I have never seen a laundromat romanticized in a movie as far as I can recall.

The OG cooler ranch bags were, ironically, absolute FIRE 🔥🔥🔥

That’s true, but that’s not what a drop in the bottom line means in this context. If you reduce quality, you also reduce your cost of production. So you’re right if there’s no change in sales numbers at all, you were spending too much on something you didn’t need, and you made a good adjustment. But more often, these adjustments weigh the drop in sales vs the increase in profit that results from the lower cost. If the expected drop in revenue is offset by the increase in take home, they don’t care and keep it that way. What’s really shitty is that once the revenue trend stabilizes and customers adapt to the new lowered quality, there’s nearly always a price increase.

Yes, good point.

Not to be pessimistic, but this is also a somewhat common strategy to test how shitty you can make something. Basically, intentionally make things worse to test the impact on revenue. If profits don’t drop keep it that way. If the bottom line starts going down, slowly increase the quality again until they stabilize. It’s likely that changes were not reversed, they were just improved over the trash they made them for awhile. Chipotle has mastered this process. Raise prices, reduce quality, raise quality slightly but not to previous benchmark, repeat.

I’ve been telling people this since somewhere around 2014/2015 when I read the third book. The first two books were well thought out, the plot moved, the exposition had purpose and was driving toward something. While I was about 2/3 of the way through the book I realized that it felt like GRRM had changed his mind about what he wanted to do with the story. The book no longer seemed focused on a destination, it seemed focused on moving characters around so that he could make something different work instead. But doing that new thing meant killing off 75% of the characters he’d spent two books developing, so he had to replace them with new ones, who were less developed, kind of cardboard cutouts of the previous ones. But now these new characters stories needed to be fleshed out so he could make their involvement make sense. In doing that he realized he couldn’t slot them in to accomplish the goals he needed to complete the story. So he kept expanding the web, expanding the universe, but never really having a plan or path in place to make it all come back together. And that’s where he’s been for over a decade.

He hasn’t finished the books because he doesn’t know how to at this point. He can’t get everything tied together, he can’t go back to the story he wanted to tell because he killed off pieces necessary to make it happen, and the replacements didn’t fit where he needed them to.

My espresso machine. They’re expensive. I do not know why they are, but they are. I hemmed and hawed for years about us getting one and finally decided fuck it. Im an adult, I want one, we can afford it.

In 2+ years the only times I have not made myself a cappuccino are when I have not been home to do so. It is one of my most used appliances. Espresso owns.

So I just had it forced onto my work machine and here’s my take away so far:

It’s slow. I don’t care about the bells and whistles they added visually, it’s slow. Really slow. My workload and usage has not changed one iota from 10 to 11. Every single aspect of my job is the same, i use 90% Microsoft Apps, plus chrome (no choice) and acrobat. WHY IS IT SLOW. My laptop was built for windows 11. Windows 10 ran fine and was not noticeably different in any way other than some visual changes I don’t need. Why the fuck is it SLOW. Why. Seriously, why?

I do not care about tabbed explorer, it’s fine but it’s not a feature I’ve ever had in an OS or needed. I don’t care about most of the other obvious changes, but I do care that my job is now significantly more difficult because my every day tasks take longer and the OS locks up due to high CPU and memory usage even though all apps combined are only using about 20% of my resources. So the OS eats 80% because…i don’t know or car why, it fucking sucks and I hate it.