Mask off moment. Their purpose is to protect capital. The only crimes that cops prevent are through deterrence because they are crime punishers, not crime preventers.

Not OP, but probably price gouging? Especially regarding things where you aren’t afforded the reasonable opportunity to make an informed decision (healthcare, baby formula plus necessary clean water). Also maybe regional monopolies (internet service) or pretty much anything involving an event or venue (ticket pricing or cost of a slice of pizza or a can of beer at a festival).

In all of these examples, you likely don’t have a heads-up or the chance to choose something else. Admittedly, most of the examples off the top of my head were unnecessary luxury spending, but how in the blue fuck is it okay that any of them are literally a situation of “pay me whatever price I decide or else a person will die”?

Pretty fucked up if you ask me.

Because people continue to accept that price by agreeing to pay it. The price of a product is dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. If the price is so low that the seller isn’t happy with it, they don’t sell it and stop making it.

In other words, if you think Nintendo prices are bullshit price gouging, then vote with your wallet. With enough votes, the prices come down or the company goes under. You don’t have that luxury of choice when it comes to groceries or shelter, but you absolutely do when it comes to luxury entertainment expenses. Make them earn your money.

1. They’re loud, but not necessarily many.

2. They are passionate, and therefore will turn out to vote.

3. American voter turnout is generally pretty low. The best year in over 100 years was 2020 with still only about 2/3 of eligible voters showing up to vote.

These things combined make it seem impossible for Democrats or progressive independents to win almost anywhere. All it takes is candidates impressive enough to break through to the people who aren’t showing up to vote. Milquetoast weiners aren’t exciting enough for this, and neither is the strategy of trying to court the right.

Piggybacking this comment because similar:

Chop up some veggies (I like zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and maybe carrots), toss them in olive oil, salt, some seasoning, and an acid like lemon juice or wine (or a little balsamic vinegar if you want that vibe), then throw it into a lubed pan and into a preheated oven until roasted to your liking (probably like 15-20 minutes at 400°F).

I like this method because it’s largely passive, so this can happen while you deal with some other part of your meal. Sauce, meat, rice, whatever. Plus it’s pretty hard to fuck up unless you forget to use a timer lol.

As somebody who lives near Winchester, VA, I know how you feel lol. They’re overly upset and direct their anger at people who don’t look like them because the fountain they drink knowledge from is a firehose of disinformation. I don’t know why they choose to be so angry and hateful all the time.

I don’t live in The Netherlands, so I don’t pretend to have any sort of first-hand knowledge of what it’s like there, but this resource says that children under 13 can’t work unless they’re sentenced to community service due to an offense, or working as a performance like as an actor in a commercial or a play. It also looked like there’s no minimum wage for workers under 15?

But I don’t doubt that Dutch workers have much higher labor standards. Current minimum wage for 21 and older there looks to be nearly double American federal minimum wage (€14.06 vs $7.25). I live in Virginia, which has a much higher minimum wage than the federal one, currently $12.41. The Northern counties and around Richmond are ludicrously expensive, however, so it’s not like people could reasonably get by on that in those areas. You won’t find a half decent house in those areas for under $500k, and actual nice houses start at like $750-900k. If you somehow got a 0% mortgage and somehow had zero expenses outside of paying off that $500k house, it would still take 20 years of working full time at that minimum wage job to pay that. More realistic mortgage rates and expenses would make that take closer to 70 years.

Average life expectancy in the US is 77.5 years.

Yeah lol, I was gonna say how many underpaid tipped workers do you think know about that requirement, and of those few how many do you think actually confront their boss about it, and of those handful how many do you think get that money they’re owed without retaliation.

I know not what many of those numbers are, but I’d be absolutely floored if that last number weren’t zero. Especially in 2025 and beyond.

Well, LLMs can’t drag corporate media through long, expensive, public, legal battles over slander/libel and defamation.

Yet.

I’m concerned that it wouldn’t back up the parade at all. Reboots and remakes of 80s shit has been the trend for a long time, so it’s not far-fetched to think we might see a new, American “Tank Man” scenario. It’s not what I want to see, but I didn’t want to see people getting disappeared away to concentration camps either. But fucking here we are.

Lafayette Square Massacre. Rated NC17. Coming this Summer.

To quote a genius billionaire regarding a time of immense hardship due to receiving abrupt bad news,

“CHAINSAW! YaAaAgHhH!”

I’m sure that somebody’s heart goes out to him. He seems to have quite a bit of the Nat-C party standing behind him.

