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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.

    Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.




  • On this train of thought…

    OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

    It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

    Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.




  • Good context and explanation. Thanks. After reading that, I’m less sure my reasons apply as much to your particular situation, but I’ll throw them out there anyway:

    1. They assume you don’t just want the answer but why that is the answer. For me, I tend the learn and remember better if I understand why X is correct. If I’m just told X, I’m more likely to forget that answer later. If I have the context around the answer, I understand it better and can recall it better. Similarly, they may think you have (or will have) similar questions, so are showing you how to find the answer to those related questions.

    2. They don’t realize your question is precise/pointed and think you will have follow on questions, so are answering the potential related questions.

    3. if the question doesn’t have one right answer or they think their answer is right but could be wrong, they are providing background sort of to say “This is how I came to this conclusion, but you may come to a different one or there may be alternatives.”

    4. they just like to hear themselves talk and are happy to have a break from their work.

    Aside: when I said “they assume you don’t just want the answer…” or similar statements, I don’t mean that they are literally stopping and thinking about whether or not that is what you want. It’s probably subconscious and their default way of answering questions. Understandably, this leads to your frustration: even though you are giving a clear, well thought out question, they aren’t stopping and thinking about why you asked the question that way. Instead they are answering in their default mode.



  • Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

    It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.




  • Here’s my recollection from my limited research on this a few years ago (in the US):

    -High premiums

    -Insurance company can cancel coverage or jack up premiums if your pet becomes expensive

    -needing pre approval for coverage, so you may be dealing with an extra layer of beurocracy when you need to get your pet treated

    -Notable risk of insurance company rejecting claims

    -Maximumum coverage seemed rather low (ie they cap the amount insurance will pay per year or lifetime, so your coverage may dissolve if you end up having serious pet health issues.

    -high copays, so you’re still paying a lot in the event of large vet expenses.

    Basically, overall, it seemed like a scam in which, even for those that end up needing a large amount of vet care, you are likely to get less benefit from insurance than premiums.

    All that said, I don’t think I did much research. I think I looked at a couple of pet insurance companies that seemed “legitimate”, looked at the details of their policies, did some math, and concluded “lol, fuck no!”


  • Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

    It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

    We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.


  • Agreed. From his statement, it sounds like he was giving a general example, not attempting to recall the specific animals he was shown. I say this as someone who thinks trump sounds like he is mentally unwell. Heck, this is downright coherent compared to a lot of the gibberish that comes out of his mouth.

    “I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”



  • People use words in different ways. You will find varying definitions of propaganda. Some people will call any information produced by a government propaganda. Some people will only call that information propaganda if it appears to have a notable bias. Some will only call the info propaganda if it contains outright lies.

    You seem to want to define propaganda as any information produced by a government designed to pursuance people of something. Most people are not going to be against that kind of information (or at least not strongly against it). I’m pretty sure most people that say they are against propaganda view propaganda as information that is misleading or an outright lie.

    The problem here seems to be that you have taken the stance that propaganda simply means “persuasion”.


  • Yeah, the whole kids and inheritance thing is a really big sticking point. I saw your other comment about this being based on a discussion your family has had. The thing is, that even if your family was discussing jobs on the surface, if the people they are picking from are other family members (or at least people they actually know), their decisions are weighed by all their other knowledge and feelings about those people.

    I can see you’re trying to figure out how much value people put on each of these particular career cicurmastances in isolation but kids and inheritance is just a terrible framing for that for the above reasons. As a framing exercise, I think the question would have needed to be framed in a way that puts the reader in a much more distant position. This could be something like:

    An eccentric billionaire gives you the following list of people and tells you to choose one person from the list for him to give a million dollars to. The billionaire says you must make your decision based solely on the list. Who do you choose and why did you make that choice?

    Still maybe not a great framing, but it helps alleviate some of the rejection of the premise.