She is going to continue the TP USA grift thing. Saved you a click.

*exabyte

If you do the one million terabytes thing, you have to do an evil laugh after you say it. It’s mandatory.

That comment needs a top hat and a monocle.

You mean WALL-E wasn’t real?

LPT: You can usually search the barcodes online and get an answer. Not always, but sometimes.

Allergies are a very real thing but so are Facebook hypochondriacs. Some marketing departments have little regard for either and will gladly label their products gluten free if it turns a higher profit. I had an online gaming companion that bought into the bullshit so hard, he was convinced a gluten free diet was curing his sons severe autism. Sigh.

I am bitching because the people that actually have issues always get left behind.

I doubt he got bored. That mechanical hand probably felt like someone else’s until the nerves fully adjusted.

After digging a little, I think I found the start of an answer to this. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that saline solution contains sodium chloride. (Basically table salt.) In some cases, there is a small risk of gluten cross-contamination in that salt which may lead to some irritation for people who are extremely gluten intolerant.

This research path immediately opened up a mess of search results that I have no interest in digging through and fact checking.

Based on some of those search results though, I would speculate that there may have been some kind of overblown social media scare about gluten in salt and some companies just started categorizing eyedrops as gluten free.

Then, most importantly, I lost interest in this topic. Cheers!

Not surprising when you have closed architecture and have no problems replacing your entire system for any kind of an upgrade.

Raw performance comparisons between something like a Ryzen 9 and Apple silicon is misleading. It’s not wrong nor is it a “scam”, it’s just not taking many important differences into account.

(The correctly used double negative was confusing for me at first, btw.)

You make a very interesting point I haven’t ever thought about before.

While I have always considered myself a patriot to a mild degree, I never associated it with tribalism directly. Even with the many faults of all countries, it’s OK to be proud of where you are from. (It does make perfect sense that tribalism is the end goal of state sponsored patriotism though.)

In my mind, the fine line after patriotism was usually nationalism where tribalism runs deep and hate-based rhetoric becomes extremely effective. The definition of a patriot is somewhat twisted at that point. (ie: unless you believe [insert something random], you aren’t actually a patriot and therefore an enemy of the state.)

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with you, btw. Your perspective is something interesting to think about, s’all. (I am leaning on the agreement side, FWIW.)

(For the people reading this that may not realize that I am using the word “nationalism” in a negative context, I am. If that chaps your hide still, replace it with ‘christian nationalism’ or ‘white nationalism’ and fuck off. Everyone else, sorry for the disclaimer.)

I miss my old Hondas. All of 'em. I had a '94 Accord, a '99 Accord, a '03 Civic, a '03 CRV, a '13 Accord Touring and now a '23 Accord Touring. I had a 2003 Mercedes C230 that was a very quick fling, but we don’t talk about that. (I have already started talking to a few dealers for dibs on a '26 Accord Touring.)

The 1994-2003’ish generation Accords were super easy to work on, less a few quirky things. I still keep a Honda crank shaft bolt tool in my toolbox for nostalgia reasons, actually. My 99 4-cyl Accord was the car I used to learn how to rebuild engines and it was super forgiving with any mistakes. (It was running with half a valve somehow, but that was pre-existing and something I discovered prior to me breaking other things.)

You can try some Fiverr witches if you feel like taking a gamble. There was a scandal or two because of that knockoff mugwort they like to use, but in this economy I can’t really blame them for pinching pennies.

It’s “cheaper” from a margin perspective. They can still apply a standard margin on the milk and have the price be less because of the ~500% markup on the sodas. (Admittedly, you have to twist your brain a little to think this corporate accounting is the slightest bit logical.)

If they applied the same margin to the milk, people would go batshit crazy.

But to clarify, I was initially assuming these were school style boxed milks where the raw costs could be comparable. The actual reason the milk is cheaper was price fuckery.

The margin difference is significant when you factor in the retail price of the soda is $2.59 and the retail price of the milk at $1.50.

Culvers can’t pull off a 500% margin with the milk like they do with the soda and likely uses a standard margin of about 20%-25% which still comes out cheaper than a soda. (I have no idea what their margins are, so just guessing.)

I just edited the post above after I did a price check. The retail price of the milk was more than a dollar cheaper and the milk is likely going to be even cheaper due to wholesale pricing and less delivery risk.

Now the question is, why only a $0.31 discount?

