D61 [any]

You and your correct predictions... smdh

"Would you like to round up your purchase, we promise that we'll give it to somebody who needs it."

Large, well known companies that just advertise that they still exist. Like, yeah, I know McDonaldsBurgerTacoBellWendySonic's exist. I pass them on every street corner. Show me an advertisement for something I don't know exists.

Resetting/moving the products on the store's shelves en masse, not because there's holes from discontinued products but because "people will stop paying attention to the shelves if everything stays the same." I'm old and in a hurry and I was here to give you my fucking money. Don't make it hard for me to give you my fucking money.

Pricing to the 9's.

Filling the shelves with a bunch of things that don't seem to sell all that well, taking up space that could have been used to keep more of the fast moving products on the retail floor, just to have the appearance of diversity on the shelves.

The optics of a potentially publicly traded company (what ever happened with the Reddit IPO thing?) openly having a "how to steal other companies copyrighted work" forum is more of a negative than IP farming with no method to actually do anything useful with the IP addresses.

USA Civil War: It was only the Southern states that were racist.

USA Civil War: The Confederacy was "only fighting for its way of life". With the hope that most USA'ians will assume that "its way of life" was anything but slavery.

So yeah, the USA isn't the world but if the place you live in is falling apart its understandable to shrink your worldview down to the that which affects you most or that you witness the most often.

1. Don't feel like you have to stare into the abyss all the time. This is just self harm. Its like habitually looking at entries on the old rotten.com website. Nothing good will come of it.

2. Do something, anything, that you can do alone. Plant some flowers, pick up trash in the neighborhood, read a manual about combat first aid or small engine repair, pick a country at random as far away from the USA as you can point to on a map and start learning about its history and culture.

3. Find somewhere to do something, anything, with other people. Internet book club, see if any local groups/orgs need help feeding the hungry or helping the unhoused, probably some groups not too far away that exist to support one minority group or another that could use some help in research or outreach.

Also, the world is a complicated place with lots of different actors. China is doing some pretty cool and good things. There's a lot of scary situations that probably will lead to positive change in Africa and South America right now.

Going to be USA centric because I don't need you doxxing yourself, just giving you ideas of what to look for where ever you happen to be.

If you've got solid internet access and enough work/life stability that you can start doing research into any government assistance programs and community groups that help navigate the processes that are in the area.

I live in the USA, and my partner and I finally got poor enough that we could get enrolled in Medicaid (Medicare is for the old folks). Partner found that the Medicaid would pay for a pretty serious surgery they'd kinda been needing for years (the final price that the government paid was a bit more than $30,000).

Back when I spent more time in Reddit, there was a post on in r/AntiWork about some USA government assistance in paying for internet (and possibly a cheap smart phone). I looked into it, found we qualified, and the process wasn't too hard to navigate on my own.

There is a program called LIHEAP (i think that's the name) that is assistance in paying for energy bills. We didn't qualify for it last year when I looked into it but my good paying job last year was temporary and now I'm in a job making about 600~800 less as a part-time but permanent employee. I should probably find the website and see if we're poor(er) enough to qualify for some help paying for electric bills.

Food stamps (WIC, SNAP) for assistance buying groceries. This one can get weird as they tend to be run state by state in the USA and the requirements can often times be super shitty. If you've got a stable job, even if its shitty, that might make things easier.

Look around for local food pantries and see how they work. Don't be surprised if they're run by churches and you've got to sit through a sermon before you get a bag of groceries. You might get lucky and the pantry is funded by a grant and needs part time workers they will be willing to kick a bit of paid work you're way (assuming you have the time).

Its desperation money, but there is Amazon's Mechanical Turk program. Piecemeal work online or doing survey's for a few cents a pop. It can help buy a tank of gas or replace a cheap busted cell phone but I've never made much more than that when I spent a whole lot of time on it. When my anxiety about money gets really bad and I need to put the energy somewhere I'll fire up my account. I'm pretty sure this has an international reach so it won't be geo blocked. FYI, it doesn't play will with VPN's.

