fuck indeed fuck ziprecruiter I want to be paid $1000/hr to sort skittles by color
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #adventures in human capitalism #venting cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Friendly reminder as we head into tax season (for US Americans), that the major tax preparation companies are fully prepared to lie and mislead you into paying for their tax preparation software when you might qualify for free software through the IRS.
Don’t fall for their bullshit. Visit IRS Free File and see what services are available to you. The requirements vary depending on your household status and income, but if you make less than $79,000/year (which is nearly everyone I know), you probably qualify for something.
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#…the fourth question they ask is ”what country do you live in” #(with a long list of possible answers) #I am going to have to look into this #I still don’t *super* expect it to work #–later parts of the questionnaire kind of implied that the #only valid reason to be a non-resident citizen is if you’re on a military deployment– #but it does need further investigation #(tax-preparation services for non-residents normally start at USD$120) #(that’s for an ~installation-wizard‚ not a person) #(it’s $160 if you’re a gig worker) #(if you hold index funds outside of a short list of exceptional circumstances #you don’t qualify for the DIY tax software and you have to buy a human-assisted service for $550) #((yes‚ five hundred and fifty)) #home of the brave #tag rambles #PSA #adventures in human capitalism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
#I’m not sure how to answer this #I guess ”no” is probably closer to the *spirit* of the answer #in that I *think* OP wants to know whether your parents want a financial contribution On Principle #and it’s very clear that both of my parents would *rather* let their kids live here for free if that were an option available to them #but they cannot‚ in fact‚ afford to let us live here for free #we will all hang together or we will all hang separately #surveys #domesticity #adventure in human capitalism
Another warning: Western Digital owns SanDisk, and issues have been reported with their drives too. Current recommended brands are Crucial, Samsung, and LaCie
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#PSA #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #adventures in human capitalism
“Adult Canadian residents”, give or take, so maybe tens of millions of dollars.
I was going to say “and you have to live somewhere where food prices are low enough to make the math check out, so, like, not Nunavut”, but then I did some checking and…none of the grocery stores in Iqaluit seem to have online catalogues, but there’s a Real Canadian Superstore branch in Whitehorse, Yukon and it claims to be selling Cheez-Its for exactly the same price as the Superstore in Kitchener ($3.39 for one or 2/$5).
(I do kind of wonder if maybe it was too clever for its own good and ignored me asking for Whitehorse data, but OTOH I guess if any food *were* going to be the same price in Yukon it’d be a lightweight non-perishable like crackers. Hmm…okay, a 3L jug of store-brand apple cider is $3.99 in Kitchener and $7 in Whitehorse, so it looks like this is real price data. (Although I was honestly expecting the apple-cider prices in Yukon to be even worse.))
Maybe the main issue is *how many* grocery chains are in your area: the more options you have, the more likely one of them has a good sale on a given week. And since the receipt has to be from a (fairly long, but still) whitelist of specific chains to count, looks like the folks in Iqaluit are out of luck no matter how good a Cheez-It price they get.
I *am* wondering now if Brother is obtaining a larger fraction of his own food than I’d realised. But even if 0% of my food spending were for him (*definitely* not true), that would still only be USD$8.21.
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#reply via reblog #oh look an update #food #fun with loopholes #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land
“Adult Canadian residents”, give or take, so maybe tens of millions of dollars.
I was going to say “and you have to live somewhere where food prices are low enough to make the math check out, so, like, not Nunavut”, but then I did some checking and…none of the grocery stores in Iqaluit seem to have online catalogues, but there’s a Real Canadian Superstore branch in Whitehorse, Yukon and it claims to be selling Cheez-Its for exactly the same price as the Superstore in Kitchener ($3.39 for one or 2/$5).
(I do kind of wonder if maybe it was too clever for its own good and ignored me asking for Whitehorse data, but OTOH I guess if any food *were* going to be the same price in Yukon it’d be a lightweight non-perishable like crackers. Hmm…okay, a 3L jug of store-brand apple cider is $3.99 in Kitchener and $7 in Whitehorse, so it looks like this is real price data. (Although I was honestly expecting the apple-cider prices in Yukon to be even worse.))
Maybe the main issue is *how many* grocery chains are in your area: the more options you have, the more likely one of them has a good sale on a given week. And since the receipt has to be from a (fairly long, but still) whitelist of specific chains to count, looks like the folks in Iqaluit are out of luck no matter how good a Cheez-It price they get.
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#reply via reblog #food #adventures in human capitalism #fun with loopholes #our home and cherished land #tag rambles #fun fact: I did the math after seeing a discussion of U.S. food stamps recently #and in 2022 we spent USD$6.16/person/day on food + soda #(I normally categorise soda under ”recreational drugs – caffeine” rather than ”groceries” #~~in order to (not-so-)subtly express my disapproval~~ #but it does in fact contain sustenance) #((it’s USD$6.02 without the soda‚ and yes these two figures *do* count restaurant spending)) #apparently this is substantially less than a food-stamp budget #but it requires more ability to exploit-sales-to-maintain-stockpiles than someone living paycheque-to-paycheque would have #some fortnights I spend $350 at the grocery store and others I spend $100: depends on what’s cheap enough to resupply on this week #(and how many loyalty points I had piled up from previous trips) #(I got over $800 of loyalty points last year‚ which I treat as a discount) #I still feel like we have a lot of room for improvement in our food spending #(indeed‚ I’ve *made* improvements since 2022: things are shaping up to be cheaper this year) #((and not entirely because I’ve been getting more food as ~gifts‚ though that is also happening)) #but Vimes Boot Theory is nevertheless a hell of a thing #as are the plans of a sublimated accountant
If you ever wanted to be a swan, move to the UK and you can become one.
