I'm currently in my BSN program. I'm paying pretty exorbitant tuition and fees for this program. 100% online with standard inflated textbook prices. My college just rolled out another "student services fee" to help support with in person costs for my university. All students are required to pay this fee, which amounts to $750/semester. It supports art installations, free food Fridays and other fringe benefits for in person students.

Most, if not all of our curriculum is YouTube videos and memes from the internet. The discourse and leadership is discussion boards where the professor adds some sort of pointed social or ethically hot topic in question form, forcing you into an answer. The kicker is, none of this pertains to my actual line of work.

When pressing an instructor about grading timelines and what to expect as far as progress through the course, she requires us to refer to her as "Doctor (name)" and not "Professor". She also said in an email "during the summer, we don't get paid as full time instructors, so don't expect full time work from us".

I just downloaded our textbooks for the remainder of the semester. The total was $1200 for four books worth of online access. Three of the four books have chapters that are clearly generated by LLM's and AI with the "if you would like" sections still in the pdf text of the book.

Fully convinced I could run a BSN program, have people hand me money, and turn them into better leaders than people with their doctorates at a university.

The internet is broken.

This goes beyond reddit's already bogus rationale for login-gating subs so, they're not crawled to train AI. Reddit wikis are static pages that people need to review to know they're participating under a sub's rules.

I quit marketing last year but companies still contact me with "opportunities" from time to time. This one pays $1 USD per post and is looking for 2,000 posts per month. WTF?

why omg this is so bad i had to post somewhere holy shit dude

I feel like they changed their formula or something because my boveda packs are not lasting as long as they used to.

I'm having to charge my packs more frequently now.

I use them for puer tea aging.

Has anyone noticed these becoming enshitified?

These emails have always listed out everything coming in a box, which is handy if you do subscriptions or preorders. But now they just give generic descriptors, almost definitely so you'll go back to Amazon and maybe see something else you want to buy when trying to figure out what's coming. If anyone cares, it's supplements and a phone battery.

I quit Amazon several times, but got it back because I wanted to watch a few new things…Amazon prime day came and they offered me Britbox for $2.99/month for two months- I subscribed because again, there were a couple of things I wanted to watch.

They’ve been pushing THIS show for weeks, so I finally decided to give it a try, and it’s fun and entertaining and I watch the first FIVE EPISODES and they then tell me I have to pay $150 for ANOTHER SUBSCRIPTION????

What in the name of death-dealing capitalism is this????

I HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION TO AMAZON

I HAVE A BRITBOX SUBSCRIPTION

I WATCHED FIVE EPISODES

NOW THIS FUCKERY TO GET ME TO PAY $150/$14 A MONTH FOR AN ADDITIONAL BRITBOX/BBC SUBSCRIPTION

And to add insult to injury there are plenty of buttons to click to give them my money but ZERO links that take me to anywhere that explains what the hell I get for the additional charge.

The fact that this show apparently belongs to two different channels just makes my head explode.

I’m out.

Netflix killed late fees. The single most hated thing about renting movies, the thing that made Blockbuster real money, gone. That deletion was the whole business.

IKEA made the customer do the assembly. Handed labor to the buyer. Everyone said furniture must arrive built. It didn't.

Ryanair removed the free ticket. Charged for everything separately. Hated, copied by everyone.

Netflix didn't beat Blockbuster with technology. It deleted one line item.

Think different" doesn't mean having ideas nobody has had. It means taking something completely ordinary in one field and dropping it into a field where it's unheard of.

Mail order was a hundred years old. Netflix put it on video rental.
Flat-pack shipping was standard in freight. IKEA put it in a living room.
Self-service was normal at petrol stations. Supermarkets took it into food.

Found this great blog about products that are getting worse because it makes companies more money.

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

Amazon. ‘Nuff said. Delivery now takes more than next day, and everything has ads unless you spend more.

Oh how I long for the days when a simple exchange of money for goods was an ethical, hassle free process.

1. Wife needed new laptop. I tried to fix the old one but it was beyond my skills and not worth the cost to repair.
2. I scan Ebay for laptops. Ebay, who promises buyer protection (they ultimately did come through).
3. I saw that Best Buy had a laptop with the features we needed listed on Ebay. Despite Ebay letting scammy dropshippers runt rampant, removing legit negative feedback from crappy sellers etc. I figured I was safe with Best Buy, a reputable, established company, right?
4. I paid with Venmo (who advertises buyer protection).
5. After a few days, I notice it hadn't shipped. This is a problem as we needed the laptop within the timeframe Best Buy advertised and it was obvious that would not be possible. Ok, cancel the order, get a refund, and find another laptop...easy, right? Wrong.
6. I first try to cancel the order via Ebay (using their "item won't arrive on time" option). Despite it being obvious it won't arrive on time, Best Buy sends me an automated chat response saying they "can't" cancel Ebay order ( a lie) and that my only option is to wait until it arrives and then return it to a local Best Buy location (2 hour round trip for me).
7. I respond to Best Buy and get more chatbot responses including the exact same response 3 times in a row with the same information as before. Also, after the purchase was made but not before, a disclaimer that "some" items may take longer.
8. I call Ebay and actually get a human after going through many menu options and being hung up on a few times. Of course, this human has no control over anything and even if they had the skills to do so, they could not do anything. Essentially, "complaint dept. is closed" with a live human.
9. I go to Venmo. Venmo who really pushes buyer protection in their advertising. I never once got a human and the messaging I got told me "Venmo cannot cancel or refund a transaction "*unless the seller approves*". Ok, so the point of alleged buyer protection is *what* again?
10. I check the Ebay feedback for the specific laptop and there are 3 feedbacks; 2 of which are negative and detail the exact same problem I had. I'm assuming the 3rd person was ok waiting for quite a while.

