1/5 syrup is a lot of syrup, and doesn’t track with Italian-style sodas.

I have heard that brand name syrups are often charged extra for a patent fee or something, much like the studios overcharging movie theaters since the 90s / aughts, forcing them to run entirely on concessions.

I’ve run nothing, but a friend of mine was a Pizza Inn manager and talked a bit about it, albeit in the late 80s / early 90s.

But the attitudes I’ve seen from managers suggests at an anecdotal level they don’t know that much and don’t care. They penny pinch in the wrong places, often developing the reputation that their own establishment has mean, miserly policies. Maybe, if their margins are that low, like it’s Walmart, this is necessary.

Still, there’s a lot of focus by companies on loss control than there is by making their places welcome enough to bother shopping there; this figures into the recent Walgreens franchise culling in San Francisco.

The focus of my own studies (as a game dev) had been about crunching in AAA game development, which is still done even though it has the opposite effect as tended (specifically, hurrying up production to meet a deadline). Managers of billion-dollar projects are willing to be stupid in the face of data-driven policy; the cruelty is sometimes the point. Among the convenience store managers I’ve encountered, they don’t look at or care about the data.

Believe what you need to believe, though.

Incidentally, the soda (gas-injected water plus syrup) is so cheap this [a real boy really named Peyton coming in and filling his bin for the fill-your-own-cup-special] would be better indulged and tolerated as a photo op and free advertising. When you get a fast food cup and free refills, the cup is literally more expensive than the soda + ice that goes into it. It’s nearly 100% profit.

ETA The same is true for people who eat too much at AYKE buffets. Take a picture of the dude, and have him sign the guest book and put him up on the wall of eating champions. The loss from one over-eating dude is going to be made up by the draw that yes, we mean all you can eat, and all he ate. Managers who throw big eaters out are just short-sighted and failing to do the math.

AI art has come a long way. You can make your AI look like shitty florescent lighting, or a fading photograph. Also AI folk normally have five fingers on each hand in a normal position thanks to LORAs. LORAs also fix wording when you specify what you want a caption to say.

It’ll mess up logos unless you specify a particular brand.

Controllers in 2015 were about $40 for a Playstation standard and could get up to $200 depending on the features you wanted (e.g. wireless, self charging, extended range, game domination features, etc.)

Most people have a $10-$30 market for sex toys until they get serious about it. Kids exploring their bits don’t have any budget at all, and can only get things that pretend to be toys for kids.

Evidently, it’s appropriate to get your tween a vibrating broomstick (or a bumble ball if you’re a California hippy parent who wants to assure your toddler grows up well-adjusted) but not a vibrating rubber duckie. I’m not fully sure why.

A friend of mine had to vibrate the snot out of her leg as part of PT (it’s a very long and gruesome story), and for stuff like that magic-wand type vibes are great. But the new orgasmotron vibes use weird biofeedback science and fancy rhythms to get the pulse just right for people who have various kinds of sexual dysfunction.

Some of them also relay your health issues back to the App provider to be added to your consumer profile and sold, so do use IoT security and try not to get ones that sell your info.

As I played it with mouse and keyboard, I never got to experience the rumble effects of Moxxi’s gear.

To be fair, having recently been on the market for a proper vibrating sex toy, they’re expensive as fuck, and according to my ex-wife (ow. ex- still stings.) capable of providing mind-blowing orgasms. So yeah, for those without a budget, we make do with what we got, or the bargain bin at Good Vibes.

TMI:

The same thing happened to terrorist, a term that became overused and dead during the IWoT and yet the Trump regime is still trying to leverage that word against his political enemies.

For my own arguments, I use alternatives to fascist or get specific, such as calling it an autocratic regime that uses fascist rhetoric to justify state violence. That way my readers know I’m talking seriously about a serious thing.

Only during REM sleep, and even then, it’s not the same as alert-and-aware consciousness.

During non-REM sleep, during which your body does most of its growth, healing and cell replacement, death stops by for a visit. See also when under general anesthesia.

Without a brain and no small amount of power (20% of your calorie count at rest on average, less when jogging, more when doing the calculus) the age of the universe goes by instantly. You don’t track time.

You also don’t track heat or pain, or memories good or bad. You don’t contemplate your trials and tribulations. You could be in the core of the sun at over a million degrees Celsius and not feel a thing or care how you got there.

The universe has been around for thirteen billion years, and will be around for even longer, and we only get this moment. And then it’s gone.

It’s not the death part that scares me. It’s the transition between living and dead that’s going to suck.

But then I had a really terrible November 2024 and am still suffering a high-suicidality psychotic break, so my opinion might be biased.

The non mushy straws aren’t terrible, but all rubberized tires are, whether on cars or bikes. The car ones are much worse.

And air travel is even worse still

But not close to industrial pollution which is exponentially greater.

The billionaires could care more and put some R&D into it. They just dont.

I’m assuming bragging on Miller’s prowess is an explicit part of Katie Miller’s tradwife contract.

It’s a good time to be there for those buddies who totally thought they were on the invite list but here they are.

It’s okay, dude, we’ll have our own party! With blackjack and hookers!

I had half a mind to tell them oh yeah, it totally happened! 17 thousand missing persons in Mississippi! Another 12k in Nebraska. Check your county rapture count website to see if it’s come locally.

They’ll have to come to terms that they’re one of us now, but they were one of us before.

The thing is, this isn’t a curse.

A curse is what happened to Bill O’Reilly, to Tucker Carlson, to Glen Beck. Either there’s a scandal reckoning, or the guy believes his own rhetoric a little too much and says something kooky or too far out the Overton window, or draws the stupidest chalkboard diagram and someone in FOX notices his average viewership is 72 years old, and retires his show.

They take a serious demotion in popularity and a pay cut and all but retire. That’s how witch’s curses work when they do.

However Kirk did suffer one of Charles Dickens’ many curses. ( …Charlie Dickens – Charlie Kirk – coincidence?) In A Christmas Carol the chapter on the visitation of the Ghost of Christmases Yet To Come. Wealthy people who have not empathy with nor sympathy for the rest of us folk eventually die and then are not grieved when they’re gone (except by those who have to gain by presenting a sad face). Kirk wasn’t one of the moguls, but he spread their rhetoric and was one of their ruthless minions.

Not soon enough.

Narrator: The problem wasn’t the kids it was the US.

Clarification: venues getting shot up is a specifically elevated problem in the US (exacerbated by availability of guns, but that’s not really the root of the problem). The thing is, the root of the problem (right-wing-leaning low-information constituents – lumpenproletariat in left-wing speak – suffering from precarity sometimes turn to violence) is being visited on European nations where two-party systems have taken root, and neoliberalism has set in. It’s the old King Log vs. King Heron problem. We’re seeing violence and counterviolence in the EU, just with less frequency and fewer guns, but it will catch up to them.

Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.

Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.

I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they’re decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it’s still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn’t take immediate action.

But yes, I’m bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don’t even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.

We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that’s not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.

So I can’t be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.

The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do… assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.

But I don’t say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I’m saying this as a sober assessment. We’re not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020’s era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we’ve wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.

We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.

But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).

That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.

All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.

So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.