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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • He was decent at the pitch and everything, but I am street smart and could smell the bullshit immediately.

    The other guy who was working in a gas station would have been a great mark that hit all the qualities of someone that would have chased the promise of a better life the dude was trying to sell us. I really hope he cut and ran and is doing well.

    Hopefully some young or desperate person reads the story and remembers it when they get approached for an MLM.


  • That is a viable means to force a quick sale at a buyer favorable price, but that would also harm other homeowners in the area because the value of comparable homes of a similar type that have sold are factored into the estimates on houses going on the market.

    So say a corporation is losing 5K a week off the sale of the home, it drives the price well below market because the market conditions aren’t ideal at the time. The house sells for $50k below fair value. The week after that house sells, a similar house down the street goes on the market for $50k less than it would have prior to the other house selling.

    That could be a big problem for the homeowners that want to sell and could cause some big problems for foreclosed houses seized by a local bank or credit union.

    I don’t support that idea. I would rather forbid corporations from buying houses in their name.




  • There is a difference between forced socialism where the government uses their monopoly on violence to compel participation in distribution of resources under duress and personally giving of what you do not need to those who have less.

    The store management willingly being charitable in their own community is fantastic and should be encouraged. It is the right way. The community should respond by giving them more business.

    The government raising taxes to fund organizations that accomplish nothing of value at a high price while their management grows wealthy should be abolished.

    An example is LA spending over $24B over 5 years to address homelessness without meaningful results. That average of $42,000 per person per year should easily handle the problem, even in LA metro. If they spent $75k per person per year, that should result in more than 5x the 45k homeless people LA has being set up in better circumstances. They tout 4.5k people getting off the streets last year as a win.

    Compare that to Abode Services that helps 4.4k people every year with an operating budget of $29m.

    Letting the government get involved only leads to waste and fraud as entities bid for contracts that they will commit fraud with the funds and nothing of value is done. It creates bloated administrative bodies that are only self-accountable and only have to report some progress to keep being awarded more and more money.



  • We are saying the same thing, I was oversimplifying though.

    The profile is based on the voltage of the battery, the capacity, and the permissible amp draw. The actual voltage reading informs the device of the real remaining capacity because the device can’t read capacity and can only infer it based on historic data compared against the profile. Battery temperature is also a throttling factor, but we don’t need to get that far into the battery management weeds.




  • The battery has a capacity reading down to the milivolts and the phone knows how much power it is using, which changes dynamically to meet the usage. The remaining battery level is determined by the voltage available at the current consumption. There is some averaging involved based on your usage profile.

    So your battery level is accurate at a given time, but changes based on what you are doing and what you have running. So your battery will drain faster if you are playing an intensive game, but will last far longer if you have nothing unessential running and the screen is in sleep mode.

    Apps like Facebook, chew through battery in the background because of how often it has to use resources to check for notifications, when when you don’t actually have the app open or in the recent apps list. So your battery will lose charge faster than you would expect when you haven’t been on your phone.

    so, naw lil bro.




  • In my early 20s while working a shit retail job, I was approached by a Ukrainian man in a cheap suit that was trying to recruit me for a marketing and sales job. I come from some money, so I know a nice suit when I see one; his suit was not terrible, but it wasn’t tailored/bespoke. So I knew he was trying to convey success, but was not successful.

    We met at a Starbucks and talked about the work vaguely, he handed me some CDs that were speeches given by higher ups in the company. He also gave me a website to look at the products they offer and a sample of the caffeine-free “energy” drink they sold. It sounded off and I already knew it was part of a scam of some sort. We parted ways and I gave them a listen. The drink was about a generic and unremarkable health drink that included every buzzword of the 2010s healthy energy drink alternatives that never seemed to make it out of the first half of that decade.

    The speeches were about success and business stuff. Very much screamed grifter motivational stuff that said nothing about the business.

    He wanted to meet again and get my thoughts. He had not asked for money, he had not presented me with a contract or anything, so I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went. He described the job as being an independent business owner in direct digital marketing(giant red flag terms). He invited me to a “business meeting” at a hotel where I would learn more.

    I showed up and I saw a lot of people in cheap suits, maybe a half dozen were in tailed suits and designer dresses. It was a hotel convention hall with a few hundred in the audience, the majority of which looked like they were grabbed from a low-paying job like me and the gas station worker that was also invited by the same guy as me.

    There were a few speeches and a few explainations of the business structure and how you make more money. There was a lot of talking about how successful they were, how much their life changed, and how great their lives became. It was a pyramid scheme, a legal one, but just barely.

    After, the guy I was talking to and his wife sat down with the other guy he invited and myself to chat about the next step. Dude tried really hard to hype everything up and convey excitement while he pitched the deal to us. He made the mistake of asking me what I thought after asking the other guy, who was excited. I told him that it was a pyramid scheme. The suit acted dumb and didn’t understand what a pyramid scheme was. I borrowed a pen and drew a diagram on a napkin of the “business structure”. He continued to play dumb and defended it, claiming that it is his business and it is legitimate. He humble bragged about buying his car in cash(a Chrysler 300) and how him and his wife are doing really well while the ticking Rolex told me how well he was actually doing. (If you didn’t know, a real Rolex second hand does not tick, it glides.)

    I had obviously crushed the other invitee’s dreams of having a mansion, a luxury car, and vacations to tropical beaches with a trophy wife. At least I hope I did and he went on to live a modest life of joyous contention with mediocrity instead of chasing a lie that would require roping in anyone foolish enough to fall for the scam.

    We concluded the conversation and I ghosted him, keeping like 6 of his CDs lol. I honestly don’t remember the name of the company. I think it was an Amway derivative, but I might be misremembering.



  • The Britannica was one of those essential things for every home. It was like having a home computer. It contained as complete a collection of human knowledge that was possible without a full-blown library.

    I remember in the 90s looking through them trying to answer a random question I had and then later on going to the library to check out more research material if the Brittanica didn’t satisfy my curiosity.

    As great as the internet is, I miss running a finger across the tomes to learn something new about the world.