AngryDeuce

I’d have to look at my bill(s) but long story short, every time I visit the doctor, I get billed by two seemingly separate entities for merely visiting them. Everything else they do is a separate line item on their respective bills. So if it’s not a copay, what is it? A visit fee? All I know is I either pay it or I get harassed incessantly so I pay it.

Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.

I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?

And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.

Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.

But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.

And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.

Cest la vie lol

God on the PC end of things youd get like a literal book with some games. Keyboard overlays for controls, posters, all sorts of fun shit.

My bills literally list them as separate line items, theres the clinic copay, then the doctor copay.

Occasionally I even get two separate bills, one from the hospital, one from the Dr. Guessing their practice is the source of the one and the hospital system is the other?

Either way its fuckin annoying to be paying out of pocket 30+ bucks only to be told the equivalent of “gee i dunno take Tylenol I guess”.

Oh, you see an actual doctor? I haven’t seen an actual doctor in the last like 3 years, always just a physicians assistant or other nurse.

Still get charged the dr copay though, funny how that works.

I wouldnt be surprised if the doctor is an AI construct and theyre just running my symptoms through whatever insurance company provided AI bullshit at this point.

Well I want Microsoft to take a big step back and fuck their own face

That’s for after youre onboarded, so they know what names to drop when theyre sending you scam texts and emails.

So whatever you do, make sure first thing you do when you get a new job is drop as much PII in there about your current employer so your IT department doesnt get too lax with thinking people are finally figuring out that the CEO that you’ve never even met in person would totally send you a text asking you to buy 1000 bucks worth of iTunes giftcards on your second day of employment.

And then the next one does it…and the next one, and the next one…

Then you discover the only way to buy a dumb TV is by buying through a commercial vendor and costs 10x as much and has none of the fancy features because theyre not meant to be used in home theaters but as digital displays in boardrooms or as fleet tvs for hotel rooms that have their own AV services.

I love the future!

As a former kleptomaniac, I cant wait to see all the self driving trucks getting helplessly forced to the side of the road and ripped off while the people monitoring the cameras in India or Thailand frantically try to get the US police force to give half a shit about their fucking self driving truck getting stole from.

People about to make bank if they ever try to pull that shit, and it aint gonna be the people owning those trucks lol

Well said.

I dont hate my job. I hate the fact that my job sucks because everything we do is first and foremost a monetary transaction that is being governed by the principle of minimum investment for maximum productivity, all so a handful of people at the pinnacle of the organization chart can make more money annually than their entire entry-level workforce combined. They could take a fraction of that money and hire enough people that it wouldn’t be a constant fuckin grind but they won’t because why own 4 houses when you could own 5, or 6?

The world’s billionaires, roughly 3500 people, hold $20 Trillion in combined assets. Split evenly among the world population, that would be enough to give every single person on the planet nearly $2500. Doesn’t sound like much until you consider that there are currently 8.3 billion people on the planet. Each one of those billionaires corresponds to roughly 2.4 million people. The population of Houston, TX per single billionaire.

The average lifetime earnings of someone in the US is 1.85 million dollars today. Someone with just 1 billion dollars has the equivalent of 540 lifetimes of earnings. Elon Musk is currently worth 823 billion dollars. 444,420 lifetimes worth of earnings. One person.

Its not the job that sucks. Its the fact that I have to be miserable doing it that sucks, and all so a small handful of people can amass more wealth than some entire countries GDP.

Really. And even better, now they can granularize Windows even further. Windows 11 Home or Pro? Naw fam, that’s not enough. You’ll have the baseline Windows 12 sub for $10 per month…seems reasonable, right? Except that’s the baseline. That’s the version that can only make use of, at maximum, 4 CPU cores. Want to use all the cores in your bomb ass new processor? You need to bump up to the $20 per month subscription which includes the CPU-MAX add on. Not a fan of the basic Windows wallpaper? Well, fret not! You just need to download the Personalization add-on for an additional $5 per month and now you can change your wallpaper. Hey, is that a new GPU you got there? Yeah, you’re going to need to spring for the Gamer bundle…$20 a month for that, on top of the base sub. Oh and don’t forget about your local storage…they can subscription lock that, too. “You don’t even need local storage anyway! Just use OneDrive!!! It’s only a few bucks extra per month!!”…deliberately priced far less than the local storage subscription so that they can scrape all your shit for marketable data which you’ll see in the fine print of the ToS they’re allowed to do with abandon.

Go to turn on HDR…“sorry, you need the graphics booster add on”. Try to output 5.1 audio? “Sorry, no can do, you get 2.0 only, peasant, you didn’t sign up for the media add-on.” Want to throw another stick of memory in your rig to extend it’s life? “Sorry, base Windows can only use 16GBs…you need the performance package to address anything more.”

