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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)IN
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2 wk. ago

  • 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.

  • It's interesting that now the narrative is that all these words are being censored due to advertisers.

    By my memory, at least some subset of these terms was being self-censored because they were triggers or considered offensive for other readers / users of various sites and people were trying to protect others by avoiding words that upset them. That's what I was told about words like rape, suicide, and profanity like fuck, bitch, etc. At the time when I was first noticing a strong trend towards self-censoring, most of the sites I was seeing it on had little to no advertising, particularly not from major brands, so this while that may be the reason for the trend to continue, I'm not convinced that's why it started or how it became widespread.

  • 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.

  • People hoping that are likely ignorant of what AI actually is. It's incredibly unlikely that AI "ends", at least not if/until things get really bad on a societal level to the point where our species loses its ability to produce and use technology altogether.

  • Blossom end rot.

    Most commonly this is due to insufficient levels of calcium, which can be caused by too little available calcium in the soil, pH of the soil being out of range, or too much of other competing ions on the soil, amongst other issues.

    Most often, this can be fixed with the addition of a little lime (i.e. calcium powder lime, not the fruit) added to the soil. Will take about 2 - 3 weeks to resolve if that's the issue.

  • It will be interesting to keep an eye on this.

    Granted, if I had a dime for every article I've read in the past 5 or 6 years spelling out the signs of impending economic doom, I could easily buy a tank of gas for my car.

    Having barely survived the aftermath of 2008 myself, it does stress me out to realize that it could happen again and soon and worse. I'd like to think I'm better positioned to handle things now, but as they say in France, shit happens. And it's stressful knowing that other people will have to go through what I went through and worse.

    It's also unfortunate that official data makes things sound stable(-ish), but on the ground and admittedly in my own little bubble, people are not so optimistic. Manufacturing plants have shut down, people are getting laid off left and right, budgets are getting cut to bare bones, all while prices on daily things like food and energy have spiked.

  • On the topic of the title: In my own case, I didn't even pay all of my debts, all it took was to pay off my student loans. My credit score dropped 30+ points from that and has never recovered since.

    And to all the liars who said some variation of "it's just a temporary drop" ... You are liars. That is simply not true, at least not for everyone, and you lied. Maybe consider stop giving advice about things when you're clueless.

    And to anybody who might consider listening to those clueless liars, please note that a whole lot of the advice you might read from people online is coming from clueless liars.

    Okay, I'll end my rant there.

  • Two birds feeding at the same time is pretty typical for the species in my area.

    The males, which control prime feeding locations like feeders, will definitely share with potential female mates. And the females, while territorial to some degree, are much more focused on feeding than they are fighting.

    Additionally, early in the morning and late the in the day, pretty much all individuals are much more desperate to fill their stomachs and less apt to fight. During these times, the dominant males often end up losing control over the situation and seemingly give in to feeding side by side.

  • 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.