I've tried a few "do consumer survey's online for money" websites and the only one that I ever had any "success" with was called InboxDollars. And by success, I mean that a few times over the years, I could spend many hours during a month and scrape together about 30$. Though I think its a USA based company and its geo locked. FYI, it doesn't play well with VPN's.

During the pandemic in the USA, i spent most of the time without work of my own (I live on a working farm with my spouse so one of us had an income) and spent about 18 months out the first three years of the COVID pandemic selling blood plasma. If you've got two days a week that you can spend hooked up to a machine that drains your blood, separates it, and pumps in back into you (and leaves you feeling pretty crappy for the rest of the day) and can handle lying pretty still with a huge needle in your arm, the pay was kinda okay. I'd get kicked in the summer months when it got too hot for my body to recover well enough between visits but I also have to do outside farm work that you might not need to do. If you do this regularly, it does leave some pretty gnarly scars in your elbow pits, which can lead to some amusingly random conversations with strangers in public.

In the USA, its seems like the US Post Office doesn't like to post their open jobs outside of their internal job posting database. Though it seems like USPS jobs are either "work crazy hours, where ever we tell you" or "barely work any hours".

I spent about a year and a half working at a University museum as a museum curation lab technician, no experience needed, didn't have to be a student or plan on going into the field. Which, maybe it was just me being lucky, but it was a pretty sweet job. Flexible hours, chill work environment, chill coworkers, surprisingly decent pay, got to play with old arrow heads and spear points and pottery sherds and sort through boxes and do paperwork about what was in them... the two negatives were that in my case what I found was a temp job and I spent an whole lot of time alone without human interaction (which I'm super cool with, but not everybody else is). This is another one of those things that probably won't be posted on public job search websites so you're going to have to dig around local university/colleges with museum collections and find their internal job posting site.

So yeah, I know in my mind taking advantage of assistance programs feels "wrong" but I've had to start getting over it and the things that I've managed to figure out how to apply to and qualify for have definitely been worth it.

Deodorant /= Antiperspirant.

I sweat like a hog due to having a chunk of my work life being physical labor and being too poor to keep the house air conditioned at 45F when its 110F outside. So antiperspirant would just paralyze my armpit glands but nowhere else.

Also, I got tired of spending money on deodorant and having more plastic to throw away and just started making a 50/50 (ish) mix of coconut oil and baking soda and just smearing some on my sweaty parts and it does okay at covering my stink.

Whether I use deodorant or not.. I notice that my smell changes when I'm around people (they tend to make me a touch anxious), some fabrics, and clothes that fit really tightly under my armpits. Also, I've noticed a HUGE difference in pit smell between full underarm bush and shaved.

To piggy back on your "bizarre fact", the same type of iron can be found added to cereal.

I remember several times in school we'd do a science demonstration where we'd smash up Cheerio (or a knock off) brand ceral, mix the powder with water and slowly drag a magnet through the slurry. Every time the magnet would be pulled out of the mix, there'd be more and more tiny iron bits.

Does Netflix still do the "free trial period" and "get free months if a friend sent you" thing?

Are there any numbers about how many unsubscribers to compare to the subscribers? That'd be a juicy number.

Does it count if I've actually driven tanks?

Porn is less of a legal liability than copyright claims is my guess.

Also... like... if somebody is dumping money into Reddit as a user of Reddit, which is more likely to make them stop: killing the piracy forums or the porn forums?

Obligatory FF7...

There's an old PS 1 game called Legend of Dragoon... not too bad of a game but probably gameplay wise doesn't hold up. BUT... its basically you getting a team of heroes from several the surviving races after another race (the only one who could naturally use magic) decided to do a genocide against everybody (and lost badly).

There is a scene later in the game, where you're in the ruins of a floating city that (I think) was the capital of the genociders. It is a barren husk of a place, devoid of all sentient life, there are no survivors of this race. However, some of the their machines were made with magic and are running on autopilot. There is a room where you can just hang out and watch these little flying robot things zip around and have scripted NPC dialogue where rules/laws are submitted and passed.