And you know what the best part is? This shit would all likely be legal. Know how I know? Because Windows enterprise server and software licensing is already like this, and has been for years.

Shit is so fucked man…

More “Microsoft doing their part to get people used to the idea of having to login with an internet connection so that they can make Windows 12 subscription based.”

Thats what this bullshit is. Training the user base for OSaaS.

And they will have enterprise by the balls because they control like 90% of the enterprise market. The consumers, they could give a fuck if they take it or leave it. Windows licensing is such an teeny tiny part of the equation that screaming at them is going to get as much traction as screaming at Nvidia for the fact that a midrange GPU is 1000 bucks now. Nvidia doesnt care if their consumer gpu market disappears tomorrow, they’ve got the AI fucks locked in.

“Passerby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.”

shes got a boyfriend sorry

That’s the part of all this that truly blows my mind…nobody wants this shit. You dont even need to be a technophobic boomer to fucking hate dealing with AI when youre trying to get an answer to a question that isnt something you can find on wikipedia, like for example, “How much will this particular software license cost me if Im installing it on two host VMs serving approximately 200-250 concurrent users?” The AI isnt gonna answer that right…I know it wont, because Ive spent at least 2-3 full fucking 10 hour days in aggregate playing this stupid fucking game as phone lines are getting closed left and right and I always end up running in circles until it will even permit me to get an actual human fucking being involved, if that is even a possibility, which 70% of the time, it just dumps you to an email and a wait for a response email that also didnt answer the fucking question.

And the thing is…its getting harder and harder to opt out. I cant even vote with my wallet because its either deal with the AI trash, or deal with some fly by night company that no one has ever heard of and goes radio silent for weeks when they cant fix a problem in 3 minutes.

This is gonna make me sound old but I saw this coming 25 years ago with self checkouts. Look at what a piece of shit the average self checkout is. Just last weekend the lines at my local grocery store were out the fuckin door because all the self checkouts somehow decided the cart itself was an item in a cart that wasnt scanned and thought everyone was stealing. Rather than get humans on the checklanes and shutting the self checkouts off, the store just had an extra person at the self checkout to enter their code after literally every single transaction to bypass it. Im talking rows of 20 self checkouts that had two people that had to code through every single transaction. Human cashiers wouldnt have had that problem, but human cashiers cost money, so better your service as a customer suck fat ass then bring in a couple teenagers extra to cover some weekend shifts on a register.

I see this at the doctor now with their self checkin machines that take fifteen minutes to get through what you could do with the person in three. I see this when trying to ship a fucking package and the machine runs out of labels and theres no human being for miles around to put more in so you can get on with your life.

This shit fucking sucks, and they no longer have any incentive to improve, because theyre all doing it, so everybody sucks, and we just get to deal with it.

Remember this when you see the lack of savings being passed on in lieu of all the payroll theyre saving. Every minute you fight with AI to answer a simple fucking question, some oligarch is screaming CHACHING!!!

Grids were more efficient for pedestrians and unmotorized transport, but the caveat is that motorized transport, especially on large grids, will often be driving faster than is desired among the pedestrian traffic.

Which is why the ethos has changed off of grids to the windy, curvy roads that naturally encourage slower speeds…no straightaways to really build up speeds like you can with a grid.

Most town centers, which have likely existed before the car did in large numbers, are still laid out in a grid…but youll notice as you get farther out, when the neighborhoods started getting built in the post wwii era and the rise of the burbs, are not generally grids.

This is an easier way to eyeball how old a particular neighborhood is…with some caveats and exceptions of course.

A grid is still most efficient, but were trading efficiency for safety which is reasonable…weren’t too many idiots doing 60mph on 35mph city streets like we have today.

My problem is if im not bed by say, 930, I might as well just plan on getting 4 hours of sleep before work because im going to be up until 1 in the morning at the very least.

This “second wind” shit is for the birds. I dont want this wind. I want to sleep!

I thought this was a common thing lol

I’ve been ordering twice as many fries as I actually want because after 15 years of marriage I goddamn well know that despite her saying she doesn’t want any fries she’s going to eat half my fries lol

I skip the juice, but coffee plus a cigarette is pretty much laxative in my experience lol

Yeah here in WI too. Like on 55mph state highways in the literal middle of nowhere, as in the intersection is corn fields on every quadrant.

Its weird, but of course I stop. Im only ever stopping for the corn, but I aint trying to have some cop come flying out of the corn and tear my ass up either lol