Chocolate production is infested with slave labor, child labor and child slave labor.
i don’t think this is a secret anymore though
I used to think that at least the parts that are Fairtrade wouldn’t be affected as much.
So is banana production. And here I am with a bowl of banana-topped chocolate ice cream. Dammit.
Hehehe. That’s just plain mean.
So what are you gonna do to stop it? 🍫🍌
I alone cannot stop it if that’s what you mean. In fact, often the reverse course of action seems the best. But I try to think forwardly and would stand up for what’s right even when I’m alone in doing so.
Not trying to be offensive, but could you provide examples of your second point? 😉☝🏻
The part about me standing up for what’s right?
The cost of digital advertising cannot be justified by its effectiveness (or rather lack there of). We’ve collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating the infrastructure for invasive hyper targeted ads that do not get better results than simple billboards and terrestrial TV ads even now. We’ve created a global economy of marketing, media, advertising and sales solely reliant on technofeudalist overlords who’ve provided very little actual improvement of anything.
Do you have additional inside knowledge?
Most people in the field don’t even ask themselves this question. They all have an incentive in believing it works.
There’s a book about it though: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattentioncrisis
Yeah it’s a good book. It’s a cycle that this issue surfaces every couple of years where someone does a study, finds that the numbers they’re given don’t match their own analysis and the ad tech platform does some PR to paper over the story.
Most people selling ads are just like the real estate agents in The Big Short. The media people make their money via rebate from the platforms by guaranteeing a certain volume of spend so they have no incentive to be putting hard questions to the platforms and the client is reliant on seeing the data which is provided by the platform with no third parties able to provide any level of transparency.
Money goes into Google, Amazon and Meta’s black boxes which spit out numbers. The agency people copy and paste the figures into a presentation and everyone congratulates each other for a job well done.
Maybe if those invasive highly targeted ads were the least bit accurate I would buy some shit from them. Instead half the time I can’t find the product I want without wading through a sea of crap even when I give them a search with specific parameters.
(Buy Washing Machine)
“Hello, I see you bought a washing machine. Would you like to buy a few more?” - Internet Ads
Yep and in order for these companies to grow they must continue to increase the volume of ads being shown, which only makes them less effective, which they try and counter by making them ever more invasive.
And that’s where this article comes in.
Imagine if an alternate timeline is already being produced in the virtual world. The one we will all be strapped into until the death of our core energy cell.
Could you elaborate?
The world is littered with fake empty buildings used to obscure phone line junctions and internet provider stuff.
Almost every neighbourhood has one. But they look like normal houses, so you can never tell unless you know where to look for.
Underground railways use houses for ventilation as well.
Can’t believe Harriet Tubman got all that infrastructure up.
It’s too bad you didn’t get to post that on Juneteenth.
Can you share the address of a specific one? (Does it count as doxxing if nobody lives in it?)
https://youtu.be/VQz9JwtmLy4?si=WmRY1M6tiy-IOOlK
This video shows a bunch in Toronto.
Thanks for sharing! That was really cool. I’m going to be looking out for those from now on.
There’s a power utilities building disguised as a house just down the street from me. You’d never know it wasn’t just a house besides the industrial equipment behind it, the lack of a car in the driveway and the warnings plastered on the front door.
What do you look for?
I know of two buildings sort of like that, they both look like a bungalow office building with an empty parking lot and a card reader by the door, one building has plastered over windows, the other has normal but dirty windows
Here’s one on Google maps https://maps.app.goo.gl/55qqbQRYY7abKPVy9 I drove past this for years without thinking about it until one day I drove under it.
Now that I know what it is, it’s pretty obvious, but how often does the average person really inspect houses as they drive by?
Edit: maps links suck, 3911 Frances St, Burnaby, BC V5C 2P4
That one’s pretty obvious though. It’s got no windows nor doors, and like 8 condensor units out back.
I bet there are ones that are less obvious
There are other ones, this is just the obvious one. I’ve only spotted one other in the wild and I forget where it was.
Haha I love how it has four reviews/3.3 stars
Someone shared a video upthread.
Bruh…
Most of hacking is done by mass effort with maybe a couple percent of people that aren’t doing basic things to protect themselves being affected. That couple of percent is enough to keep the hackers flush. (So please, follow basic cybersecurity steps, people.)
The plain truth of the matter, though, is that if a hacker or group of hackers is targeting someone individually for reasons, that person is in real trouble.
This has been a PSA for everyone chasing fame and clout.
I miss the days of Anonymous (there was a sub group of the actual hackers whose name I can’t recall and a bunch of wannabes I guess providing them a crowd to lose themselves in) doing justice hacks. Not that they were always on the right side of things, but now everything is state actors trying to bring us all closer to Armageddon.