It was this weird example of the banality of evil that I don't think I've come across in a game before or since.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit, if it turned out that the most common gender ID is actually non-binary.

Like, my spouse and I pretty much consider ourselves "cis" but ... but not for any particular reason other than, "well, its good enough to get the point across." We don't really "feel" any particularly strong emotions about it.

50gbps down and 10gbps up

holy shitballs...

I'm not reading through all the comments to see if somebody has already mentioned these...

1. A game where you start out Godlike, superbuffed, maxed stats, best equipment whatever... but to progress through the game you slowly start to give up your gear, quit using your best skills (until they atrophy and are lost/drastically weakened) to end the game as a regular person just doing regular things. The catch would be to wrap a good story around why you'd be giving up all your cool shit.

2. A FPS that is split between the cutscenes of the warriors talking shit and the generals talking shit and the actual gameplay of you being a random nobody who is just trying to survive. You can't pick up weapons, because you dont know how to use them or it draws attention and you get attacked directly by the soldiers of both armies. Maybe there'd be NPC's at the beginning of the levels that you'd sorta be expected to try to keep alive but inevitably they would start to get picked off by cross fire, artillery, tanks, booby traps set by the fighting soldiers, etc.

3. An RPG where the basic game loop is kinda flipped. Where you'd expect to have random encounters and fights, you'd be able to see the mobs and the interactions would be more of the "Talk" or "Trade" variety but doing things like opening a door or crossing a bridge or equipping a weapon starts a fight. Usually your character would have something wrong with them... so like, going to sleep would leave you with sleep in your eye or groggy and trying to search or open things would start the encounter. Another example, your character's let gets hurt and now your random encounter is with the cobblestones that you're trying to walk on to get to the house of healing.

4. An RPG in the style of like the NES/SNES Final Fantasy games or the Earthbound/Mother series where you're characters are trying to start a band and the Random Encounters aren't fights but gigs. You finish the fights by either playing really well a type of music the crowd wants/likes, playing poorly or playing something the crowd doesn't want/like until they kick you off stage. The goals are things like, getting better equipment, playing notable venues, making a name for yourselves and making it to "The Big Show".

me hearing a person's name once during being introduced

me... minutes later realizing that there is just a blank spot in my memory where there name should be

me... waiting for months hoping that somebody uses their name around me in a context that attaches a name to that person because I'm too much of a coward to ask the person directly

If HR and manager do nothing to address the problem, wouldn't it be a better strategy to start working the least possible and let the company fire me, while looking for another job?

Solid tactic.

There's no easy way to make this into an actual business proposal... probably to the point that it isn't possible at all.

The tactic I could think of, if I were to NEED to do this... would be to try to find some way to argue on the grounds of some of the Ethical Altrusim stuff (I'm not a proponent of this stuff but... devil's advocate time).

You'd get a bunch of rich EA's to invest a shit ton of money on the regular, you take this money to pay the licensing fees or fees for use on other copyrighted research and technical manuals and then charge as close to zero as you can get away with for the individual users accessing the licensed/copyrighted work. The argument being, "more people having access to quality research and technical documentation will be a net positive for humanity and the return on investment will be measured in thousands of years in the future."

Doesn't have everything, but does have quite a bit. Still 10/10, would use again.

Specifically, the executives and shareholders want their Publicly Traded Shares of company stock to be increasing in value. Advertisers are good for getting long term holders of the stock to keep holding and buying, but everybody else is looking to quietly pump up the numbers and sell what they can without upsetting the apple-cart.

I'd bet a shiny metal dollar that after the IPO starts, the porn subs will slowly start being winnowed down. Give it a few years and if any exist they will be private.

me

my pasta maker under an inch of dust

A lack of basic level manuals and work flows for basic job duties.

Holy shit folks, where is my picture book that lets me know how this 15 year old point of sale system out in a rural post office is supposed to do the things that I need it to do?

