This is a long read, but worth it. Some takeaways:
-Don’t use “buy now pay later.” The fine print isn’t what it seems.
-The fine print on medical financing, store credit cards, and contactless payment is also not what it seems.
-Payday loans are still predatory, even when offered by your employer
-Rewards programs are an income stream for the companies that run them. The points systems are manipulated so that the house always wins. They depend on people leaving money in rewards accounts and not in interest-bearing traditional bank accounts.
-Electronic payment apps like VenMo are not banks. You don’t earn interest. Your money is not protected.
-Your financial information is not private if your money is not kept in a regulated bank.
-None of this is regulated by the FDIC. Your money is not protected if it is held by a non-bank doing banking business. Our economy is not protected from the collapse of financial institutions that are not banks.
-The Biden administration was making progress in increasing accountability for non-banks operating as predatory financial services providers. The current administration is reversing those protections to favor corporations.
PEOPLE! DO NOT LEAVE YOUR MONEY IN VENMO OR APPLE PAY OR ANY OF THIS SHIT. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO FIND A REAL BANK OR A CREDIT UNION.
If Venmo were to close tomorrow all your money would vanish. There’s no insurance or guarantee on any of these things. I know banks aren’t great but legit banks will have the “FDIC insured” logo on their doors and websites, which means if my bank goes under tomorrow I still get my money back. Also I guarantee you there is a credit union somewhere in your town, go find it.
You can leave some money in Venmo or Apple pay or whatever, but NOT ALL OF IT for the love of God.
“To protect their copyright, streaming sites do not allow for screenshotting of any kind.”
Hey remember VHS where you bought a box to plug into your tv and you could legally record whatever was playing and then own it for free forever
I cannot emphasize enough that you not only COULD, it was ENCOURAGED. Blank video tapes for recording whatever you wanted were available everywhere and it was hard to miss the record button on the machines. They also deliberately designed stuff like VHS players that you could tell when to start recording things - as a kid I’d tell the player to record the cartoon channel beginning at 6 or 7 and then sleep in and watch the tape later - and then they would tell you how to do it in the owner’s manual, this was no secret. You were SUPPOSED TO record shows you wanted to keep or that you wouldn’t be home for to watch later.
Blank DVDs were also a thing and you were encouraged to transfer your VHS to DVD so you could continue owning your VHS but now with all the benefits of a DVD… like physical media is truly a fucking gift, and I cannot stress that enough
Nothing will ever comvince me otherwise that R* gave Micah that hideous mustache because Peter is too beautiful and no one wouldve taken Micah seriously looking like that
yall know that post with all of those absolutely stunning crochet flowers? well i just bought a pattern from the shop those are from and Good Fucking Lord.
I was expecting a like a Chart or two, maybe some written instructions. not Seventy Seven full color pages for One type of rose.
for a long time i lived alone, but then i got a service dog. after a lot of training, the service dog came to live with me—except, the same day the trainers brought quincy, an orange tabby tomcat also showed up.
“you didn’t tell us you had a cat!” said the trainers, both very upset (because they hadn’t trained quincy to live with a cat).
“i don’t have a cat,” i said. “I don’t know who this is.”
the cat never went away. i named him poe dameron and he lived with me and quincy. they got along fine, in their own way.
we had our quiet adventures. poe was very cuddly but sometimes he just took off for a day or two. once he got into some paint.
after a while, i found out that poe dameron really lived across the alleyway, and belonged to my neighbor elizabeth’s teenaged son, and his real name was PUMPKIN. but poe apparently didn’t like the teenaged son (probably not least because he named him PUMPKIN), so he had come to live with us instead. elizabeth was fine with it.
the years went by and one day poe dameron crossed the rainbow bridge too soon. i took his ashes to elizabeth. we were very sad.
a few weeks later, she asked me to come over to see something.
it turned out that poe dameron had also lived with a THIRD lady, a few streets over. this lady, whom neither of us knew, was a painter, and she had made this painting of poe dameron. i don’t know what she called him, but she painted him like one of your french girls.
“i think you should have it,” elizabeth said, tactfully. “after all, he spent the most time with you.” i was quite sure she just didn’t want this hideous painting in her gabillion-dollar house, but i agreed.
the painting now hangs in the kitchen over my stove—not least because its brick-red frame matches my curtains. and because it delights me to see poe dameron every day, looking so fluffy and sultry, like an orientalist renaissance odalisque.
Everyone reblog consummate cabana boy moocher and orange cat extraordinaire Poe Dameron and his odalisque.
I once heard a quote by a dude named Alan Watts that went “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions” and now when I get trapped in an anxiety spiral that likes to pop in too
I think the internet might be like this as well actually
This quote may in fact be the philosophical highbrow equivalent of Bitch Go Touch Grass
tbh the current default state of operating systems & internet browsers looks fucking indistinguishable from when i gave the family desktop one billion viruses downloading Free Neopoints Hack in 2005
not to be a millennial but back in my day getting blasted in the eyeballs by ads on your desktop the instant you turn on your computer used to mean something was extremely wrong
