Shop at a local hardware or grocery store. Even if it’s a fucking chain grocery store, you’re doing more for your community than shoveling money into walmart.
If you don’t care what happens to your community, you have no right to complain about how shit your community is.
We’re all going to run headlong into a very difficult inflection point in human development as a species very, very soon. Which is the looming divide between people who have no idea how their own minds work, and those who have even a shred of self-awareness.
And not a “facebook/twitter argument” type of self-awareness, but understanding that your intelligence and your understanding of things are entirely separate factors. We are species of cognitive dissonance. It’s baked-in. Everyone, even YOU personally reading this, has some level of contradictory ideas or feelings that you can’t pry apart without effort.
Some people think about how they think, and come to conclusion that they need to make effort to balance out their values and understanding of the world. Other people are going “brain go vroom” and conclude any idea they have, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it aligns with how they feel at that moment, MUST be true because they still think brains are fact-finding machines, not story-telling machines. This is why we have anti-vax doctors and climate-change-denying scientists (although rare) which is because they live in reaction and story-telling, not reason. If anything, education can make it much, much harder to break out of story-telling-reaction mode, because you think your own thoughts far less fallible.
So yeah, education is only part of the problem. We are going to have to figure out ways to teach people self-awareness, how to think about their own thoughts, or we’re going to have billions of brains rotting in an AI/social-media/emotional-porn cesspit in the next decade and they vote and carry guns.
I always wanted to be a teacher. I have a passion for teaching people new ways of looking at the world. I manage a team and used to open every Monday call with a chat about science news until the higher-ups started cracking down on “unproductive time.”
Then I got to know a few teachers, and the way they have to work one or two other jobs on the side so they can afford to bring their kids art supplies and science books and I just don’t have it in me. Massive respect to the men and women who stick with their teaching careers despite not being paid, respected or honored in any way by Western society.
I will not guide you how easy and fast it is to submit disputes, because you seem to think this is contentious and as such you will resist knowledge I share now out of spite, because you’re a human on the internet. But if you’re spending more (or less) than a few minutes a month going through the charges, you either don’t need to or don’t care or never learned. Look into it if you care.
Otherwise, I’m done trying to argue the basic point that “it’s not a big deal to leave the AC reset in a chain hotel” like i’m advocating for Unibomber-level anti establishment actions, you do you.
How much time does it take you to dispute a collection note on your credit report?
In most cases seconds. This all works online. There are forms. You should get to know your credit history and how to manage it, it makes a huge difference in your financial life.
I don’t think anyone thought it was that funny or interesting of a comment, it reads the same kind of petty AI-bro comment that people make who are absolutely hooked on blindly defending AI in all capacities.
Usually these employee screening systems are implemented by completely out-of-touch CEO’s and upper management who want to seem like they’re still taking “bold action” and such during their endless meetings.
I was supposed to use a really convoluted and stupid personality profile screening system to determine who would be best fits to hire for my team. I ignored it entirely, just had a lot of interviews and got to know the people. After making my decisions, I got called in for choosing candidates that “didn’t fit the personality profile for the position” and I said I would take full responsibility if something went wrong.
The people I hired lasted there longer than me, a couple got promoted.
Whoever is trying to collect on it, unless they have a posted sign to not tamper with the AC controls, with a description of the fines/fees, AND they have a way of proving I was the one who did it, I wouldn’t hesitate to dispute a charge like that. Because I’ve done it a dozen times on small BS charges from companies large and small and 90% of the time the collection or credit hit were successfully dismissed.
Pro-tip on both staying in a hotel or renting an apartment: take a video tour real fast on your way in and out. It’s one thing to dispute something harmless you did do, it’s quite another disputing actual damages that someone else did. If nothing else you get a little vacation clip to remember your stay.
When I write two paragraphs to reply to someone making a stupid, hateful argument and then they reply “I ain’t reading all that” and get a bunch of upvotes for it, I really think about every super-villain story where the bad-guy was trying to destroy the entire world and I feel a sharp pang of understanding.
And the few humans there will go “I ain’t reading all that”
I lost 7 reddit accounts, some over 12 years old, because I quoted someone saying a gendered slur on a serious discussion sub, so that he couldn’t edit his comment. Then i reported it. They banned me for “using a slur” and I appealed and the mods of that community laughed at me and acted like the sewage that they were and then when I appealed to admins I got perma’d.