I was a part of the chapo exodus and found myself just going to the hexbear instead of the reddit to the point that I just pop into reddit like once or twice a year.

tldr

"Womens, get your mans to pirate you the latest season of Outlander"

My ability to do math and predict my monthly budget costs is bad enough that it finally worked out in my favor... I'm still curious how that's happening, but I'm not inclined to look to deeply else I tip the balance of the universe out of my favor sooner that is bound to happen.

I mean, my home is filled with ancient laptops that we use until they explode, its a pretty common occurrence when trying to watch something streaming the ads would load just fine but the actual show wouldn't actually load. So... shrug

make a backup

Pffftt... coward.

/s

Only ever had two services, Netflix and Hulu. It worked out that a VPN's yearly subscription was cheaper than the base plan of Netflix so I just canceled that and what I can't find on Hulu.

Yeah, and the older I get the more I notice it.

It hits when its really cloudy for a few days in a row, even.

Lots of us poors just don't vote at all.

We're working all the time, so its difficult to find the time and energy to try to be up to date on the local politicians and ballot measures in any real way and even find time away from work to physically go vote (because who the fuck even knows if the mail in ballots even get counted assuming you can get one and figure out how to mail it back in).

Also, there isn't anybody to vote for. Your options are Dem, Repub, Libertarian, Independent. And none of the politicians running under those banners are actually offering any drastic material change to a shitty system. During the last mid terms where I live, I took a few hours to find who was going to be on the local ballot and skim their websites. The farthest "left" candidates were the Dems and the choices where "Religious Person", "Religious Person", "Milquetoast Boilerplate Dem", and "Cryptobro." None of them run off voting year outreach programs where they help people in need navigate the few social support programs in the deep red state where I live. None of them advocate for vacant houses, apartments, empty hotel/motel rooms to be appropriated by the city government to house those without homes. None of these candidates even really exist outside of the 12 months between filing their intent to run, securing their spot on the ballots before they're printed, and the final vote counts are certified.

Don't know where you live, but in the USA just about any hardware store will sell EXTERIOR grade door handles for somewhere between 25~50 bucks on the lower budget end. Assuming you've got cash or a friend who can loan/give you some money. (Or if there are abandoned buildings nearby... you know... grab a phillips screwdriver and a flat head screwdriver and make magic happen).

Installation is very easy since you're just changing out door handles. There will be a hex key for changing the handedness of the handles and all the screws should be included along with (typically) easy to understand instructions. Should be two long screws that will hold the inside/outside handles together and (possibly, sometimes things work out and you don't have to change out the strike plates) two short screws that hold the strike plate to the door and two more to hold the opposite strike plate on the door frame. Just remember to put the keyhole facing outside of your room and the handles oriented so that they are pointing in the correct direction actually shut the door and you're pretty solid.

(If the door opens in to your room, you can might be able to ignore this next bit.)

If the gap between the door and the door frame is big enough it is possible to use something like a butter knife to work the door catch back into the door if you're able to pull on the door. Make the gap smaller if you can, layers of elmers/wood glue by itself or layering paper and glue to a proper thickness before gluing it to the door frame.

Also, if you're still worried about the door being jimmied open this way, always remember, "Lube, lube, lube." Lube up the door catch with anything you can get that doesn't turn sticky (you're probably going to want to wipe off and reapply old stuff on a somewhat regular basis. Petroleum jelly, cheap chapstick, mineral oil, a dab of motor oil or 5-in-1 oil.

If you've got some beefier wood working tools accessible, you can put in a dead bolt (but you're going to have to new holes into interior doors.)

If you've got gorrilla/super glue handy you can probably glue the hole shut that works as the "emergency release" for the interior grade lockable door handles.

If you're just worried about privacy for yourself while you're in the room, you can buy and install those slide chain things for way cheaper than a new door handle. Downside is, most interior doors are hollow core so there isn't much for the mounting screws on the door side to sink in to and some hard shoving or kicking can work them loose.

