I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Burning waste qualifies as recycling.
I used to work for a specialty waste company. We would brag about our ability to recycle better than any of our competitors. Because we would burn most of the waste.
If what is burned is used to creat electricity, then in a way it is recycling. Burning trash isn’t a bad thing if it’s done properly and if what’s burned isn’t otherwise recyclable. Plastics should probably be burned at this point rather than thrown in a landfill or tossed in the ocean.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Electric cars could move back to drum brakes. This would cut down on pollution and save costs.
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Supermarket employee here. We have a “fresh” fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.
Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they’re lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some … people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.
Long story short, “fresh” fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.
Hold up, you mean that market in the middle of nowhere (like Kansas) with “fresh caught” fish was not caught by my local fisherman.
Shocked, I tell you 😂
Oh you’d be surprised … by the way, the same goes for literally everything at the bakery counter. Heard a customer complain once that she won’t ever buy pretzels in the store again because they weren’t actually freshly made, the employees just tossed prepackaged frozen pretzels ino the oven yadda yadda … uhhhm lady, do you really think they’re kneading dough behind the scenes?! Never wondered why your croissants, bread rolls and the like always have the same shape, size and weight? It’s almost as if they were made in a factory or something …
…yet these, too, are treated like first choice over the frozen bread rolls you can bake at home, because “a real baker made them” …
The bakery part hits me especially hard, I’m living in germany, where many people are proud of the bread culture, and you basically need to look for artisan bakeries to get stuff they actually made themselves instead of having frozen stuff delivered and just baked in the store. The saddest part is most people don’t realize, while still writing comments online about how “american bread is just sugar”
Outsourced IT provider here:
90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff’s personal home devices.
The reason they’re not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.
Isn’t password rotation a horrible practice because it makes people use passwords like “MyNewPassword15” since it’s the 15th password reset they’ve been forced to do?
I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.
I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.
No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.
Sounds like they didn’t spend any money on Cyber security’s team to properly implement it then…data exfil %100 would have been picked up by any real DLP solution and even barebones heuristics based EDR would have thrown a red flag as well.
Haha, please. You’re talking about machine learning when the best any business is using is antivirus. You forget, Boomers are still running big business and IT departments are running security.
It’s perfect world vs. real world my dude, and real world puts out tender for the cheapest solution.
It sounds like you’ve been working for Mom and pop shops then, and they’re not having audits done. Companies with millions of customers will usually either have in house secops or an mssp handle everything. Point being is, without audits then insurance usually will not be approved for PII loss or they flat out will not work with the company at all. It even more so with HIPAA laws.
Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.
And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.
I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
