It would in a properly free market. But late stage capitalism’s goal is monopolization, because it maximises profit. Or to quote Marx: “Monopoly is the inevitable end of competition, which engenders it by a continual negation of itself.”

And this is exactly what Steinbeck is describing here: “you buy food from us, at our prices, or nothing at all. We’d rather destroy our product than to sell lower.” And they can do this because no one has access to the products, or the means of production (e. g. the land to grow produce).

And this is where we are today with Amazon, Nestle, Walmart and so on. They don’t have any real competition anymore.

Dude, you have some tiny ass washing machines.

Mit achzisch Euro is der Prüjel aber auch jut bezahlt.

I would say that this is not just to blame on the Generation, but to large extents of how stuff is designed these days. It has been becoming harder and harder to control where stuff is stored, and to find it outside of the intended app, and this, IMHO is by design, to wrestle the control of your own device from your hands. Just look at how aggressively Microsoft is pushing one drive in its office suite, they want control over those documents so they can lock you into a subscription model.

That’s why I call my cat a guide cat. He guides me to lolll around on the couch for 22h a day

Vor allem in Pog Form!

Also something related I never came to grips with: cat’s breath = the stench of a thousand decaying corpses. Licks fur constantly. Fur = the smell of springtime itself.

My (unfortunately late) void had a scratching post with the top level just at my nose height, so whenever he lolled around there I made a point of taking a deep breath of fluffy freshness.

The Problem is, being unprepared worked out for them because they always had someone around who was prepared. It’s the same people who say afterwards: “You see, wasn’t that bad, all worked out fine”. Yes, it worked out fine because someone else was prepared and saved your ass. The worst of those people then also somehow turn it into their own achievement, which makes them think like that: “Why would someone carry around $thing$, I never do that and yet I still manage to save the day.”

Unfortunately, being such a person seems to be a requirement to get hired for middle management.

I guess every religion old enough has such kind of loopholes. I know from Roman Catholic that there can be made up so many exceptions that the 40 days of lent before Easter books down to a few days of actually fasting. No lent if you’re travelling (commute to work counts), no lent if you have guests, and of course no lent if you are a guest somewhere else. And Sunday is exempt from lent anyways.

The permit requirement does not apply to kitchen knives, does it? Been some time, but I travelled to Tokio quite frequently for work, and always made it a point to go to kappabashi and get a nice cooking knife, some of the longer than 20 cm.

You see, I don’t think people like him ever feel shitty. He feels as a victim, a martyr of sorts, people like this can and will twist anything in their heads so that it proves their grandeur, their importance.

This guy goes to sleep every night thinking how great he is, and how the world is just jealous and that’s why some stupid judge was out to get him.

My dad is a pathological narcissist and behaves exactly like that.

My bidet toilet came with a “demonstration tool”. A (transparent) plastic contraption that can be put on the toilet which 1) activates the bum-sensor and 2) blocks the water stream.

The toilet also has a “demonstration” mode, I did not dare to turn that on, though.

I got to learn to love those bidet toilets through my frequent (extended) work travels to Japan. Got one for myself at home when the bathroom was up for renovation. Now I am dreading any work trip to not-Japan because I’ll have to shit like a barbarian for that time.

You’re probably thinking of Tenet?

I’m pretty sure my Dad’s cat is really a glutton.

It’s not even pizza. It’s some weird tomato quiche, but definitely not pizza.

You can buy alcohol at Disney?! With everything being so prude about drinking in public in the US, this completely amazes me.

Because if I spend 50k on an ICE car, I get a really manly truck which makes me feel important and not like a wimp driving a car that makes me look poor!

I am so surprised that this stone age reasoning still works so well with cars.

“But I need the space! … once every two years…”

Same with fuel efficiency: “My big ass penis enlargement SUV gets the same mileage like my tiny sedan did 30 years ago, so it’s not worse for the environment!” - “But a car the size of your tiny sedan 30 years ago would now be twice as efficient?” - “Does not matter, I will use up the transportatin CO2 footprint that has been allotted to me, why should I give something up for the benefit of everyone , especially something important like a antiquated status symbol?”

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

Did they solve their quality problems in the newest iterations? I had a 2 and a 3, and boy were those pieces of crap. Not the 3 I had to replace so many modules over its life span of 5 years that it kind of defeat the purpose, as it probably was a total of electronics enough for three phones. And it had so many weird bugs which took months to fix (the mic stopping to work after using a certain app, the not working auto brightness, just to name the annoying ones).

I really, really like the idea behind the Fairphone, but I just could not see past the crappiness of the phone (especially at their price point).