That replacement infrastructure being installed in your area was PE stamped decades ago. It is quite possible he/she who did it has died at this point. All the mistakes they made are still in there and getting replicated with each upgrade. If anyone tries to fix anything it will be an uphill battle. Parts are specified that don’t exist so without eBay nothing would get shipped.
The person managing the project is in sales and their degree is probably in English Lit. Sometimes you get lucky and it is a construction worker. Their boss is the mayor’s nephew and has the contract because of a rule that stuff used in local area must go through a local company. An example: a replacement part that we sold last month was for 2,200 dollars. The local company charged 11,500 for doing nothing except repackaging the part. A big fuck you to the Arizona tax payer.
All your infrastructure is using way more electricity than it needs. We can’t get anyone to shift over to more efficient systems because that would involve effort on their part. We also can’t get them to upgrade the service, instead we just have to find by trial-and-error what parts can deal with under voltage. Code has to be designed to deal with the frequent brownouts because no one wants to pay for a generator. Speaking of code the number of times I am asked to give people a printout of code is much higher than you would expect.
Global warming is ripping us a new one. Everything is flooding that shouldn’t be flooding plus heat is everywhere. Waterproofing and heat upgrades are taking time because the original specs have to be updated. Which can’t happen because they don’t want to get the PE in to stamp it. Because that would make the project cost more eating into sales.
In short everything keeping you alive. Your water, garbage/recycling systems, sewage, trains, traffic signals, and roads was designed by better minds who are now dead. Everything now is a mixture of nepotism and short term self-interest trying to blindly copy what didn’t even work that well to begin with under new conditions. If you want a job for life go work in infrastructure, if you want to be happy with your life go work in anything else.
Oh you might be wondering how is it we all haven’t died from choleria and rabies infected garbage rats by now. The answer is simple. The very lowest paid people, the operators and maintenance crews, are actually good at what they do. Perfect? Hell no, however they get the job done. Which you wouldn’t know given how hard the government is working to cut their pensions and not increase their salaries but there it is.
It would be immensely useful to mention what country you’re talking about, because while this issue may exist in every nation, it also may not.
If nothing else, it would be nice to know what region your insider info comes from :-) Spain?
He’s mentioning Arizona, so I guess he’s from the US.
The US, but it’s all subcontracted. Think this summer alone I have worked on orders to Vietnam, Australia, Canada, UK, Kuwait, Iraq, and the US.
Spain I have sent only two systems to but your neighbor to the west is going to upgrade a recycling operation next month. Which is probably going to be us. Shrug. I am really not the one you should be worried about, I am the subcontractor. If my stuff doesn’t work it becomes my problem. It is the middleman and the people in your local government who are messing everything up.
I have little confidence in that upcoming order next month. Already seeing stuff that is bothering me in the RFQ specs. Glad my tax dollars aren’t paying for it. On the bright side the people of Portugal are going to be given a lot of money to a certain German based multinational.
I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
Not so fun story:
One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.
As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.
After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.
After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.
On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.
I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.
I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.
I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.
I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.
You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.
You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.
The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.
What do you mean by “public funeral”? What’s the alternative? It sounds like you’d consider an event with only friends and family where there was a coffin in a room to be a “public funeral”. That seems to be what most people have, but it isn’t very public. Is a non-public funeral one where the family makes the coffin themselves and there’s no event where people see the dead person and the coffin?
The minimal services are essentially transportation, government documentation, and disposition (cremation, burial, entombment, etc). Some funeral homes won’t charge for a private viewing by immediate family, some charge a small fee. Typically there’s a cap on number of people and amount of time, something like 10 people total for 30 minutes.
Anything more than that will require you pay thousands of dollars extra. Hours of receiving guests, a published obituary, a mass or ceremony, musicians, clergy/celebrants, reception. All of those are pushed as “traditional” or expected but they’re incredibly expensive.
How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it “put ads here, here and here”.