Alt2600?
Tips for being secure online:
- Use your browser’s password manager to generate random passwords.
- In the rare case you need to manually enter your password into a site or app be very suspicious and very careful.
- Never give personal information to someone who calls or emails you. If necessary look up the contact info of who called you yourself and call them back before divulging and details. Keep in mind that Caller ID and the From address of emails can be faked.
- Update software regularly. Security problems are regularly fixed.
That’s really all you need. You don’t even need 2FA, it is nice extra security but if you use random passwords and don’t enter your passwords into phishing sites it is largely unnecessary.
Im not so sure about your number 1. Fine if otherwise they won’t use one but personally I use bitwarden online for unimportant ones and a local keypass for important ones.
The reason I say browser password manager is two main reasons:
- It is absolutely critical that it checks the domain to prevent phishing.
- People already have a browser and are often logged into some sort of sync. It is a small step to use it.
So yes, if you want to use a different password manager go right ahead, as long as it checks the domain before filling the password.
What do you mean a password manager that checks the domain? Isn’t the auto fill based on the domain? I can’t imagine how a password manager could fill a password without checking the domain, it wouldn’t know which password to fill after all. Do any actually exist?
There are some password managers where you need to either manually look up passwords and copy+paste or autotype them or select the correct password from a dropdown. Some of these will come with an optional browser extension which mitigates this but some don’t really tract domain metadata in a concrete way to do this linking.
Some examples would be Pass which doesn’t have any standard metadata for domain/URL info (although some informal schemes are used by various tools including browser-integration extensions) and KeePass which has the metadata but doesn’t come with a browser extension by default.
I see, so you mean manually getting the password out of the manager instead of domain based autofill.
I was a bit confused on this to. Are their ones that constantly spam all your passwords at every opportunity???
Many game companies specifically target vulnerable people, who end up spending their entire pay check every month, and are called Whales.
I’m on a game, Whiteout Survival, you’ve probably never heard of it. I haven’t spent a penny, but I was curious about how much one obscure “upgrade” cost. Mind you, there are hundreds of purchases in the game.
It was $100 US, and it said 29,000 had been sold… in the last WEEK!
2.9 million dollars a week for NOTHING. And that’s just that one obscure item, far from their biggest seller.
And that’s just in one game you’ve never heard of.
You’re a non-monetizer, just like 95% of the players. The game will make you some form of offer in order to convert you into a paying minnow, dolphin or whale. Whales are rare, less than a percent of the players, but they generate a significant amount of the revenue.
Companies compare their conversion rate with each other and have specific goals to meet. 5% for example is good. If your company has say 3%, you’ll want to focus on improving that. Each product will have a specific goal here, and otherwise is shut down because there’s a customer acquisition cost. Games easily cost more to market than to develop.
A lot of effort is spent on the first offer. This is where you’ll see a screen that makes an amazing offer you’ll seriously consider. It’ll have something that is high value but incredibly cheap and so temporary. This isn’t to earn money, it’s simply to convert you. Because after you’ve spent your first dollar you’re likely to keep spending.
Yeah it’s been showing me that banner every time I start the game since the very beginning.
And I nope it every time.
Yeah not the best design
It’s highly likely they fudge those numbers or outright lie.
Reason for saying that?
BTW: not the company reporting those numbers. Google Play’s numbers.
Because every single thing about those games is a psychological ploy to get people to spend as much money as physically possible. They run studies on what tweaks get people to spend more or less and I guarantee the numbers they show in the store have been studied.
Also, who’s going to call them out on that? What court wouldn’t throw that out immediately? And even if you did win, the company wouldn’t even notice. You probably signed away the right to be part of a class action lawsuit in the Terms of Service anyway.
I knew multiple people who spent several ten thousands USD in State of Survival. A fucking mobile game.
A buddy of mine spent several thousand on Marvel Heroes. He wouldn’t go out to lunch with us, and finally I asked him what was going on. He eventually told me, we had a “dude…we are adults and can’t be doing that shit. Imagine the hookers and drugs you could have bought!”
He quit, but still tells me he thinks about it and is immediately filled with regret.
One time I nearly cut a job due to being asked to make something gambling related, but when I worked on an addictive mobile game I simply didn’t realize what I was doing. Honestly, I couldn’t have known unless I had asked about their monetization strategy before they brought new people on to implement it. And at that point the game was as good as done. I remember walking through Barcelona and seeing all these kids on their phones in the park and not playing or having fun, it felt surreal. I bawled my eyes out and didn’t return to the job. You know I genuinely just wanted to give people some fun in this world.
