If youve never experienced costco or been a member, this is difficult to understand but there is an undercurrent, nay, a prevailing sentiment of savings value and above all else things like rebate and cash back. Costco has established transparency for the consumer so pocketing the money is an egregious offense for most customers.
- credit cards offered by costco offer generous cashback
- most costco food items include discount pricing thats predictable and visible in the price itself. the decimal value of the price can even determine if the item is being phased out.
- even costco memberships are broken down into savings and the staff will gladly quantify your expenditures and potential cash back should you change or upgrade a membership. unused membership portions are even refunded.
- the refunds. no questions asked, for virtually anything, any time. this is where the costco member expects tariffs to be refunded as well.
I fully expect these to get refunded back to customers.
I occasionally get a gift card in the mail for a product I already purchased from Costco because they negotiated a better price for the batch after the fact.
> a prevailing sentiment of savings value and above all else things like rebate and cash back.
I did some consulting work there a long time ago building some software to manage inventory in one of their departments.
When we asked about their goals, like improve margins, they said "absolutely not, we will not increase beyond 14%". When we asked why, they said "the minute our customers think we are increasing margins, we will lose members, and membership is the goal."
Costco uses a convention for their retail (doesn’t work for by-weight) products where e.g .97 typically means it’s a limited run or to be discontinued.
There are others as well, they have more precise meaning for their internal procurement processes but that’s the customer facing rule of thumb.
unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.
- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.
- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.
- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
>I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people
There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.
i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.
The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.
having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.
- deregulation of airlines in the 1980s led to rampant consolidation of routes and SPOF hubs that only work for revenue purposes and offer no real resilience in traffic planning. over-subscription of flights and lack of any real competition compounds this issue.
- climate change and global warming increasingly exacerbate severe weather conditions that ground aircraft and incur delays or cancellations in an already fragile system
- reagan-era policy hostile toward air traffic control labor unions that once checked the excesses of capital resulted in understaffing issues for more than two decades later. poor regulation of working hours, outmoded systems, and wage stagnation has further stressed the ATC system.
- the partial government shutdown has caused massive delays and cancellations of flights as the artifice of security theater begins to break down under its own political morass.
the solution is reform and regulation through policy change and investment. this is not possible in late stage capitalism (Streeck, 2016.)
Calling it a perfect storm is too generous. This is deliberately tearing down the floodgates that protect you from the extremely normal and predictable storms.
one hypothesis for why meta wants this is because AI (including its own push for it) has turned much of the internet and its social media platforms into slopfarms and clickbots that advertisers are increasingly moving away from.
The real driver is as always, ad revenue. This time, advertisers want and need to know a real human is engaging the brand and Meta cannot see any other way in sight to assure this fact save for age verification.
this is just the latest evolution of surveillance capitalism.
Man who remembers when a big Mac was a wholesome and tasty meal option now shocked to find that, under capitalism, the wrapper is actually more nutritious than the meal itself.
This isnt going to be a popular post because the HN crowd is very much a "China bad" crowd but I hypothesize China will likely step in and offer a fork that's compatible with open ecosystems not under the direct control of the us state department. This might be in the form of commits and investment in fdroid and pinephone, or a tiktok like alternative to the wests walled garden.
Edit: this will likely exist "uncensored" in other markets but conform to the PRCs standards and practices domestically, similarly to how tiktok operated prior to selling a version specifically taylored to US censorship and propaganda.
Not a chance. A fork that is under China's control, maybe, but not an "open" fork. They don't even pretend to have that as a value.
You may theoretically find it advantageous to use such a system anyhow. To a first-order approximation, the danger a government poses to you is proportional to its proximity to you. (In the interests of fairness, I will point out, so are the benefits a government may offer to you. In this case it just happens to be the dangers we are discussing.) Using the stack of a government based many thousands of miles/kilometers away from you may solve a problem for you, if you judge they are much less likely to use it against you than your local government.
But China certainly won't put out an "open" anything.
Not sure if you have been following the LLM space or even the emulator handhelds space, but Chinese companies have been doing great with putting out open source software lately.
The irony is that software coming from China is a lot more open than western software. Biggest examples are huggingface models mostly coming from Chinese institutions. Its also strategicaly wise for China to go this path.
Maybe a shift to Huaweis HarmonyOS with its android compatibility layer or SailfishOS if they play their cards right.
As far as HarmonyOS i dont see many uptakes outside strict US free requirements as the other OEMs are lazy and also dont want to be locked into a competitor.
SailfishOS looks like its your time to faceplant once more , by not having a proper stratergy on monetizing on the many missteps from the current monopoly.I thonk at this point they need a leadership/biz stratergy overhaul - the tech is nice and polished, user demand is off the charts for an alternative . And they are just .. missing. Not even in th e conversation.
Pinephone is tragic, bought a bunch of Pine64's devices (PP, PPP, PB, PBuds, arm tablet, eInk tablet) but old tech, missing drivers, can't blame em no money no drivers... Still the community on Discord is great/helpful people.
That'd be great but I'm not feeling like the Chinese market is too worried about open development. I got a Huawei Watch 5 as a gift and I liked it enough to try to develop my own apps (their app store is a wasteland) but to my surprise Harmony OS is not Android compatible (just Android based somehow). The watch's developer mode is useless. Trying to register a developer account is almost impossible and it seems they only allow chinese nationals and there's no plan to open registration. I couldn't even download their custom IDE (something like Android Studio) without an account.
Yeah, I’m amazed at how far the western surveillance apparatus has been able to coast on plausible deniability. Folks, please don’t stick your head in the sand domestically just because there’s an even more obvious or egregious example abroad.
Say it with me: “Living in a police state is bad no matter who’s running it”.
I'm just imagining the poor intern at the NSA having to sit in a dimly lit room with an array of 64 x 64 monitors mounted on a wall, watching the O-faces of thousands and thousands of fat, balding, middle age men for hours straight.
- credit cards offered by costco offer generous cashback
- most costco food items include discount pricing thats predictable and visible in the price itself. the decimal value of the price can even determine if the item is being phased out.
- even costco memberships are broken down into savings and the staff will gladly quantify your expenditures and potential cash back should you change or upgrade a membership. unused membership portions are even refunded.
- the refunds. no questions asked, for virtually anything, any time. this is where the costco member expects tariffs to be refunded as well.
reply