New accounts made, those got insta-banned. Used VPN and new email, purged all cookies. Insta shadowban. Repeated the process, no VPN, reset IP, cleared everything, got shadowbanned within a day.
Meanwhile there are AI and bots just pouring low-effort content and comments across the entire website. “People” scream racial and sexist rants without facing any consequence. Entire communities of hate and sexism running rampant and gaining members.
It’s enough to make a reasonable person feel unreasonably conspiratorial and suspicious.
I’ve lived through the times when online discussion was considered “just weird internet stuff, not to be taken seriously” and then people grew up and everyone used the internet and it was the frontier of communication and was “shaping all facets of society” and now we’re back at “just weird internet stuff, not to be taken seriously.”
seven levels
HOW DEEP IS A LEVEL THOUGH???
I am so fucking old.
I think if a hotel billed me for resetting their AC I would throw the bill away and see if they really want to waste their time with collections and court.
I use AI to script code.
For my minecraft server.
I rely on expert humans to do tech work for my team and their tools.
I am not anti-AI per-say, I just know what works best and what leads to best results.
If you had a hard time understanding the point being made in that post, you could probably be replaced by AI and we wouldn’t notice the difference.
I’ve been using a cartoonish profile picture for my work emails, teams portrait and other communications for many years. There is almost no way to tell that kind of icon apart from AI generated icons at that size anyway.
And even if it was, that’s not the point of the conversation. Fixating on that is such bad faith it betrays a defensiveness about AI generated content, so it’s particularly important that someone like you get this message, let me reiterate clearly:
I have a role of responsibility, I hire people and use company budget to make decisions on other companies and products we’ll be paying for. When making these decisions I don’t look at the email signatures of people or the icons they use. I look at their presentation materials and if that shit is AI generated I know immediately it’s just a couple people pretending to be an agency or company, or some company that doesn’t quality-control their slides and presentation decks. It shows laziness. I would rather go with a company that has data and specs rather than lean on graphics anyway. So if those graphics are also lazy AF that’s a hard pass. Not my first rodeo, I’ve learned to listen to experience.
While I hate the statues and flags and everything they stand for, how well did that fight help us? Where are we now?
The nation is falling because people can’t figure out where to focus efforts because you all get distracted by emotional appeals and straw tigers and little fiddly bullshit while in the background corporations empowered an army of ravaging orcs who are now in control of the mightiest nation on Earth, laughing at our failed efforts to mobilize towards policy, community and representation, the things that would have prevented this.
I mean, it doesn’t matter now. The whole thing is a footnote in America’s slide into fascism and eventual fall of democracy. But sure, at least we successfully fought a few symbols.
Any amount of time I spend arguing with hysterical leftists about this point just fuels the machine, so I’m not replying nor will I see replies.
This is all so stupid and tragic and you all need to actually do something instead of attacking some rando on Lemmy who thinks we’re not fighting the right fights. I mean, it’s pretty evident we’re not fighting the right fights BECAUSE WE FUCKING LOST EVERYTHING AND ARE STILL BICKERING ON SAFESPACE BUBBLES LIKE THIS.
Nah see, this is still dodging accountability.
It’s not about if the STORES care about the community, it’s YOU. You decide if you want to pay more so the community prospers. It’s ridiculous to expect smaller stores to be able to compete with large corporations, but it’s also ridiculous to expect “someone will take care of it.” Nah bro. It’s on YOU to decide if you’re investing in your town, your county or your state or if you prefer low prices but also rotting wages and none of the things you want around you.
“I’m just doing what everyone is doing to survive.”
Yah and you’re all here in “survival mode” because you picked the faster, cheaper option. It’s not too late to turn it around. Maybe you will spend $5 bucks on a new toilet gasket instead of $4.50. Maybe you have to spend $1.90 on each cucumber instead of $1.25. Yes it adds up, but that money is staying in your immediate area. Your local walmart doesn’t cut checks from your local credit union, that comes from a corporate account that never touches your area. Repeat this all over the country, every day, every month, every year, and you have massive amounts of YOUR money being shipped out of town and out of country.