I really pissed off a bunch of my family when I was a kid with this general concept.

“Illegal Mexicans” are taking all the jobs was a common sentiment with some of my adult family members and their friends. Being young, precocious, and naive, I remember asking why they are mad at the people “taking” their jobs, but not the owners who were hiring illegal immigrants. It didn’t go over very well.

I’m in the USA, so if they were made in China they’d probably cost me $30 USD by now.

I grew up poor in the southern part of the USA. Anti-intellectualism is a core tenant of most of the common religions in this region, which trend heavily towards evangelical christianity. One of my earliest formative memories is being called a “Scientologist” and getting condemned to hell because I believed in evolution. Lots to unpack there, I know.

On the other hand, I somewhat regularly get accused of using AI to write my comments/replies on various social media platforms, something which I have absolutely never done. Simply writing in my typical style, even with all the poor grammar and misspellings, is enough to make all the Dunning-Kruger mother fuckers crawl out of their basement long enough to make accusations against me.

In the third grade, I won the science fair.

The competition was pretty strong. There was a kid who built a contraption to simulate a mini-tornado. Granted, it was probably his dad who built the thing, but still. There was another kid that built and programmed a robotics project. Again, probably his parents did a lot of the work, but the guy was super smart so I’m sure he did some of that work. One girl came up with an experiment to use fungus to grow plastics or something like that, I don’t remember. It’s been decades.

Me? The afternoon before the fair I had literally nothing. I grew up poor, we had a lot of junk laying around the house because my parents would go to the county dump site, dig through the trash, and bring home anything they thought was valuable or fixable. I managed to hobble together one of the light sensors from a broken night light to the electronics from a toy radio so that it only played when the lights were off. I stuffed that into a cardboard “robot”. And the people judging the science fair loved it.

So fuck you Stephanie Petty, Chris McDonald, and Dequan Shaw and your rich ass parents and your entitled ass selves. I won bitches.

If they were cheap and not made in China, I would buy these. They look neat.

I have known a ton of people like this. The hardest part of dealing with it is that sometimes they are right. It’s typically a case where they came to the correct conclusion but arrived there by faulty logic and/or false information.

All they will ever recognize is that the were right, doesn’t matter why or how. They never actually learned any lesson, they’ll ignore the myriad other cases where they were absolutely wrong, while they continue to use the same baseless methodology to form future opinions and conclusions.

Honestly, my experience is entirely anecdotal, and I completely admit that. I have not read this article yet, so I don’t even know what the conclusion is (but I can make an assumption).

Disclaimer being what it is, literally all of the full-on racist people I know or have known are also MAGA conservatives. And conversely, all the MAGA people I know or have known are way more racist than average. I say that from the perspective that, at least in the USA, most people have racial biases to a certain extent.

I’ve been told things like “You don’t have the right skin color to take the bus into the city”, meaning because I’m Caucasian with “white” skin, I would somehow be an outlier among the rest of the folks taking the bus. Many, many times I’ve heard statements like “we can’t even say [the N-word] anymore even though that’s what they call themselves all the time” and let me tell you the people saying that don’t say “N-word” they say the real deal that rhymes with chigger. They’ll claim illegal “Mexicans” took their jobs, without a moment’s thought about who hired those “Mexicans” or what nationality those “Mexicans” are. There’s really no skin color other than white-white that doesn’t receive some hate.

Anyway, this is just old man ranting at this point, and it may even be too long to be readable, so let me summarize it with FUCK RACISTS & FUCK MAGA.

Up until about 6 months ago or so, in my area FedEx was the best of the delivery services in my area by far. Granted, I know that whichever service is best tends to vary from region to region. But, whenever I saw that my package was getting delivered via FedEx, I was generally glad to know it.

In my area, UPS is the shady shit-show that would totally pull some bullshit like this. UPS will open my mailbox and put packages in there (which is illegal in the USA). UPS will claim my package is delivered and then 3 days later, USPS delivers it. They have some kind of agreement with USPS to deliver the last mile, but UPS tracking literally shows the packages as delivered the moment they turn it over to the USPS. UPS will furiously beep the horn outside my bedroom window until I go to the front door to see what’s going on, and then have ME dig through their truck to find my own package. Anyway, I’m ranting now, as is the custom for men my age and in my condition.

