LyraTerra

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

kids in high school: holy shit free college?!

biden: oh no two years of pre-school and then two years of college*

However.

There is decades worth of evidence that pre-K education is one of the strongest ways of giving kids enduring advantages in K-12 education. A lot of the data comes specifically out of Oklahoma, which does have voluntary universal pre-K (which makes it an excellent case study) and the research shows gains across all racial and socio-economic boundaries. That paper is from 2005. Researchers revisited the kids later to see how persistent these gains were, or if they were drowned out by all the other stuff.

Turns out, the kids who were in pre-K continued to have academic success through middle school (they hadn’t tracked through high school). And just for fun, they also did some projected adult earnings for kids who went through pre-K, as fun benefit-cost analysis of the whole thing. And it looks like the benefits skew disproportionately in favor of the more disadvantaged students.

and then every single other channel out there thought “hm. why are we using a third party site to do what WE could do ourselves?” except not a single one of them had enough material in their libraries to do what netflix was doing. but they still pulled all their content out of netflix anyway and tried to do what netflix was doing. and then disney decided to do it as well, which… essentially just killed netflix.

but not only did they kill netflix, they just restarted cable! the whole point of a streaming service was being able to watch one show in one go, over a weekend or something. but bc these services don’t have enough material to keep people invested on paying every month, they have… to…. release shows one episode at a time, so that by the time one show ends they can roll out a new one and keep the subscriptions. which just? defeats the point?

Source

STARCH MASKS

O N   H E R    B O D Y

does that mean

Pranget sex?

20 foot waterslide

while uu are

Look, I don't make the rules but you're legally required to watch this.

Short list of the Shit the HOA at my pervious house tried to pull:

Banning personal and community food gardens (The reason the tag for my garden is “The garden of earthly HOA violations”)

Banning people from using thier personal yards as Native Plant Restoration microzones, something that looks gorgeous and is extremely helpful to the local ecology

trying to get the city council to remove protections on adjacent city Open Space/Native Plant restoration zone so they could mow it.

mandating the use of ONE landscaping company in the neighborhood, coinicdentally owned by the HOA president’s son

Mandating the use of an unecessary water purification company on all properties.

suing city animal control for collecting lose dogs and cats and returning them to the addresses on thier collars.  You know. that thing animal control does so the animals don’t get run over or disemboweled by the coyotes or catch and spread rabies.  The thing that’s illegal to let your pet do out here for those reasons Karen.

Suing the city council to remove a city bus stop in the neighborhood that was heavily used by many residents.  They damn near got away with it becuase the HOA meetings were always in the middle of the day on a weekday.  You know, when the residents that use that stop are working.

Sending people letters threatening to fine them for having “Out Of Season” holiday decor.  Specifically targeting my Indian neighbors who were celebrating Diwali, not Christmas and the Jews with visible Menorahs.

Fining people for doing thier own appliance and car repair on thier own personal property

Fining people for operating a business out of thier house, specifically targeting a disabled neighbor that does comission tailoring and garment repair out of her home.  never bothered a soul except the one snoopy bitch who didn’t like that her clients were allowed to park in the tailor’s designated and otherwise unused parking space.

Trying to fine a neighbor for flying a Pride Flag

HOAs are invasive, bigoted, corrupt and cruel institutions that should never have been allowed to be created.  If you live in and HOA area, showing up at the meetings to tell people what the fuck is wrong with them, Joining your HOA board to protect your neighbors and possibly organize the dissolution of the HOA is one of the best things you can do to protect the marginalized members of your community.

Shit hit the fan when she installed a wall around her property. A 3 feet tall 2 foot wide wall around her yard. Topped with gorgeous iron work with sharp points that make climbing dangeous. Think Addams Family Lite. They tried to stop the construction because she was using the /wrong/ company (a mutual aid group she worked with). Send her fines and fees, and made the mistake of sending a copy of the HOA contract with a forged signature.

Ooooo...it got so ugly! She remembered the HOA post here about that happening to others and, well, the HOA broke up because of other fuckery on top of this. But it was mostly due to her dragging them in court for fraud, harassment, disturbing the peace, trespassing, stalking, and a few other things. She was petty about it too, looked into every fucking thing she could to destroy them.

I was informed that you not, in fact, obligated to sign the HOA contract. It's not a legal requirement. When you look for a home, make sure to ask about the possible HOAs, and look at the details of your homeowner's contract. Sometimes HOAs have that shit written into the purchase. If you see it, change the contract, put your initials and date in the changed sections, and see how the real estate agent handles in. This is legal, btw.

poverty & poor people = bad