tocopherol

No, fuck the middle man, we don't need billion dollar conglomerates to distribute our media. The people have the tools and connection to create and share without these old business models trying to keep us in the 19th century as wage slaves, happy for the peanuts that their monopolies allow us to have.

I pirate things, and I also pay artists directly for their work when I can. Companies like Netflix manipulate the data and the market to ensure they are making the most profit possible. That is their entire goal as businesses. This exploitation should be separate from art altogether.

"Customers want to own their content". It's amazing to me that execs don't grasp this? Or that they think if they stop allowing it people will stop caring, but maybe they will eventually. But it seems obvious, I've know many families that had massive dvd collections they were proud of. Bookshelves with dozens of books they probably never even read. It's just comforting to have a thing and know it's yours.

Every development in business consolidates their power and increases anxiety for the people.

Would you really put the blame on piracy for that when there are conglomerates manipulating the entire market? I'm not doubting they exist, but can you name a small business streaming service that would be affected by pirate services? I have never heard of such a company. I've seen small streaming services utilized by libraries but they are on government contracts and tax funded as far as I know.

If they aren't going to recycle which rarely happens even today that is probably just as good of a solution as landfilling them, those little bottles are littered all over the earth. When they demolish a building they would trash all that debris anyway, but yeah a hilarious find, hundreds of them lol.

That sounds like a very reasonable way to view it haha, plenty of parents do view the things their kids do in that way and teach them to be sensible, I was lucky to be raised that that way. Many parents here are not that reasonable though and will use as much force as they can to keep their kids from doing things they don't want them to, and are happy to use the law to help with that, one way by supporting strict enforcement of drinking and drug laws. From the last stats I remember seeing the US actually has worse rates of alcoholism and alcohol related illness than Germany also!

Yes in the US honestly I feel anxiety thinking about the cashier being too nice and not responding appropriately friendly enough haha, there is such a pressure for good service for any retail worker that I feel like it's somewhat rare for them to be straight up 'rude', at most they will be quiet. Like you mention though it does vary a lot region to region from what I've seen.

There are pretty strict alcohol laws in the US compared to a lot of countries, I couldn't see this system working here because people would argue teens or whoever would use their parents card or ID. The drinking age being 21 here makes it different I think, there aren't so many under 18 that would really want to drink that would abuse the system, but since you have to be 21 to buy alcohol there are plenty of people in the 16-20 range that would take advantage I'm sure.

If it always has issues it makes sense you wouldn't like it, where I use it there are rarely any errors and there are usually regular cashiers still if you don't want to self checkout, personally I'd rather scan my groceries than have someone else do it. I do agree it would be much better if they had an RFID system like you mention though.

I have a lot of anxiety, sure I can just 'get over it' or ignore it and go to the actual cashier, but I love having the ability to scan things myself, it is also much quicker because I usually have less items than most. They still have the employee there, there are still other cashiers so I've never seen it get too hectic where I go.

We would call the sauce for burgers, fries etc ketchup, 'tomato sauce' in the US would be the sort for pasta, like marinara. If you asked for tomato sauce for a burger people would be very confused lol.

You have tomato sauce packets? It's funny to think of ketchup as tomato sauce, in the US if you called it that everyone would be confused even though it is really the most accurate thing you could call it

A place I worked had a noodle machine made in Japan. The manufacturer had us send noodles to them from our shop in the US to ensure the machine was working properly and that our noodles were good, I had never heard of any other sort of company doing that. Where I work now has top quality machinery and they are mostly made in Japan.