Mask off moment. Their purpose is to protect capital. The only crimes that cops prevent are through deterrence because they are crime punishers, not crime preventers.

Not OP, but probably price gouging? Especially regarding things where you aren’t afforded the reasonable opportunity to make an informed decision (healthcare, baby formula plus necessary clean water). Also maybe regional monopolies (internet service) or pretty much anything involving an event or venue (ticket pricing or cost of a slice of pizza or a can of beer at a festival).

In all of these examples, you likely don’t have a heads-up or the chance to choose something else. Admittedly, most of the examples off the top of my head were unnecessary luxury spending, but how in the blue fuck is it okay that any of them are literally a situation of “pay me whatever price I decide or else a person will die”?

Pretty fucked up if you ask me.

Because people continue to accept that price by agreeing to pay it. The price of a product is dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. If the price is so low that the seller isn’t happy with it, they don’t sell it and stop making it.

In other words, if you think Nintendo prices are bullshit price gouging, then vote with your wallet. With enough votes, the prices come down or the company goes under. You don’t have that luxury of choice when it comes to groceries or shelter, but you absolutely do when it comes to luxury entertainment expenses. Make them earn your money.

Piggybacking this comment because similar:

Chop up some veggies (I like zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and maybe carrots), toss them in olive oil, salt, some seasoning, and an acid like lemon juice or wine (or a little balsamic vinegar if you want that vibe), then throw it into a lubed pan and into a preheated oven until roasted to your liking (probably like 15-20 minutes at 400°F).

I like this method because it’s largely passive, so this can happen while you deal with some other part of your meal. Sauce, meat, rice, whatever. Plus it’s pretty hard to fuck up unless you forget to use a timer lol.

Well, LLMs can’t drag corporate media through long, expensive, public, legal battles over slander/libel and defamation.

Yet.

privacy and security

I’m not really sure how much my OS affects that though. If I remove that avenue, cool, but I’m still signed in on my browser and YouTube and various other apps, so to really protect my privacy and security, wouldn’t I need a whole slew of other changes to actually be effective? Credit bureaus, which I never even asked to have involved, can’t even keep a lid on my shit. How secure and private can I really expect to feel just from changing my phone OS, and is that warm fuzzy really good enough to justify moving from something that is working exactly as I want and expect to something that is, in a word, uncertain?

Not trying to attack you or anybody with these questions, just kinda frustrated that any time I’ve tried to look into it, all I find is a vague statement about privacy without any real elaboration, or worse, a bunch of speculation that the guy running it is unstable or something. Idk, it just feels a little like the wave of people screaming the praises of crypto.

I used to loudly support Google Fi when I switched to them from Verizon. My coverage wasn’t as good, but my bill was a small fraction of what it had been, and I’m usually on wifi so the pay for what you use model was great for me. I also really enjoyed taking it with me to Mexico on vacation. Sweet deal since my average data use was like 1GB/month.

Then like a year ago, I did some digging and found that I could have a very similar experience with Mint, except unlimited data for about the same price. Plus the price was locked in because you pay for it up front. It took maybe an hour to swap our phones over, and we kept our phone numbers. There was a little bit of hassle getting voicemail to work properly, but that got figured out.

My favorite thing about these types of services are that you can buy a pretty cheap, unlocked phone, use eSIM, and you’re not locked into your service provider. I am a fan of the Pixel a series of phones since they’ve got plenty good capability at half the price of flagship phones, but with good support. Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why I personally should go to the trouble since I don’t see enough of a benefit for my use case. But that’s neither here nor there. I just like unlocked phones, and my 8a and my wife’s 6a were cheap and they were easy to transition to another provider; look into unlocked phones the next time you’re shopping for one so you can have that kind of freedom.

Right now, I’m working a ton (72 hours per week) and my wife is working and going back to school, but every Tuesday is an entire day together. We just started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time, and we look forward to it all damn week lol. We started like a month ago, but we’re still only just now wrapping up the goblin camp. We both were already really familiar with 5e DnD, so a lot of the mechanics feel pretty intuitive to us. I have gripes with the camera (PS5 version) but overall it’s a fantastic experience.

Before picking this up on sale, we were passing the controller back and forth through Astro bot. Also amazing! We rolled credits, and I’ll probably aim for the platinum trophy at some point without her. There’s truly not much left before we snag that, so she’s not missing out.