Nah, alcohol shares the same boat. There are lots of examples if you really dig into the effects of various things. Alcohol and tobacco just kill you so slowly that it doesn’t drop profits.

Customer taste preferences are definitely odd. I liked their pizza before the change, and really liked it afterwards.

Aye, the difference between me, diagnosed in preteens, and my friend, diagnosed at 3, is immense. I still have the odd craving and sometimes indulge with stupid results. She? Never even crosses her mind.

Lol, just around the corner is right. My doctor, waaaay back in the 90s, said a cure was 10-15 years away. I think it’s just language they use. Especially when they are talking to the extremely sick/depressed who just learned what they have.

That’s a culture-thing. I’m a member of two forums that are still pretty active. One views dead thread revivals as amusing, the other almost literally has a celebration in-thread when it happens as all the members with older posts in it come piling in. Heck, the second forum has a thread so active that people literally ask for, and get, recaps for the last X amount of time for it.

For better or worse, that aspect is never going away. Places with less funds, like rural counties and cities, rely on their police to do everything that gets called in to 911 and isn’t fire/ems/construction (which, thankfully, they have dedicated teams/people for).

Oh god, what? I haven’t seen any since the first either, was the movie fun enough to make it worth watching the series of them?

That just…seems so wrong. My mentally declining grandmother used firefox back in the 00s era (though now that I think about it, my uncle is a developer, so maybe he set up the computer). How have we backslid since then to where so few people know/use firefox?

It’s funny you say that. On all the possibly scammy websites that I sign up for, I used Marc xxx as my name, and somehow I did get some texts using that name. I still wonder how they connected my cell# to throwaway emails and a made up name.

It probably falls under the ‘not illegal’ category. They got the number somehow, and I would bet it’s from some stupid agreement that lets a company sell his number and whoever buys it is allowed to send messages to it.

It’s also hard to get harassment charges for these, since realistically it is hard to contact the assholes and tell them to stop sending messages, which is required for most cases. There’s also the issue that harassment needs to be a repeated thing (and usually after being told to stop) from the same source/conspiracy. If you could prove all of these different messages were from the exact same organization, or that each entity sending the messages had collaborated, you could possibly get a judge to agree that harassment took place. Then, of course, your issue becomes the question of who did the harassment. If the judge/jury believes that it was a particular individual at the corporation, maybe that person could be prosecuted, but if they only will say that it was the entity, like a PAC or LLC or inc. or whatever, you’re boned. No one holds business/political entities accountable.

All that to say… those of us who get these messages are boned, with little legal recourse. I just block the numbers and delete. It seems like it works, because I haven’t gotten any messages like OP did for the last year or so. They must reuse numbers to send texts.

I took it to mean people who earn that much per year. The average person working a $30k+ job should have more than a million in the bank at retirement, and that should have been enough to retire on comfortably. Now I’m being told it’s more than 1.5-2 million dollars at retirement.

One day, I’ll play all the different white wolf games, FATE, and whatever else is in there. One day soon…

What’s it matter? Because a large portion of those millions of followers are going to be in positions where they can do damage. You want to swing every single one to believe that the law was carried out in a manner true and faithful.

Imagine, if you will, if somehow the federal government passed a law banning firearms for private use. Right now. Do you think the police in most places would actually go around and try to seize firearms? Fuck no, and not just because they aren’t suicidal morons. Most of them think people should be able to own firearms. It would be chaos as some attempted to follow the law, and others did everything they could to sabotage it.

Now extend that to the military/national guard (and if it was “millions of followers” burning the country down, the military/national guard would get involved) in the event of Trump conviction and an imminent/happening revolt/riot. Imagine how many it would take to create mayhem inside of bases/squads/etc. Even if you want to be really positive and say that the military had plans for contingencies where they can effectively stop traitorous members, it would still take a chunk of operating efficiency.

Now extend that to everywhere. State governments, counties, cities, business offices, doctor’s clinics, hospitals, sanitation departments, etc. etc. etc. You might think that they’re “all self-fulfilling, selfish, egotistical, narcissistic, irresponsible and demented people,” but don’t be childish. People are people. There are all sorts in that group, and they all have varying levels of commitment and care about the issue. Some can be convinced.

So, think of the way this is being handled as an effort by a large group of people to head off complaints that could be made and accusations about incorrect handling that would give cretins something to latch onto and endlessly jabber about, thus preventing a potentially swayed individual from coming to the conclusion that yes, Trump was lawfully convicted without conspiracy because he actually fucking broke the law many, many times.

Credit unions aren’t always perfect either. I switched unions because one started adding fees.

Don’t forget that there used to be literal assassins that would kill you if you tried to sell (as a retailer, obviously the resale by individuals was so small-time they didn’t care and hard to track) under the price you were told to sell it.

Your neighbor must be rich.

Vacation is the key word there. Living is different, because the services you’ll need aren’t necessarily available. We now have stopgaps for certain areas if you aren’t poor, like delivered groceries, but good luck in Seattle and Washington DC if you aren’t at least upper middle class.

Man, I hate that constant night/day rotation. I didn’t mind it when it was once per year, but when we switched to once per month, it sucked. I can’t imagine doing it every period.

Some email systems now won’t mark things as spam. They’ll have a popup window asking if you want them to help you unsubscribe from the shit. I about blew it when I saw that.

“They’re pretty open about that” doesn’t quite cut it, when I’ve seen examples in this lemmy post alone of people discovering the fact. We need removable batteries.