"Menu prices will rise!"

nothing a bunch of two-bit con artists MBAs hate more than an informed mark customer.

The actual good businesses run by good people will not suffer by this. only those that relied on duping their customers.

"fixed. whoops..."

I'm not even talking about those people or those scenarios.

you call them the extreme scenario, but they are the norm. this kind of scenario is the average reality for a massive number of Americans. it might not be "single parent with a flat tire", but there are thousands of ways people get stuck in a rut with only credit as a lifeline, and it's getting more and more common, and it's rarely something that could be foreseen or mitigated against. that's how our society is constructed now. desperation is the norm. it's profitable.

that is what this trend reveals. the ones who buy more than they need on credit they barely qualify for are the minority. the desperate are the majority.

you'd think you'd take some personal responsibility over your ignorance on the matter before loudly asserting that desperate people need to just pull up on their bootstraps harder and stop whining near you.

same. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit. they have to try and trick you to get it instead of letting its quality organically speak for itself.

when things are actually good, you don't need an ad agency to tell you.

I don't believe I'm immune to advertising but I don't think advertisers are willing to admit that it's just as easy to create negative brand associations as positive brand associations. when the only exposure you have to a product is frustrating and irritating and offensive, these feelings can bleed over when you see them on a shelf later.

after many years of trying to ignore advertising and pretending I'm not influenced by it, I've admitted I am, just like everyone else. so instead of resisting the effects, I try to turn the feeling of brand familiarity into a warning sign: if I'm drawn by familiarity to a particular product, I question why before I buy. if the answer isn't "a friend or i have used it and found it valuable/good", then i remind myself that it's not good enough on its own. they have to try and trick me into liking it, so it can't be that good. if it were good, they wouldn't have to drop dump trucks of cash into an ad agency to try and trick people into buying it. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit.

I agree. and I happen to enjoy baking. arch was my first distro and after a whirlwind tour of other options at some point, has remained my daily driver os for the better part of a decade.

i don't suggest arch to just any newbies. I suggest it to the ones who are overtly interested in baking. I don't suggest it to people asking the best way to get tasty cookies, who are perhaps the majority, but not by as much as people seem to naturally suspect. sometimes I think some people giving answers don't remember or realize that there are many kinds of people interested in learning about Linux and therefore many right answers for a starting distro.

People who are modifying Windows this deeply are not going to switch to Linux

I did. I was a heavy Windows customizer and deeply understand it as an operating system and target for application development. I left because, at some point, I realized the OS I (one way or another) paid for was treating me like a product instead of a user, and I resent that. I don't like the feeling of slowly losing grip on the OS as it slides into becoming adtech tooling for marketing interests instead of the thing that runs programs for me. Despite my entrenched Windows knowledge, none of my primary personal computers run it anymore, including my gaming PC. Adaptation is a lot easier than most people expect, in my opinion.

I have reached the age where I find gags like this - and the massive cringe effect they inflict on young folks - fucking hilarious.

i'm comfortable with my fate. who ever really needed hair on their head anyway?

ding ding ding

this is your reminder. 5 hours overdue, but here nonetheless.

but for real, your phone can do these things.

there are always the people in every horror movie who think that if they deliver their friends into the open drooling maw of the monster stalking them, they'll get a reward.

the "reward" is usually at least as bad as their friends' fate. it's just narcissism really. they think they're more like the enemy than they are like their friends, so it would be natural to spare them. but they're all just meat to the monster.

trump is just a shitty xenomorph. small hands instead of small mouth, and substantially less physically threatening. I think they both probably have the acid blood though.

FUN!!!

pls no bully

fun fact, when Firefox for Android or its forks hits over 99 tabs, it just switches to a little infinity icon...

so if you're regularly annoyed (1/4), angry (2/4) and spiteful (3/4) about being forced to participate in this exploitative system designed to bleed you dry until you die, you're ok still... but if you try to do anything about it (by arguing with or defying "authorities" in any way) you're an insane person that needs to be locked up and given drugs? cool. that's really convenient.

so if you're regularly annoyed (1/4), angry (2/4) and spiteful (3/4) about being forced to participate in this exploitative system designed to bleed you dry until you die, you're ok still... but if you try to do anything about it (by arguing with or defying "authorities" in any way) you're an insane person that needs to be locked up and given drugs? cool. that's really convenient.

I had kids that would do this at my school too. they'd sell them at a loss, technically - see, it was their parents money paying for it, but they would get paid cash by kids for discounted food items. it was essentially a way to launder the money your parent gave the school for your lunches into usable money, with a little bit of a loss yes, but at a big gain in versatility - for any kid, cash in hand is way better than dollar values in a school lunch system.

but I'd much rather have this "fraud" (of the kids' parents maybe lol) than kids go hungry.

and this has nothing to do with the free school lunches either. those were always fixed meals given to you - not "lunch money dollars" you could choose to use as you see fit. so this is just a bunch of greedy old assholes wanting to starve some kids.

it makes sense to his followers, which is his intent. he wants them riled up. they don't see this as him experiencing the consequences of his own actions, they see this as a left wing democratic deep state attack on trump to try and prevent him from winning the upcoming election. they believe this "deep state" is afraid of trump because of how he's obviously (/s) about to win a landslide election and finally flush all the "undesirables" out of power and turn america back into the racist wifebeating paradise of the 1970s. he wants them to be thinking about "defending him" from this "deep state attack". he's trying to solve his massive Impending financial apocalypse by gently prodding his followers into thinking about domestic terrorism.

removed

removed

for real! I'll use Google maps on my phone only if I'm going to a new place I haven't been to before and I don't have time to take a few moments to learn the route(s) ahead of time. that's its convenience. but I hate being on that digital leash, being scolded by my phone if I take a different road to see where it leads or to stop for gas or a break. so, I tend to drive everywhere in my day-to-day without it, and my friends think it's so weird.

one of my friends won't start driving to the grocery store a few blocks away from his house without turning on his Garmin. he's all "if I take a wrong turn I don't want to have to pull over to look at the map!" like he can't just turn around and get back onto the simple route he usually takes? same friend is among 3 of my friends who get visibly anxious when I drive them places without GPS and will pull up their phone in the passenger seat to "get directions for me". had to tell all 3: "don't give me directions unless I ask for them. I know where I am and where I'm going, I don't need you telling me to make a turn 60s before each one."

Sticking my finger into the coin return of every pay phone

do you remember being told the urban legends about evil drug dealers putting "needles of drugs" in the coin return slots so you'd poke yourself checking for coins and "get high" and then "be addicted" so you'd have to buy from them? lmao

same place the urban legends about people putting "drug needles" into candybars on Halloween to hand out came from, I figure