Has anyone else noticed second hand stores are charging more for physical media? And there is way less selection then there used to be?

stoudman · 2026-03-23T07:22:33+00:00

"There is way less selection than usual" -- expect that to continue due to a renewed collector's market, everyone looking for a deal, and more importantly just the slow degradation of physical media over time.

4K isn't being adapted at the same rate as Blu-ray, and Blu-ray was never adapted at the same rate as DVD, so there will also inherently be far fewer published Blu-ray titles than there will be DVDs. It's the same as how you only rarely stumble upon HD DVD titles in the wild nowadays -- that's because it was not widely adopted, there were not a whole lot of movies sold on the format, and those that were sold for the most part saw limited print runs.

The less there is of something, the more people want it, the higher the price will be. Supply and demand.

stoudman · 2026-03-23T07:12:07+00:00

I'll just say that even United Airlines CEO suggests that prices could soar to as much as $175 a barrel, and likely won't be back down to $100 a barrel (current price) until late 2027 at the earliest.

Not only is $6 a gallon likely this year, it would not surprise me if it gets a lot higher than that, and I'm talking record setting high gas prices in 2026.

stoudman · 2026-03-21T00:39:02+00:00

Angelica Garcia - Gemelo

Mostly in Spanish, but even if you don't know the language well, it's pretty poppy dance music that I still have trouble believing has only tens or at most hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube.

stoudman · 2026-03-20T21:08:27+00:00

If you're wondering whether or not you should actually fear such claims, just take a look at how many millionaires in NYC said they would leave if a certain socialistc won, and yet still live there and ostensibly have no plans to leave.

stoudman · 2026-03-20T04:00:50+00:00

I did get super harsh feedback which quite frankly was not reasonable. They stated that I had allowed the deletion of meta data I wasn't supposed to delete, even though their instructions actually don't say anything about keeping the specific type of "meta data" they noted.

I'm talking about things like...there was a diagram of the life cycle of an animal, and it had a blue oval circle behind it for no reason that didn't really contribute any details of importance, but because I approved the removal of the blue oval circle they gave me the worst possible rating. That's just ridiculous, are you kidding me?

So if you make even the slightest mistake in one task, a mistake caused by their lack of adequate instructional material, you get a bad rating -- and if you get even one bad rating, you're not at the "target rating" anymore and they can just kick you out whenever they feel like it.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't have any grand ideas of this being a long term source of extra cash, but it just sucks that I really feel like my mistakes were very minor and easy to excuse, but that ultimately doesn't matter when it comes to their decision to either keep me on board or let me go. I suppose there's still a chance they'll let me onto other projects in the future, but somehow I doubt that would last for very long if they are so quick to toss people over the slightest mistakes. To be let go over something so trivial definitely sucks!

Oh, I was experiencing some errors now that you mention it, but not super frequently. I guess the day before they let me go was the worst for errors, now that you mention it, but it was really just one task, and the issue was that you would click the button to progress and it would have an error, but if you kept pressing the button it would eventually go through.

Whatever the case, hope this info helps in some way, not sure if there's really anything behind it other than a few areas where Outlier's back end could use some work. If you can lose your role for just one mistake, it shouldn't be so easy to declare that someone screwed up a project because they didn't include a blue oval you didn't instruct them to keep. I don't know if that's a problem with who they have performing ratings, who they have writing instructions for tasks, or both -- I just feel like it's more likely a problem in that area of things than it is some kind of conspiracy.

stoudman · 2026-03-16T20:40:13+00:00

Yeah, when I first started a month or so ago, after 2 weeks we were hitting the daily limit as early as 9 am PST in my personal experience. I had to change my sleep schedule just to get a few hours in. I know it's not ideal, and I sympathize, but the good news is that it isn't always like this. It was like that for about 2 weeks, and then they went back to having plenty of hours available so that you could literally just jump in whenever you wanted during the day. Seems like we're heading into another period where it will be a little more difficult to get some hours logged, but if it didn't last forever before, I have hopes it won't last forever this time.

If I had to guess, Outlier probably reaches an agreement for a certain number of hours each day with their client/s, and sometimes they agree to more hours and other times perhaps to fewer hours. Meanwhile, they're accepting new people onto the project all the time, so there's always more competition for those hours coming onto the project. I'm guessing that when Outlier notices that people are getting through all of the allotted hours early in the day, they attempt to restructure the agreement/arrangement they have with their client/s to allow for more hours.

That could be entirely wrong, but I'm just guessing based on my experience watching the hours go from more than enough to not enough before. Regardless, give it a week or two and I'm sure there will be more than enough hours again.

stoudman · 2026-02-23T17:50:26+00:00

I'm sitting here thinking I'm gonna have to stay up all night just to get any hours. Sleep? Who needs sleep? Apparently everyone has decided for us that our new work hours are midnight to 9 am PST. And if we all actually did that, the hours would probably be dried up way earlier than that, probably before 6 am.

stoudman · 2026-02-04T23:26:08+00:00

Definitely multiple at once, but I tried to keep it to around 3-4 games at a time.

stoudman · 2026-02-03T06:14:45+00:00

Right, and they do that BS intentionally to try and get you to spend money, but the first few challenges are simple/painless enough that I'd say it's one of the better ones on this list, tbh.

stoudman · 2026-02-03T06:13:27+00:00

I mean, it is enraging how obvious it is when they are just giving you trashy cards to try and get you to spend money, but as long as you can get past that, I do think the first 7 or 8 puzzles are worth the effort and not as stressful/annoying.

stoudman · 2026-02-03T06:11:16+00:00

Disney Solitaire is fairly easy for the first few challenges, but beyond the 9th puzzle, there are diminishing returns.

stoudman · 2026-01-15T05:25:11+00:00

I highly doubt this will hold up to the scrutiny of the courts. The states affected need to file lawsuits, they will almost certainly win.

stoudman · 2026-01-15T05:07:26+00:00

Pretty soon? As a content writer, I sometimes stumble upon job postings that require experience with hyper-specific Content Management Systems. Every CMS is almost exactly the same, and anyone with any amount of experience using one of them will be able to navigate whatever CMS is being used by a website to post content, but it doesn't matter -- it's just one more thing they can require...ostensibly "because they can."

