On Facebook, perpetually trying to engage me with groups it thinks I'd like.
Like "Owl Lovers".
Captioned "Great Photograph", which it would be, if there were some subspecies of 6 legged owl in the Sahara Desert.
Pretty sure there isn't.
But you see this more and more, "Dream Homes" - which don't exist, or "Archeological Mysteries" that aren't, and AI is proving a remarkable tool at generating photo-realistic documentation of non-events. And who has time to fact-check everything?
This is where we're heading, where the past, present, and future are all one big confabulation, impossible given the bots writing the content, the increasing gullibility of people that are too busy and distracted to care, the inability to process and sort the increasingly huge volumes of information, of which only a diminishing fraction is true...
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And this I noticed, on my trip to the city, the new tip function on the POS systems in Starbucks.
While for the longest time they wouldn't accept tips (you had to have cash for the tip jar), they now have a tip function. And, instead of prompting you with a percentage % or dollar $ amount, it actually suggests a minimal tip of $1.00.
This, for a coffee, boy oh boy they're making up for lost time.
Anyways, late stage capitalism, when the customer is expected to make up the shortfall in every employees wages, and - really - I'm all for tipping, I tip a dollar on coffee anyways, but to make it the minimal expectation, this is predatory...
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Of course, working in a thrift shop you realize pretty quick how we all bought into an even worse nightmare than originally was created by cheap disposable plastic bags.
By which I mean those "reusable" fabric bags, branded Wal-Mart or Save-On or Safeway or any of a thousand companies, yours for only a dollar, you really don't want to harm the earth any further by using one of those cheap disposable plastic bags, do you?
Only, working in a thrift shop you see how many of those purchased reusable bags come in, having seen perhaps half a dozen, at most a dozen uses, and you realize that they need to be used in the thousands of times to offset their bigger (and worse) environmental footprint, and - no, we've actually made things worse, far, far worse with reusable bags and - best of all - they're making us pay to do so!!!
So, I brazenly demand cheap plastic bags, I have no shame having forgotten my reusable bag, the plastic, it'll see it's next use as a garbage bag - food in, garbage out - and I'll be damned if I'm paying to further lay waste to the environment...
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At the restaurant this is what we use to process debit and credit transactions.
Sometimes it works.
Lately it hasn't been.
And the owner, calling technical support, 2, 3 times a day, an hour or more a call before they tell us the problem is "fixed".
It never is. The Technical agents helping us with the issue, clearly clueless, every call begins the same way, asking for Merchant ID, terminal ID, despite having provided all this information on file from not even an hour before. The owner refuses to get irate. I'm not bound by any such scruples and having tired of turning away what few customers we have with a "cash only" policy (because we can't process debit/credit) - I'm getting really pissed off.
These people, you have to work to give them money, you should feel grateful they've lowered themselves to collecting the $3,000 - $4,000 a month they collect in merchant fees, really, they're better than this, they're doing US a favor providing this "service", ... every successive CSR providing conflicting suggestions to the one previous...
I'm listening to it, not having a working debit/credit machine fucks up your day big time, and - when it works, briefly, only to have the whole boondoggle begin again a few transactions later...steam is jetting out my ears, there's a time to demand escalations and we're overdue, we're only half busy but if we were busy we'd be right fucked...
It reminds me of Shaw Cable, the same "commitment to customer service", and I'm lobbying for a cash machine in the restaurant, instead of paying for an unreliable "Chase Paymentech" we can be paid for providing a reliable service...
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