You might be able to charge more for the eggs if you feed them to a civet cat first and then collect the egg laden civet cat shit and sell that as some kind of delicacy.

I’m halfway assuming I’ll get down votes and angry responses for this, and I didn’t read the article (yet), but honestly the title is inaccurate. It’s simply not true that “nobody wants it”. You’d have to be willfully ignorant or living on Mars to think that.

I asked ChatGPT and it said the answer is 255.

Pretty much nothing that I’m aware of, other than my neighbor’s greenhouse grown tomatoes.

That’s how I met my partner. We both love dips. We could talk or not talk about dips all day long and then do it again tomorrow.

They’re minerals, Grostleton.

Well, initially there were a whole slew of things I needed to take care of before my job’s benefits were officially cut off. So many calls, appointments, emails, research, paperwork, applications, and so on trying to get things situated before I was officially, fully unemployed.

On top of that, my life as of this past year could be summed up as “one thing after another”, so losing my job was part of that, and it didn’t end there. Deaths in the family. Major medical issues. Major accident/injury (that literally wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t unemployed b/c it was a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing). The list of stuff that’s happened since losing my job goes on.

Some things boil down to personal choices I’m making. For instance, now that I have more time than income, things I might’ve paid a professional to do, I’ll just handle it myself when it makes sense to do so. Similarly, when friends and family need help with stuff, I’m making myself available for that. Things like taking care of pets for people when they have to travel for work, helping a friend put together a shed, helping move heavy furniture, etc.

In my own home, I’m taking on a much larger chunk of the day to day chores. My partner is having to shoulder more of the financial burden and having to deal with lifestyle cutbacks because of my situation, so I take a lot of pride in being able to relieve him of as much housework as possible. I’m the one doing the bulk of the dinner prep, a lot of the daily clean-up stuff, and things of that nature.

I’m also doing some things to help insulate us in case of a severe financial down turn. For example, I’m building and planting a larger garden this year than originally planned. I’m prepping all my canning and preservation equipment to make the most of whatever I’m able to grow. I’m clearing out old junk and reorganizing our storage spaces so we have more room to stock up on necessities.

Although I’m not devoting a ton of time to job hunting yet, I am still spending time doing some light networking, looking at job postings, investigating new skills, and things of that nature for when I do inevitably get back into the rat race.

Keep in mind, my days run together now and if you asked me what I did yesterday, I could probably only recall about 10% of it. Plus, this is already turned into a novel of response even though I’ve kept things high level, but know for sure, it’s all this stuff and so much more.

My baby insanity wolf self already does a variation of this.

When my conservative family and acquaintances give me gifts, I donate the gifts to charities or political groups that I know those folks would hate to support. Uncle Ben gives me a debit gift card? That’s going to Bernie Sanders and the ACLU. Cousin Jen gave me a digital photo frame? That’s getting sold and the money’s going to Planned Parenthood.

The fact that I repeatedly tell these people not to give me any gifts and yet they still do is the icing on the cake.

Peppers and cucumbers are the traumatic forced abortions of the plant world. Broccoli and cauliflower are the amputated sex organs of the plants that were cut from their bodies. Celery, brussel sprouts, and artichokes are severed limbs of plants. This is a literal mass grave of dead and dying vegetation, an alter to the horrific mutilation and abuse perpetrated on an entire kingdom of life by humans. A final act of humiliation before we condemn them to the hell of cooking and consumption. I doubt the spray mist provides much comfort.

So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.

You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.

You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.

And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.

I’m currently unemployed, and I was not expecting to be so busy. I thought I would have a little more leisure time, might be able to catch up on a few things that I never seemed to have time for, like catching up with family, playing some video games in my back log, and doing a small bit of travel. That hasn’t materialized. It’s like as soon as I stopped “working”, more things came up that needed my attention. I’m basically busy from the time I get up in the morning until I wrap up for the night and veg out in front of the TV for an hour before bed. I swear I had more me time when I was working. Not sure how this happened.

On the other hand, it’s amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you’re talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn’t even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That’s not to say that some app isn’t or hasn’t done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.

Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam’s Razor.

I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they’ve only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.

As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.

Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there’s limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we’re all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn’t specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn’t we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach’s? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.

It just seems like nothing works the way I expect it should these days, and I’m happy to be wrong, but I don’t think my expectations are that high.

