Aceticon

"Perceived value"

Without that element, there would be no explanation for Marketing other than pure Brand Awareness promotion working (and McDonalds is definitely beyond needing more Brand Awareness, at least in the Developed World)

Even then, it doesn't explain a lot of how Marketing does its work (namelly the stuff they took from Psychology and use to do things like create associations between brand and specific feelings on people's subconscious - you know, the way cars are "freedom" and perfumes are "sex").

And don't get me started on other techniques that prey of human cognitive weaknesses (for example, FOMO would not work with the fabled Homo Economicus that underpins so much of Free Market Theory)

Anyways, a ton of present day enshittification (and that includes this kind of price inflation) relies on people having a well entrenched positive perception of a brand after years of having a relationship with it (i.e. chosing it as customers) and there being quite a lot of momentum behind it. It also relies a lot on using a "slow boiling" effect to keep people from spotting the full picture of the changes.

The complexity is not in the "writing words", it's in knowing which words to write.

The best possible proof that Belgium is not just a place set up by The Netherlands and France as a network of gas stations to travel between those countries is that the roads in Belgium are visibly worse than in The Netherlands or France (really: you can tell exactly were the border is when driving into and out of Belgium by the change in the condition of the road).

The problem for the Belgium friend is that he's not keen on admitting that if Belgium wasn't a real nation but rather a Franco-Dutch partnership, it would be better run.

Well, it's their community, ain't it?!

If you go into somebody's club, no matter how insane you think it is - say, a Flat Earthers Association, Pizza Is Best With Pineapple Club or some Church or other - and start hanging post-its all over the place criticizing their mad as shit beliefs, they're absolutely entitled to tear them down and kick you out and they'll even have the Moral High Ground doing it since your "right" to loudly be a whiny insulting bitch about somebody else's beliefs doesn't trumpt their right not to have loud whiny bitches insulting them in their space.

Now, if they went after you for your opinions outside of their space, then that's a whole different mater and you would be in the right, but that's not what you're complaining about: you're going into a forum called Late Stage Capitalism to indulge in some "tankie-baiting" and then turn around and whine to the rest of Lemmy about how moderators are such nasty people and shouldn't be allowed to take down your tankie-baiting posts in an anticapitalist forum.

The simplest solution to this specific "problem" is for you to stop going into their space and act like a cunt there because you don't like them. You can even block that forum if it makes you feel bad seeing a post from there in All.

Sorry mate but you just sound like a total wanker trying to find support from the crowd to get away with being a total wanker whenever and wherever you see fit.

The problem is that what people need in the environment we live in (i.e. Capitalism) is monetisable skills, whilst often College Degrees, whilst teaching people things that are very hard, if not impossible, to learn elsewhere, do not in fact provide people with monetisable skills. A good example would be most Arts Degrees. I was lucky that my natural inclination was towards Science and Engineering and that I had a knack for Programming, but had I gone done the other direction that I had a bit of a knack for - Acting - my life would've been totally different (judging by some acquaintances of mine from that world, it would've been a way way harder life in the financial sense).

As for the hiring people from third world countries, in the case of India (if that's one of the ones you mean), having had several colleagues from there and from talking to them it seems that whilst indeed most people don't even have basic computer literacy (I'm not even sure if being able to read and write is something that a majority of people can do there), there are people that do have access to the same stuff as in Developed Countries (at worst they just pirate it) and even though they're a small fraction of all people, in a country with so many people it still adds to a larger number. Companies abroad aren't hiring the poor countryside illiterate people who can't even speak English (I believe most people in India can't), they're hiring the Middle and Upper Middle class from over there and given the massive, massive inequality there, those did have access to modern computers and software.

Same thing would apply to places like South America - lots of poor people who are totally computer illiterate (often just plain illiterate in the general sense) but a minority did have access to all the same things as in Developed countries - most having maybe not as powerful computers and using mostly pirated software, but still the same stuff.