The issue with mobile games is that nobody is prepared to pay even 5 euros for a game. So for mobile game developers it is business as usual to do it this way.
It’s crazy to me how we went from buying a complete game for $50, and now we get an enshitified, half completed mobile game for free but people spend hundreds of dollars playing it.
And it’s nowhere near as good.
I was suckered into the shark cards on GTA Online, I worked terrible hours and it was my escape.
I bought shark cards for thousands of SEK ocer a year or so, not much in compared to normal whales, but I did feel the addiction drawing me in harder.
Then one day I had just had enough, and uninstalled the game, else I knew I would continue.
I am glad though, the money I spent was not wasted, it taught me a valuable lesson about what to look out for, and how to recognize sinkholes like this.
It’s good that you managed to wake up and take care of yourself. Players with that pattern are called dolphins.
Thank you, I do my best, I had no idea obout the dolphin name, fun!
There’s worse things to be called I suppose
They’ve just learnt it all from Vegas.
They hire behavior specialists.
They have ARPU targets (Average Revenue Per User) and UAC targets (User Acquisition Costs). Whales contribute significantly to the game’s bottom line. Non-paying customers are vital, because player population is a game quality, and Whales need a population to notice how awesome they are.
But game companies don’t tend to separate Whales from other players (at least not the ones I’ve worked for), they tend to care about ARPU, which is more stable, and a much easier target to shoot for. And they want to keep UAC down, which lowers the required ARPU for a successful game.
Here’s an industry talk about how to prey on whales
That’s a great link. There’s just so many people exactly like him.
The quality of education at college and university is in free fall.
I fear too many universities are businesses designed to fund seminars; and students graduating are whether an afterthought or an actual negative for them.
It was related to me that, because they want to keep their customers, one can solve any problem at uni - grades, minor victimless crimes, etc - simply by offering to take more courses. The only problem money can’t solve is the one where the student has no more money, and it’s over quickly after that (saw that one happen).
It is far worse than that.
Universities have a lot of metrics that they are judged against that don’t lead to a quality education. Research doesn’t lead to good undergraduate students. A good pass rate just means the curriculum is soft enough to keep don’t students from failing.
So you have university presidents who are incentivized to increase prestige and they aren’t going to focus on the quality of education because that doesn’t lead to better metrics. If presidents try to defend their universities’ way of teaching, they get replaced by those who follow the system.
Why I likes the ABET requirement for engineering. Still have an 80% fail rate due to the standards, and you get audited for coursework.
I have yet to meet an employer who will hire an engineer from a non-ABET school.
Worked in higher Ed for a decade. Can confirm.
US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.
Most problems are being solved by turning it off and on again.
What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.
. . .
Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.
(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)
Dude, I just had my mechanic call and tell me my car was out of oil. I’ve never felt so dumb and ashamed.
And if that doesn’t work unplug it for a while and plug it back in.
I have anxiety and depression. Gonna give your idea a try.
A good chunk of my work is scheduled turning off and on again in the right order so things don’t break
Building HVAC engineering (equipment sizing, ducting design, etc.) has been largely handwavy bullshit for a very long time and only recently has moved towards any sort of precision. Not uncommon to find boiler plants that are 3-4 times the maximum heating load in the winter, or fans running at 100% 24/7 when code only requires half of that.
Costs just get passed on to tenants so there was never much motivation to do better, the only reason building owners are moving now is because of government regulation and incentive programs.
I used to work in HVAC. I remember we had a small cold room that was struggling to maintain temperature, as in, design was supposed to be 0°F but it couldn’t get below 36°F. There was a large hole in the box that was undoubtedly the cause of the problem, so I asked the installer how they accounted for that. “Oh, I doubled the infiltration value.” When I tried calculating the actual losses it was way, way higher than the infiltration value. Like, the room needed someting like 3-4 times its total refrigeration capacity to reach target with a giant fucking hole in the box.
No idea who thought putting a giant hole in the box was a good idea.
I work in building science. It’s obscene how little actual design and quality control goes into residential homes.
The typical design is just one step above being illegal, and people are often scared off of doing anything more than that by the threat of increased cost. However, they don’t realize that they pay for it either way; either on their mortgage, or on utilities. Only one of those you can actually own in the end.
I loved that Technology Connections video.
Ugh. Yup.
I learned that after buying my house. My furnace is 3x what my house needs and is expected to be an expensive repair someday.
~Things people don’t want to know~
Putting a layer of tissue between your butt and the toilet seat doesnt provide enough of a barrier against microorganisms over the time it takes to shit or piss to prevent transmission.
Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.
The n95 (and other) rating(s) are over time in free, circulating, open air. Derate safe exposure time sharply for use inside or in spaces with stagnant or unmoving air.
