I’m lucky to have an Aldi within driving distance, but their cheapest stuff I used to buy has gone up over 150% since covid while other grocery stores around here went up 70-90% for similar food. Aldi is still cheaper, but not by as much.

Yes but you can’t help with that part. My goal with this post is to find lesser-known websites or chains that treat its customers like people.

Luckily there are some thrift stores around here, and one nice thing is they’re always small enough they have real people working instead of some AI robot. Although you never know for sure what they have so shopping takes longer. I’ll just need to plan for a day when I’m less busy.

I’ll be honest I heard of mercari but it just seemed like an eBay clone and I didn’t want to make another account just so it coulf leaked in a data breach, but I never bothered to look into them. Thanks for the recommendation, I think it’s finally time I check them out.

Yep I think so too. Once companies get so big they have more money than they know what to do with, so why not expand into tracking customers and selling their data for a few extra cents?

Target partners with Flock Safety and famously has one of the most sophisticated security systems to where they’ve partnered with the FBI to help them solve crimes. https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-forensics-lab/

Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world and they build profiles on users and track people across other websites, plus they own tons of smaller companies to help in this regard. They also own Blink and Ring which have partnered with Flock and ICE to identify and track people in the real world as well as report them to the police if they are believed to be here illegally or potentially involved in a major crime. I will add Ring cut its partnership with Flock and ICE because they ran a dumb Superbowl ad telling people about it, but they will do the same type of thing again, just more secretly next time. https://hrnews1.substack.com/p/ring-cameras-join-flock-and-amazon

Amazon is also starting to make delivery drivers record everything with smart glasses. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/amazons-delivery-drivers-are-getting-ai-glasses-and-thats-the-least-unsettling-ai-in-the-job

Amazon is also rolling out drone deliveries at the same time, which will be more cameras in the sky. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime-air-drone-delivery-expansion

Walmart partners with Flock, and therefore ICE as well, but I don’t know as much about them. I’m sure they also do some data tracking online like everyone else. I know I don’t want to give them money so I don’t bother looking up new stories on them. https://www.gadgetreview.com/fact-checking-the-whistleblower-what-walmarts-official-alpr-notice-actually-says

I assume they get paid for serving me ads, and is that the case even when I don’t click on any ads?

Thanks for reminding me about them! I remember shuffling through their catalogs a long time back.

Plus it would open the door for even more tracking.

That’s my plan: consume less, support physical stores, and use more cash.

I didn’t realize Ace hardware is a co-op, I’ll have to check out the one by me. Thanks!

Yeah, plus Amazon uses dark patterns to get you to sign up for prime, and then prime isn’t even fast shipping anymore…it bothers me enough I can stand to pay a little more somewhere else.

I didn’t think about using amazon to search for an item to buy on another site, that could work well! Like the other user said, Costco might be my best bet as far as chains go, and for any other physical stores I’ll just have to try harder to find local ones.

That would be neat! Text adventures are hard to find these days

Maybe the open source stuff would exist, after all there will always be nerds doing this stuff for the fun of the game, and some companies would be using the open source models to build customer chat bots or in-house troubleshooting agents. Things that help them move faster or more efficiently. I don’t think the audio, video, or code generating models would be far enough along to be useful at all.

OK that’s fair.

Do you have any examples of good decisions he made? From what I remember he bought Tesla well after it was making money and not much has changed except his decision to remove lidar sensors and he keeps promising new cars or features that don’t come out for 5+ years, I don’t know what decisions he made with spacex, the hyperloop was never a feasible idea, twitter seems to have gotten worse since he bought it, and I don’t knowb if the boring company is still around honestly. Plus there’s the stuff like his Doge coin rug pull, doing an actual Nazi salute because Trump was elected, and the allegations about him helping rig the election for Trump, stealing taxpayer money and data, aiding the antagonists in the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Epstein-related claims.

I won’t try to claim he’s done nothing positive, but I actually can’t think of anything.

I’m curious what lead to both of these posts

That’s true, it’s not as bad as I was originally thinking. However, there’s probably a reason traditional power plants never use jet engines for power production. According to this article, “But repurposed aircraft turbines tend to be less efficient and more polluting than engines designed for conventional gas-burning plants.”

AI can make decisions and micromanage. What’s stopping the higher ups from replacing lower management now?