$2.13/hour. In 2025. Fucking insane.

My job is 12 hour shifts plus an hour commute each way. This is a big part of why we haven’t already gotten a dog. Well that, and also until a few months ago we were in a pretty small apartment. My wife is home more than me, so we’re considering it, but I want to try to time it so that I’m off and there more early on for adjustment period and training.

Humans don’t deserve dogs. I want to be the kind of human who can almost disprove that fact.

So are you a writer for Black Mirror or a time traveler or…?

privacy and security

I’m not really sure how much my OS affects that though. If I remove that avenue, cool, but I’m still signed in on my browser and YouTube and various other apps, so to really protect my privacy and security, wouldn’t I need a whole slew of other changes to actually be effective? Credit bureaus, which I never even asked to have involved, can’t even keep a lid on my shit. How secure and private can I really expect to feel just from changing my phone OS, and is that warm fuzzy really good enough to justify moving from something that is working exactly as I want and expect to something that is, in a word, uncertain?

Not trying to attack you or anybody with these questions, just kinda frustrated that any time I’ve tried to look into it, all I find is a vague statement about privacy without any real elaboration, or worse, a bunch of speculation that the guy running it is unstable or something. Idk, it just feels a little like the wave of people screaming the praises of crypto.

I used to loudly support Google Fi when I switched to them from Verizon. My coverage wasn’t as good, but my bill was a small fraction of what it had been, and I’m usually on wifi so the pay for what you use model was great for me. I also really enjoyed taking it with me to Mexico on vacation. Sweet deal since my average data use was like 1GB/month.

Then like a year ago, I did some digging and found that I could have a very similar experience with Mint, except unlimited data for about the same price. Plus the price was locked in because you pay for it up front. It took maybe an hour to swap our phones over, and we kept our phone numbers. There was a little bit of hassle getting voicemail to work properly, but that got figured out.

My favorite thing about these types of services are that you can buy a pretty cheap, unlocked phone, use eSIM, and you’re not locked into your service provider. I am a fan of the Pixel a series of phones since they’ve got plenty good capability at half the price of flagship phones, but with good support. Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why I personally should go to the trouble since I don’t see enough of a benefit for my use case. But that’s neither here nor there. I just like unlocked phones, and my 8a and my wife’s 6a were cheap and they were easy to transition to another provider; look into unlocked phones the next time you’re shopping for one so you can have that kind of freedom.

Right now, I’m working a ton (72 hours per week) and my wife is working and going back to school, but every Tuesday is an entire day together. We just started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time, and we look forward to it all damn week lol. We started like a month ago, but we’re still only just now wrapping up the goblin camp. We both were already really familiar with 5e DnD, so a lot of the mechanics feel pretty intuitive to us. I have gripes with the camera (PS5 version) but overall it’s a fantastic experience.

Before picking this up on sale, we were passing the controller back and forth through Astro bot. Also amazing! We rolled credits, and I’ll probably aim for the platinum trophy at some point without her. There’s truly not much left before we snag that, so she’s not missing out.

Guess they’re just smarter than you

Perfect. I said something similar the last time this sort of rhetoric came out of a coworker’s mouth. Literally what I said about begging on the streets and making 6 figures was what he said. I said “that’s not happening, at least not for more than maybe up to 5 people, and if you don’t believe me then why don’t you just do that instead of working harder and making less?” The response was some bullshit about not wanting to be a drain on society and how he would feel bad taking money he didn’t earn. And yet his goal is to buy a few houses and rent them out so his housing is paid for by other people. Pointing out the irony to him would be a waste of breath.

My mom hasn’t worked in a decade. Survives off of snap and my dad’s SSDI survivor benefits. She STILL buys the whole welfare queen narrative.

Of course she does. She is said welfare queen. I’m sure she’d try to explain how it’s not the same thing, but the reality is that she believes that she’s earned (there’s that word again) what she’s receiving, implying that others haven’t. I would have trouble maintaining a close relationship with somebody who holds these beliefs.

Thankfully, nobody ever becomes homeless due to losing their job and struggling to find a new one. Robust social safety nets have ensured that the only people who find themselves homeless are lazy pieces of shit who are actively trying to be in their situation. They prey upon people’s generosity by begging in the streets and raking in 6 figures.

Big fat fucking /s because holy shit, I’ve actually encountered people who believe bullshit like that. I lived in my car for a little while, but thankfully I still had a job and there was a shower I could use at work. Only an absolute fucking ghoul would prey upon the unhoused.