Logbook: Economy
AI and Fast food, A marriage made in hell.
I have been thinking, I was hungry and went to a Burger King and there was a profound difference. The store was near empty, The front kiosk was devoid of life and replaced with computers. At the wall was 3 computers that had screens with “order here!” , In the first five seconds of looking around I felt unwelcomed with a place that looked closer to a funeral home , most of the old decor was removed. In its place was ugly sterile furniture.
Before this to make an order you walked up to a human and said “Hi i would like to order a original chicken sandwich meal. They would put that in the machine, you’d pay with cash and be on your way.
Now there is a massive change that basically makes you create the meal from scratch. You go to the machine, you tap order . You scroll around through menus until you get to your original chicken sandwich. From there it goes into a conundrum. You get a menu with 45 different options. Mentally you are going “I just want a fucking original chicken sandwich” . They have made the same trap that subway has, Go there and try to order and Italian sandwich, you spend 10 minutes trying to remember the base components of the damn thing. This methodology turns you into an unpaid worker.
With this, the human element is gone. they have replaced 3 workers that could be floaters helping in rushes with stuff, Now its 3 to 5 cold machines that sit there , they don’t say hello, they don’t say Hi nice day isn’t it what would you like to order. You have to dick around with a machine for 10 minutes because you have no idea how to assemble the thing you want. Now with the cost of those machines and the upkeep and the electricity they have replaced 3 to 4 workers with a machine that likely cost more than what those workers would of made in the time those employees would of made in the churn lifetime of those workers. Not only that those machines are likely taken care of devs that are paid to keep the machines updated. This tech is not fire an forgot , there is a near constant maintenance. You likely replaced 4 workers with a computer that cant help in a rush when a school bus drops 70 kids plus 4 teachers. Those computers cant help bag , get fries, and help with other things. so with the leftover staff they are now picking up the fluff work that normally is hidden from them and their process time doubles. these machines are strategically inefficient. They have hidden costs, while workers may fuck up, machines can absolutely fuck up because they are absolutist. These machines do not have intuition , they will not adjust the frialator because they can not see 4 school buses pull up and 5 teachers approaching.
Outside it gets worse , the person who used to be on the radio is gone . replaced with an AI that basically is dumber than dirt because variable is its enemy , If you say I’d like an order of umm A whooper with fries and a coke and um no cheese. the AI will likely fuckup.
“We are witnessing the loss of humanity of America through a drive-thru speaker. We traded the ‘Hi, how are you?’ with machines that can’t handle a stutter or slurring. These machines are a ADA nightmare under the guise of Innovation, They replaced the ‘Floater’ with a ‘lamp that pretends to be a computer. And when the system inevitably crashes with the arrival 4 school buses, they’ll blame the Staff instead of the machines that caused it.
What the shit is with shit coffee.
We’ve had Cat Shit coffee , Elephant shit coffee, Monkey shit coffee, and now we have expensive as shit coffee.
Geisha coffee from Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete was sold for $30,204 a kilogram. When coffee gets more expensive than printer ink that is CRAZY. With that same money you could fly to Japan spend 3 weeks there while getting coffee from every mom and pop shop and live like a king while absorbing the local culture. The SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) has 100-Point Scale. This coffee scored 98, This coffee is apparently perfected liquid angel piss. If dunkin donuts had this coffee it would likely cost over $3000 a large cup.
If you took that $30,204 and put it into a high-yield savings account or a conservative index fund it would generate roughly $1,500 to $2,100 a year in interest. it would fund a 5 dollar coffee day for the rest of your life, and worse if you skip 2 days a week, by the time you are done with compounded amounts eventually you can start getting crazy Starbucks coffee.
Im sure somewhere somehow someone wants the cred to have the most expensive coffee in the world but the cost of cup of coffee I’d rather have enough money to start a coffee trust fund that pays for my Everyday coffee.. But while the every-person just wants a cup of coffee someone is making a coffee that is apparently the “best” coffee.
I’ll stick with my coffee from local places , I don’t want a bag of coffee that i could put a down payment on the house. Give me some mechanics coffee and the cash and I’d be happier.
