WTF kind of dining habits do you have that you are eating TWO COMBO MEALS plus TWO MORE SANDWICHES?!?!!?!? That's food for a family of 4 to 6!!

Yes, I do eat out, but not all that often. Maybe once a week on average? Why? Because it's freaking expensive!! And I make $400k a year and my wife makes $300k a year. Also it's incredibly unhealthy. I just went to the Hardees website and two large monster burger combos plus two chicken sandwiches are $45.33 after tax. But that's 5,270 calories!!! That's the entire calorie intake for two adults for the entire day!!!

So my recommendations to you are:
#1: Eat less.
#2: Eat at home more.
#3: Get a better job if you want a better life. This will probably take effort.

I don't buy tickets on ticketmaster either, but I *think* the problem is that they advertise a low price, and during the the checkout process they list the additional fees.
So you initially clicked on a $50 Taylor Swift ticket, but then...
        a $15 'venue fee' because that venue charges for the usage of their facility, the original $20 was just payment for the Taylor Swift crew.
        a $9 "destination fee" because based on your home address you are traveling to this concert and the local government has required payment from businesses that bring people to the local area.
        a $12 "Local Tax" fee because the local government taxes ticket sales at a different rate
        a $7 "venue security" fee because the $15 'venue fee' doesn't include security services and both Taylor Swift and the local government require hired security
        a $8 "seat fee" because the default venue fee doesn't include assigned seating. So It's $8 per person, no matter what seat you choose.

When you clicked on the $20 Taylor Swift ticket at first, by the time you get to checkout, it's $101. But you've already spent 15 minutes poking around on your phone putting in your name, address, selecting seats, and so on. So when it adds these fees all at the end, you are emotionally invested in the concert.

Sure this is stupid emotional manipulation and people that can't control their emotions are the only real losers by not 'fixing' this. We've been telling young adults for the last 25 years to 'listen to their feelings' and this is what we get from that.

In the united states, in 2024, 'large enough to be taxable' is $13.61 Million to a single beneficiary. If you have $20 Million and you are splitting it evenly between two people, it's still not taxable.

Each year you can gift some amount of money to any other person without even having to report it. In 2023 that amount was $17,000. If you give more than that, you must report it on your taxes, but until you hit the lifetime cap for gifts above the $17,000/year annual exclusion, no actual taxes are owed.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.schwab.com%2Flearn%2Fs...

Umm.... Yes, you can.

Let's pretend that there is a person who is going around being violent to everyone they encounter. They are causing what I'll call here 'not peace'. Let's pretend that we can predict that they will keep doing this until someone physically stops them.

When I say "physically stops them" that could also be interpreted as 'fighting'. The person fighting them is doing it for peace.

I'll leave the comment from aRTeeNLCH as an effective rebuttal of the concept that you can't "fuck for virginity".

I didn't think that what I wrote would be interpreted as "extremism and fear mongering". I really thought the whole thing was humorous, and nobody should be more extreme or fearful after reading it.

The original article seemed to be written with an intent to make people afraid by giving very large numbers for the amount of soil 'lost'.
Some phrases from the article that are intended to create fear: "climate stress" "reduces our ability to grow food" "we have a real problem" "drastically underestimated" "melts away the landscape"

After actually reading the article, it seems like the 'erosion' they are talking about it mostly that the soil near the tops of hills is moved downhill but remains in the field. To quote the article: "flattening higher points in a field and filling in the hollows". And I fail to see why this is unexpected in the slightest or cause for any alarm.

There is a difference in the erosion of topsoil that is caused by human activity. The ground will have some erosion even if there are no humans at all. (Example: The Grand Canyon). I am confident that human action throughout the midwest has caused there to be a higher rate of erosion in aggregate than if humans were not here.

I happen to be a farmer that farms in the midwest which is why I was interested in this topic to begin with. And I do practice notill. And yes, Ol Olsoc is correct that there will still be significant erosion. Of course, that depends on how you choose to define 'significant'.

I'm glad that my attempt at sarcastic parody wasn't totally lost. Thanks, NateFromMich

Pretty much everything in my original post was meant to be interpreted that way.

"republican farmers" as a group should not actually be considered 'evil dastardly' people.
The land they own should not be considered as actually owned by the 'the people of the world'
Specifically, not owned by 'the people of the world excluding the republican farmers who own it according to our current laws'.
The soil that has eroded is not actually 'permanently removed from mother Earth'
More soil can be created.
The eroded soil is not 'gone from this universe'
Making a judgement about a group based on their membership in a group or location of origin of having the character fault of making judgements about groups based on their membership in a group or location of origin is displaying exactly the character fault that I am claiming they have, which was intended as a self-referential statement to cause the reader to do some amount of self-reflection.
Saying the 'republican farmers' group stole the land the own while claiming the people they got it from did not steal it from others is unreasonable. If we want to claim that the current owners are thieves, then in order to be consistent we'd need to acknowledge that the ones they got it from are thieves too. And the ones those people got it from were also thieves. I find it unacceptable that it seems to be currently acceptable to point out the flaws in one group while ignoring the same flaws in another group.

