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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • They’re processed, yes. The corn is milled, pressed into triangles, coated with preservative-heavy flavor powder and cooked in one order or another, possibly repeatedly.

    What makes it ULTRA processed?

    Frickin… most raw potatoes are “processed” because they’re typically not covered in topsoil when they get put in 5lb plastic bags.

    A grass-fed organic, antibiotic free, roaming free-range massaged poterhouse steak is “processed” because it’s not still attached to the cow.

    I’m trying to understand the definition, here. Almost everything is processed to some degree or another.

    Is white flour ultra processed because they bleach and de-hull the wheat berries? Or only when it’s made into cake flour? Or do both of those count as “processed” and only “cake MIX” counts as “ultra processed”?

    Am I making sense?


  • Do they?

    I don’t even know what an “ultra processed food” •IS•.

    How is it different than the “processed cheese product” that passes for most individually wrapped “American cheese” cheese slices? Or is that ultra processed?

    Are Doritos ultra processed or just the regular kind of processed?

    Which kind of ground beef qualifies for “ultra”? Only the pink slime or anything that’s been chemically treated?

    I’m not being a pedantic contrary asshat, I legitimately do not know what qualifies something to be in this category and why it’s worse than normal processing.

    Bpa from plastic tubing used in the processing of Annie’s organic leeched into the food. Is that considered contamination or a side effect of processing?



  • I personally felt like it was a reference to the complete lack of corporate loyalty to it’s employees.

    It’s hard to have a “career” in the classical sense the way my 90 year old grandparents did.

    You can still choose a field of work and if you’re lucky you’ll get to stay in it for most of your adult life, but between outsourcing in IT, fields being made redundant as technology advances/changes (from cashiers and retail to journalism and marketing, accounting, and phone work) and whole fields of manufacturing work getting shipped overseas, the number of lifelong fields of work available is rapidly shrinking, facing fierce competition for jobs, and becoming a moving playing field faster than most people can retrain for.

    “HR” jobs could get halved or more with chatbots providing benefits and payroll adjustment information. “Big data” is doing most of the “market research” that advertisers handled manually 30 years ago.

    Big money is still trying to sell us the “career” dream because it leads to the school loan debt they feed off of and temporarily gluts fields with workers to reduce salaries, but only a few handfuls of fields of work really have “career” style options anymore.

    I took it not as an insult to the people trying to have one, but as disdain and disgust at how the word gets bandied about like so much bait on a hook when the reality is fastly becoming far different for the 20- and 30- somethings of today.

    That might be just me being both charitable and jaded, though.







  • I’ve clicked on ads “plenty of times” on purpose.

    Probably a half dozen a year at one point.

    There was a period of time where some sites I visited hit the sweet spot of only using advertisers that were moderately relevant to the content or to similar interests that people who would be perusing that content might have.

    If the ads are for things I might be interested in, I’ll click.

    It’s utterly shocking that with as much as most service providers and companies actually know about the average person that we’ve so thoroughly failed to target ads at people.

    Couple that with ads being an occasional attack vector because nobody properly vets shit anymore and it’s not worth it to whitelist most sites in my adblocker unless I’m REALLY interested in supporting them.

    I avoid YouTube and that sort of stuff like the plague unless I need to repair an appliance or a car or something, so outside of text ads, the only ads I regularly see anymore are the occasional totally irrelevant commercial on a streaming service.

    Once upon a time Hulu let you PICK what kind of ads you wanted to see, which was the tiniest of baby steps in the right direction.

    We had the potential to drill down, do the hard work, and provide relevant, interesting, and specific ads, and the corporate fuckis at the top chose greed.

    I almost feel bad for people who work in advertising.

    A few of them.

    Maybe.


  • What do you use now?

    I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

    Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.