That said, I totally agree that college degrees shouldn't be required for many positions they are required for nowadays. The degrees there aren't really required because they teach things needed or even useful for those positions, they're required because there's an imbalance of offer vs demand for those jobs (too many candidates, too few jobs) so those hiring just put that requirement there because "we lose nothing from doing it and, who knows, maybe the degree will come in handy at some point" plus they're kind of an easy way to thin the applications.

If the job market was tighter demanding degrees for jobs not requiring them would stop. And, yeah, at least in certain areas the mainstream parties helping out business interests by giving away work visas like confetti is the reason why the job market is not as tight in many areas as it would naturally be.

In a wall near were I live somebody in the time of peak Covid vaccination tagged a slogan (in a language other than English) that roughly went like "50% or the prickled will die" - so prickled here meaning those who got the Covid vaccine - which might sound like a smart anti-vaxxer slogan until one thinks about how it implies that 50% of those who get the vaccine will never die, or in other words that the Covid vaccine actually gives eternal life to half the takers.

I can't really speak for other areas, but at least in Science and Engineering what a College does that you don't get "in the field" (because it doesn't directly lead to operational results so you don't get the time to learn it) is the foundations for the work you do, so the Mathematics and the "why" certain things work as they work rather than merely the "how" to do it (or at least it did back when I got my degree 3 decades ago).

Mind you, in my experience your "9 out 10 times" point is probably right at least in what I do - Software Development - that kind of knowledge is only useful in a fraction of the work for a fraction of the people, generally the kind of developer who is a "tool maker" rather than just a "tool user" working in things which are stretching the envelope of what can be done and are innovative or unusual technically (so, not "innovative" business models, which are what most of Tech Startups do nowadays), which might actually be an even worse ratio than 1 in 10 for those people vs the general universe in even just Software Development (much less Tech in general).

I supposed that what I'm trying to say is that at least in Tech you're not going to be all that great at doing work which extends the boundaries of what is possible without the kind of foundations a good Science or Engineering degree will give you - hence there is value in such education - but the vast majority of people in even the supposedly expert positions in Tech aren't extending the boundaries of what is possible, not even close.

(In other words, I'm expanding on what you said rather than disagreeing with it)

Humanity is far more likely to be wiped out by Natural Stupidity.

I literally have two machines running on always on VPNs, one my personal PC and another a home server were a torrent service is running, and have no such problems.

I think maybe the mistake you made was spending most of the time with it OFF and then turning it ON once in a while, whilst mine just goes ON as soon as I boot my machine and stays on.

Granted, I'm not using it for getting around geo-locked websites, I'm using it for having a bit more privacy and for safety when sailing the high seas so once in a while I have the opposite problem (that I'm blocked from accessing sites in my own country because the connections appear to be coming from a different country).

Any other good in comparison

Arguing good option bad...

The second line doesn't logically follow from the first - you're talking about a relatively better option all the way to that top line and then you switch from "better than other" to "good" - it's like going about how in a choice between being knifed twice versus being knifed just once the "just knifed once" is good in comparison and then jumping from that to saying that getting knifed once is good.

Even beyond that totally illogical jump, the other flaw of logic is treating each election as a unique totally independent choice whose results have no impact on the options available on subsequent choices - I.e. that who the Democrat Party puts forwards and who the Republic Party puts forwards as candidates in an election isn't at all influenced by how the electorate responded to previous candidates they put forward in previous elections - it is absolutely valid for people to refuse to vote for Kamala to "send a message to the Democrat Party" (I.e. to try to influence the candidates the party puts forward in subsequence election) and it's around the validity or not of risking 4 years of Trump to try and get an acceptable Democrat candidate in at the end of it that the discussion should be (and there are valid points both ways) not the hyper-reductive falacy you seem so wedded to.

Choices in the real world are a bit more multi faceted and with much more elements and implications than that self-serving "simpleton" slogan the DNC pushed out in its propaganda which you are parroting.

Beats getting a hoodie for Christmas!

(Don't ask me how I know)

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It's totally unsuitable for gaming unless we're talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I'm using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn't exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they're about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you're starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).