Good Things Friday (194) and Link Love
November 11, 2022
1. Comcast actually automated something useful! Our internet service was out most of the day on the weekend and I went to Xfinity chat to (I thought) argue for too long over a credit for our account. Instead I got this screen when I asked for a credit:
I entered the dates of the outage, and they just applied the credit:
That was unexpectedly painless! I’d like to think they decided to make that bit easy because of all the prior times I insisted on getting a credit on principle and wasted a lot of their time AND my time over a $5 credit.
2. We’ve got a $1 off basket discount on our last three receipts at Safeway. I don’t know why! But I appreciate every one of them.
3. This Aseel campaign could really use some support: Keep up Education for Afghan girls in Afghanistan
4. Season 2 of Leverage: Redemption premieres Nov 16 on Amazon Freevee! I really like this reboot and I am glad there will be a little bit of Aldis Hodge in there.
5. PiC’s work had a couple of catered events with WAY too much food and so he brought home an armload of sandwiches and fruit which became my lunches for the week. Free mediocre food that I didn’t have to think about! Perfect!
Why is the gay leather scene dying?
This is infuriating: They defied California and drained an important salmon stream. Their fine: $50 per farmer
This made me wonder how I’m going to teach the kids the dangers of gambling. We have an addiction problem in our family, and I can’t pretend they’ll be immune. How I turned $15,000 into $1.2m during the pandemic – then lost it all
I don’t have a subscription to the Atlantic but the first bit of this was worth reading anyway: What Adoption ‘Salvation’ Narratives Get Wrong. “The implication, whether people realized it or not, was that I was worth ‘saving,’ but my birth family wasn’t.”
I watched this and cried, and then went to Aseel to donate again, thanks to @NeolithicSheep.
This little baby boy is selling balloons on the streets of Kabul to make enough money so that his family can have dinner. What a burden to carry for a child.
Today, more than 2 million children work to survive in Afghanistan. This is a crime against humanity. pic.twitter.com/1RN5MqNUvt
— Shabnam Nasimi (@NasimiShabnam) November 8, 2022
Ooh I don’t know if this was intentional, but I was in NYC at age 13 with my mom, and I saw someone doing 3-card monte. She let me take a try at guessing (I assume I had to put down some cash) and of course I didn’t win. That sowed a good seed of gambling aversion.
I sort of want to do that on purpose now too in case it helps!
I’m trying to teach our kiddos about both the financial and psychological aspects of gambling. I’m hoping that if they understand exactly how that worm is placed on the hook, they’ll be less tempted by it – or at least better able to recognize the trap if they do fall into it. So we talk about the math behind why “the house always wins” and explain that the vast majority of scratch tickets are only worth a daydream. We also talk about the way lotteries prey on poor people and how impatience & greed can trick all kinds of people into falling for get-rich-quick schemes. MLMs are an especial pet peeve of mine that will be covered in extremely prejudiced detail when they start venturing into social media. Far too many of my friends have been suckered into selling various Fad-Of-The-Year products! 😛
And don’t even get me started on the “Send one secret sister gift/get 10 gifts in return!” Facebook chain that keeps respawning every year around this time. Aaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!!
Do you have a fast primer on why the house always wins? I just always believed that and never needed to hear proof so never thought about sharing that part of it. We DID start talking about this exact idea last night over a Chopped: Casino Royale episode though, so thank you for the inspiration!
MLMs! We have to talk about those too! I didn’t know about the secret sister chain though, I’m not on FB, would you care to rant about those here so I can share too?
Using food banks as an analogy seemed to work for us.
“At a food bank some people donate things in and then the food bank gives those things to other people who need them. But – they can’t give away more than came in. They’re not magically making food for free; every banana or loaf of bread they “give” actually came from someone else. And they use part of the donated money to pay bills like electricity & the building mortgage. But good charities only spend a little on that because they mostly want to help people.
Casinos & lotteries aren’t charities; they are businesses. And the people who own businesses want to earn money! So lots of customers put money into a casino, and the casino gives SOME money to a few winners – but the casino also uses part of the money to pay for electricity & the mortgage AND they also keep part of the money as profits – as much as they can! They can’t give out more money than the customers paid in because you can’t make money out of thin air. They can’t even give winners ALL the money that came in, or the casino wouldn’t be able to pay their own bills or earn a profit. They’d go out of business really quick! So most of the people who go to a casino lose some/all of their money, and a few lucky people are winners, but the casino always keeps some.”
And here’s an article about that dratted scheme. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/money/news/a35410/facebook-secret-sister-gift-exchange-scam/
I generally have at least one FB friend every year who is naive enough to think the Secret Sister scheme might work. Trying to talk them out of it has never been successful. So a few years back I tried a preemptive strike – a post in November complete with cheesy little stick people sketches depicting the difference between a Secret Sister pyramid scheme (Greed on top! Sadness on the bottom!) and a Secret Sister ring exchange (no greed, no sadness; just happy friends <3 ). It got slightly different results I guess because someone argued that she knew she might not receive anything but was okay with that because the joy of giving her gift was enough to satisfy her. *headdesk* I admire her generous spirit, but despite an extremely polite debate, she couldn't seem to understand that her encouraging other people to participate WITHOUT WARNING THEM was just helping the pyramid scheme recruit more dupes – dupes who might NOT be so happy to sacrifice pointlessly.
Ahem.
I will now descend from my soapbox and go remind my little minions that clean-up time does, in fact, actually mean: CLEAN-UP TIME. 😂 Goodnight Revanche, I hope you get a peaceful night for once!