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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

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!!!

bad post, no mention of dollar bills

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

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.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #discourse cw? #(also we have quarters) #((they have moose on them)) #((sometimes poppies with actual red colouring))

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etirabys:

“wow, this is a difficult pose to draw, I think I should probably strip down to underwear and photograph myself in the same pose because I’m not going to find the exact reference I need by googling”

“yeah, but what about… [vague sense that any sense that the photos on my phone are private is illusory]”

“oh… that… yes. I do feel bad about that. okay, let’s just keep guessing”

“hey, I need to borrow your single-purpose camera, it’s a long story, no I’m not going to let you see what pictures I took before I remove them from the storage drive”

Tags:

#reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(I feel like this obeys the letter of the tag if not necessarily the spirit) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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gasmaskaesthetic:

Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.

Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!

I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).

Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.

Takes me 1-3 hours.

 

brin-bellway:

This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.

(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.

Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.

And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.

 

brin-bellway:

I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.

(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)

 

cromulentenough:

The solution to employers making it difficult to get pay statements is not…keep on using physical cheques in the year of our lord 2019.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

You tagged it #wtf America but I think @brin-bellway is canadian

 

cromulentenough:

Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.

Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.

—

I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.

—

Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))

((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))

—

We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.

(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)

—

Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.

I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)

Tags:

#long post #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #adventures in University Land

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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gasmaskaesthetic:

Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.

Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!

I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).

Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.

Takes me 1-3 hours.

 

brin-bellway:

This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.

(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.

Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.

And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.

I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.

(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.

Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!

I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).

Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.

Takes me 1-3 hours.

This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.

(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #(ftr I’m one of the paper ones)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

hugintheraven:

exigencelost:

Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:

1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.

2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.

3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.

4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.

5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.

…wait, did you guys never lie awake at night as kids wondering what breathing would feel like if you didn’t *need* to do it

practicing holding your breath, partly to expand the *total* length of time you can hold it but also to try to expand the time length of the initial segment, of neither breathing nor feeling the lack

(though all too aware that feeling it for a few seconds at a time is probably a very different experience from feeling it indefinitely, from *knowing* that you can feel it indefinitely)

—

(I remember I started at a total length of around thirty seconds and managed to work my way up to about sixty, maybe sixty-five. I haven’t practised in ages, but just now I tried it and was able to do sixty seconds on the first try, and might have been able to squeeze a few more seconds out of it. Is it like riding a bike? Does puberty do something to increase your lung capacity relative to your oxygen consumption?)

Tags:

#Twilight #death tw #asphyxiation cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #my childhood #(for anyone with their proofreader goggles on or otherwise paying close enough attention to notice: #there are two different spellings of the verb form of ”practise” in this post and both of them are deliberate) #(child!me spoke American and adult!me speaks Vaguely Canadian Mishmash) #((although I did start experimenting with Canadian spelling fairly young #–I knew from the age of 8 that one day I would live in Canada– #and that time period probably did overlap)) #((but I think ”practise” was among the later ones I adopted)) #(((I started off with ”favourite” and ”colour”))) #tag rambles #our home and cherished land #(((also I played a lot of Neopets and Runescape so some Britishisms leaked through from there))) #(((but there was definitely an aspect of ”I’m going to have to get used to it someday and might as well start now”))) #language

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rustingbridges:

So in movies and shit people are always getting really angry and flipping tables and smashing their own shit. Not to spite anyone or anything, but just because they’re all mad or something.

Is this supposed to be relateable? Do people actually do this? Or is it just supposed to be dramatic shorthand?

Violence against entities that can’t feel pain is entirely unsatisfying, so eventually I stopped bothering with property damage because it wasn’t any better than repressing it.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #violence cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

two things I learned today:

1) there’s a youtube video in which George RR martin shares his opinions on new york pizza

and

2) said opinions are thoroughly peasant-tier

Given one of our previous discussions [link], my first thought was that a peasant-tier opinion on this is “the best pizza is the kind you get for free by showing up to NYC tech meetups and pretending to care about The Cloud”. I *suspect* that’s not actually what you meant, though.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #adventures in human capitalism

Anonymous asked: Body mod: Unaging preteen girl.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

moonlit-tulip:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

On the one hand, unagingness is very good and worth grabbing. On the other hand, I like having an older-than-preteen body, both for personal “I enjoy the results of estrogen-puberty and would rather have a body which lets me have them rather than not” reasons and for social “being seen as a kid by people who don’t know me would lead to assorted interpersonal difficulties” reasons. Ultimately, though, the unagingness consideration is a Very Big Deal and wins out over the downsides, and so while it’s not my favorite choice within the space of possible unaging bodies it’s pretty clearly worth it relative to my current baseline (which is how I’ve been rating these).