[ID: Newspaper ad with picture of swan. Want a New Challenge? Retrain as a Swan. Two Day courses; no experience necessary. Full tuition in:
Honking
Gliding serenely
Eating bits of bread
Breaking a man’s arm
Earn up to £40 working on one of Britain’s illustrious waterways. Book online at Cygnusjobs-4-u.net /end ID]
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #birds #adventures in human capitalism #(sort of) #make sure to go to the website #violence cw?
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.
i mean you can get a terabyte phone but it costs like $1600 USD (give or take a couple hundred, idk, i’m not looking it up)
what really pisses me off is that the samsung flagship phones have completely phased out their sd card slots. you can’t get a cell phone with expandable storage anymore
Yeah, it’s such bullshit that it’s a whole ordeal to dig up a model with a microSD slot now.
I *do* have a 2020-model phone (a slightly different model of which is still in production) with a half-terabyte microSD† in it. (For CAD$155 instead of CAD$70 I could have gotten a full terabyte of microSD, but I didn’t have the budget. Mind you, I *could* upgrade later, without having to replace the whole phone…) But that’s because a microSD slot was my single highest priority when deciding what model to buy, absolutely non-negotiable: if I’d cared any less, I’d probably have ended up with a Pixel or a OnePlus.
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Hmm, I wrote an extremely outdated guide to orienting your phone setup around not having reliable Internet access in 2015, and a substantially outdated guide in 2018, so it sounds like I’m due for another one. Be right back.
†Some of the specs for that phone model you’ll see around will say it takes “up to 128 GB”, but don’t be fooled: 64 GB – 2 TB microSDs are the same backwards-compatibility tier. If a phone can take 32 GB, it might not be able to take 64, but if it can take 64 it can take 2048.
I am told it legitimately (to a small degree) helps with waterproofing. Because a very small number of users like to swap out the SD cards regularly, like for photos and stuff for easier transfer. And some number of them are bad at it and tend to break the waterproofing around the card slot, which makes the phone less safe if dunked.
Now, this seems (a) true, and (b) like total bullshit. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who talks about regularly swapping SD cards. And the ones who are doing it for semi pro photography stuff are generally going to be types who are more careful (or use, like, real cameras).
Right now you can get a 1TB SanDisk SD card (a better brand) for $100 USD. I’m sure the memory isn’t quite as fast as whatever is integrated into the phone. But also, 1TB can easily be fitted into that footprint. I’ve also seen chromebooks recently sporting 64GB, which is absolutely unacceptable and clearly them trying to offload like 5 year old stock. And honestly, that is part of it – the lower end processors or memory are outdated stock they are trying to get rid of. But also, since the base model seems to have been stuck at 128 for about 3 years, they are obviously still *making* the 128 for phones.
There is that point that upgrading storage (128gb to 256 gb for $100) does subsidize the lower models of phone. But also, this could easily be done for 512 to 1024GB for a $150 markup for similar profit margin (the cost to upgrade 128 to 256 sd card is about $10, from 256 to 512 is $25, and 512 to 1024 is $50.
(sorry about the additional delay: it’s been a weird couple of months)
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The waterproofing complaint has the same vibe to me as, like, when people complain about the Internet connection being slow on an airplane, or that their laptop battery only lasts for five hours. All this time I have been taking for granted that these aren’t things it’s feasible to do (except *maybe* for the ultra-rich?), and the way I find out that things have changed is by overhearing people complain about the exceptions where things *do* still work the way I thought they did.
I just double-checked and indeed my phone model is not waterproof, exactly as I had unconsciously assumed of a delicate bundle of electronics with replaceable internal components.
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(also there was a while there where I was having some file-sync issues and *was* regularly pulling my microSD card so that I could plug it into my laptop and sync it through there, but I’ve sorted that out now)
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And yeah, I don’t feel like I have a good grasp of the reasons for what’s going on with internal storage.
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#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disappointed permanent resident of The Future
Too tired to draw but I still need everyone to be aware of this bizarre interaction I had at work this morning
Worth mentioning is that I’m in Iceland and the store I work at only accepts icelandic króna so like even euros wouldn’t have worked in this case
It occurs to me now that since cash registers are full Internet connected computers these days, surely they could be programmed to accept any currency and calculate appropriate change, with an exchange spread and an owner-configured Annoying Foreigner Surcharge.
Our full-Internet-connected-computer cash register *has* a foreign-exchange button, but (for some reason I am not privy to) it’s turned off. Our store policy is that we take U.S. cash at parity (with Canadian): if you want to pay a 35% Annoying Foreigner Surcharge, be our guest.
(Though I acknowledge that it makes a lot more sense to have a pre-existing policy on how to handle U.S. cash in Canada than it does in Iceland.)
(I think I had a guy hand me a USD$10 bill *once* in the several years I’ve worked here, and he was very apologetic about it and asked permission before ordering. Mostly it’s just a matter of not bothering to point it out when someone accidentally hands you an American nickel instead of a Canadian nickel.
We’re not *supposed* to accept when people accidentally give us British nickels or Jamaican dimes or something, but often cashiers don’t notice. Sometimes I’ll trade the cash register for it out of my own wallet so I can bring it home and go “hey guys, check out this neat coin we found!”.)
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#reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #adventures in human capitalism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #discourse cw? #embarrassment squick?
Brinens and Things 