Lu Zwei wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:43 pm I have now read most of that wiki page and I have to reject the premise. Tinder has gotten me laid plenty. Like a lot of plenty. This is a hoax!

I refuse to believe you’ve ever had sex.*





* just kidding fella, plow away.

brephophagist wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:38 pm

cakes wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:02 pm But worse would be car companies like Toyota selling cars with all the features, but some features are locked behind a subscription model, like a seat warmer.

Yep, that’s that raw. Rent-seeking on your expectations.

Almost all of the major US automakers do this now, but mostly for features that ride the line between convenience and expectation, like remote start. BMW does do the seat warmer thing though.

Honestly that’s just Rentierism. The worst form of capitalism. Extracting money for doing nothing. It will be the death of the system if it carries on.

My favorite shirt is a short-sleeve All Blacks rugby jersey that my parents bought for me in 1991 during a New Zealand/Australia trip. I've worn it to almost every show I've been to since then and whenever else I feel like putting it on, probably 600-700 times total. I wash it without any consideration to temperature or the color or texture of anything I put it in with. It has faded a little, but unless you were intimately familiar with All Blacks apparel, you would probably think it was just a few years old.

Them days are gone. Now, even buying a "like the players wear" Test cricket shirt (about the most expensive sporting apparel I know of), the quality just isn't the same. At all.

Gramsci wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 2:42 pm

Lu Zwei wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:43 pm I have now read most of that wiki page and I have to reject the premise. Tinder has gotten me laid plenty. Like a lot of plenty. This is a hoax!

I refuse to believe you’ve ever had sex.

me too. it's just a talking point to feel cool and grown up.

Frankie99 wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 12:20 pm

jfv wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 11:52 am The thing that comes to mind that hasn't been mentioned yet... automobile manufacturers releasing "features" into their cars before they are ready for prime time.

We bought a new Honda earlier this year (tariff-related purchase... bastages!) and it has a feature that is supposed to tell you on the dashboard what is the active speed limit. It does this by attempting to read the street signs. The feature blows ass so bad. It's wrong like 80% of the time. And I cannot turn off the piece of shit!

I'm not sure if this 100% classifies as enshittification, but it at least seems adjacent.

Huh - my 2019 base model insight does this with about 80%v accuracy, tho I agree with you overall. I've had cars with the modern features that were more hassle than they were worth. Hands free volume motion control for the stereo on a BMW was silly, obtrusive and worked poorly.

I do LOVE modern adaptive cruise. A godsend for those of us whose main driving nowadays is roadtrips.

Subaru has always had a sub for remote start. I've always turned it down. Remote start in my garage? Let me just walk into a closed space with a car running for 15 minutes.

My wife tells me I look like grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds but I know I'm right. Pretty much everything is worst now.

Vibracobra wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:20 am My wife tells me I look like grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds but I know I'm right. Pretty much everything is worst now.

I think in a lot of ways we’ve gained a colossal amount of choice since the 80s, but people’s actual spending power has collapsed. The neoliberal obsession with “freedom of choice” has resulted in consumerist slop. Zillions of options but have our lives improved in a meaningful way? I don’t really think so. I grew up through this. In New Zealand in the early eighties consumer choice didn’t really exist.

Anyway, I can’t be bothered writing an essay justifying that I’m not Old Man at Cloud. But I think we’ve lost more than we gained from the liberal economic reforms of the eighties.

Having worked in software for over 20 years, I can say I have been in many management meetings where the object is not to discover "what new ideas do we have to generate more money" (because line must go up), but instead: "how can we extract more from our existing customers without them revolting".

You guys must not have heard of cuss nerds.

brephophagist wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 10:16 am Having worked in software for over 20 years, I can say I have been in many management meetings where the object is not to discover "what new ideas do we have to generate more money" (because line must go up), but instead: "how can we extract more from our existing customers without them revolting".

This. I always called out shitheads in meetings for this. Luckily, never been fired for it.