affordable thrift store items

This has slowly become less and less true.

The big corpo thrift stores have long since had pricing that exceeds reasonable: a 10 year old shirt with some event printed on it is not $9.99, when I can go to any of a dozen retailers and just… buy a new one, often for less.

Smaller ones aren’t quite there yet, but smaller ones also tend to put more effort into fishing anything good in their donation streams out and posting it on ebay, so you end up with a store full of what is, quite literally, just trash.

The last wardrobe refresh I did I ended up buying almost entirely new or used from like eBay because the pricing at Goodwill, Salvation Army, and a couple of local thrift stores were at best similar and at worse wildly stupid.

The days when you could get a $0.99 shirt and $1.99 pants if you went on the correct color day are pretty much entirely dead, because capitalists going to capital, even if they’re literally profiting directly off stuff people are giving them for free.

He could sell his various parts as they fall off. What’s a trump toe worth you think?

ReactOS is cloning NT, so the 2000 part of that is correct.

95/98/98se/ME are completely different beasts, even if they happen to share the same GUI.

His advice was always bad.

Somehow, and I don’t get how, he got a reputation for “common sense” financial stuff.

He always was the 10%-to-the-church type which is just braindead if you’re financially strapped: the Jeeesus can live without your money, but your family probably can’t.

Also he’s a sexist, homophobic and probably racist piece of shit (since those come in threes) so really, no reason to do anything other than pretend he doesn’t exist and try to save cult members.

If your retirement window is 5 years, you’re probably very very fucked.

If it’s 10 years, as long as you’re assuming social security is going to contribute $0, you’re probably still pretty fucked.

15 years? Maybe, but at that point that whole global climate change thing we’re ignoring is going to start getting more serious, so I’d wager on fucked.

20? Please, you’re already in the trenches of the Water Wars, so your retirement plan is machine gun when you go over the top, sorry.

Basically retirement is going to be you dying once your insurance lapses and someone coming along later to pick your corpse up and billing your family for doing so.

(I’d love to be proven wrong, but ‘What’s the worst most awful thing that could possibly happen’ seems to be the right choice these days.)

Listen, I can’t just not use Amazon. Where else am I going to get my SYPHILICHODE nail trimmers and LEAKCROTCH underwear?

You can’t just find horrible garbage to buy ANYWHERE, you gotta buy it on Amazon.

I can live without it for a week, but man, these underwear don’t last too long so I gotta keep buying more!

(/s in case this was not sufficiently clear, but this is the ultimate problem with all these pointless little internet symbolic gestures: nobody will notice, remember, or care about them since they’re only going to be a very minor stoppage in buying things, which everyone ends up buying ANYWAYS after the week is over.)

Hey, Tesla tires and wheels are suuuuuper expesnive relative to normal cars.

Like several hundred dollars per tire (or in the case of the fatty dumpster, like $600) becauase the cars are so heavy you can’t just use ye olde normal tires on them.

I would very much like EVERY tire and wheel thief to go after nothing but Teslas and leave everyone else alone. Better money, and absolutely nobody will ever recall seeing you steal shit.

Hey if you’re near a Tesla storage lot, there probably IS a couple hundred cybertrucks nearby.

Sitting there, having their wheels stolen and rotting since nobody is buying them, but that’s still technically nearby.

Elon has always been a terrible person

The problem with Elon is he’s been provably an idiot for the past 25 years.

The first thing I ever heard about Musky is that back in 2000-ish he wanted PayPal to take their infra, throw out all the Linux/BSD in use, and move everything to Windows NT.

Anyone who was even remotely IT adjacent in that era can come along and tell you how utterly moronic that idea is.

Anytime I’ve ever heard him blather on about some stupid shit that doesn’t exist except in his delusions or talk about, well, ANYTHING technical or specialized all I was ever able to think of is that he got lucky that Thiel didn’t drain all of his blood and leave his corpse in a ditch.

Hey, I live near that McDonalds!

It’s right across from the Dallas Zoo, so you can imagine that there was a not insubstantial traffic of kids leaving the zoo and getting a McNasty with Cheese with their parents.

Everyone around here hated that they turned something fun and unique into another corpo hell hole of blandness, so there’s that at least.

Or do think, with their last gasp of breathable air, they curse the liberals and communists?

I would expect it would go something like “Dang woke DEI molotov cocktail, it’s trapped me in the master truck! Truly this is Obama’s fault.”

As a totally unrelated side note, I wonder how much thermite you’d need and where you’d need to place it to have it burn a hole through the car and into the battery, turning your cybertruck into a cyberfire.

What’s hilarious to me is that this was totally a Thing when I was younger.

Not for measels, because we weren’t braindead dumbfucks, but for chickenpox.

You’d have whole groups of kids get together to have everyone get sick at once, instead of one kid at a time for months and months as it spreads through classes at school.

IDK if it made sense, but it was legit a thing that people were doing.

Of course, there’s a vaccine now, so if you’re still doing this you’re one of the aformentioned braindead dumbfucks.

Sounds like a fantastic plan.

The handwringing about if we’re being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we’re now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that’s very specifically nazi rock, so they’re being extremely limited in response, imo.

Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that’s exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they’ll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

I hate to go ‘Boy, I don’t buy it’ but, uh, I kinda don’t?

This is one of those things that COULD happen, as long as every teacher, every administrator and the state itself were all intentionally trying to make it happen.

CT has standardized tests that are required to be taken to progress through school, so how can someone who can’t read or write pass those?

And EVERY teacher she had from first grade on just accepted the fact she clearly was unable to read or write, and thus was almost certainly not doing any work, and just decided that’s a-ok and we’ll just pass her along anyways without doing anything?

Somehow feels like there’s a lot more to this story than just her side as presented by that article.

Uber-like surge pricing on electricity

We don’t really: that story you heard from a few years ago was the only company that billed like that. The customers made a bet that the pricing averages through the day (lower at night, higher cost during the day) would average out in their favor over fixed-cost billing, and frankly, it did right up until it didn’t.

They took a risk and got bit by, frankly, not understanding how the system works and basically ate the spikes.

Everyone else paid $0.09/kwh or so during that whole period, and the electric providers ate the cost because when you’re averaging out spikes across millions of kwh, it won’t lead to bankruptcy.

“Work 50% longer weeks so you can make something that’ll both make me richer AND cost you your jobs!” is not the motivational speech he thinks it is.

Or, if it was named by users of Microsoft products:

New Teams (2) Final-Final (1) Final-THIS ONE

They’re almost certainly doing that because they’re forcing you into SMS 2fa as a ‘backup’ to the TOTP solution.

Cheaper to get everyone’s phone number so you can send them a text message when they fuck up their totp app/delete it/get a new phone/whatever than deal with support calls.

It’s stupid and insecure and incredibly dumb, but, well, business decisions.