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes “I know this guy, they’re an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I’ll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face”. Someone else yells “I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn’t bought one yet.”
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That’s extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
And how you’re tracked online. I’ve worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don’t see you,the user, and your data.
I just click “female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone” and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they’re super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that’s advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won’t even get into the audience side of things and they’ll stick to keywords: they’ll show you an ad because you searched for “autumn home decor” and that’s all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don’t have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don’t understand it, and it’s true, they don’t have time… so then Google takes your “autumn wreath” keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for “Christmas trees”, because they’re both seasons and they’re both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn’t interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn’t fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren’t there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It’s fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it’s bad for everyone except Google.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
::hugs my PiHole::
I’d be interested in the amount of electricity that gets wasted on this
My guess is that it’s a couple watts while you’re actively using the internet, mostly due to the extra CPU load a few bad ads cause when they’re on your screen. Without having done the math I expect all the servers, data transfer etc. to be negligible, on a per-user basis, because they serve so many users.
That’s another interesting thing btw. Most of the “internet thing X uses Y amount of electricity” are utter bullshit and massively exaggerating. What uses most power on desktop/TV is the screen. The second biggest consumer is likely your router (which is on whether you use it or not, but the studies usually ascribe all of the standby usage to your active usage - this makes sense if you try to look at “how much CO2 does all our digital stuff including ‘having an Internet connection’ cause” but not if you’re trying to look at “how much extra CO2 does activity X cause, assuming I already have an internet connection because I’m not gonna live in a cave”).
Don’t the fans use a lot of power? And wouldn’t a datacentre or server need a lot of cooling?
The server uses a kilowatt of power or more (most of it in the CPU). But if the server is serving 1000 active users concurrently, and only 5% of the time you spend online is spent fetching ads, 20000 people staring at their screens get their ads from let’s say 2 kW of server power usage, plus another 2 kW for all the equipment to get the data there… for a total of 0.4 watts per user.
These are completely eyeballed numbers, and could easily be off by an order of magnitude.
But your on premise gear (screen, computer, router) are likely by far the biggest factor.
One easy way to cross-check power usage claims is cost. It will only catch the most egregious bullshit, but it’s easy. A random page I found claims that “According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy it takes 5.12 kWh of electricity per gigabyte of transferred data.”
A Steam game with 50 GB would thus consume 256 kWh. Even if your 300 watt idle gaming rig, 50 Watt Router and 150 watt screen to watch the progress bar spends 2 hours downloading that, that’s 1 kWh. Even at 8 cents per kWh, that means just downloading the game would cost someone (not you) over $20. Do you think steam would let you delete and redownload that game that you bought on sale for $10 as much as you want if between them and your ISP someone had to pay for $20 just in electricity, each time? Not the game rights, not the servers, not the connection, just power.
Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
Sounds like it’d be pretty simple to just replace it and not tell them. If they tell you they know it should’ve broken down by now, just ask, “Why, did you intentionally sell me something defective?”
Psst, that’s another secret
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
That last paragraph sounds like something that is braking entire sets of laws and a big lawsuit waiting to happen
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
That non-trivial software development is really freaking hard, and incredibly expensive . And the majority of developers barely have any idea what they’re actually doing.
I remember my first job where I saw someone using actual math like trig and calculus to perform flight calculations and I freaked out not remembering any of that from school. I later found out that person was like part of the “A team” group of developers who would be handed task like that and fortunately I was assessed at a lower level
And that a lot of the work is googling answers and using other people’s code (either directly copying, or through a library/package)
Haha it’s so true, as a junior dev, I started in a company making Mobil apps for people. And a senior dev said its basically a glorified excel database with a nice UI. Even though its simple read/write. It just takes a shit ton of time to develop everything the customer wants
Your PC runs firmware written by some companies with really sloppy engineering and security practices. Whenever possible opt for a computer that runs open source firmware (coreboot).
We’re guessing. Everyone claims it’s all based on research and advanced modelling, but we really have no idea and and are bullshitting our way through presentations and press conferences.