*

Loophole hacking, maybe? They didn’t say pre-*adolescent*, they said pre-*teen*.

Me aged 12 years and 364 days is a *little* less physically developed than me aged 25, but close enough to be believable as an adult: most of the difference between 13 and 25 is experience, and I assume you’re keeping the ability to gain experience (unagingness wouldn’t be any fun if it gave you anterograde amnesia). You might not pass for adult *at first glance*, but people routinely mistake me for 17 as it is, and I doubt being physically reverted to 13-less-one-day would make it that much worse.

(And it does occasionally have its advantages: one time–it was the day after my birthday, I think I was either 21 or 22–I was in a grocery store and the attached bank had a guy trying to talk passersby into signing up. He started trying to talk to me, but when I turned around and looked at him, my face pinged to him as “too young to sign legal contracts” and he stopped.)

((While seeing whether I could look up which year it was, I found another relevant quote in my diary (age 21): “She tried to take only the parents’ cards†, reading me as underage. (Most of the museum cashiers did. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)”))

—

†Note from present-me: the cards were a citizenship gift from the Canadian government, granting free museum access for one year. Only adults get cards: children merely accompany their parents.

it’s pretty nuts that some people are almost the same size they were when they were 13 for their whole life

I was probably only like 2/3rds of a person when I turned 13! kind of short and very lacking in upper body strength

(for completeness, note also the existence of this branch)

It’s pretty great! One of the nice things about estrogen is that the physical effects are often very front-loaded: you get them out of the way when you’re about 10 – 12 and then have, like, 20 years of looking pretty much the same. I love how stable my appearance has been for the most recent half of my life: even with prosopagnosia I can look in a mirror and get a visceral sense of “yep, that’s me!”, because I have *so much experience* with this face that general object recognition is enough for that.

(I didn’t feel a visceral sense of recognition in the mirror until I was at least 17, maybe 18! Before then I’d never had the same face for long enough to really deeply get to know it!)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #morphological freedom ask meme #amnesia cw #aging cw #hormones #prosopagnosia

Anonymous asked: Body mod: Unaging preteen girl.

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

moonlit-tulip:

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

On the one hand, unagingness is very good and worth grabbing. On the other hand, I like having an older-than-preteen body, both for personal “I enjoy the results of estrogen-puberty and would rather have a body which lets me have them rather than not” reasons and for social “being seen as a kid by people who don’t know me would lead to assorted interpersonal difficulties” reasons. Ultimately, though, the unagingness consideration is a Very Big Deal and wins out over the downsides, and so while it’s not my favorite choice within the space of possible unaging bodies it’s pretty clearly worth it relative to my current baseline (which is how I’ve been rating these).

*

Loophole hacking, maybe? They didn’t say pre-*adolescent*, they said pre-*teen*.

Me aged 12 years and 364 days is a *little* less physically developed than me aged 25, but close enough to be believable as an adult: most of the difference between 13 and 25 is experience, and I assume you’re keeping the ability to gain experience (unagingness wouldn’t be any fun if it gave you anterograde amnesia). You might not pass for adult *at first glance*, but people routinely mistake me for 17 as it is, and I doubt being physically reverted to 13-less-one-day would make it that much worse.

(And it does occasionally have its advantages: one time–it was the day after my birthday, I think I was either 21 or 22–I was in a grocery store and the attached bank had a guy trying to talk passersby into signing up. He started trying to talk to me, but when I turned around and looked at him, my face pinged to him as “too young to sign legal contracts” and he stopped.)

((While seeing whether I could look up which year it was, I found another relevant quote in my diary (age 21): “She tried to take only the parents’ cards†, reading me as underage. (Most of the museum cashiers did. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)”))

—

†Note from present-me: the cards were a citizenship gift from the Canadian government, granting free museum access for one year. Only adults get cards: children merely accompany their parents.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #aging cw #fun with loopholes #morphological freedom ask meme #amnesia cw #our home and cherished land

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