Is amazon ok?
Amazon has been weird lately, Just a bunch of things I have noticed .
For one amazon prime Video is getting weird. Not sure if this applies to everyone but, Watch a TV show on amazon… Rather than go to the next episode It returns you to the Amazon Prime Video screen, I thought it might of been a fluke in the amazon app. I tried the same thing on my samsung TV , Same thing happened! Loaded up a brand new firestick that i have for media sharing Same problem?
This alone may not have anyone going Hmmm but there are other things Amazon Resale has people complaining because of people order X and get Y. Other items are shipped and people are getting refunds and told to dispose of Item.
They also are heavily leveraged into AI and their Rufus is dumber than a brick. They are putting hundreds of billions into AI and are hemorrhaging money for this.. They are trying so bad to be next Facebook in a way by being Big Data and they do not know how to do it . Costs for their AI outwiegh there standard app approach. The way it is going Jeff Bezos might have to use low grade fuel for his plane.
Amazon is also hiding reviews from normal users and instead show compensated reviews. Compensated reviews are garbage because the only way to keep getting items is give a glowing review. I’d take 10 Honest reviews over a single review where the person received the item for free.. They are so badly losing their way that they are bleeding long time customers turned off by this approach. Amazon probably knows they are losing a small percentage of customers. They are over leveraged and I am willing to bet they dont know how to get back . but even month to month if they lose 0.25% customers , You don’t have a leak you have a crisis , because even in that small percentage they are losing “whales” people that are big spenders.
If you go by this metric it works out to big money and the more that leave would be catastrophic.
| Metric | Regular Member | The “Whale” (Top Tier) |
| Est. Annual Spend | $1,400 | $12,000+ (Business/Bulk) |
| 0.25% Monthly Churn | 625,000 users / month | ~6,250 high-spenders / month |
| Annualized Users Lost | 7.5 Million Users | 75,000 “Whales” |
| Direct Revenue Loss | $10.5 Billion / year | $900 Million / year |
| Subscription Fee Loss | $1.3 Billion (at $179/yr) | (Included in revenue) |
So right now Amazon is using an enshitification phase while they try to bet the house on Rufus. Rufus has the tact of getting a pickaxe to the skull. If you ask google it gives you what you want while Rufus throws shit at you and goes HERE THIS IS WHAT YOU BUY NOW! At a guess Amazon knows they are bleeding but they are so committed to their act that they are reducing everything just to keep the ship running. So piss away customers and hope they can profit. if amazon had incrimented the changes rather than try to use a grenade to empty a bucket people may have tolerated this. But even marketwise they are pissing away money , The stock is down 8.18% in the last 6 months.
While amazon serves better as the general store they are trying to get into a neiche market and they have no fucking clue how to do it because they seem to be trying a what can we replace while not realizing th e limitations on the new.
They’ve replaced the general store with a high-stakes AI experiment, and right now, the experiment is blowing up in everyones face like wile E coyote trying to catch a profitable roadrunner.
Anyways, back to my coffee after this steamy thought.
CVS, Your Dealer you never wanted.
CVS sucks. and i have multiple reasons for that, if you are on meds they fuck with you in numerous ways.
The regiseters are a privacy nightmare. I had complained about them and they said they were safe. the problem is people will see your name and your birthdate when you put in your information for meds.
That the register, the front one but the same as the one in the pharmacy , While the ones in the back do have a limited visibility, they do not cover you from behind so someone could talk your information while you type it in.
Also for meds, CVS seems to have made themselves high lord of your drugs over your doctors. If you get one med they will often substitute medications even with doctors objections. If you are on an opiate CVS treats you like a dirty druggy. Even the smallest amount of medication you will find delays , Out of stocks and more on meds. I had one med delayed while having a respiratory condition. “Oh you can come back in about a month for it..” the fuck is that. its like telling the person they are not sick enough for the meds.
CVS is in my opinion a borderline monopoly. Fuck em.