We say whatever we can to keep our shareholders invested and the public buying. I’ll let you guess the industry, but you probably know.
In my captial city, the lead city designer’s wife owns an industrial design company. All of the bollards, lights, bins, seats… everything is given to the wife’s company for manufacturing because the lead city designer only ever puts orders in to that company.
Everyone in the industry knows but doesn’t want to do anything because he’s a nice guy.
New home construction materials are the lowest possible quality that will meet specs. The allure of a new coat of paint and modern design masks the cheap quality and low durability. Some doors are basically slightly stronger cardboard. My theory as to why American homes have gotten so huge is that for the same budget you can get a much larger volume of materials than in the past.
There was not a single Intel / X86-64 “unibody” Macbook in the entire history of Apple that didn’t have a heat stress issue 😂. First unibody was released in 2009, the first w/ “M” chip fixing the problem in 2020 🤦♂️
I work on photocopiers. Some people will lie to dispatch to get me out faster.
I can always tell you’re lying 100% of the time. The copier tells me what happened, and I can remote into the copier before I even show up (which is helpful because I can bring parts I might need). But I’ll never say anything. I just want the customer to be happy.
Edit: I’m talking about office and light production copiers.
Don’t I know it. Part of my job involves out main guys checking out buildings to assess potential danger if there’s damage or whatever.
If a member of the public calls something in that isn’t something relating to new construction work, it’s always perfectly fine, they just don’t like their neighbours or, usually, are racists who don’t like that non-white folk are building.
Can’t explain it but they’re always lying and it’s so clear. It’s come to the point I genuinely ask “is it actually dangerous or are you complaining about the work?” They always come out with something about the safety of children and double down.
Not sure how secret it is, but in many states your credit score can be used as a rating factor in determining your auto insurance premium. Insurance companies charge you more if you have bad credit.
That sounds very illegal
We used to call it your “insurance score” when I worked insurance about 10 years ago.
Damn, fascinating and evil haha. Do you know if one of those states is the United Kingdom? I might spread the word amongst my friends and family.
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Sorry, I meant states in the US because that’s where I’m at. Based on a quick Google search it seems that in the UK this is also the case.
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
Shout out to Banjo Kazooie, an older platformer from the Nintendo 64 game era, where the antagonist always speaks in silly rhymes. So the translators needed to translate and also make it rhyme while also keeping the context and humor intact. They took creative freedom of course because there simply isn’t a good match but it actually enhances the game in a way. So if you played the game in French before and now switch to English you’ll get a fresh set of jokes and rhymes.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.
Proper translation is really, really hard, especially for something like Anime.
Not only do you have to get across the same message in a language that works completely differently, you have to time what’s being said so it matches the timing from the original language. And then there’s the fact that there are many cultural differences. If you just translate the words, sometimes the meaning doesn’t make sense to the new audience because what’s happening relies on a cultural understanding that’s different.
Too much “creative liberty” is a problem, but it’s just as bad to get rid of it entirely. That’s why it’s so refreshing when someone makes the effort to do it right. Doing it right is really hard and takes a long time. It’s often a labor of love because doing it acceptably well is much faster and normally pays the same.
Absolutely. The problem arises when the source material then gets translated from English, which already suffers from losing nuances.
It’s also often debatable if something counts as liberty or is really a lazy shortcut, when it’s clear that something could have been done in better ways.
Every motel room has had someone die in it at some point in its history. I always chuckle a little when a new maid tells me they’ve heard that room 24 is haunted. I didn’t tell her that there have been 3 different deaths in 3 different rooms just in the year and a half I’ve worked there. Sometimes i want to say, “All the rooms are haunted” and stare at them blankly, just long enough to make it uncomfortable. Then just walk away.
If you order a package that passes through the hands of the USPS it gets literally thrown. If you live in an urban area the logistics are not even set up that could sort packages without throwing them. On the upside throwing microwaves is good exercise.
