This is mostly the fault of what people search for.

90% of your average buyers don’t go on shopping sites and search “20W USB-C PD Charger” they go on and search “Samsung S22 charger” or whatever they’ve got.

Sellers are incentivised to design the listings around that, or they simply won’t get the clicks.

Very kind and polite of you

To play the role of the annoying five year old, “And why is that bad?”

That’s part of it, but it’s certainly ALSO a mechanism to encourage people to use an account, or to register if they haven’t, because that’s more trackable and monetisable.

Same reason why when you hit an X post or an Instagram post it normally lets you see a little tease but roadblocks you to sign in as soon as you start scrolling. They want you signed in for their own reasons.

If google wanted, they could implement a range of measures to disincentivise bots, like not counting views apart from signed-in users so there’s less reason for bots to be engaging with the platform, but that also is bad for their ad view monetisation metrics so they surely don’t want to do that. They’d rather inconvenience the user.

She could call her parents on the phone and tell them herself, but she doesn’t want to because she knows it will be a difficult conversation.

Therefore she wants to put that undesirable conversation on bro instead, so she doesn’t have to.

This painting wasn’t done carefully with a brush or roller, it was done by spraying with a jet of paint.

It took them no time at all to paint this, because they just blasted it at the same time they were doing the rest of the wall, without even caring it was there.

What would have taken time would be to try and carefully spray around without getting any paint on it (or the proper solution, to remove it from the wall before painting)

How so?

Combination, right.

Landlord wants the job done fast, meanwhile the contractors know that the landlord isn’t the one actually living there so they can get away with cutting corners.

This increasing trend is extremely annoying.

Several times here in the UK I’ve been trying to reach out to companies I have relationships with (e.g. my phone provider) only to find they want me to DM them on Twitter or Instagram.

There’s no fucking way I’m using some proprietary service to have a convo with my phone company, especially when A) I don’t even have an account on the service and don’t want one and B) the convo will contain info about my phone account and personal info, and no way should I be sharing that over such a channel.

As far as I’m concerned it should be straight up ILLEGAL for companies to offer official contact on big tech platforms, when they have no control over how data in the chat is later used.

If they want to offer online chat, it should be through a third party who does that as their primary business model as a paid service, and can give explicit contractual guarantees on data storage and ownership.

Let’s say the third party lists it for $35.50

Amazon applies a discount of $0.51 cents to bring it under the $35 amount for free shipping.

Someone buys it for/that $34.99 but Amazon still pays the original seller based on the seller’s original listed price.

And so Amazon subsidised it, but still came out net benefit because the amount of the subsidy was less than shipping cost, or less than the price of some other item the customer now had to put in their basket to get over the free shipping threshold again.

Would be nice to see a graph of inflation-adjusted wages at McDonalds between 2014 and now.

I don’t have the data, but I doubt much of this price increase is going into worker’s pockets. It’s profit for CEOs and shareholders.

In the UK where this ticket is from, if you buy a ticket from the machine in the station it will spit it out in potentially multiple parts.

You can see this ticket says “Valid only with Travel Ticket”, which means this is the second of two parts. The " Travel Ticket" (not pictured) is the one that actually allows you to travel on the train, and the reservation part (pictured) is the one that gives you a seat.

So the mystery isn’t that there is no reservation, but that this ticket doesn’t even need to exist without a reservation. The machine could have just not printed this ticket at all.