I’ll expect my free credit score check sometime in the next 2 years.

Good for you.

DIY filter change? $25 give or take depending on the filter. Service company doing it? $100 for the luxury of them arriving, $30 filter, $150 min labor rate to maybe do a service check, then whatever $ for issues they find.

FWIW think it’s good to have pros check stuff once in a while, they’ll see things I won’t know to check.

Hopefully it will stay that way.

They don’t know what happened to Pretti’s phone that he was recording ICE with.

They don’t know what happened to Pretti’s gun.

Blender is safe.

Nothing is impossible to fuck up when you have enough money and/or lawyers.

You’re not wrong. Just have to be selective which brand printer you buy - and I say that with the awareness that a company can enshittify an online printer capable of monitoring cartridge use/ID at their whim. BS Proprietary cartridges that know when they’ve been used up and tattle someone’s refilled them and refuse to work (looking at you, HP).

Reading card files in libraries.

Servicing and repairing many things in the house, but devices were far more easily diagnosed and repairable due to not being computerized. Really the “it’s broke and I gotta fix it” ability across age groups has really dried up. Doesn’t matter if it’s changing a tire on a car, or a kid having to fix a punctured tube on a bike tire to get to their friend’s house. They don’t ride anywhere for that matter. Changing brake pads. Changing the air filter in the home HVAC. People don’t do this stuff anymore.

Being bored.

Reading newspapers, books, magazines, etc. I don’t think people read as much anymore.

Hobbies. I think they’ve kinda died off, at least the physical ones. Model planes, trains, building stuff in your garage, cars, etc. Some of it’s been priced out of range or has gotten too technological for some, like cars, but manually creating something as a pastime has really disappeared.

Remembering a lot of phone numbers in your head.

I’m sure I’ll think of more, but it’s been a while since I was a kid and thought about pre-modern tech society.

All the presidents combined for the last century have only amassed $40 million in wealth while in office despite the whining and complaining by the right about the Clintons or Obama. All of them, combined, a century’s worth…$40 million

Trump has stuffed his pockets with $3 billion in since he got elected. In one year.

Vanity project that nobody wanted.

They’re cosplaytriots fighting people that are unwilling to fight back. There’s no price for being boot camp dropouts with a badge.

Ironically the deeply entrenched right are the first to point fingers and make accusations when someone says they were wrong or changes their mind, most publicly since Bush Jr.

How about never.

Shitty president = more sadistic tools put in their place. It’s not going to get better.

Not sure what the markets have to do with anything but the DJIA has been down pretty much for 5 days straight. The USD as well, brief spike but down steadily over the last ~week.

So yeah, dollar weaker with a market decline.

That’s true. He wanted to pay Americans less so we could compete with low-wage manufacturing countries like China and slash environmental regs so we could pillage the landscape for resources. Nevermind how much it would wildly increase disparity and fuck the average person.

Yet, as usual, his supporters couldn’t think past tossing brown people in cages and pissing off the libs, so here we are.

I get that people don’t want to help them.

Because the odds are the eaten suddenly didn’t grow a conscience.

They were fine with all the other shitty things being done. That’s the problem. You help them and odds are they’ll continue to throw people in cages, hand massive money to rich people, keep supporting the Orange Idiots tariffs, invading [insert pretty much any country], wrecking the government, anti-vax, anti-science, turning America into a dictatorship, etc.

So maybe they feel wrong about trump because he made their heating bill too high, or their groceries cost too much, or maybe because a couple people got executed, but the rest is still ok because they’re self-centered idiots.

I’m not sure “enemy of my enemy…” applies. They seem pretty determined to fuck everything up, and have bitten every time someone extends a hand.

He’ll leave the US completely bankrupt and walk away with the billions he grifted on office.

The point being a person with a few billion will still be able to buy pretty much whatever they want while everyone else struggles.

Not the actual worth of the currency.

And if you’re a rich person it affects your finances essentially zero while hurting consumers far worse.

You should actually read the book, or at least that part of the chapter.

Edit: you can read the context, and the entirety of the book, for free here or at Project Gutenberg.

It‘s not surprising some rich self-important wanker thinks they have some pseudo-insight into something.

What is surprising are the people that want to listen to rich wankers.