1,104 karma · joined January 30, 2014
Passionate about FOSS, right to repair, data privacy, and de-corporatization of the internet.
Drupal is not a great piece of software to try to use out of the box as both a CMS and a website front-end. Drupal doesn't have the same kind of ecosystem as WordPress. Many of the best themes and modules are really there to assist your development of your own features, as opposed to being plug-and-play solutions.
I was definitely on the bandwagon from this thing from the first time I saw it. Four years of Elon's dumb antics and I now absolutely will not spend a dime at any company he's associated with.
I believe the parent commenter's point was exactly this. Giving money to the investor class and expecting it to benefit everyone is the definition of trickle-down economics.
The reason? It's one of the first images that pop up when you punch 'chigger' into Google, and it appears to be licensed (and mislabeled) by Getty. Tracking the image back to its original source, it was clearly identified as a red velvet mite.
I wish publications wouldn't do this. A completely random lede image would be better than showing a picture of an animal that people will now believe is the one the article was talking about.
I do, actually, because I want my local natural foods co-op to stay in business.
But your point still stands. The alternatives aren't actually comparable, because they're for-profit entities, and I don't want my food budget going to them.
Of course, as soon as my credit card date needed to be updated, they kicked me off of the introductory pricing I was told I could keep forever. It's now about double that price (your price may vary for "reasons"). Then they killed Google Music in favor of the inferior YouTube Music.
For me the risk was acceptable because it was read-only access from a very small number of institutions. But those institutions have changed over the 15 years I used Mint, so having the historical data from places I used to have accounts was immensely helpful in understanding things like how much net worth changed over time. Especially when I could layer in other accounts manually as well as estimated real estate values from Zillow. So "I bought a house" wouldn't show up as "I lost $X dollars" but instead "I owe $X on a mortgage against a house worth $Y."
What I mean is that they provide enough information to pair your first-party data with "anonymous" web traffic matched to the account level with enough granularity to line up the two.
That said, most of the companies in this space massively over promise and under deliver. The one thing they all have in common is that they're good at ABM, so they can sell to your CMO/CRO faster than you can call them out on their bullshit.
Some companies are trying to sell you on "AI based" solutions that take deanonymization a step further, but as far as I can tell, it's mostly horseshit and wishful thinking.
You reference cults in the paragraph above, but honestly this sounds like a generalized recruiting message from everything from corporations to militaries to organized religion.
To be fair, though, a lot of people I know have only ever had terrible managers.
I hope for a future where their monopoly position is litigated away so that there is a fair marketplace with other options for next day delivery for common household items. I prefer to shop in brick and mortar stores, but there's definitely a legitimate use case for next-day delivery of household supplies. I have a family member currently experiencing severe mobility issues who lives several hours away from me in a rural area, and unfortunately Amazon is the only way I can get things like household medical supplies to her door on short notice.
What I haven't seen yet is a reminder that a Google Account is effectively Google's private property that they're letting you access in exchange for vacuuming up your personal data.
The only winning move is not to play.
I went down a long odyssey recently of trying to get a refund for a food item that was four months expired the day it was delivered. Amazon refused. I escalated it. Amazon refused again. I tried to leave a bad review. Amazon deleted it. I reviewed the seller itself. Deleted again. Kept trying over and over again for several days, making ever so slight tweaks to conform to the policy. I came to the conclusion it was simply impossible to leave a negative piece of feedback.
I think what's actually fuzzier is the definition of "real" engineering, whatever the hell that is. I'm not discounting that specific practices within engineering have clear definitions, but there's no one consistent way to lump every one of those professions together and have a cohesive "you're in or you're out" definition.
That said, I absolutely would take a significant pay cut to get to work on a project I cared about again. Golden handcuffs are not absolute.