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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • My credit rating is so bad that I had to have my brother co-sign a lease for me fifteen years ago. The landlord told him his credit rating was the highest he’s ever seen. My brother (and his wife) were in debt up to their eyeballs - over $100K in credit card debt and a mortgage they were deeply underwater on. They’re still in bad shape financially; meanwhile I now own my own home outright (having paid cash for a fixer-upper after saving up for a few decades). I still have shitty credit and it’s not affecting me negatively in any way.




  • Fun fact: Hitler’s actual plan when he invaded Poland was to reproduce the trench war stalemate of WWI on the Western front. He knew that in that war, about 2.5 million German soldiers had been able to stymie more than 4 million French and British troops while the remainder of the German army pillaged Russian territories. This is why during the Winter of '39/'40 he devoted almost half of German productive capacity to making artillery shells that mostly ended up not being used until the later invasion of the USSR. His biggest success of the war was the blitzkrieg of France, and it was absolute blind luck (mixed with French ineptitude and lack of preparation) that it ended up going the way it did.


  • My parents watch PBS Newshour and are very anti-Israel because of what they’re doing to Palestine. One night, PBS ran a piece about how Israel’s PR was labeling any criticism of Israel’s action as “anti-semitism” and my folks were naturally incensed by this. The very next night, PBS ran a piece about the statistically increasing occurrence of anti-semitism in the world - without any discussion of just the possibility that much of that increase is due to criticisms of Israel being labeled as anti-semitism. My parents, of course, were then incensed about all the anti-semitism.






  • he’s been selling the AI kool aid for so long that he actually believes his own bullshit

    I worked for an Internet startup in the ‘90s and at one point we were sucking up to R. J. Reynolds’ venture capital division for more funding. This tobacco company had so much fucking money they had actually branched out into venture capitalism to do something with it. The VCs came to visit us one day; we were in a non-smoking office and these assholes spent the entire day literally chain-smoking in the meeting room. We had not much ventilation and the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see to the end of the hallway. I kept walking past the meeting room and loudly coughing and my bosses eventually sent me home.

    We ended up not getting any money from them. The only good part of this story is that these guys have all surely died horrible deaths from cancer or emphysema by now. But in order to sell the lie that cigarettes aren’t harmful, these R. J. Reynolds executives had first convinced themselves of it. The human capacity for self-delusion is truly remarkable.






  • Where I live, a few stop signs have a square white sign below them that says “EXCEPT FOR RIGHT TURN”, i.e. you don’t have to actually stop if you’re turning right. It’s incredibly fucked up - it works fine if you’re a local and you’re familiar with these signs, but people new to the area don’t know anything about it and if they’re on the crossroad they actually expect the other driver to stop since all they see is the backside of the octagon. It’s pointless to have these signs anyway since people usually roll through stop signs as it is.