I’m going to contact my State Farm agent about this. Maybe Geico or Progressive are more adverse to Nazis.

They can try. But cleaning up a mess takes a while and there’s no magic wand to make it ho faster.

And then we should all charge outrageous hourly rates to fix the AI generated code.

Loose tea isn’t very common on supermarket shelves. If you live near a store that has a bulk section, then they might have loose tea in bulk. I end up ordering online from Stash or Harney & Sons

China does have a lot of agricultural and manufacturing workers who aren’t on computers all day. And they have some pretty poor rural areas. But I’m calling bullshit on Japan’s numbers. Tokyo looks like Blade Runner at night but and the office culture is famous for long hours but no one is looking at screens? Get the fuck outta here.

Same. And knowing that I have been an efficient cashier in the past makes the awkwardness of the self checkout super frustrating. If you have the items coming down the belt and are in a groove and so it regularly, you can get through a cart of items so fast. Between the poor UI and theft deterrence the self checkout is way slower.

Ans what happens to the people whose jobs are eliminated by the self checkout? Yeah, it’s a crap job, I know, I’ve done it. But if the only alternative in our current system is more homelessness and absolutely desperate poverty then I’ll skip the self checkout. I’d love to live in the glorious future where machines do all the grunt work and people are free to spend their time in better ways. But it seems humanity can’t have nice things.

I don’t know how much flour you’d need but you should definitely increase the other ingredients by the same proportion as the flour. If you have a recipe you like for an M inch pizza and you want an N inch pizza you should be able to scale all the ingredients up proportionately by calculating the area of an M inch circle and an N inch circle. But bear in mind that rolling out a ginormous pizza and moving it around is difficult (I’d definitely use a pan rather than trying to get an 18” or larger pizza to slide off of a peel onto a stone). And make sure your oven is big enough.

Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.

Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.

When it’s really cold out, I wonder if there is a risk of the moose’s tongue getting stuck to the car. That would be a sticky situation.

Load up an app? REVIEW THIS APP! (YES/NOT NOW)…

Want to pay your utility bill? RATE OUR SERVICE! (OK/REMIND ME LATER)

My policy is: Apps that interrupt me to ask for a review will get a 1 star review. I’ll add comments about wanting to be left the fuck alone and please sthaaap with the thirsty pop ups and emails - if it is convenient to do so. Hulu keeps bugging me on my XBox and I’m not entering an explanation with a fucking remote control (WTF ARE THEY THINKING?) so they just get 1 star with no explanation. Fuck’em. They asked for my opinion so they’re getting it.

makes dating and marriage seem pointless too. Can’t even afford a place of my own how am I going to support a wife and maybe kids? Assuming she doesn’t work which she would almost have to anyways.

You should date to enjoy someone’s company (or find someone who’s company you enjoy). That’s the point. It doesn’t have to have a larger point where anything not getting you closer to marriage and kids is a waste of time.

I don’t know about the point of marriage and kids, those have pretty personal motivations, but it would be a shame to let buying a house be the gatekeeper. You can have a very happy marriage in a rented flat. You can raise lovely children without owning a house or even having a great financial outlook. Sharing expenses with a significant other who has similar values can be a huge financial boost (on the flip side, marrying the wrong person can lead to financial ruin). Like don’t have 20 kids that you can’t afford to feed, but don’t feel like you have to be wealthy to have a family, if that’s what you really want out of life.

If people who believe in a magical bearded sky father manifesting their bedtime wishes and helping devotees win sporting events and awards are somehow taken seriously, well, I feel perfectly fine choosing to believe in free will.

Humanity didn’t have a clue about all kinds of shit just a few generations ago. It’s quite possible that there is more to the world than what we currently understand and that we really are more than some crazy elaborate finite automata. It’s an egotistical blindspot to think that there are no more unknown unknowns.

Oh, and I do like flipping through cookbooks for ideas. When I see something I like in a cookbook, I use my phone to scan it into One Note.

It can be a little awkward flipping between recipes when I’m making multiple things from recipes at the same time. My setup is good enough but not great

I’ve been using One Note. I had the same issues you had with paper and recipe cards and I happened to be using MS office a lot in general. It’s handy since I can use it from my phone or laptop and can share with family. I copy internet recipes to One Note since they can be available offline and since sometimes recipes on random sites disappear.

Converting to something I can self host would be cool.

I don’t think I’d ever use meal planning and shopping list features. It would be nice to have an easy way to generate nutrition info for my invented or modified recipes.

I used to stick to that rule and get a sensible mid sized Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord that’s a few years old as needed. But in 2013 (the last time I needed to get a new car) the cost savings were really low compared to new. I think the used market was particularly hot so you’d save less that 10% of the cost, so I ended up getting my 1st and only (so far) brand new car ever.

Owning your data is seeming less and less possible. Even paying in cash isn’t an option in some places now

Some municipalities had passed laws saying that retail businesses had to accept cash since going 100% electronic is discriminatory towards the poor. But covid fucked that up

Sounds like you’re doing everything you can. It sucks that you’re going through this; I hope the situation improves and you don’t get furloughed.

I’m guessing that if you could get to all your jobs without the car, you would have already done so? Saving on gas and insurance can help, but depending on where you live that might not be realistic.

You could try contacting local food banks and see if they ever make accommodations for people who are working during operating hours. They might not but there’s no harm in asking.

Right now you’re in a serious hole from missing work for a family emergency. I don’t have much advice for getting back onto steady ground aside from being super crazy frugal and working extra hours in the short term (which is fucking exhausting mentally and emotionally and physically). Do you have any long term plans for having more breathing room years from now? If your steady state is “one car repair or illness away from defaulting on payments” then that’s a hard path. Do you or your wife have prospects for better paying jobs in the future? Are there training or educational opportunities that could help? Are there cheaper places you could live (smaller, worse neighborhood?) to save money while working towards better job prospects? Living on not enough money in crappy circumstances sucks but it is definitely more bearable if you know it’s temporary and you’re making progress towards something better.

Good luck.

And is that amount of money enough to replace the item that’s been taken away? Like if the DVD were widely available at the same price at the time of the digital purchase, but you got the Amazon “purchase” instead (for convenience?) then what are the odds that you can still get the DVD for that price today?

Growing up in New England we called them “egg with a hat”

Anyone who says their smart overestimates themselves. Anyone who says their dumb underestimates themselves. How does anyone even answer this question?

I think it’s possible for someone to know that they are generally pretty smart or not very smart without over or under estimating. A lot of people will over or under estimate but if you’re just looking for a rough placement in a third of the bell curve, there’s a lot of feedback in everyday life to help.

Pedants who choose to make big deals over minor issues are always out to prove something and are objectively not smart.

Some people sincerely have trouble adapting to different precisions of language in different situations. I know some very smart and successful people with autism who struggle with this. It can be super annoying when they are way too pedantic for the context but I don’t think being deficient in this one area makes them dumb.