DEAR READER
sheepfilms
todays bird

Andulka
art blog(derogatory)
Monterey Bay Aquarium

roma★
No title available

@theartofmadeline

★
will byers stan first human second

Discoholic 🪩
dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
d e v o n
hello vonnie
RMH
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
taylor price
seen from T1

seen from Canada
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from Singapore

seen from Germany
seen from Austria
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Brazil

seen from United States
seen from South Africa
@meagainmullen
One company bought all the retail outlets for glasses, used that to force sales of all the eyewear companies and jacked up prices by as much as 1000%
If you wear glasses, you might have noticed that they’ve been getting steadily more expensive in recent years, no matter which brand you buy and no matter where you shop.
That’s because a giant-but-obscure company called Luxottica bought out Sunglass Hut and Lenscrafters, then used their dominance over the retail side of glasses to force virtually every eyewear brand to sell to them (Luxxotica owns or licenses Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace); and used that to buy out all the other eyewear retailers of any note (Luxottica owns Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical) and then also bought out insurers like Eyemed Vision Care and Essilor, the leading prescription lens/contact lens manufacturer.
Controlling the labs, insurers, frame makers, and all the major retail outlets has allowed Luxottica to squeeze suppliers – frames are cheaper than ever to make, thanks to monopsony buying power with Prada-grade designer frames costing $15 to manufacture – while raising prices as much as 1000% relative to pre-acquisition pricing.
It’s even worse for lenses: a pair of prescription lenses that cost $1.50 to make sell for $800 in the USA.
LA Times columnist David Lazarus wrote a column about skyrocketing eyewear prices and was approached by Charles Dahan, who once owned one of the largest frames companies in America, Custom Optical, which supplied 20% of the frames sold at Lenscrafters prior to the Luxottica acquisition. Dahan describes how Luxottica cornered the horizontal and vertical markets for eyewear and pushed out or bought out every other company (Oakley refused to sell or lower prices, so Luxottica boycotted it from its retailers, forcing the company into such a precarious position that it Luxottica was able to buy it for a fraction of its peak book-value just a few years later).
This is a good example of how decades of far-right ideologically driven antitrust malpractice has hurt everyone. After all, glasses aren’t just a fashion item: they’re a necessity for people with poor vision, a prerequisite for driving, walking, cycling, reading, getting an education or doing your job.
Luxottica grew through acquisition, by buying up its competition. This was banned under classic antitrust law, until the Reagan years. This pattern has been repeated in many other domains: beer, whiskey, retail pharmacies, and so on. In every one of those domains, we are getting screwed, as are small businesspeople and the families they serve.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/luxottica.html
“People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, ‘The animation genre.’ It’s not a genre! A Western is a genre! Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids’ fairy tale; but it doesn’t do one thing.“ - Brad Bird
what if people got a new name every birthday
what if the name represented how old you were, like every 11 year old was named Josh
“I had my first kiss when I was Greg”
this wasn’t supposed to get notes
id like to present to you my proposal for a Michigan-less super lake
Lake No More Michigan
Lake Michigone
charmander
“Don’t buy any Girl Scout cookies!!! They support pLANNED PARENTHOOD!!” me:
Girl Scouts support planned parenthood? Y’all just doubled my order
Don’t forget this too
Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta has expanded upon this to include nonbinary youth (and adults) seeing a Girl Scouting experience.
Reblogging for important information.
Shout out to the time they returned a $100,000 donation because the donor– months after making the donation– wanted a guarantee that the money wouldn’t be used to support transgender girls.
In this house we respect girl scouts
I love how it’s “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and MISTER Hyde” as in, yeah, they are basically two sides of the same person but only ONE has a doctorate
#unless your bitch ass second personality helped you write that thesis it is your fucking doctorate
The Netherlands democratically puts a list of the 2000 best songs together every year around New Year’s and the biggest mystery every time is whether Bohemian Rhapsody wins again
i’m serious, if it doesn’t win, it’s second place
every winner before 2005 is Bohemian Rhapsody as well
why arent we talking about the constant presence of hotel california
Old People Restaurant Scam. You know the scam. Whine about perfectly good food to get some sort of comp.
In their old age, my parents befriended another older couple who would pull this stunt everywhere they went. After my mother told me a few stories about how their new friends had shown them how to get discounted or free meals, I felt like I was suddenly the responsible adult, concerned about the bad influence these people were on my parents.
While visiting my parents with my girlfriend, this other couple attended dinner with us. As I expected, the food was brought to the table and they immediately began dramatically complaining to one another about the quality/taste/temperature/etc. They were making a scene in order to attract the attention of the waitress. When our waitress returned to ask how we were doing, the miserable old bastard who played the lead role in their act took a deep breathe, struck a dramatic pose (with his hand raised to begin gesticulating for emphasis) and bega–I leaned forward and cut him off before he could finish the first word: “Everything is absolutely fantastic. It’s all great! Thank you very much!” She smiled, and began her obligatory “Great, well if you need any–” when he made a second attempt. “We come here all the time an–”. I didn’t acknowledge that he was speaking at all, repeated that all was just as we ordered and thank her again.
He was stunned and thrown off from his routine by my interruption. During this pause the waitress walked away (It seemed clear that she knew what they were trying to accomplish). He turned bright red. I turned to my girlfriend and, smiling and without lowering my voice, stated how pitiful it is that some people could be dishonest, deceitful and put at risk the livelihood of a cook, server or hostess for a pathetic discount or a free early-bird special. My passive-aggressive reverse-parenting broke my parents of the habit in short time.
And baby boomers talk shit about Millennials being entitled
As a Jimmy Johns employee for three years, the largest demographic that scams us for sandwiches are older than 40.
Here’s a good starting point for those of you interested in learning more:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05707-8
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/technology-is-biased-too-how-do-we-fix-it/
Absolutely. The programmer must develop code to work within the expected parameters. A less heated example is left vs right handed. Most hotkeys are really geared towards right handed people. It is simply a byproduct of not looking beyond your experience. Software isn’t from God.
Season One
Charles: Jake, do you like Amy?
Jake:
Season Six
Anyone: *breathes in Amy’s direction*
Jake:
During the 1980s, more gay men died in New York City during the AIDS crisis than all recorded deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. You need to know that.
Sources, for Skeptics who can’t figure out google
120,453 aids related deaths from 1980-1990
57,939 american soldiers died in Vietnam
observations from urgent care
- People who exercise a lot get knee injuries from overdoing it
- People who only exercise occasionally get knee injuries from being unprepared for the exertion
- People who don’t exercise get knee injuries from being out of shape
- Maybe knees just suck
Solution: Don’t have knees.
Suburbitank.
Whoa. The MLA has officially devised a standard format to cite tweets in an academic paper. Sign of the times.
ebooks, Horse. (horse_ebooks). “Leg Butt” 18 Nov 2011, 12:38 PM. Tweet.
I keep going back to watch this video it just captures my sense of humour perfectly
Demön
When an NPC warns chaotic-aligned players to not do something
I lose it at the cheerful “Fuck you, Goat-Man!” every damn time.