It depends on the serving of milk. If it’s a larger sized milk or juice, it’s going to be more expensive like you say. If it’s a school sized box, the total cost should be much less. Small drink boxes can be had for < $0.20 wholesale depending on your location, which should challenge the total cost of a fountain drink. (Total cost is raw materials + employee time + delivery overhead and other factors.)

There isn’t a specific source for this other than googling a bit for wholesale school milk prices. The rest is just estimates for normal business and delivery overhead.

Edit: I saw the size of the milk you just posted for another comment. The cheapest retail price I saw for that was $1.50. Locally, the cost of a Culvers fountain drink is $2.59 for me.

Prepackaged kids drinks like milk or apple juice should be slightly lower in cost, take less time to include with a meal and are less prone to spillage in transit. The total cost for delivery is going to win even if the raw cost for the beverage is similar. (Milk and apple juice boxes are likely near zero profit and is already manufactured at brain numbing scales for schools already.)

Edit: OP just posted a picture of the milk and it isn’t school box sized. I did some price checks and the milk a dollar cheaper at retail pricing. ($1.50 vs $2.59)

The required drink is at a fixed base price. The price difference is because those drinks are cheaper, not healthier. (They likely come pre-boxed which likely reduces overall cost.)

Sugar-milk health benefits are probably subject to debate and apple juice is basically sugar water.

This is an interesting problem, for sure. Sticking with open source/open platforms and staying away from closed ecosystems is a good direction to start in.

If a product line requires its own hub and proprietary software, try and steer clear of it. Hue lights are an interesting example as, IMHO, their smart lights are some of the best on the market. However, you are tied into using their apps and hub to get 100% functionality. (Much of their API is accessible via third parties and the balance of open vs closed is tolerable enough for me.)

Home Assistant is probably going to be your best start as control software. This will naturally push you in the direction of getting hardware that is usually open source and designed with Home Assistant in mind. (There are still privacy drawbacks to HA in some cases, but that is very use case specific.) Since HA is open source, developers tend to rely more on open source hardware.

If you must integrate with closed(ish) ecosystems like Samsung, Amazon or Google, never use their hub or software as a primary management system. What I mean is that you can use their hub to relay commands from HA, but turn off, disable or misconfigure features that are platform specific and you may never need. (The goal is identity places where a big provider would harvest data and not give it data to harvest from your HA system while also attempting to reduce failure conditions that might be introduced by having multiple, “primary” control systems.)

I am sorry for generalizing most of this when you asked a very specific question, but home automation is very much a “build your own adventure” kind of situation. Especially on the open source and privacy-awareness side of it, you are going to need to dig in and research each product you are interested in.

Start learning communication protocols, hardware types and how to read source code now, btw. Home automation is an excellent way to jump into the deep end of hardware + software development.

Edit: My lessons learned:

1. Open source products/projects may not stay open source or may have open functionality reduced. Samsung SmartThings has been a rollercoaster in this regard. Chamberlain is an example where they cut off their open API completely. Open products that convert to closed should be regarded as a privacy threat: When a product is monetized, so is your data.

2. Stay away from fly-by-night products on Amazon. Super cheap products from rando brands that leverage usually custom phone apps tend to get abandoned and may have critical bugs that are never resolved and may end up only being useful as botnet endpoints. (Shit IoT products can be nasty security threats as they tend to be placed inside private networks.)

3. Study new products and vendors you plan on adding to your network. Setting up your own DNS server and transparent proxy to record all Internet calls for a couple of weeks is a good option. Learn those products from the inside out: What chipsets do they use? Is their firmware open and regularly updated? What is the community reputation? Etc, etc.

4. Home automation is a “long game” hobby. Sure, you can setup something that works over the course of a few weeks, but plan on slow changes over years. From a privacy perspective, see item 1 as software tends to morph over time.

In a direct answer to your question, no. Dialing is usually automated and it will route a call to an “operator” only if it’s successful and you answer the call. The ratio of calls to actual scammers could probably be 100:1 or even 1000:1. We simply don’t know what call volume different scammer call centers are capable of.

Also, the scammers could be targeting a specific age group or geolocation for one reason or another. This may cause daily or weekly fluctuations in call volumes. Scam call centers may run multiple scams resulting in several calls from the same place, but just from different phone numbers.

It may be possible to collect call back numbers for one or two places and you could call back multiple times and attempt to take a rough survey of how many different people might answer. In many cases, scammers work using a hand-off system where the first operator will bait the person before handing them off to a “manager” to complete the scam. From this, you could get a rough idea of the worker hierarchy at a particular place which may help identify how many people are working.

Even with that local information, you probably couldn’t get a global picture.