Yes! And I’m honestly very thankful for it. The federal grants are the main reason I have affordable gigabit-speed fiber internet way out in here in my rural county. Without it, I’d be stuck with 10mb DSL, crumby and expensive satellite based options, or very limited 4G/5G based hotspot internet.
Last year, there was not a single conservative person in my “circle” that wasn’t constantly griping about the cost of eggs and “Bidenflation”. Poor souls could not afford to eat anymore, the only protein they supposedly lived on was eggs, but the price of those was so high they were just going without.
The moment that Trump took office, egg prices spiked again and suddenly these people understood that the president doesn’t control the price of eggs and besides eggs cost so much due to the effects of bird flu. Suddenly these people who couldn’t previously afford anything but eggs to eat are telling me that they’re having roast beef for dinner, then pork chops, and so on. Literally nothing has changed in their lives except there’s a different president and nearly everything is far more expensive, and yet all the financial woes they were complaining about this time last year no longer seem to exist.
I even mentioned the price of coffee, milk, and beef in a recent conversation. Supposedly these things were higher when Biden was president (not true), and when I refused to budge on that, suddenly it’s back to “well the prices are determined by complex market conditions” and “the president has brought down the price of many other things like eggs”.
It’s literally impossible to have a logical and factual conversation with these types of people.
This is what I hate about going on vacation. I never know how many kimonos to pack. General guideline is 3 per evening, but it seems like every trip I always end up having to rewear a garment at least once.
Is there a name for this video artifact effect in this image? I’d love to see a bunch of this.
It reminds me of the early 2000’s digital satellite television. Any time the signal got blocked a bit by the weather, the on-screen content would do this. Very trippy. Later on when cable tv in my area switched to digital, I noticed it happening there, too, but nowhere near as often as in satellite. Now that over the air is all digital where I live, however, I almost never see this happening anymore. I guess it’s not a thing that happens as much with modern encoding formats.
In two different cases where I’ve disputed part of a charge/order, the credit card company returned the money for the entire order like you said. I was surprised they did that, and didn’t realize that was the norm.
On the one hand, I never wanted anything I extra that I didn’t deserve. On the other hand, both times this has happened to me, the companies at fault really, really went out of their way to deserve it. Not necessarily scam level deserved it like this hotel’s smoke detector scam, but still.
To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.
The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use “AI” to make sure you’re not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you’ve swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.
However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they’ve mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don’t even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There’s probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don’t know. I’ve never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I’m paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who’ve never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.
YOU DON’T KNOW HOW LITTLE I CARE ABOUT PUSSY THOUGH
Dozens of accounts, yes. But probably only like 3 or 4 real human people if we’re being generous.
This is a variation of an idiom that goes something like “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will think it’s stupid”.
But as someone who used to raise killifish, I actually found out that there is at least one species of fish that can climb trees.
That’s a spicy meat-a-ball.
Howdy “relative” neighbor.
I’m also in the southeastern USA and I’ve driven by the peach more times than I care to count.
Is failing. Has failed. Same difference I suppose.
A broken clock is right twice a day. At least that’s a saying in my part of the world.
There’s already a term for this, it’s called moonlighting.
Every full-time salaried job I’ve ever had prohibits moonlighting, and specifically calls it out in the employment contract I’ve had to sign when starting the job.
Having said that, I am unemployed directly and entirely because of Donald Trump. Although I have no plans to return to work in the immediate future (because I was privileged enough to be in a position where I was able to save for a rainy day like this), when I return to work I am considering doing this.
As long as I’m making my deadlines and producing quality work, my employer should not give a crap whether I have other jobs. Period. I’ve spent my entire career so far working with bosses that tell me I’m family, but treat me like dirt and discard me at the very first sign of an economic downturn. They are all the same. So, when you treat people like disposable cogs, don’t be surprised when and if those cogs fit a variety of different machines.
Oh, that’s awful.
My uncle also had very few allies left in this world, he was just the embodiment of an asshole to pretty much everyone. My dad and aunt were the only people that would even bother to try to communicate with him. Fortunate in some way, they’d talked on the phone the day before my uncle passed, and he agreed to let my dad stop by to drop off some food the next day. Meaning, he’d been dead less than 24 hours before my dad found his body. Otherwise, it very well could have been weeks or longer.
But the house? Total loss. My uncle had become a trash hoarder. Fueled by depression, but also by his beliefs that the government was tracking him (and would go through his trash if he were to set it outside). My dad and my cousin tried to locate some family memorabilia like photos and things, but they gave up. The house was literally bulldozed and the remnants hauled away, it was in such bad shape inside and out.
Welcome to mental illness. Many people are perfectly functional, yet still deeply sick.
I had an uncle like this. He definitely held it together okay-ish (though that’s up for debate) for most of his life. But the conspiracy bullshit was a consist sign that he was not well.
And then when his wife passed, he also lost his ability to be functional, so the sickness took over entirely, eventually even took over his body. Nobody could help, not even his children.
To a certain extent, this is why I am trying to stick with a mission driven career, choosing opportunities that I feel actually make some small part of the world a better place. Granted, yes, I’m ultimately doing the job because I need the paycheck since I prefer to have food, shelter, and some degree of freedom/control over my life.
Not everybody has that luxury, though.
And expecting people to play pretend all day as though it’s anybody’s life dream to be typing up OBMC reports because that’s their passion in life and that the people they work with are family and that the ultimate goal of being the dominant player in the disposable widgets industry is for the greater good of humanity – yeah, whatever that’s just subversive mind control games. Glad some people can live in that and deny reality, but for the rest of us, you want me to work, then pay me.
My current “provider” is an NP. I like her, she’s personable and does the basic stuff well enough. I can understand having her do the basic annual physical type stuff for relatively young and healthy people.
But, for one of my recent visits, they scheduled me with a doctor instead (dunno why), and the experience was honestly almost night and day for the better. Granted, the way my health insurance works (ugh USA), the NP visits only ever cost me a flat amount, perhaps $45 for the copay. The doctor’s visit cost me the $45 copay, plus additional coinsurance down the line that I got billed a couple of months later because the clinic apparently charges two different rates depending on whether you see a doctor or not, I guess?
Gray squirrels in my area will raid bird nests to feed on the eggs and young chicks. They also hunt and eat cicadas. They sometimes scavenge from animal carcasses and are known to gnaw on mammal bones (like from a dead deer) or even turtle shells for the calcium.
Chipmunks will catch and eat crickets, worms, and beetles as well as small reptiles or even frogs. Although I’ve not witnessed it, I bet they’d at least gnaw on animal bones for calcium.
However, I think hunting voles is kind of a bit more advanced / unique.