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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • In the mid-90’s I was working as a cashier for a regional chain that would buy cheap shit from China and sell it to social security recipients (who back then were prone to hoarding because they were Great Depression children). After tax (sorry, entitlements, like social security and medicare which I’m suuuuure I’ll get) at minimum wage it was slightly less than $2/hour in that state. So every day was all checking out social security recipients blowing their checks on $500 of 10 cent plastic gnomes filling their cart. We got in at one point “Candles from the Holy Land” (which might have been from a Taoist holy land, but…) marked 30 cents but rang up as $3 (this chain preyed on old people so upmarking v listed price was common but 10x was something you’d notice buying a cart full of them expecting to pay $500 and it’s $5000) so I had to manually correct per candle whole carts of candles from the holy land on checkout. One time I did this and the elderly couple buying 100 candles from the holy land asked “why do you keep typing all this stuff on the cash register per candle” so I told them “well, this is priced at 30 cents but rings up as three bucks so I need to correct it, but I can’t do a price change on multiples at once.” They check out and then the customer after them is this elderly meth head lady with no teeth who gets ALLLL up in my shit “I’VESHOPPEDHERESINCE [pretty sure 10+ years before this chain or one store existed] AND THEY WOULD NEVER MISPRICE AN ITEM!!!” And she goes to the manager and gets me fired.


  • While materially true that there are finite resources, I see little evidence anyone in DC sees that when no american benefits from spending the dollar in question. It allll just goes on the tab and I bet Trump will spend $30+ trillion unpaid. I don’t think the tech oligarchs are becoming republican because of China, they’re following raw corruption for profit and some weird crypto-ey mass dumb trend thing (see Zuck’s weird nod to rightwing podcast incels latin shirt thing). All of tech from AI to crypto is scams now. There are no 1000x yield social media-style markets left out there, so they’re going for the con and just hoping something else comes along imminently. Which having worked on the web longer than I’d like to admit was kind of always the case, but like, 20/20 hindsight, pets.com was a viable model and the internet DID change everything. But I don’t think there are any imminent new horizons, so the tech oligarchs are going with Trump because he’s been grifting since before they were born and game recognize game.