The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I’ve got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.
If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.
I really don’t even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service
Rookies. The real wealth gets to eat sushi off a porn star’s front!
Mutual disdain was the catalyst. I did it for eight years and probably lost fifteen years of life expectancy from it. Ungodly toxic environment. Fuck big firm accounting. Fuck them all in the most demeaning, painful way imaginable.
I make roughly one third the money today, and I’m much happier for it. I still make a comfortable living where I don’t particularly worry about money, so what would the additional two thirds do for me outside paying medical bills it causes?
No matter how much I try to remove my name from searches, I still get recruited by ambitious young people on a regular basis. I generally make them stop with a response that goes something like this:
I would rather have my eyes gouged out by the white hot barbed penis of Satan himself while he spits in my mouth than return to public accounting for any amount of money.
As a tax accountant, I sincerely hope this gets to a point where a vast majority of the population has no need for my services.
I used to play in the big leagues where none of my clients would ever qualify for this and their returns routinely took upwards of a hundred hours to complete. Those guys need to keep paying.
Now I play down in the minors a couple steps above the Block, and I hate seeing the owner sell these three or four hundred dollar returns that might take me an hour to complete in the first year and maybe thirty minutes in subsequent years.
Funny you mentioned that. I was out with my daughter a couple days ago and she got a flat that had to be replaced. She was legitimately worried that Toyota would void her warranty for not buying a tire from the dealership. Nevermind that we were out in rural nothingness with no Toyota dealership to be found.
I love the hit counter. Super nostalgic right there.
The last time I logged on to Facebook was this past fall because there was a death in our fairly tight knit group of high school classmates. It had been three or four years since I’d been in there.
So I went on and said my words.
While I was there, I didn’t really notice what was in my feed.
What I noticed was suddenly I was getting notification after notification that my posts from years and years ago were getting deleted because they didn’t fit whatever the current terms and conditions of use were.
This amused me.
So I left my words of dead classmate up for a week then sent my account silent again.
I can’t see Facebook or any social media being a place I ever hang out again, which is a little bit of a bummer because without any social media, IRL social activities all but come to an immediate and total halt.
Oh well. I’ll live.
Does this mean I still can’t watch porn in Texas?
Planely obvious
I am so much NOT a dev, that it took me a minute to even register what you were trying to say. I thought of a college classmate whose name is Dev.
I too have had my time in hard physical labor.
But you do you. Enjoy your Internet sanctimony.
There’s also the little detail that I’m not a dev. But let the guy have his moment I guess.
Friend of mine had a heart attack in his early thirties working for AT&T in the nineties. I ended up in the ER with acute chest pains working for UBS.
These days, I’m generally able to weather the daily shit storms, but I’m mostly dead inside just waiting for the sweet, sweet relief of the real mortal deal.
I kinda wonder what the machine is going to have at its disposal to extract more out of me after I’ve left this mortal coil. Reanimated labor I suppose.
I got a pretty decent raise a couple weeks ago. As I usually do, I expressed my appreciation, but added the commentary that when a hundred percent of my time away from work is spent bedridden from exhaustion, what’s the difference between an $X thousand dollar raise and an $X million dollar raise.
Yes, yes. I’m sure I’ve got several things in my home that are terrible. I’ve cut off streaming and Amazon, have never owned a gaming console or gaming PC, quit reddit, quit Facebook, never had Twitter, Instagram, Tok Tok, used wish, etc. I do not use cash transfer apps. Neither my appliances nor my HVAC connect to the Internet.
But I can’t become a complete Luddite overnight. It’s a series of steps. So until this Roku that I bought about six or seven years ago craps the bed, I will continue using it, mostly with antenna broadcast local stations, but also with some of the free streaming sites like Tubi.
If you would like to come audit the entirety of my existence and personally fund immediate replacement of everything I have that is evil or offensive, I invite your benevolence.
Otherwise, let a guy use an illustrative example while engaging in casual Internet conversation in peace.
My Roku is doing this and has been doing this for quite some time.
Of all the ad delivery schemes cooked up over the past ten years, this one is the least offensive to me.
Like I’ll come back from the bathroom or whatever, and all that registers before I hit play is that some random graphic is covering the screen while on pause. I cannot name a single thing that’s been in any of those ads.
In general, I do wonder how effective this constant onslaught of marketing is. At some point there have got to be diminishing returns, right?
Expensive and impractical today, yes. But we would say the same of every man, woman, and child having a supercomputer with the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket fifty years ago.
War and policing. You’re dug into a foxhole/bunker with your bolt action rifle, and a few thousand of these things come marching along. Or you’re protesting the party in power, so a few hundred of these automated law enforcement officers get sprung loose to “keep the peace”
How the fuck can an economy that’s almost nothing but advertisements sustain itself for any period of time? It feels like forcing more and more ads is the only thing anybody does for money anymore.
Channel change and volume control are all physical buttons on my steering wheel. All feel, no look. To me, that’s the best way it can be. The only time that isn’t useful is if I’m out of town and presets don’t work. For those situations, I’m generally streaming ahead of time.
Ken paxton? Lulz, he’d probably come after me for saying anything.
It’s just a thought exercise. There are several reputable YouTube videos on this topic. None of them claim that the speed of light isn’t the speed of light. They’re just demonstrating that we can’t prove it with current technology. Similar to the difficulty it took to finally prove that one plus one equals two. We know that’s correct, but it took years to prove it.