Michigan border towns are insane for that reason. People come from as far as 6 states over for the cheap prices. On the other side of the state from Monroe lies New Buffalo. 33 dispos on a small stretch of road in a small lake town. All to bring in.. wait for it… $1.4mil in tax revenue ie basically a rounding error for even a small municipality…
There's other benefits, I think, that extend beyond direct taxation. For instance:
I don't even partake, myself, but I went to Monroe recently for a run with some family members. And we got hungry.
We stopped at 24-hour Coney Island-like place that has American food, Greek food, and anything that can be made with eggs on a grill, and sat down for a proper dinner. It was actually a very lovely experience: The service was excellent, and the food exceeded expectation.
It was neither expensive nor cheap as restaurant prices go these days, but whatever money we spent on it was left there in Monroe instead of taken back to Ohio.
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber. Just yesterday I found myself opening a private window to watch a video with ads, rather than letting the algorithm know I was watching the video on my account. Even if I remove the video from my watch history, YouTube can’t help itself. You make a great point on stale content and the overall enshittification is becoming intolerable.
Pay a little extra for YouTube Premium Family and you can silo your interests to different Google profiles. I have work and home like this basically. Coding, AI, etc on one, cars, retro games on another. No ads.
idk though, YouTube Premium is pretty good value if you're using it enough to care about recommendation hygiene. I remember the days everyone was begging to have the option to pay to skip ads. Well, YouTube did what we wanted, and now we're complaining about it for some reason.
Enshittification is when a middleman platform locks in buyers and then locks in sellers. It's not when things cost money. YouTube has enshittification, but the enshittification isn't merely the fact that it costs money. In fact, any non-shit platform for anything would probably (either be run as a hobby or) cost money to use since it wouldn't fund itself by stealing from you.
There isn’t any sort of standard for recording public meetings. I’ve seen everything mic less live streams with obstructed cameras to well curated flawless back and forth with great audio and transcripts. Meeting to meeting it can vary.
If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.
if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)
It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.
No, you don't understand! Being interested in anything works only in one direction, and that is the direction of getting you to engage with content that brings ad money!
Where I live, if I don’t shop at fancy grocery stores 30-40min away, it’s generous to call the produce ‘produce’. Literally never knew onions could look this bad. A lot of the citrus is like deflated in the inside, the bananas are trash, and a single bell pepper is $3. I could go on and on. Just think we enshittified the food situation and now it’s more expensive and way worse quality.
One of my handful of follows puts out multiple 2 hour videos a day sometimes, almost every day. I hardly watch, but I always throw it on and let it play through, and will replay it on mute while doing other things, just so this guy with 1.8k views is getting a bigger share of my youtube premium money. I don't participate in the channel, like I said, I really hardly watch, but monthly I have been getting free memberships to his channel since I started doing it.
I've lived in the area I live in for over 30 years. It's in a rural area. Last year I was walking in the woods and I came across a bald eagle on the ground eating something. I was probably 10 feet from it when it flew away. I saw 2 when I was golfing last summer. And then just a couple of months ago I saw another flying above my car after eating something near the road.
I had never seen a bald eagle before these encounters.
The other issue is American quality has gone down the tank. 10-15 years ago I’d look for American quality over Chinese, but nowadays I prefer the Chinese manufacturer almost 100% of the time. Not always the case but anecdotally chinas quality has gotten better while American stuff has gotten worse.
Yes. People associate Chinese manufacturing with low quality products, but I feel those people misunderstand systems. It's not Chinese manufacturing that is low quality. It's really the sites like Temu and Shein that create low quality products -- because of their aggressive pricing, they create a cascade of systemic cost pressures on manufacturers, who have to cut corners.
AMZN on the other hand probably provides more headroom and reduces cost pressure on manufacturers. If you know how to shop on Amazon (avoiding 3P sellers, and only getting 4 star and above products), you generally get high quality products.
I've only rarely gotten anything bad from Amazon (from Chinese manufacturers).
I've bought Chinese products like Anker batteries, Thermopro thermocouples/sensors, Jigoo (weird name I know) dust mite vacuum, Tapo camera, Levoit humidifier, Cosori air fryer, and little clever tools like toothpaste tube squeezers and the like.
They've all exceeded expectations.
(I recently bought a Insta360 Flow Pro 2 gimbal, also a Chinese product, and it's amazing).
Not exaggerating. I had it for a little over a year. I used it in my bedroom. As usual I started it going and then went into my bathroom to brush my teeth before bed. Partly through brushing my teeth I smelled something burning. I came out and saw the humidifier in flames.
It does raise the question of certification and product safety in general, there are so many electrical devices that probably don't meet Western safety standards. A humidifier is basically a heating element in a plastic housing, it should be engineered with safety features (overheating protection etc) so it shouldn't be able to just catch fire, someone clearly didn't do their job properly at some stage. I wonder how product recalls work with that sort of thing.
It’s very unlikely and I agree, not acceptable, but any household appliance with a heating element has a nonzero fire risk. I read that for UL certified humidifiers the incidence rate is 1 in 100k, similar to fans. The seems worryingly high.
That's hilarious. The most popular grocery stores in Shanghai right now are Costco and Sams, with lines everyday out the door, not Chinese grocery stores. Chinese citizens don't want to buy cancerous food products for example.
It's not so much that it is cost cut to the bone, but that the expertise is being lost.
I can tell you with a straight face that american manufacturing is being held up right now by grey beards pushing back retirement because young people have zero interest in manufacturing boiler conduit fittings. You can crash course an IT cert and come out making more money than you would ever make pressing steel couplers.
This reminds me of when I was in HS. There was a auto car wash that would print a number on a receipt for one to enter and get a carwash with. One day for whatever reason I just punched in 12 random numbers and it worked. And thats how I got free car washes all through high school...
https://www.wndu.com/2026/01/28/new-buffalo-residents-voice-...