Also , WHen you try to look at a webpage for a prescription they bring you to their app, The APP that claims it helps you with AI slop, the app that says that your protected medical information is not protected. So on a phone you are unable to see your meds unless you submit your soul to them. That should be illegal. The fact that our culture is continuing to accept the AI bull shit slop and companies who abuse the average consumer without resistance is disgusting. Soon enough CVS will just pan all of the patient neglect to the app and saying it is not their fault.
its coming to your wallet and soon enough your health will be in the hands of a computer that often tells you to eat glass.
Removing the penny was a bad idea and a scam.
In the year 2026 we bid farewell to the penny, But was the death of this penny warranted? I say no. Others will say yes and scream and stomp their feet saying “It CoSts 3.7 cents to make!” While this is a factual number i am going to call bullshit on this. There are more factors in the penny that make that 3.7 sound expensive but in reality the real cost of a penny is a fraction.
Pennies in of themselves are not a one time use commodity. If you have pennies laying around check the dates on them. More times than not you will find pennies that are 10+ years old. But is removing the penny logical? No…
Removing the penny from the currency system will inherently will not save any money for the average consumer. moreover, It will cost Americans much more than ever. Going forward with the elimination of the penny corporations and their products are suppose to round the prices to the nearest nickel. I really do not think they will use this logic at all. They will go for the greedy approach and round right to the next dime. This is an automatic Gift to companies. They will part out everything and charge you through the ass for the product.
Imagine a device made of 37 small parts, each costing 3 cents.
- Actual Cost: $1.11
- Fair Rounding: $1.10
- Corporate “Creative” Rounding: They’ll price each part individually at $0.10, turning a $1.11 product into a $3.70 expense.
Do i trust companies to do the right thing? Absolutely not! They will use methodology to make a bigger profit and scale their prices to make rounding in their favor. Companies are out there and they are not in the business to make humanity better. they are out to screw the consumers for the benefits of the shareholder. Do I believe every company will do this? No, they will start out honest at first but, once profits take a dive, they will use creative rounding in order to scale profits. Because why Improve when you can use some magic rounding and make a huge profit. I’ve made an example below to show how rounding can run away with pricing!
| Calculation Method | Price for 37 Parts | Percent Increase |
| Original Cost ($0.03/part) | $1.11 | — |
| Total Price Rounded (Fair) | $1.10 | -0.9% (Small loss) |
| Nickel Rounding (Per Part) | $1.85 | 60% Increase |
| Scam Corp Rounding ($0.10/part) | $3.70 | 233.3% Increase |
As you can see, this is not only bad but it can be completely destructive. But i digress I’ve strayed a little bit here. The statement a penny costs 3.7 cents is a shortsighted idea. Lets look at the penny. Does it magically disappear if it is used? No. Does it break easy? No! is the penny reusable? YES! A penny can stay in circulation for up to 25 years and be reused up to 2500 times. if the penny was a one time use device it would be a terrible thing! we’d be using more resources than it costs. but the penny in a year can be used 100 times. So lets break the costs down. since a new penny is not needed after use we can spread these costs. If we are to break this costs per used the penny is actually a very cost effective device.
If we say a penny is used 100 times in a given year in the first year the cost of this penny is actually closer to 0.037 Cents ! If we go for the average lifetime of a penny (25 years) 0.000148 cents. the cost analysis here shows the penny to come out on top, It’s worth it to keep. Why hide the penny? it can account for stealth inflation that hides inflation by elimination lower currencies to make it look like efficiency.
The Bottom Line: The “3.7 cents to manufacture” argument is shortsighted. Killing the penny isn’t about efficiency; it’s about stealth inflation. By eliminating the smallest unit of currency, we make it easier for corporations to hide price hikes and “round” their way into your retirement fund.
We need to talk about AI .
AI chatbots are becoming a daily interaction and the problem is they are all shit. Amazon for example has RUFUS, While sounding cool in nature it is the most annoying AI known to man. it keeps bothering as over and over. it is like
The idea of RUFUS if asked for is one thing but this thing is the collective powers of the bothersome waiter , a nosey neighbor , a know it all and attempted know it all. if you type teva shoes it tries to show you all sorts of garbage even though i typed [Teva] [shoes] , Rufus pops out and overtakes about 20% the screen throwing irrelevant bullshit at you .
