In retrospect, it’s kind of wild how many of us (myself sadly included) actually believed Google’s “Don’t be evil” thing instead of seeing it as a “My “Not involved in human trafficking” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.” situation.

I vote we give it to PeerTube, video hosting is so resource intensive but there’s so much potential good content to be liberated from YouTube.

I’m a big fan of using those clear plastic soup containers from takeout, if you have them. (I try to avoid plastic where practical, but life happens and they accumulate.) Their transparency means most spiders (or any other creepy crawly I’m trying to gently relocate) don’t see them coming, and their size compared to the target makes for an easy capture job even for fast little critters. Very straightforward solution IME.

Yeah, that tracks.

There is a portion of the population for whom fairly intense pain is not a “when that happened to me” but a “when that happens to me” and it just really results in developing a pain tolerance skill that I don’t think those for whom pain is understood as the occasional discrete injury really get. There are conditions that can cause that to happen to cis men, but it’s less common than for, uh, the entire rest of the population, and so fewer of them have had to develop that skill.

(Also, really glad you were finally able to get the surgery to help!)

My theory is that people who have had to deal with neither menstrual cramps (let alone childbirth) nor the various trials of gender affirming treatments are a lot less likely to have had extensive periods of just having to deal with pain for a long time. Like, maybe they’ve had some injuries, or other brief episodes, but unless they have some other condition like chronic migraines, I think a lot of able-bodied cis men haven’t had to regularly sit with pain and just deal with it.

It’s understandable that this would happen, but extremely frustrating when somehow that becomes the default cultural view and condescending cis men in positions of power get to smugly decide that they’re manly men with great pain tolerance and anyone who complains about pain is surely just being a baby/whiny hysterical woman.

(There is also absolutely a racialized component here where Black and brown folks tend to receive fewer painkillers, which this doesn’t really account for, but this is not meant to be a comprehensive explanation of disparities in pain management in health care, just my theorizing why cis men on average seem to have lower rates of pain tolerance.)

Aw, that’s a way more mundane answer than I was hoping for, but I appreciate you explaining. (And I find myself doubting that it does much to AI scrapers, yes.)

Hang on, you have successfully thorn-baited me. Are you typing them manually or do you have a macro or something swapping them in? For what purpose are you doing this? Give me your villain monologue.

I am a big believer in regulation, and some governments right now are in a position where they can be pressured to take anti-monopoly action against Amazon, which I want very much to see. Being in the U.S. as I am right now, though… There are some state governments I would like to see act (and shout-out to California for doing so here), but I am also brainstorming other nonviolent disruptive action which could be taken, because the federal government right now is actual fascists and Amazon is in league with them.

Frustrating, but I appreciate your answer; thank you.

Why is “(most favored nation status)” in parentheses?

I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.

The other commenters here are right about Amazon’s initial methods, but I’m also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.