Author: Brin

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

neutralangel:

fullmetalfisting:

fart-poop-daily:

fullmetalfisting:

Fuck society fuck capitalism I’m gonna go full feral and live in the woods

Ppl on tumbler LOVE talking about how they want to “go feral” and “live in the woods” and let me say first hand that NONE of y’all have the skill it takes to lone wolf it out in the wilderness for even a single day … . stop appropriating werewolf culture and get an office job….,

Oh you think I plan to survive? You think I’m gonna try and drink river water and eat squirrels out there? Fuck you im gonna rub dirt on my face and immediately die

Stop appropriating what

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #death tw #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #the humour of my people #werewolf

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

Any time somebody posts a video of some outlandishly large classical instrument, there are always comments to the effect of why would they go to the trouble to make such a large instrument when it just ends up sounding terrible?

Let me explain you a thing.

The sound that comes out of your speakers or headphones sounds awful because your computer is not capable of reproducing what such instruments sound like. Its audio hardware does not have a resonanting chamber large enough nor an electromagnet strong enough to even approximate it.

You know how, when something is deeply known, one might poetically say that it’s felt in the bones? When somebody starts rocking out on one of those puppies, you can literally feel it in your bones. These devices are capable of achieving the resonant frequency of the human skeleton.

What they sound like to the ear is very nearly beside the point!

Tags:

#okay but counterpoint: the feeling of a sound resonating in your bones *is* terrible #I avoided the fireworks shows on Canada Day in large part because I can’t stand the resonance of the explosions #when I go to concerts I am always careful to get a seat way in the back so I can just hear it and not have to *feel* it #pretty sure I’ve been known to *leave* some concerts because they didn’t have anywhere far enough back to be safe #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #music

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

official-voice:

tumblr_pklctvhx8g1vn3gkeo1_500

 

sigmaleph:

gudroo:

this is the last year that we can make this stupid joke so im going to make the most of it and post it every day until 2020

the good news is, after the end of next year, we can start making ‘hindsight is 2020’ jokes

…I just realised that if anything, “I hate when people ask me what’s going on, come on guys I don’t have 2020 vision” is actually funnier than the versions about what they’ll be doing in X years.

(though I’m not sure how much of the humour depends on already being familiar with the genre?)

This meme still has further heights to reach.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #puns

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

transsexualite:

Is it just me or does 90% of gendering occur at restaurants and fast food places

 

transsexualite:

petition to force restaurants to replace “sir/maam” with “mortal”

 

transsexualite:

okay but like fucjing imagine rolling up to the drive thru and a brooding cashier says “your total is $11.60, mortal”

 

shacklesburst:

who’s spreading rumors i’m mortal?!

 

dagny-hashtaggart:

In which the big golden M stands for both “memento” and “mori”

 

serinemolecule:

Come to Asia! It’s really only Indo-European languages that have gendered honorifics. In Japan, service workers always use “Honored Guest”.

If you watch anime, notice how words like “senpai” and “-san” aren’t gendered at all.

Linguistic gender was invented in Proto-Indo-European as a neat party trick to make it clearer which pronoun referred to what. And then most languages in the world came to be descended from it. But the languages that aren’t don’t make random words gendered.

My native dialect of English technically *has* sir/ma’am but doesn’t use them much†, and it weirds me out when my co-workers call customers “sir” and “ma’am”. I just don’t call customers anything: there’s really no need to add *any* word to the end of, to use OP’s example, “your total is $11.60”.

(Boss, Meta-Boss, and Boss^3 have all witnessed me talking to customers a fair bit, and none of them have ever complained about this. Boss^3 specifically complimented my customer interaction!)