The thing is …. AI has no idea of timing. if i typed shoes ands went through 50 brands and it popped up than i might be more apt to recieve help from the Annoying bot. but it comes on the screen like its trying to throw shit off the table and goes “do you this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this!” and you immediately get overloaded with bullshit that you are not looking for . No matter what you tell rufus it does not go away. Even if you tell rufus you hate every fiber of its being and you would rather be waterboarded and have a hot poker stuff up your ass, it still does not go away. Amazon …. seriously you cant push an AI that has no tact and has the patience of a waiter that waits for the exact moment you take a bite of your food to ask if everything is ok.
AI should be a choice . Not be forced. not be invasive. not be brash . The AI boon is not , it will fail and eventually companies will force AI to be under a price point. Google is already at this point . they have fucked over their google home devices.
The AI boon is fucking over every consumer and most people do not realize this , when a computer has an “ai” chip they have done nothing to the chip to optimize it . in all likelihood you could get AI on a 486 chip however slow. The price of RAM and storage is going through the roof because companies are stealing every bit of data they get their hands on. If i copied anything like that they would go copyright infringement but they steal 99% of what’s out there.
When companies are sticking AI on everything they can as a sales point you know that for the most part AI is bullshit.
More coffee….. We all need it some days.
Since I’ve moved into my new place, I have a conundrum for the ages. As a drinker or better said a former drinker of outside coffee because I was too impatient to wait for the coffee pot , have the coffee cool down than make it into an iced coffee. I’ve bought coffees from almost every major company that served iced coffee. But as the years press on and the coffee gets watered and cheapened its getting very hard to make a choice , Now i can’t blame the companies , Its more over the franchisees . There are problems all around, They have crazy employee turnover and skip on machines in order to earn more money.
Formally, You’d have well trained employees that could manipulate the machines , now they just do whatever the hell they please when making coffee. For the milk and cream containers they have straws that need to be cut to a certain length , You just do not see that anymore, also the portioning has gone fucking nuts. Dunkin Donuts for explain if you ask for extra sugar , You summon the Brimley god and have to sign a contract.
I’ve said in other post that i’ve sort of cracked the enigma code of ordering from dunkin donuts, if you look at the receipts they do not list regular sugar/ Medium sugar /Extra sugar/Extra super Diabeetus sugar. If you watch the cash register when you order a coffee you will see the coffee droid press the Sugar button with a fix amount of sugar 1 2 3 4 5 6 sugars normally, I’ve seen these go higher. For the poor souls that do not know this system and ask for extra extra sugar they normally get this in there coffee!
There maybe a dunkin donuts under that pile! After they get a bulldozer to check where it is .
Honey Dew on the other hand 95% of the time they are fairly good repulsing the Brimley god away, Even asking for extra sugar the does not quake with the Eventual resurrection of the Brimley god. On a rare occasion at honey dew though you will get a new worker that makes the mistake of it but they are whipped tortured and appeased to the brimley god so he does not rise. My only problem with honey dew these days is travel time. I walk or ride my bike so its a little bit of a huff to get to my preferred coffee. Though my bike was just stolen not too long ago. So my options are not really that great right now due to limited travel and health issues and being disabled does not help me get a bike .
Starbucks ….. Is …. Special , there is no way about this, they are just damn special. The last time I attempted getting coffee from there was a failure on all levels. Ten monkeys on miralax had a better chance of getting my coffee, I walked in thinking hey no line, A guy working on a particle physics book and 5 workers…. I thought to myself “this just might work” The person in front of me ordered a simple coffee and I thought this will be quick. I have no idea of the mental breakdown between five workers and two customers could reach critical mass this easy. So after standing around watching these coffee baristas in action, THis is where all things started going down hill. Out of the 5 coffee droids 4 had short outs and the register droid was broken as well. The order was made and from Cashout to coffee serve was longer than 10 minutes. I have never seen so many question in my life about an order and I tried to be patient. While Starbucks is a bit higher in price i was ready to pay the premium to avoid Dunkin Gonuts. Wrong move there, I should of just rolled around in coffee grinds while forcing K-cups into my eyes. I ended up leaving ten minutes into this exorcize of watching how coffee is made by professionals.