For what it's worth, I actually own and farm ground in the midwest and my family has been farming there for 4+ generations.
My family has been using notill practices for more than 40 years successfully.

gtall seems to be doing exactly what I was (poorly) making a parody of in my original post: judging others based on their membership in a group or location of origin.

We all make decisions for personal benefit now at the cost of future benefit for both ourselves and others. Have you ever watched a video simply for your own amusement? That demonstrates that you would rather shoot the next generation's lively-hood so that you can have some entertainment today, since you could save those resources and do something that would benefit the next generation instead. Have you ever eaten anything that wasn't the most sustainable and healthy thing that you could possibly eat? Same deal. Using that mindset and logic to attack one group (republican farmers) is hypocritical at best.

First: Your ad hominem argument is not effective. And you might not realize it but the discussion is political to begin with because the authors are trying to cause hate and discontent against one group of people.

Second, I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I really do communicate poorly sometimes. My statements were intended to be so outrageous that readers would understand that I meant the opposite. What I meant is that the soil is actually still here on Earth and if we want it, we can go get it. I know that would be an enormous undertaking and the cost of doing so wold be large, but if the alternative is to not have enough food, my expectation is that we humans will find a way.

For number three, again I was attempting to use ridiculous false statements to imply the opposite. And I failed. The tribes that happened to have the land when the European migrants took it by force, themselves took it by force from other tribes. This is what has happened to every bit of land in the world many many times. In the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, everywhere. Nobody has an ancestry that is virtuous. We are all descended from people who did what we now consider to be 'bad' things. I believe we should not punish people for acts that they themselves did not commit.

To clarify a few other things... My comments in the first note was meant to be very obviously judging individuals based on their membership in a group or location of origin, which is not something we find acceptable these days. And the negative judgement that I was stating about these individuals was that they themselves make judgements about others based on their membership in a group or location of origin. So I was doing exactly what I'm claiming it is that *they* do that is bad. Which is akin to screaming at someone else to stop screaming. And in my opinion, darned funny. But I apologize for not making it clear that I didn't intend for people to interpret my statements as true statements of my beliefs.

Why oh why does my comment look too much like ASCII art?

It's really an argument against extremism and fear mongering.

That's right, the soil that those evil dastardly republican farmers(1) make their living off of that belongs to "us", the people of the world(2) is now permanently removed from mother Earth!! Yes, they have permanently disfigured mother Earth for their dastardly profits, doing as much damage as they can and now the soil is gone forever. No more can ever be created and what they destroyed is simply gone from this universe.

(1) We know that they are all dastardly evil because they are republicans, and we know they are all republicans because the 'midwest' states vote republican, and therefore they are all evil and do horrible things like judging others based on their membership in a group or location of origin.

(2) Except of course for those farmers, who don't actually "own" anything. They just stole their land from the rightful owners, who of course never stole it from anybody, because the rightful owners are BIPOC while the farmers are all white men and therefore only get anywhere in life because of oppression of BIPOC and women by the patriarchy.

The article and headline are claiming this is some sort of desperate condition. They even use "desperate" in the title. They talk about how prices are the highest they have been in a decade.

But wait a second.

This means that prices have been depressed below previous highs for at least an entire decade! These prices are only now recovering, and they might not even be recovering to their previous levels, just what they were a decade ago. I would expect that due to inflation prices have been going up an average of 3.5% every year, so every single year would be a new high. But no, prices have been low for the last 9 years. We need to increase cost by 35% more just to keep up with inflation!!

This article and those like it parroting the same thing are attempting to generate outrage and fear, not inform the population of what is going on in the world.

The article does not actually say "How Fraudsters Exploit Popular Interest-free Payment Plans". It just says they are doing it. The examples they give are not actually fraud.

1: They say that the risk scores are different from other methods of purchasing on credit and people will use this one if they can use it and they can't use the others. That's not fraud, that's just looking for a working solution.
2: They say people used this service to buy products (PS5) and then resell them at a markup. That's not fraud, that's just business.

Unfortunately that's not fully correct. There is no requirement for paper maintenance records. There are requirements for signatures but those can be digital.

When/where was the Sun E6500 incident? I had a very similar incident, but I *think* mine was with a Sunfire V890.

Mine was in a data center in Tukwila, WA in probably late 2004.

I was working at a data center near Seattle and we got a brand new Sun V890. It was pretty heavily loaded with CPUs and RAM. It came in on a pallet with cardboard sides, and on one side was an interesting hole. It was about 4 to 6 inches long, and about 1/2 inch tall.

After taking the cardboard off, I saw that there was a similar hole in the side of the metal case.
After taking the case off, I saw that the hole went through most of the computer on the inside too.

Someone had run a forklift tine most of the way through the whole thing. It was totally ruined. While I'm sure some parts were salvageable, there was nothing that any of us in the data center could do about it.