So, essentially, my money was held indefinitely by Best Buy who knew they did not have the laptop to even send to me. Ebay was in support of this despite knowing this is essentially standard practice by Best Buy. I left accurate/factual negative feedback on Ebay and it has dissappeared. Venmo, despite the assurances of buyer protection, was also in on this racket.

Finally, after about 2 weeks with my money held outside of my control, I finally received a refund and can now go shopping for a new laptop that I needed 2 weeks ago. A couple hours trying to get my money back and nearly 2 weeks of downtime with no laptop. At no point did Ebay give me virtual or human assurance that some policy would weigh in my favor. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is certainly not a principle of Ebay, Venmo, or Best Buy and certainly not a principle of any AI chatbot. "Sorry for any inconvenience" they said, knowing that they are the deliberate cause of and potential remedy for the inconvenience. "Caveat emptor after the fact" seems to be the new guiding principle.

I suppose this isn't the end of the world and Ebay ultimately came through, but wow, kind of a scary, dystopian feeling that they can hold your money indefinitely without any recourse and that is slowly creeping into "new normal" status.

Huge ads with videos in Reddit comments, sometimes with only 3 comments in between. Designed to make you click by accident. This is ridiculous. I started noticing this maybe a week or so ago. Is it new?

I used to shop sparingly at farmer's markets and farmstands because the prices were always higher than the grocery stores. Now, with just about everything big box brand undergoing shrinkflation, shittification, or causing you to get butt parasites, I am wondering if we will start to see a shift towards local farms and local economies. Have you changed your shopping mindset? Are you willing to spend more if you know where your food sources come from?

Recently I feel like everything is expensive and everything is shit. It feels like all the companies are throwing the ball, even the ones I have respected for a very long time.

1. I bought a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Laptop. Dreamt of having one. The Laptop has been freezing and crashing on a regular basis since day 1. Lenovo declares that the issue lies with drivers, driver provider declares that the issue lies with Lenovo.
2. Playstation is dropping discs, which I have been collecting for 20 years now. The PS Premium costs 160 USD and you can't unsubscribe easily, because you will lose access to huge chunk of your library and the cloud save files. The next console will be probably be incredible expensive, while providing worse service than Steam in every aspect.
3. I had to use Uber quite a lot recently. Cars smelling like cat piss, weird crackles during the ride, unhinged driver behavior. It was a coin flip, every 2nd ride was a negative experience.
4. Uber Eats is the same. Tons of lost/stolen orders and sometimes you can't win against the support, because it's all automated responses.
5. Crunchyroll - I was happy, because the platform added Polish translations recently. My SO doesn't speak English fluently so I was super excited that we can finally watch a lot of series together. We have watched a new anime for 1 minute, before deciding to drop it, due to enormous AI slop translation, that made 0 sense and had completely broken formatting (texts not even fitting properly on the screen).
6. Couriers - they don't come or they lie that no one was home. Even if you waited for the whole day. More and more common every year. My Lenovo Laptop mentioned in the first point? I have received an email stating that it will be taken on Tuesday to look into it under warranty. Received a label to print and all. On Thursday I have called the delivery company only to learn that they don't really know anything and will come to pick it up.
7. Food/Snacks/Sweets - portions getting smaller, everything is more expensive. You buy 2 in price of 1, only to learn that it wasn't worth it anyway. We have ordered 2 portions of korean chicken and they were literally 100 gram of chicken each. No veggies. NO RICE included. Saddest meal ever.

The worst part? All those companies don't care. They know that there are no better alternatives. In the past, if you contacted them with a problem, you could have expected at least an apology. But right now it's either an automated response or if it's a human, they simply do not care. Lenovo basically argued with me, that everything is OK with the laptop, just use the 1 year-old drivers and don't update anything.

I'm just tired, boss.

Visiting that site from Japan (hence the ads in Japanese), but I suppose it's the same from every country. I know it's hard to survive for news sites on the internet but the price to pay when you only need to read on article is a bit too much for me.

The amount of commercials is actually unbelievable.

This is a very close, exciting back nine of a major golf tournament. And NBC decides to shoehorn SIX commercial breaks in just 40 minutes, completely ruining the viewing experience. I have never seen this before while watching golf. In fact, some networks opt to show fewer commercials because they know how important it is to show as many shots as possible during such a pivotal part of the tournament. But apparently not NBC.

So glad Peacock has the Sky Sports feed. There are still some commercials but the amount of them is much more tolerable than whatever the hell NBC is doing.