This was the final straw, I’ve gone to making my own iced coffee. Sure it has a learning curve, but the money savings are excellent. In 3 weeks i’ve only bought myself coffee outside the house 2 times and both were goooooood.
You can make your coffee any damn way you want it . Even if you want nuclear death coffee or coffee that you can mess with genetics with and rewrite the base of the universe. Overall i’ve spent 10 dollars on making my own coffee and its worked out really well. I keep perfecting my coffee to the taste i want. which is pretty much Stronger than all of the coffee shops aaround without tasting like burnt donkey ass (starbucks) Coffee Flavored Water (dunkin) Or A fairly ok Coffee for day to day that i miss (Honey Dew) . But the savings are extreme by making your own coffee…. I’ve likely been saving somewhere around 5$ a day by avoiding coffee shops.
Note: this post was made at 4:30, I’m half brain-dead.
With a new place to live i am testing more ways to make coffee and trying to replicate drinks from coffee places and see what I can come up with. I have pretty much nailed down iced coffee to perfection of what i want.
In two and a half weeks my wallet is also noticing that i am saving money on my attempt to make my own coffee, From my own math so far in 2.5 weeks if i had gone to a store for coffee everyday I would of spent over 70.40 in coffee , Thats fucking insane, Since I’ve started this i’ve spent less than 15$ for coffee and still have half a bag left.
I am curious to see where this goes and see how much of a savings there is by the 21st of this month… Lets see…
Coffee post to follow up shortly!
The price of coffee and you.
About 3 years ago the price of coffee went up in all the coffee places around, which was understandable due to the market price of coffee went through the fucking roof. now that the markets are going back up yet again chains are putting there coffee prices slightly higher, the problem is the prices never went back down when the price of coffee (commodity) went down.
Yes the prices have jumped for year 2014 but look at the price in 2011 , we should of seen a decrease in those prices. I know someone will say BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE OTHER PRICES. Oil has stayed somewhat stable but what ever the fuck they do to increase on that is always a mystery, its like someone goes “SHIT the suns out SOMEONE INCREASE GAS PRICES QUICK!” . Milk prices are slightly up and there is a multitude of reasons for that that could get its own post, but considering the milk to coffee ratio it would have a lesser effect on the total price.
A lot of the times companies find the easy way to raise the price of things is “insert random thing happening here to a small portion of the total that really doesn’t have on effect on the thing in question”. Bob shit himself again.. RAISE PRICES! of all the times I’ve read about oil refinery fires and how they are going to spike gas prices , doing a little research you find out that said refinery is only responsible for 0.1% of total fuel production, that makes you go WTF are they making there? It seems every other commodity market has gone into the practice of manufactured disasters or some sort of market manipulation to increase prices.
CWT financed ten rounds of herd retirements from 2003 to 2010, during which CWT was responsible for removing over 500,000 cows from production, reducing the nation’s milk supply by approximately 10 billion pounds…. By the end of the program in 2010, it was responsible for a cumulative increase in milk price revenue of $9.55 billion.
That resulted in a class action suit for price fixing. Since its not about supply and demand, its more over about money and more money. So at this point I’ll stick to making my coffee at home.
Wells Fartgo and the idoits who run it and shake down old people.
It’s been awhile since i have typed up something on here and I’ve made it a point to catch up and get something on here. I’ve been dealing with a mortgage company from hell or pretty close to it and, it does take a lot of time. I’ve tried to reason with this company , I’ve tried pleading , I’ve even tried to get them to realize this mortgage was flawed from the inception. It’s gone to the point of throwing lawyers at the bank and seeing if they will listen, Ironically they are trying to play deaf, dumb and, blind to said lawyers. Rather than replying to any request the lawyer sends out they in turn reply to us and try to scare the hell out of the people in this house by sending people to “check if the property is occupied” it is alright.
