The reality is they may not know exactly what was obtained, but they do know it wasn’t anything they don’t collect (like DOB, SSN, etc listed in the message). Instead of looking at this purely as a CYA message, instead looking at it as informing you as soon as they had any idea your information may have been impacted instead of waiting weeks/months to inform you. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.

I’ve also never paid for a library card and I live in the US, so it’s clearly not always America. In fact most commenters here are noting they are paying small fees in euros so it seems this trend is common in Europe more so.

Food theory covered this in terms of Christmas trees. The answer is yes, mostly, with a lot of caveats, and also probably not really.

Paper goods meaning napkins, paper plates (mostly for food prep), paper towels, etc. agreed 100% on actual paper for writing.

In most companies I’ve worked for, T1 is there to put in tickets from calls, and handle the simplest of tasks (password resets, account lockouts, “have you tried turning it off and on again” tasks). Anything beyond that is generally sent to T2 (usually the desktop team who then force other teams to accept tickets as needed) and T3 for anything that more systemic or needs deeper troubleshooting and system knowledge.

In many places it’s a combination of piss poor pay creating little motivation and high turnover (and thus lack of training) and management prioritizing the wrong metrics (generally looking for short call times and short call queues). If you want to try and improve things I’d suggest learning about the KPIs that team is expected to meet, and then ask management why they chose those metrics. Generally I’ve found prioritizing first call resolution over call times to be a huge improvement to motivation of the team and user satisfaction scores (we all like solving problems and users tend to be way nicer when you fix the issue vice kick the can).

I would say, at least to your point about them not having access to systems, that’s it’s very common for T1 to have pretty limited admin access to systems. Partly to protect against inexperience, but also as a social engineering protection. If they need to ask for access to pass a ticket for elevated rights, it gets another set of eyes on the call to ensure it’s all kosher.

• Almost all paper goods, specifically Kirkland brand.
• Canned veggies are all the same as well, so whatever’s cheapest
• most dried herbs and spices
• staples like flour, butter, sugar, oil, etc. they are basic and as long as you are getting the kind you need (like AP flour or dark brown sugar) there isn’t any room for differences that the average consumer could notice anyways

No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.

Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.

So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.

Another option is to join as a contributor to one (or many) of the great apps already being worked on. This gives you a great way to learn how they work and to help the community with a much lower risk of failure since PRs are generally reviewed prior to inclusion and pushing new versions out.

In general it’s because it’s difficult or impossible to fully monetize a user on a third party app. This could be because the API doesn’t serve ads (like Reddit) or because it’s harder to track and harvest user data when they are not using a first party app.

Essentially, platforms like Reddit make deals with advertisers that they will display an ad in a certain format near certain types of connect (and away from other kinds) and will show them to users with specific interests. They can’t really do that if the user isn’t coming through a platform the company fully controls (so their website or apps). On top of this, their apps are designed to keep you engaged as long as possible and to harvest as much information about you as they can without you getting upset and leaving. This lets them target ads more specifically (which means they can charge more for them) as well as sell that data to brokers for even more money (who then sell it to advertisers). It’s all about how to best turn your attention into money, and a third party app doesn’t allow that (either at all or as much as a first party experience).

Reddit specifically also wants to sell access to their data to companies like OpenAI to train large language models as additional revenue sources, to do that they need to lock down the API used by apps to work with the platform.