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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • For me it was performance. Google Chrome consistently couldn’t handle the tab loads I would put on it after around 2022, despite my computer not really showing signs of degradation.

    Since switching to FF, I can run the same amount of tabs with almost not hiccups or stuttering - what I’d experience with Chrome. Hell, Chrome would crash randomly and I’d lose all my tabs and would have to reload them.

    Plus, sometimes to fix Chrome’s poor performance I’d shut the program down entirely, upon re-launch the browser wouldn’t even remember all of the tabs/windows I just closed (it used to). So, if I was doing research on something, Chrome would just not open certain windows back up after a hard reset, even if I CTRL + SHIFT + T and I check history. Madly infuriating.

    FF opens all windows and tabs upon hard reset, no questions asked. Plus, the compatibility between PC and mobile is awesome: I can load up a tab from my phone that’s on my PC super easily, which makes things useful for when I want to share web content with friends or family.

    I seem to have woken up from my slumber of tolerating Chrome, and chose a better service instead.















  • Huh, weird. The Twitch chats I hang out with and I tend to use “parasocial” as a term in which people develop a relationship with others that people haven’t really seen or spoken to. I’ve seen them and myself use the term to talk about how chats have relationships with streamers themselves, which aligns with your definition, but I’ve also seen it used between Internet users that have minimal interaction with others aside from texting.

    I’ve made friends online via Xbox that I have on other social media and that know my face/voice/background, but I try to secure more of my anonymity these days. I wouldn’t consider those relationships as parasocial, but in some ways, depending on how the relationship evolves and grows or decays over time, I’d say they dip in and out of being parasocial and tangible.

    Perhaps parasocial might be better thought of as a class of relationships people share that are digital and that don’t manifest IRL in any meaningful ways (excluding face/voice/identity).

    Maybe the idea I’m getting at here has a term coined for it already. I’d be willing to change my vocabulary if you suggest something!



  • It all depends on the cost of living relative to the wages accrued. Often wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, so people feel more and more that the deal with their employers gets worse and worse. Someone earning 200k/year might be living the same as someone working 60k/year depending on where those people live

    Now, there is something to be said about why cost of living should vary from place to place. Part of it is scarcity of habitation: if there aren’t very many available flats or lots, there might be fierce competition for people to fill what flats or lots do become available. Supply and demand.

    Other aspects might be debt accrued by businesses that they pass on to their customers, externalities like wars or laws, etc.

    I also want to point out that a lot of people associate more wealth with more consumption, so you might see people rise to spend all of the new resources they accumulate rather than securitizing and saving that wealth for unforeseen events. Lots of people consume at terribly non-sustainable rates, and there should be conversations about what effects behaviors can have on the world, outside of the economy.


  • There was a phenomenon in the US labor market during 2022/2023 called “quiet quitting” where laborers across the market realized that companies weren’t paying wages adequately or to a level that reflected the kind of work laborers would perform.

    It was thought that companies paid their workers short of what the workers are owed, and in response to that, a large number of people, many trending young, started behaving according to those wages.

    This often meant reducing work speed or efficiency, reducing communication, etc. Laborers would claim that they were doing the bare minimum to match their wage compensation.

    The other side of this is that the US labor market at that time favored laborers over companies. Workers had more leverage about getting job offers and negotiating terms than companies had, partly due to a rebound from COVID.

    This meant that there wasn’t as much of an anxiety of workers being fired from their position since they would find it easy to get another job. So people did look for other jobs, often while working, to see if they might improve their circumstances and land a job that pays better.

    The “quiet” part was about sliding back on performance or even job tasks themselves, and the “quitting” part was about workers possibly leaving companies for other offers.

    I might have conflated The Great Resignation with this, but both phenomena affect the other.