The first instance of these so called inspectors ended up with a man trespassing on to the property and recanting on how he “beat his son and went to jail for breaking his arm”. he’d also went on about responsibilities and such to my mother, I was not home at the time and It only was made known a few days later to me. Now fuckstick stuff like that and being a representative of a large company hiring thugs sounds like something out of a movie plot that Brian De Palma would direct. That said alone it is a threatening posture to take . he Was told to leave the property and while being told he continued to keep taking pictures of the yard inside the yard and inside the garage. Now I don’t take nicely to people trespassing on my property nor masked threats, You don’t treat people like they are shit nor to you recant your life as a criminal when you’re representing a company. Calls to wells fargo went unanswered or passed off to different departments, and treated as if it did not happen.
The Second incident took place Not more than a month later. Again a person trespassed into the yard and was either looking around or otherwise , When confronted he went to his car and sat in the car with the windows up, when confronted the person would not identify who they are and what they were doing. After a momment that person put down there window and said “HI” and than pulled out almost hitting the person trying to get some identification from this person to who and what they were doing, since all they leave on the house is an envelope with a phone number in it. unknown to asshat whom almost hit someone he has been caught on camera and pictures exist of the incident.
I was livid and called the number in the envelope and asked when since wells fargo was trying to corner the market on murder, to which the person said sorry and said there was nothing that could be done since it was a third party , My ass…. They are hired by wells fargo and they control what these little droids do. Its nothing short of bullying and scare tactics in order to scare the people whom have mortgages with the company, I’ve fought my way through this and if i even started on the fraud that wells fargo has done I’d have to rename this site Wellfargofraud.net.
It has got to the point where if i call my own mortgage company they will not talk to me in ANY details about anything other than pay us money , if you want information from us its Subpoena only. I was forced on to the mortgage, I was defrauded on the Initial application and since 2008 I’ve been trying to confront this issue to which wells fargo(wacovia) has categorically ignored any and all communication from me and will only talk to my mother. to this end I’ve sacrificed almost any credit i have in order to keep this house due to this scam of a loan. Wells Fargo/Wachovia/World Financial has got away with defrauding almost every American out there and with the foreclosure fraud settlement they have basically got away with murder without as much as a slap on the wrist. 36 billion is a drop in a bucket the size of china when it comes to how much they have invested into derivatives / oil / securities and everything else.
I could write all the issues i’ve been having in this post but I think I’d overrun the internets bandwidth in doing so with this company and how they treat people. So I will save it for another couple of posts….
Hey AT&T would you quit blowing smoke up peoples asses… I mean really…
I’ve been passively watching the attempted merger of T-Mobile & AT&T , but what they are saying would make someone more angry than the hulk on crack. They keep saying this merger will create jobs and to a tune of 100,000 jobs and that’s a right out lie. The point of a merger is to combine ones interest and take the brand over to make it there own. In this video AT&T is claiming that 96,000 jobs will be created. What?
By the two companies merging there will be overlap of positions, overlap of coverage , overlap of just about everything and logically there’s no reason to keep employees on the company that your merging, Logistically if AT&T blowing smoke out there ass since T-mobile USA supposedly employs over 40,000 people. if this counts all the store droids in all the malls and mobile stores is a good question. but how is this going to create these jobs. Since this is a narrow field there is going to be a huge amount of overlap.
in malls you would have AT&T stores next to new acquired AT&T stores that were formally T-mobile. in all over time the parent company would see no use to having these stores together, and likely break lease and fire all employees, While AT&T is playing the “hot” card for job creation when you look at the big picture- the jobs lost while likely have a big effect on what jobs are created. There are other things in play , AT&T is generally regarded by some as terrible, the T-mobile customer base will erode on acquisition, Also the longer this merger stays in limbo the more damage that’s done to T-mobile and to an effect I think AT&T likes it because , if the company goes critical they will *Sweep* in and be the *her0* .
If there is any job creation at all it will be skilled labor and not sales force that will be VERY temporary at best. Retail locations might get held for a short time to fluff the books on saying they “Created” jobs and as soon as the merger is complete most of these employees will be laid off. With the limited pool of jobs in these companies it will likely be a clusterfuck of lay-offs as soon as the ink dries.