I make an appointment at the driver’s license office for 10 a.m., I kind of expect to be seen around that time, especially since they tell you to show up at least 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment. Certainly, I don’t expect to have to wait 2 hours to be seen.

I go to the store to return an item that was missing parts, I don’t expect to be turned away completely because the “printer is down”. I have the receipt, can’t you just make a copy and refund the very small amount of money or let me exchange it?

I go to the bank to withdraw a few five and ten dollar bills, I don’t expect to be told “I don’t have enough”. I especially don’t appreciate being treated like I’m the first human in history to want specific denominations for a withdrawal.

I get told to return my internet equipment to any of your locations, only to be told you can’t accept that at your store. Why did the customer service person I talked to on the phone say any location, the company website have your location in the list of locations available when I filtered by “returns”, and my final bill state “return equipment to any location” if your location doesn’t accept returns?

I go to the doctor for a specific health concern (that unbeknownst to me is a red flag for a major problem), they give me a medicine that actually exacerbates said major problem without ever mentioning it or testing for it first. You’re the expert and professional, not me, and I guarantee if I’d asked about that major problem because I saw something about it online, you’d have made a snarky comment like “don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree” or similar.

And all of this, plus much, much more, in just the past month or so.

It seems like a lot of people are really quick to forget what the “rat race” is/was like AND many of them over estimate how well they handled it when they were in it. Unfortunately, my dad is one of the worst offenders so I have to deal with that kind of negativity more often than I’d like.

For my personal situation, it often helps to push back on the most egregious manipulation. When I was younger and more naive, I would let things go with no push back, and all the happened is the guilt trips became more frequent and more hostile. Once I started calling it out and correcting the details, it happened considerably less and I’m pretty sure he’s more apt to think twice before bringing those types of things up in front of me (though I know he still does it behind my back).

For example, I will remind my dad about things like “it was easier for you to visit your parents every week because they lived in the same town and not 2 hours away like you and I currently do” or “you were in your 20s and early 30s when you did this and that, but when you were my current age, you definitely didn’t have the time or energy for it”. Usually he’ll concede, at least for the moment.

I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can’t feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.

My opinion is subject to change, since I do plan to eventually give Eternal another attempt, but I know why I like 2016 better. It’s because I can go at my own pace and have the freedom to play the battle scenarios out how I want to (for the most part).

Eternal basically tells you early on, you have to go, go, go, go, go. Keep moving or you die. I find that kind of annoying.

But then the fact that you’re almost constantly being forced to use every single button, skill, weapon, etc on-demand, in very specific ways with a fair amount of precision basically kills the joy for me. I don’t get to play games much, sometimes it’s weeks or months between sessions. I can’t keep up with all that bullshit and it sucks nearly every last drop of fun out of the game if I have to waste my limited fun time having to relearn all the mechanics.

I just want to casually rip and tear for fun. Eternal felt like a micromanaging boss constantly telling me that I’m doing things wrong and behind on my unrealistic deadlines.

I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead but that looks like something my ex-bestfriend, Patty Henshaw, would have baked.

I’m going to ignore the most heinous aspects of this and just say, I’d love to be introduced to a variety of venomous and non-venomous snakes and would likely find it to be a pretty cool experience. Snakes are neat and the venomous ones are often beautiful and fascinating.

Just an opinion, but I feel like trouble was on the horizon for Target regardless of this DEI fiasco.

Of the major online general retailers, it seemed like Target held out the longest against 3rd party sellers. That was one of the biggest reasons I preferred to buy from Target. But they caved on that and somehow came out with one of the worst implementations. That decision really tarnished their brand for me.

Another factor that made me favor Target over the years is that their clothing offerings were pretty decent quality in styles I liked and affordable prices. But the last few times I’ve purchased clothes from Target, it’s been outright junk and Target should be ashamed. Either way, it turned me off from buying clothes there, and by extension, soured me to the brand almost entirely.

By the end of 2024 I had basically given up on Target, and I can’t help but think that all the issues I was having were systemic to the company. Feels like preemptively caving on diversity and equity policies was just another sign of the actual problem the company is facing (i.e. bad management and poor decision making).

MY new Tesla? Doubt it. Considering I’m unemployed due to this clown administration and I don’t tend to upgrade much of anything, let alone a vehicle, unless/until the old one no longer functions.