Idiots. The toilet seat tissue layer doesn’t do anything, that’s why I lick the seat clean first. Saliva has antimicrobial properties, use your brain.
A whole bunch of welds in nuclear reactors are visually inspected using cameras duct taped onto the end of incredibly long poles which also get duct taped together. This would be the inside of BWR plants near the fuel and jet pumps. There is also an “art” to moving the cameras and poles around to get the shots you need. And if you get stuck the talented people know how to get you unstuck. There are also cameras just duct taped to ropes that the camera handler “swims” to certain spots.
Don’t get me wrong, we have cool ultrasonic inspecting robots as well, but I was absolutely blown away by what visual inspection looked like in practice.
PS: The high dose fields make the camera look like it is being blasted with colorful confetti because of the high energy particles bombarding the camera module.
Every high-tech workplace tapes shit together sometimes, and has systems and practices that are just kind of “good enough”.
Is it not an issue that duct tape can be pretty flammable?
Reactor is full of water so it’s not an issue
75% of American drinking water needs treatment to reduce particulate and parasites, and the treatment additive used to render the water safe is produced at a single chemical plant located in an area of severe flood risk – which means that a flood could take it offline for a day or two, or damage it for weeks.
(Efforts to build a second site recently fell through due to ever-changing regulations. Of course they’re stockpiling it in some mountain bunker, I’m sure)
The next Katrina could give us a brain-worms infestation via tap-water.
Are you saying the chemical plant provides the treatment or that one plant is somehow responsible for polluting 75% of American drinking water?
I think the former, based on my limited knowledge of the water treatment industry. There aren’t many manufacturers of low margin commodity chemicals, most people are in specialty chemicals with higher margins.
Nah, lemme reword that. Thanks!
I don’t know the details about alum production (assuming that is what you are referring to), but there are many alternative coagulants available now. Sure the supply logistics would be incredibly challenging and many people would have to boil their water or use point-of-use filters, but this take is pretty doomer in my opinion. Most plants use alum because it’s cheap and easy, not because it’s their only option.
I want to comment here so bad but given that I am one of two people that know and one of maybe a dozen that suspect, it would definitely violate multiple NDAs.
ProTip: Invest in off-grid solutions for your home.
There are more than 2 people that know that Texas’s power grid is a teetering disaster waiting for the right event to crumble and break in unfixable fashion
(Or water, water’s probably even more sketchy. Look up the incident in the UK where they accidentally put a shitload of treatment chemicals in the main water supply and a whole bunch of people got poisoned. Harder to do off grid solutions for though.)
There are more than 2 people that know that Texas’s power grid is a teetering disaster waiting for the right event to crumble and break in unfixable fashion
OP asked for a secret. The Texas grid sucking is not a secret.
Fair enough. I read your other comments and my current guess is abysmal cyber security coupled with clear indications that hostile state actors are trying to fuck it up, and showing no sign of having any more trouble than would an NFL team pushing past the volunteers who have signed up to work the door at the senior center social hour
In which case if that’s accurate I would say that yes that fits the brief
All the cybersecurity in the world won’t matter if a handful of
manipulated idiotspeople shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.
The Bucees logo tells me this is probably going to affect Texas more than other regions.
Ha! I used to live in Austin and I don’t fly, so Buc-ee’s and Cracker Barrel hold a special place in my heart. Unfortunately what I am talking about is a US thing, not just a Texas thing.
Just get tor browser, make a throwaway account, post your comment and delete the browser.
With the exception of at large buildings in dense city centers, just about everywhere else, utilities enter a building at just some point on the back, out in the open. This includes utilities that feed alarms and security cameras.
While some places will have systems in place for situations where these outside connections have been severed, like independently operated cameras on an intranet, cellular data backup for alarms, electrical generators, etc., most places don’t, so successfully circumventing their security is just a matter of cutting all the cables on the back of their building at the same time, and then being gone before they notice
I’m not an expert on modern alarm systems but it seems that it is very common and fairly inexpensive to have cellular data backup. Not every system has it, but many do. In that case cutting the main connection will likely result in someone appearing on site fairly quickly.
Many cameras also have some form of local buffering. So even if you are gone before someone does show up you still may find yourself recorded.
But at the end of the day just put a bag over your head and you can be gone by the time anyone shows up without leaving a meaningful trace. Other than the very top-end system security systems just keep the honest people honest.
The NYPD does not internally call itself a “police force”, its always “paramilitary organization” or similar.
[x] doubt
I actually worked there as an intern (unpaid of course).
“F*** the paramilitary organization” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Just make it an acronym, P.O.
Maybe double up to make it sound cute
popo
Nice try FBI