • Oh, c'mon - have you EVER tried managing people? They're a pain in the ass: expensive, unpredictable, needy beyond just the money they demand. Of course dimwit managers would rather outsource their people jobs to a service company wherever and whenever they can, let the service company do all that messy people-management.

    What they're missing is: those outsourcing service providers, even the ones providing AI "workers", are themselves made possible by, staffed with: people. Your outsourcing bills are ultimately paying for: people. Once they become dependent upon these outsourced service providers, guess what? Their billing rates will go up and up and up right up to the point that it's almost tempting to stop paying the service provider and just: hire their own people to do the work.

    Worth the time to read: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-18-asbestos-in-the-walls-government-by-spicy-autocomplete-ff437603809c

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • Well, really, it's wage slavery. Work is all you have, and the pay you get is not enough to give you any freedom from the work.

    As you say, you don't have enough time / energy to go look for another job - such places also intimidate the workforce and arbitrarily fire workers who might signal that they are looking for another job (such firing probably being a favor in the long run, but not if you starve to death in the meantime...)

    Ben & Jerry had it right with a 5:1 ratio. No person in a company's time is "worth" more than 5x the value of another person's time. Some incentive to develop skills, advance in your role, recognition of better performance, sure. At 5x, that should be enough to recognize your investment in yourself and your skills and your commitment to the company vs some guy who just shows up to push a broom. It wasn't so out of line with "reality" when they did it in the 1980s, but today it just doesn't work - the US is stratifying into classes/castes like the ones India is trying to abolish, just without explicit labels. The US system is based on how many digits are in your annual income figure: 4, 5, 6, 7, more?

    UBI would go a long way toward rectifying all of this. Let business do what they will, provide every citizen with enough money to live, instead of 0 + whatever they can squeeze out of the bureacrazy by "demonstrating need." If "illegals" can earn enough to live better here than elsewhere without any UBI, let them - if they get into financial trouble, give them assistance getting back to where they came from - otherwise: live and let live. At the very least, businesses would have to improve working conditions - otherwise the workers would just stay home until they find a better deal elsewhere. I can tell you from experience in the disabled community: people want work, they want to get out and have their value to society acknowledged with a paycheck - they also like to be able to buy shiny things. The current welfare system is a big bureaucratic stick hanging over their head threatening to beat them with benefit cancellation if they do get out and earn a little money.

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • On the surface I agree - what's being shown at top headlines, etc. But the PRC wasn't as TACO as 2025 USA.

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • Its random and arbitrary enforced.

    A direction the US is moving towards...

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • It was practiced in the Chinese tech sector for a while, then made illegal by their courts - but it is still practiced in private firms there due to lax enforcement.

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • Now you're being rational, looking at the big picture. Anyone promoting 996 is, first, using it for shock value, and second, promoting a: me first, me always, me only. perspective on what's desirable - for the company owners. Workers? Meh, they bought trickle down once, why not try that again? /s

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • I hope it doesn't spread outside of China, and I hope it ends (in practice) there soon.

    "Although the Chinese Supreme People's Court ruled 996 illegal in 2021, the practice remains a de facto standard in many private companies due to lax labor law enforcement."

  • 996 isn't about productivity, it's about keeping workers' living expenses low

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  • at the high health cost? Is it really worth it?

    Look at who's promoting 996, I don't think any of them take any responsibility for their workers' health.

  • ‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’

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  • What he's saying is that fascism prevents depression. Need more oil? Just go take it.

  • ‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’

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  • 500,000 jobs eliminated, how many of those 500,000 are still unemployed? Of those, how many have the means to "band together and take the billionaires down?"

  • Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers

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  • It’s obvious that personalized services manipulate people to their detriment. They make people hate one another. They make people hate themselves.

    I'd say that depends on who is in control of those services. The "big ones" like FB and X - sure, obviously. Others like BlueSky... less so. Reddit? Depends on how you use it. New Digg? Too early to tell.

    And I want a blank slate when I talk to AI

    In theory, yes, that's what I want. In practice, I find that I get the best, most productive, results from AI when I just run a continuing conversation which it periodically "compacts" as its context window gets overloaded, but that remaining context almost always helps me get what I want out of the AI better than trying to re-state exactly everything I want for every interaction. Some of that is laziness, sure I could build my own context descriptions and "control" the LLM better, and I do create a body of specification documents as I go in an AI project, for the LLM to refer back to as needed, but for the main "conversation" I think it maintains the context window automatically better than I am capable of doing manually.

    an algorithm that really understands what we want to see and tweaks every single response to match — is manipulating us. And I don’t want to be manipulated.

    Some days, Google feels "in control" - I tell it what I like, what I don't like, and content is shaped accordingly. Here, in the past month or so, I have felt a massive shift in what Google News is presenting me, tons of crap from X - much of it "aligned" to my point of view, but I don't want "introductions to X" thank you very much, just switch it all off - but they don't. And other news stories are quite a bit more "diverse" in their viewpoints than I was seeing several months ago, and I really don't want to read the Proud Boys take on current events, thanks, no matter how elegantly dressed up it is.

    If you are happy with a machine picking what you get exposed to, then you’ll do that and be happy.

    It's not that I'm happy, it's that I really don't have a choice. I can't travel the whole world and make my own observations daily, and even if I did I wouldn't have access to most of what matters... so, some form of curation in the news that reaches me is inevitable. I would like my sources to be as unfiltered and unbiased as possible (with the exception of filtering out sports and "entertainment"), but that's always going to be an illusion. Cronkite and Brokaw were filtered and biased, they just did a good job of looking like they might not be.

    I don’t want AI that I don’t strictly control the context of.

    Good luck with that. Proto-AIs that you don't control have been shaping the information that reaches you and everyone you know for decades now.