USPS is just a whole other paradigm of unfathomably terrible shit show. Okay, I’ll stop. I have a problem.

Point is, FedEx used to be the best of shitty lot, so I wonder why they’ve suddenly and drastically gotten so bad as of late.

I’m glad to see you mention that, I was going to make a similar comment. I figure it’s a message that’s probably well understood here on the fediverse, but outside of this space not so much.

I think there’s also an argument to be made for charging subscriptions based on overall maintenance needs. Upgrades, updates, bug fixes, and things of that nature take time and can also cost money.

However, overall, there are way too many subscription based apps that just don’t seem justified. If I buy version 2.3 of AppXYZ, and as long as I stick to that version nor need any online functionality, I just don’t see a valid excuse for a subscription, other than pure greed on the developers’ part.

As a sophisticated man of discriminating taste and impeccable manners, I eat these crazy tall burgers with a knife and fork. Just kidding, I use a knife and fork because they are too tall for my mouth and too messy for my beard.

To get around back, go left. Because left is right and right is wrong so the only thing left that’s right is left.

I was just thinking “I need to burn some music CDs for when I travel”, just in case.

I went on a car trip earlier this year, but forgot my bluetooth to aux adapter. I tried to buy one while I was on the road, but places were sold out, didn’t carry them, or they only sold them via online orders.

As luck would have it, I still had some old CDs I’d burned 20ish years ago sitting in my glove compartment! I honestly did not expect them to work because they’d likely spent at least the last decade+ in that glove compartment, enduring extremes of heat and cold. They were scratched to hell and back and I had always heard that they degrade and become unreadable after a certain amount of time, even under ideal storage conditions.

Luckily for me, though, they mostly worked. I think there were a couple of songs on one disc that skipped a bunch, and everything else played fine. I rediscovered a few great songs from my youth that I’d not heard in so long that I’d practically forgotten about them.

Caring is sharing and sharing is the root of all love so let’s gather round and give each other hugs and tell each other how nice our hair smells except for the ones of us who are bald your bald skin smells like sun block and sweat.

I guess I’m feeling greenhouse because I’m full of hot air, I can’t spell worth a crap, and I’ve got plans.

Honey, you have to put some elbow grease into it.

Looking at the pixels and layers upon layers of compression artifacts in this photo, it wouldn’t surprise me if the original was created at least 5 - 10 years ago, meaning it would have accurately included all millennials at the time it was made.

This reminds me of the time when I was a kid and me and several of my family members went racing out into the front yard to watch the plane that was doing all kinds of aerial acrobatics over our neighbors’s field dropping whatever chemical or fertilizer was in their tanks that day so we were all basically coated in it by the time they were done and we went back inside. Except I wasn’t a kid when it happened, I was a fully informed adult who should have known better and then a few days later we found out it was some kind of potentially dangerous fungicide. But on the plus side I now have 3 penises.

Right hand to gay Jesus, I was literally coming into this thread to type out the exact same thing. Except my comment wouldn’t have had the italics or newline because according to my therapist I’m lazy and lack curiosity so I wouldn’t have spent the time or even had the inclination.

Normally I would respond to the already posted top reply with this same message, but this is a topic which deserves multiple replies with the same answer to reinforce the idea that it is correct…

Remove any diseased or damaged strawberries from the container.

Soak the rest in a vinegar solution for a few minutes.

Rinse with fresh water.

Allow to completely dry.

Keep refrigerated.

Those are the steps. Works with lots of produce, but seems to be especially good for things like blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

But also, at least in the USA, shit’s going down with our produce right now and it seems like the shelf life of almost everything as of late is super limited. Not sure if it’s due to the tariffs or what.

Some people have all the luck. I have to pay for this type of interview, and this dude is presumably getting it for free.