Also, which side of the room are the door's hinges? Are they inside the room (and protected by the locks/shim/etc when the door is closed) or outside the room? If outside the room and visible when the door is closed, see if you can tap the pins out from below. Older model hinges can have a pin that slides through both sides of the hinge and be knocked out with a screwdriver and hammer (possibly defeating any attempt to jam the door shut or replace the current door handle with a more secure type). Newer model hinges are machined together as a single unit and its either very hard or impossible to hammer the pin out without severely damaging the entire hinge. If you find you can hammer out the pin from the bottom (and there's no way to pull the pin up from the top) you can try to superglue a small piece of metal on the bottom of the hinge. It won't stop anybody who really wants to hammer out the pins but it will make it more work.

Yeah, that's some dodgy behavior (unless you do dodgy things and keep getting caught). You might want to casually look into finding some safer spaces to inhabit.

(experiences from small scale agriculture)

Things will always cost more than you think.

Learn about book keeping, even if you don't start out doing your own book keeping, and do your best to maintain good book keeping practices... the easier you make it for an accountant to look for tax credits, profits, losses, depreciation, and potential write-offs the easier it will be to spend money paying an accounted to make sure the stuff is done correctly. And if/when you start doing your own book keeping and working on summaries if definitely helps to mentally make sense of what's going on in your business.

If you only have one source for some vital supplies or service, its a very good idea to be on the look out for alternative sources and be ready to find substitutes for those supplies/services.

You get to say "no". If you only want a small shop that does business with a "X" amount of clients/customer, you are under no obligation to try to provide goods/services to "X + N" amount of clients/customers. So long as you can work sustainably, its not your job or purpose to supply the entire "market". If there's more demand than supply, its okay for some other person to start their own thing and serve some of that ample demand. So when people start to complain that you aren't "big enough" or that "you could have a bigger business" when you aren't interested, tell them "no."

r/chapo diaspora, spent a week on the Discord that popped up and it was just too much for my old eyes. Shifted to chapochat (now hexbear) and got all comfy.

Waffles are king, pancakes are solid, French toast is kinda tricksy.

One of these days I'mma buy a cast iron waffle maker cause all the electric ones I've tried ate shit after a few months of regular use.

Now pancakes are solid as they're easy to make and it only takes a bit of practice to cook them right.

Pancake Pro-Tip: If you wanna make a home made hot pocket, make a pancake batter recipe with a bit less liquid and a bit more flour to thicken it up (if you've got the time, cool the mix down in a fridge for a while to help with thickening). Cook up the pocket's guts and set to the side, pour some batter on the skillet and let it cook long enough to get some bubbles in the center (lets you know that the bottom should be cooked well enough), spoon some guts into the center, and then ladle on some more batter over the top to cover the guts. By then, the bottom should be well set and you can flip it over without too much trouble.

French Toast... gotta have the cheapest whitest bread around or really crusty french bread. The dense loaves of like, multi grain style bread, never seem to soak up the egg mixture enough to really be satisfying.

"Highlander" rules.

There can be ONLY one!

Half assed ideas.

Option 1) % of hourly pay rate, capped at an two hours for a total round trip (but flexible) + a stipend depending on mode of transportation. Could try to get receipts from workers and have a purser issue cash/credit on their next paycheck or issue re loadable debit cards that get filled at regular intervals. (So a card for paid public transit and fuel for combustion vehicles) If we're working in a place that taxes employee wages, the more taxes the employer can carry the better on the workers.

Option 2) Everybody gets a debit card and a list of approved places/items to be purchased for the purposes of "commuting to work compensation". Workers could be expected to keep as many receipts as possible to turn in weekly just to verify stuff.

Option 3) Some subcommittee tracks worker commute times and how they commute and every quarter or something a stipend is paid in a lump sum like a bonus or it is used to give a paycheck by paycheck payout.

Easiest idea would be like JohanSkullcrusher said, full hourly pay rate the second I get into my car to start driving. Though workers would wind up paying more in income taxes and there'd probably be some issues with workers getting different compensation, like somebody walking 10 minutes to work and somebody driving 1 hour to get to work are going to have significantly different income levels at the end of the year.