I live in a rural area outside of a small town in the southern USA. The local electrician, basically the guy almost everybody calls if they need basic residential electrical work, earns almost twice the high end of what that job listing is paying. Granted, he’s basically on call 7 days a week and I’m sure his job isn’t always unicorn farts and leprechaun rainbows, but he’s his own boss and works his own hours.

I completely understand.

I spent a semester of college working at Home Depot. It was a terrible experience and awful in so many different ways that I consider it my second worst job experience, only slightly behind the holier than thou “Christian business” that didn’t pay its employees and actively committed fraud against employees, clients, and the government. 25+ years later, I still don’t like to shop at Home Depot, it was so bad.

Nice try Steve.

Remember that time I discovered a major bug in Reddit that I reported dozens of times to the site’s feedback form and directly to your user account but I never got a response about and it never got fixed (until I used the exploit in a way that directly affected you)? Well, if that rings a bell, then guess what? It’s me again. Toodles.

Any pretty much any physical job comes with copious risks to your body and health, yet these types of employers typically don’t pay for employee health plans nor do they pay enough for employees to comfortably afford their own. Why would anybody want to risk severing a finger, breaking a leg, getting bitten by a dangerous snake, a nail to the hand, etc if they don’t have to, especially knowing they can’t afford the treatment and it could lead to lifelong pain and disability?

When I was watching the news last night, they did the thing where they said something like “COMING UP. Major news tonight involving Dolly Parton. KEEP WATCHING AFTER THE BREAK.” and then those bitches went to commercial.

My heart sank because I was worried they were going to report something tragic like a terminal cancer diagnosis. Fortunately, I have access to thousands of news sources instantly so I did in fact not keep watching and instead just looked it up.

Anyway, good for her!

I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long to show up in the numbers, but I am fully aware that I’m in a bit of a bubble.

Most people I know got all their big ticket spending done before January, and then hunkered down into saving money mode so that they’d have some cushion for if and when things go bad. Sure, there have been some outliers, but they aren’t the norm.

Part of the problem is, even a lot of people who still have their good jobs are cutting way back and trying to put money aside because they simply do not know how much longer they’ll have a job. People who once saw themselves as indispensable to their employer and have enjoyed stable careers are no longer so confident in the economy or their job because they’ve seen what’s happened to so many others recently.

Also, if you have pets that go outside, such as a dog you take for walks, you need to check them even if they are on flea and tick prevention. Ticks are more than glad to hitchhike indoors on pets and then later decide to rehome themselves onto a human.

Incorrect. There are MANY species of tick.

It’s a mineral, Gurk.

It’s a comforting sentiment, but unfortunately, it’s not really true.

A lot of grifters grift not because they failed at “legitimate or useful” employment, but because grifting is easier, quicker, and better money for them (or has other tangible benefits) and they have no moral quandaries about what they’re doing.

Right hand to baby Jesus, I thought Kmart was basically no longer in operation, when did it become a programming language for nerds?

Up until about 6 months ago or so, in my area FedEx was the best of the delivery services in my area by far. Granted, I know that whichever service is best tends to vary from region to region. But, whenever I saw that my package was getting delivered via FedEx, I was generally glad to know it.

In my area, UPS is the shady shit-show that would totally pull some bullshit like this. UPS will open my mailbox and put packages in there (which is illegal in the USA). UPS will claim my package is delivered and then 3 days later, USPS delivers it. They have some kind of agreement with USPS to deliver the last mile, but UPS tracking literally shows the packages as delivered the moment they turn it over to the USPS. UPS will furiously beep the horn outside my bedroom window until I go to the front door to see what’s going on, and then have ME dig through their truck to find my own package. Anyway, I’m ranting now, as is the custom for men my age and in my condition.

USPS is just a whole other paradigm of unfathomably terrible shit show. Okay, I’ll stop. I have a problem.

Point is, FedEx used to be the best of shitty lot, so I wonder why they’ve suddenly and drastically gotten so bad as of late.

Normally I would respond to the already posted top reply with this same message, but this is a topic which deserves multiple replies with the same answer to reinforce the idea that it is correct…

Remove any diseased or damaged strawberries from the container.

Soak the rest in a vinegar solution for a few minutes.

Rinse with fresh water.

Allow to completely dry.

Keep refrigerated.

Those are the steps. Works with lots of produce, but seems to be especially good for things like blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

But also, at least in the USA, shit’s going down with our produce right now and it seems like the shelf life of almost everything as of late is super limited. Not sure if it’s due to the tariffs or what.

Looking at the game’s minimum requirements, I’m not sure I how well my available hardware will work. Granted, it’ll probably be some time before I play the game unless there’s a free demo available. I’m more of a patient gamer type and I still haven’t played through Eternal yet (and may not).

Honestly, from the descriptions and reviews I’ve seen, Dark Ages game play style sounds like it’s a sharp turn away from Eternal, which means it might be more my thing. Granted, I’m also seeing a lot of folks saying it’s super heavy into story telling and cut scenes. Not that I have a big problem with those things, but I enjoy that they’re kind of light in earlier entries of this series.

Removed by mod

I need to bookmark this for when I have time to read it.

Not going to lie, there’s something persuasive, almost like the call of the void, with this for me. There are days when I wish I could just get lost in AI fueled fantasy worlds. I’m not even sure how that would work or what it would look like. I feel like it’s akin to going to church as a kid, when all the other children my age were supposedly talking to Jesus and feeling his presence, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t experience any of that. Made me feel like I’m either deficient or they’re delusional. And sometimes, I honestly fully believe it would be better if I could live in some kind of delusion like that where I feel special as though I have a direct line to the divine. If an AI were trying to convince me of some spiritual awakening, I honestly believe I’d just continue seeing through it, knowing that this is just a computer running algorithms and nothing deeper to it than that.

Not that I plan on going back to Wendy’s, certainly not any time soon, but is that $5 deal a relatively new thing and/or a national thing?

When I was a poor college student working multiple jobs and having to do a lot of driving to get from one place to another, Wendy’s was one of my go-to places. For about $4 I could get 2 burgers that had real, fresh lettuce, tomato, onion, plus a drink. I went to Wendy’s a year or two ago and the same exact thing was a bit over $11. For what it’s worth, if they had some kind of $5 special, I didn’t see it on the menu.

Taco Bell was the same way. Back in my college days, I could get a couple 5-layer burritos and a drink for $3 and some change. Last time I went and got that order, it was $9 or $10 and the burritos were missing a few layers, not to mention just absolutely gross.

Most national/international fast food places seem to have looked at the “good, fast, cheap” principle and decided the answer is D) None of the above.

Have they been getting by on inertia and nostalgia in recent history? I could be an incredibly unlucky person, but all my experiences with these places have just been bad, bad in the past 5 or so years. I excused it a bit during the height of covid, but there’s been time to work things out and they just haven’t even bothered.

I’m not exactly their target audience, since I rarely get food at fast food places, but as it stands, if I were going to get fast food, the whole Trump McDonald’s circus show has turned me off to that brand entirely. Burger King is a no-go after getting incredibly sick from their food. Taco Bell just completely gave up on themselves. Wendy’s is so expensive now that I can’t justify it anymore even as a guilty treat while traveling. I’d rather pack some ham sandwiches in a mini-cooler and make do with that.

This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!

Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.

AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.

So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.

You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.

You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.

And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.