Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I absolutely despise how manipulative and shitty behaviors are just normalized because "of course businesses lie and mislead you". Like absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel bullshit just gets a shrug. Car dealerships in particular. I spent 10 minutes trying to decipher how something was trying to trick me into thinking I'd won a nice prize, because I knew there had to be a trick, and sure enough I eventually noticed "Order of matching symbols does not match order of winning prizes" buried at the bottom, not making sense at first. Then I realized. Four examples of prize combinations on the left, four tiers of prizes on the right. Aligned with each other. A tiny vertical rule divides the two, almost looking stylistic. But I suspect they mean any combination wins any prize, which means you're actually just going to get the garbage Temu trash speaker and added to marketing lists. Here's an 8 year old Reddit thread about an extremely similar version, I assume it's a "common" trick I just forgot about: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/667beb/i_received_a_scratchoff_mailer_from_a_car/ And it's "legal" to be this manipulative, and it's only going to get worse as what little consumer protections there are get destroyed. Fuck the grifters always getting a pass on things like this. Fuck the systems that encourage it. This is why we can't have nice things.

Did you know? In Soviet totalitarianism people were struggling to make ends meet. The State required of everyone to do these meaningless tasks all day long just to maintain the appearance of normalcy, everyone could see the writing on the wall but nobody felt safe deviating from Party lines. But people grew up hearing stories about brave agents of the NKVD cleverly rooting out terrorists, murderers and rapists; this was everywhere, all the fiction depicted the State order as the safe and desirable status quo and all disruption as murderous villainy, they were used to to think of their oppressors as heroes, as guardians who stood between them and the always-present threat of predatory monsters lurking among good people...

Hold on I think I mixed my papers for a sec, sorry that was about us here right now, not the Soviets

"In 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada for the use of Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which reduces the risk of HIV transmission. Recent research revealed that U.S. taxpayers contributed over $143 million to clinical testing and development of Truvada. But despite the role public institutions played in bringing the medication to market, the profits have gone to the pharmaceutical company Gilead, which owns and markets the drug.

By 2019, the pharma company had made $36 billion in profits from Truvada thanks in part to pricing that followed no logical line of reasoning. When it was first approved as a treatment for HIV in 2004, Gilead charged $7,800 per year for treatment. By 2019 the cost had ballooned to $20,000 per year. Similar drug combinations to Truvada were available in other countries for as little as $60 per year.

To combat bad PR, Gilead promised to donate 2.4 million vials of PrEP each year for eleven years to 200,000 uninsured individuals at risk of contracting HIV. While this is a nice gesture, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there were 1.1 million Americans “at substantial risk for HIV” who “should be offered PrEP.”"

https://newrepublic.com/article/188772/big-pharma-greed-hiv-drugs

#BigPharma #PublicHealth #HIV #AIDS

So it looks like NZXT is running a predatory rental scheme now, and Gamers Nexus has dropped them as a sponsor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pomC1CfpC0

Hey, Guardian.. that's a weird way to spell "Woolworths attempt strike busting by bringing in scabs" 🤔

#Union #UnionStrong #Workers #WorkersRights #woolworths #strike #Solidarity

Has anyone else tried using an alkali to strip old, sticky, horrible soft-touch paint? I just had a really positive experience I'd like to share!

Reminder first though: please for the love of all that is good, wear eye protection if you're using corrosive liquids - let's keep those lookingballs pristine.

If you think fedi instance drama is interesting, today someone snapped on IRC, replied in kind to the sorts of insults that they were receiving, and this caused the channel operator to kick every single user from the channel and keep it in silence for about half an hour.

what software do yall use to make 88*31 buttons?

Here is a fun piece of computing history I just became aware of: in 2007 the Bush administration changed when DST started, and because Exchange stored event times converted to UTC Microsoft had to release an "Exchange Calendar Update Tool" to help try and fix everyone's calendars https://web.archive.org/web/20070302224145/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930879

Hello World :)

I am pleased to present you a small project that I have been working on these last weeks:

MARL (Mastodon Archive Reader Lite) is a small web app that allows you to explore in detail the content of your Mastodon posts archive, including attached files (images, videos, sounds), and with different search options.

https://github.com/s427/MARL

🙏 Boosts welcome! 🙏

(More info in the post below 👇)

#Mastodon #archive

In the Netherlands it’s customary and allowed that individuals light their own fireworks. In the past you’d hear an occasional bang in the run up to New Year. Ever since corona somehow it has gotten customary to just light them whenever. It’s ridiculous and very #noisy for frightened animals at home and in nature. But with a right wing government that thrives on chaos in society I don’t think this stupid custom will go away any time soon #PastInktober 2/2016 #InkyLemonsAndPeaches #FountainPen

… have to route your traffic through a black box (which now gets deep insights into the users of your service, can block traffic according to their priorities or darker interests) then something breaks in me. This is not the internet of people. This feels more like mafia. „You don’t want your service to burn down in a fire of traffic, do you? We have an offer you cannot refuse!“ (2/3)