—

†I’m not sure I can articulate or whether I even consciously understand what the exceptions are, but I think it’s something about the power differential needing to be *vast*. People who are only a level or two above you in the social hierarchy don’t get honorifics; those are for, like, CEOs and political leaders. (or maybe it’s about them needing to be very highly ranked in absolute terms: I poked my intuition with some more hypotheticals and it seems to feel less weird to call a barely-above-you man “sir” if you yourself are already pretty high up)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #death mention #gender #in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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quoms:

American currency pet peeves power ranking

3. The fact that pennies still, somehow, exist in 2019

2b. Nickels are easily mistaken for quarters, a result of American currency designers’ longstanding embrace of the idea that money looking different is somehow a deficiency

2a. All bills same size and color (cf. 2b)

1. A dime is incredibly small in comparison to a penny (in fact it is nearly the smallest coin I have ever handled, second only to a Georgian 1 tetri coin worth 0.36¢) yet worth ten times as much! Who the fuck allowed this! On what Earth!!!

 

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

bad post, no mention of dollar bills

 

rustingbridges:

I’m actually going to disagree with on almost all of these points

  1. small coins are, actually, good, because they minimize the burden of carrying around all these random chunks of metal. this is the actual reason nickels are bad.

2a. color okay, but bills being different sizes is just displeasing. I get that blind people like to know how much money they have but they just fit together so nicely!

2b. this has never happened to me

  1. just because I’m able to tolerate the government putting xenoestrogens in my water supply doesn’t mean I’m gonna let them start rounding up prices to the nearest nickel. it’s bad enough that none of the “99¢” pizza shops give you a penny. $3.99 for a gyro my ass, it’s $4. anyway I’m not gonna tolerate a world where we have 96¢ pizza places. just no

 

brin-bellway:

Who said anything about rounding *up* to the next nickel? I was just talking last week [link] about exploiting round-to-the-*closest*-nickel laws to get 52c items for 50c.

(Our bills are all the same size, but different colours and marked with Braille-like dots.)

 

rustingbridges:

Exactly: the rounding will introduce an element I have to care about and track, or else be exploited for a percentage or two by people who care more or have enough volume for the marginal cents to matter.

I am not in favor of increasing transaction costs.

 

brin-bellway:

(see also this other branch)

True, although there are very few cases in which someone worried about every last percent would be paying cash at all [link]. Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the *very* cheapest items are worth even *considering* paying cash for.

(Maybe somewhat more cases in a place like NYC, with more street vendors? Vendors are *starting* to take credit cards now that there are card readers that use smartphones as their infrastructure connection [link], but there are still many who haven’t done that yet. And come to think of it there’s those Chinese restaurants that give you a 10% discount for paying cash, but that would be big enough to wash out other considerations and make it worthwhile to pay cash *regardless* of whether it’s rounded in your favour or not.)

Payment optimisation is a fun game, but I get not wanting to penalise people who hate playing it: the rest of us can always get it out of our system by becoming player merchants in MMOs and stuff like that.

—

From a seller’s point of view, it’s tricky to ensure that round-to-the-closest-nickel comes out in your favour, although that might be from being a franchise (prices set by people many levels above the actual store owners). As of yesterday evening, we’d *lost* 15 cents that day on cash rounding two of which went to me. That’s an unusually large number: on most evenings that I see the figure it’s a couple of cents in one direction or the other.

 

rustingbridges:

Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the very cheapest items are worth even considering paying cash for.

If there’s no fee, at what point is it worth considering? You still get your 2-3% edge by paying card if that’s what you’re after.

Firstly there’s tons of cash only food places, and the additional heap of stores and bars with high card minimums, so it’s not like you can be cash free without really limiting your options.

Secondly, I personally often prefer to make small transactions by cash. Sure, I lose a few cents, but it’s often faster. Credit card fraud also, while not costing you any money if you catch it, does cost time in catching it. Also being able to just walk out of a restaurant and not have to wait for the check to go round is often worth it imo.

It’s not about getting the absolute biggest edge, necessarily. I just don’t want to give up something more in exchange for nothing.

>>If there’s no fee, at what point is it worth considering?<<

Since the maximum savings from using cash is 2c, with a 0.5%-cashback card the threshold beneath which cash is worth considering is $4. I recently obtained a 1% card, so the threshold is now $2.

