this actually happened rule

Hi what do you do for work?

Well, I work for a healthcare company that creates electric wheelchairs and apps to use them.

Wow that is amazing, that sounds so rewarding! What specifically do you do?

Thanks! I designed the pricing structure so that each aspect of the wheelchair experience is gated behind carefully designed paywalls that are significant enough to help me my boss get a good bonus at the end of the year but not significant enough that all those poor people out there can’t afford it if they have too. Ideally the cost is always a bit more than people can afford to pay since usually people have more you can squeeze out of their social connections if the need is desperate enough (we are optimizing right now for pricing structures that most encourage customers to make gofundme’s to engage with our products which is cool to be part of a new project).

………….

This is America 🇺🇸
- *Netherlands
- Don't catch you slippin' now
- You aren't properly using metric but somehow euros you do adopt. Smdh
Honestly the only response to something this callous is "Wow, hey do you wanna check out this really cool blender?" and then shove your Defense Blender into their face.
I genuinely don't understand how people that work for companies like that can sleep at night. Like no matter how much evidence I see that the vast majority of people don't put any effort or conscious thought into being a "good" person and only think about themselves and maybe their close family, I just can't accept it.
- A spouse, housing, and 2.5 kids is quite a lot of motivation for people to work in the coal mines knowing they'll be at high risk of lung cancer.
  
  Now switch the damage to groups unseen instead of yourself. Yep... People just trying to survive.
  
  It fucking sucks.
- I guess it’s up to us to make it a bit harder for them to sleep at night.
- All the stuff like that is done by folks on the Bastard Committee. While the programming and stuff is done in pieces small enough to not get recognized, and then later assembled by the Bastard Programmer.
God this sent me haha.

Fuck the 1%

My wife and I went all out for our first born and as a baby monitor we got a MIKU. It is able to track the baby's breathing without any accessories and one of the key reasons I chose MIKU was that even though it was expensive it did not have a subscription model. BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE SUBSCRIPTIONS. Fast forward to Summer of 2023 and MIKU went bankrupt. The company that bought them tried to salvage it by including a $10/month subscription for everything except for the main camera function (which they cannot legally remove). And the way they tried to enforce it is by pushing an app update that blocks said features. I just went on APK Mirror and downloaded the previous version and turned off auto updates. And everything works perfectly. Thank you android and thank you APK Mirror.

I wish android natively has a roll back option to un-update apps... But that would be too user-friendly, I suppose.
- No, that would use up too much storage lol. Also, 99% of people don't update their apps manually, instead, they just let the Google Playstore handle it whenever it feels like it
- Android doesn't allow you to install an older version of an app over a new version. F-Droid has the UI for it but it doesn't work, the security policy prevents the install.
  
  There's probably a good reasons for that, but I can't think of it other than the flawed reasoning of "it can't be a good idea to roll back an update". I'm sure even Google can imagine a situation where, say, an app update got infected with malware or something like that and it's in everyone's best interest to roll back to the previous version until a clean update arrives. Preventing rollback means the only way to do that is for the user to manually uninstall the app and reinstall the desired version.
  
  Okay, I can think of a possible reason for that policy: it prevents malware from downgrading a target app to a former (official, signed) version which can be exploited. I don't know how realistic this scenario is, though.

300 euros, not dollars. This also means the America jokes aren't quite right in this case. 300 euros is about $326

oops my bad! thank you

I once interviewed at a (very) big usenet provider. The job was perl, I knew perl, must be fun.

No.

The job was to implement the byzantine B.S. "discounts" and plan-pricing "deals" that the sales team came up with to most effectively screw the customer.

I declined.

Which is especially hilarious, because Usenet is such a niche thing that the only people using it pretty much already know what they want from the service and know how much it should cost.

“Hey, we’ve made this super niche, not at all necessary, and easily avoidable service. Let’s do everything we can to be hostile towards our customers!”

We are disgusting.

CAPITALISM BABY!

Edit: European capitalism bad too but I can't find a funny GIF of the EU flag so this one is staying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yet the price is in euros...

Point being, the US is fucked but we don't have the monopoly on it.
I swear none of the American technobros went "paywalling a wheelchair with Bluetooth bullshit and doing screwy insurance shenanigans? damn, that's a little bit too fucked up, even for us". Instead, they went "that's ingenious, why didn't we think of it first?"