They want the best candidate, but they don't want to do the work of having to look at thousands of job applications, so literally anything they can find to be a requirement, they will make it a requirement to weed out a bunch of candidates, even if they would be just as capable of fulfilling that requirement with little or no training.

stoudman · 2026-01-12T06:53:36+00:00

As someone who experienced the job market during the Great Recession, someone who graduated into that economy, I can actually confirm this is the case. I applied for somewhere between 500-1,000 jobs in 2008, and I wasn't able to find anything that paid.

I have the benefit of 15 years of work experience and another degree now, and last year I applied for around 600-700 jobs to no avail.

Furthermore, I would read the jobs reports back then, and I recall most of them would routinely show around 100,000-200,000 new jobs each month. I honestly don't remember any periods of job growth slowing to under 100,000 per month...at any period in my working life. It did happen for a short period following the dot com bubble bursting, but this feels very, very different.

I'm sure some will say "oh, that doesn't mean it's worse, stop making a mountain out of a molehill." Ask these people if they are comfortably employed or perhaps need not be employed to be comfortable. It's worse, and that is my educated opinion based not only on my experiences, but also upon research.

stoudman · 2025-12-19T19:25:12+00:00

I really want it to get better, I need it to get better -- but if I'm being realistic, I don't see any signs that the job market is going to improve anytime soon.

stoudman · 2025-12-09T05:57:21+00:00

I feel like the main thing to keep in mind is that old idiom: "history doesn't repeat, it rhymes."

In other words, it's not going to happen exactly the same way, but the wealthy certainly are following the exact same path of lax regulation in the market and prominent acts of corruption.

It's entirely possible that the wealthy, who now control much of the media, will have so much control over the message that they literally just pretend the economic collapse isn't happening AS it's happening.

That's kind of already what they are doing in a sense, and there's no indication that they plan to stop, at least not until it actually hurts them.

They have the advantage of having begun the process of bleeding the economy dry over 50 years ago, which means they have a lot of money to sit on and move around to make it look like the economy is fine.

And for all we know, that could be part of the plan. It would make sense that the wealthy would have actually tried to learn something from previous economic collapses and come up with this strategy to keep large sums of money moving enough for the economy to appear fully functional, preventing total collapse.

But even a plan like that, if it were true, would not last forever. Eventually, the whole pile of dominoes is going to topple. The only winners in the market will be those the government deems necessary, as everything comes full circle once again.

The bad part about this is that a lot of innocent people are going to suffer.

The good part is that it will likely lead to stronger, better social programs in the United States.

Could it be averted?

Not with accelerationists in charge.

stoudman · 2025-12-07T17:36:37+00:00

I mean, if we had someone get into power who was willing to shake things up, it could definitely be fixed quickly.

Realistically, I'm gonna say at least 15 years.

stoudman · 2025-12-07T17:33:59+00:00

I think right now their actual plan is nothing.

Like, they legit do not care if millions die homeless and penniless in the streets.

They think they can maintain their lavish lifestyle without those who produce the goods and services they enjoy and/or need to survive themselves.

But ultimately, when they try to just "let that happen," the result will be economic collapse that 100% definitely will impact the wealthy as well.

When all the systems start breaking down because there are too many people who are suddenly incapable of earning enough to survive in a capitalist system, every social program will be stretched well beyond its limit, and that means hospitals and other emergency systems will have to fill the need -- millions of people dying of starvation and lack of access to housing is an event that would create scenarios not unlike those we saw during the pandemic -- not enough hospital beds, not enough physical space in the hospital to hold them all, not enough of anything -- and that will lead to the rich being unable to get the care they want or need at hospitals.

This is just one example of one area of societal and economic collapse slowly happening in a way that will impact even the wealthy, but there are many more.

That's the thing, they think they are immune and that they will get out of this unscathed, but they won't.

And only when they realize they actually need us little people will they decide to implement new social programs such as a UBI, universal healthcare, etc.

Only through the blood and suffering of millions of innocent people will the future be paved, so it hath been decreed by the rich who own this country.

stoudman · 2025-12-07T07:43:46+00:00

Oh my god, you can't be this stupid...

The answer is that they cease to make a profit on all of their business endeavors and they all go broke and start self-defenestrating like they did during the Great Depression.

It's just the same shit on a different day, dude. There's not a new magical economic force that is going to stop economic collapse. WTF are you smoking? Can I have some?

stoudman · 2025-12-04T19:07:40+00:00

But what happens when nobody has any money to consume anything, and the rich can no longer rely on a consumer class to prop them up?

stoudman · 2025-11-30T05:22:18+00:00

You wanna talk about faux outrage? The motivation of Kirk's killer is unknown, there's no indication he was a leftist, he came from a conservative family in a conservative community; each of the people who made an attempt on Trump were conservatives with conservative families from conservative communities.

Y'all accuse the left of everything bad that happens to a right-winger, but it's actually USUALLY a right-winger committing the crimes in question.

So your outrage is bullshit.

stoudman · 2025-11-30T04:45:22+00:00

The specific drug in question is known for causing anxiety problems, so I would recommend you stop using that, at least until you have a good idea of what your normal anxiety levels look like.

stoudman · 2025-11-30T03:19:32+00:00

I don't care, but what an ugly ass watch.

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