(2% cards are either not worth the fees or straight-up unavailable to someone who, as an individual, makes maybe $10k/year and spends maybe $2k. (That’s not to say that I’m saving 80% of my income: most household purchases are simply made by other household members, and in some cases I am financially backing them. If your parents are going to the grocery store and you chip in some money for it, that doesn’t get put on your card and doesn’t count towards making a high-tier card useful enough to you to be worth the annual fee. My commute has by far the fewest stores along its route of anyone in my household, so I’m rarely the most efficient choice of buyer.))

—

As for cash-only places, like I said I think I tend to encounter those less, not living in a big city. (Though I certainly do keep enough cash on hand for them, since I encounter them *occasionally* and also want to be prepared for the possibility of a card reader breaking.)

And anyway, if cash is the *only* option (or if you’re paying cash because you find it more convenient) then you don’t need to expend effort on tracking the “is this rounding up or down” variable, since it doesn’t affect your decision either way. (Unless you were willing to buy the thing for X but not X+$0.02, which doesn’t seem like it would come up much. Or I suppose if you’re trying to prepare exact change in advance, but in that case hidden sales tax is a bigger problem.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #long post #adventures in human capitalism #fun with loopholes

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

quoms:

American currency pet peeves power ranking

3. The fact that pennies still, somehow, exist in 2019

2b. Nickels are easily mistaken for quarters, a result of American currency designers’ longstanding embrace of the idea that money looking different is somehow a deficiency

2a. All bills same size and color (cf. 2b)

1. A dime is incredibly small in comparison to a penny (in fact it is nearly the smallest coin I have ever handled, second only to a Georgian 1 tetri coin worth 0.36¢) yet worth ten times as much! Who the fuck allowed this! On what Earth!!!

 

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

bad post, no mention of dollar bills

 

rustingbridges:

I’m actually going to disagree with on almost all of these points

  1. small coins are, actually, good, because they minimize the burden of carrying around all these random chunks of metal. this is the actual reason nickels are bad.

2a. color okay, but bills being different sizes is just displeasing. I get that blind people like to know how much money they have but they just fit together so nicely!

2b. this has never happened to me

  1. just because I’m able to tolerate the government putting xenoestrogens in my water supply doesn’t mean I’m gonna let them start rounding up prices to the nearest nickel. it’s bad enough that none of the “99¢” pizza shops give you a penny. $3.99 for a gyro my ass, it’s $4. anyway I’m not gonna tolerate a world where we have 96¢ pizza places. just no

 

brin-bellway:

Who said anything about rounding *up* to the next nickel? I was just talking last week [link] about exploiting round-to-the-*closest*-nickel laws to get 52c items for 50c.

(Our bills are all the same size, but different colours and marked with Braille-like dots.)

 

rustingbridges:

Exactly: the rounding will introduce an element I have to care about and track, or else be exploited for a percentage or two by people who care more or have enough volume for the marginal cents to matter.

I am not in favor of increasing transaction costs.

(see also this other branch)

True, although there are very few cases in which someone worried about every last percent would be paying cash at all [link]. Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the *very* cheapest items are worth even *considering* paying cash for.

(Maybe somewhat more cases in a place like NYC, with more street vendors? Vendors are *starting* to take credit cards now that there are card readers that use smartphones as their infrastructure connection [link], but there are still many who haven’t done that yet. And come to think of it there’s those Chinese restaurants that give you a 10% discount for paying cash, but that would be big enough to wash out other considerations and make it worthwhile to pay cash *regardless* of whether it’s rounded in your favour or not.)

Payment optimisation is a fun game, but I get not wanting to penalise people who hate playing it: the rest of us can always get it out of our system by becoming player merchants in MMOs and stuff like that.

—

From a seller’s point of view, it’s tricky to ensure that round-to-the-closest-nickel comes out in your favour, although that might be from being a franchise (prices set by people many levels above the actual store owners). As of yesterday evening, we’d *lost* 15 cents that day on cash rounding two of which went to me. That’s an unusually large number: on most evenings that I see the figure it’s a couple of cents in one direction or the other.

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #(deliberately echoes a video-game tag!) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #in which Brin has a job #reply via reblog

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