Those people stealing carts to sell them on the street are a god send.

We had a guy in my old neighborhood who would come around once a week with various necessities that most people couldn't afford otherwise. Sure he made decent money, but babies got fed, pantries got replenished, feminine products were given out if you bought stuff from him regularly.

That might seem grimey to you, but that's fine.

I had to go to urgent care the other day and the only way to check in was to scan a QR code and fill out a god awful, half broken form on a random third party website. There were no error messages. The site would timeout if you spent too long on one page, so you'd have to start over. The amount of people who had all sorts of issues is nuts.

This was "an upgrade"

I grew up below the dirt poor, like oodles and noodles were a treat poor, with no adult supervision for a good portion of my childhood. My mom was on basically every government program that existed, that didn't mean I got anything out of it. The only reason I survived was by people looking the other way as I fed myself.

As I got older I had no life skills whatsoever and couldn't hold down a job, friends, or any sort of meaningful relationship. So again, dirt poor, a little better off than I was before because there were a few ways to make money. But still I only ever got food at a store, and probably would have starved if too many people said something, or had to do even worse stuff than I was to feed myself.

Hell even when I got myself together a bit and held down a shitty job for a while I still couldn't afford to feed myself after the bills hit, it was even worse when I started making just enough to get kicked off state insurance and stamps.

There are a lot of people out here just trying to survive, they shouldn't have to steal to eat but they do and in my eyes that's a human right.

Side note: food stamps are a fucking joke. What they're giving to a family of 4 wouldn't feed a single person, from my experience at least.

Ahh I think I had it mixed up, in the states at least rice contains a lot of heavy metals so when my son was young we avoided giving him too much rice, which was difficult since basically every kid snack is rice based.

A quick google search says washing it 'could' get rid of some of those metals, but not really. Makes me feel a little better about not ever washing my rice but it does cook a lot nicer after washing which makes sense.

I love cooking and I've gotten pretty good at making a lot of stuff completely from scratch. But my rice has always been awful, it seems so simple.

We got a $20 rice cooker a few months ago and its been a game changer. Perfect rice every time.

Also I just recently found out your supposed to wash rice before you eat it. Apparently its covered in a lot of heavy metals or something.

In school I would calculate exactly what I would need to do to just pass. I've always loved learning but didn't care for basically everything about the schools I was in. Which brought a storm of shit from my teachers and grandma.

No one appreciated the effort of calculating how many questions need to be answered on a test in order to bring your grade to a 74%. Sure it would've been easier to just do the thing, but they didn't make it fun and it didn't matter.

I put up a bird feeder and few months ago and now we constantly have at least 20 birds all around our yard. My son likes to throw bird seed all around now so its really cool to see them just walking around and pecking.

I absolutely fell in love with morning doves

Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.

We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.

Years ago when I was on Medicaid I spent about 2 weeks in the hospital. They took my appendix out and after looking at it and running some tests found out that I had some rare parasite. I was in excruciating pain at the time, throwing up blood a few times a day and just withering away. There was a pill that I was waiting to get that would've killed the parasites which could've been given to me after my 4th day there when they confirmed what I had. I spent the rest of the 2 weeks being doped up on morphine and an array of fluids until I couldn't take it anymore and left the hospital 'AMA'.

I went to a different hospital and got the medicine I needed almost immediately.

I did throw up again though when I got a ~$60k bill from my 2 week stay at the first hospital. Again they took out my appendix, ran some test, and pumped me with opiods for 2 weeks without treating my actual issue.

I was always very skinny until recently. Financially I couldn't afford to eat more than a meal a day at best, so skipping meals was kind of the point.

A few years ago my situation got better and without even realizing it I jumped from 115 to 145 in a matter of a few months just from eating 3 relatively healthy meals a day.

My problem now is I can't stop eating all the time.

As a clean shaved man who doesn't shave because he can't grow any sort of facial hair I feel personally attacked.

You could always just boot up a windows VM and set up a shared folder to code on Linux/test on windows if your application has issues running on Linux.

I thought it sounded too easy, but every article i read said it worked.

Any specific brand/style of trap you would recommend? I'd like to keep the bees for my trees and garden if possible and I'd rather save chemicals for an absolute last resort

To add to this, most companies in the us have a waiting period before certain benefits kick in, like health insurance. So if you want to switch jobs for whatever reason, you better be extra careful for the first 3 months of your new job. Unless of course you want to pay $1,000 a month to keep your insurance through cobra, or go through the cluster fuck runaround of getting insurance on your own. So especially when your insurance cover your whole family, it's a nightmare.

Thanks! Definitely looks like it

Yup, spot on. Thank you!

If you don't mind me asking what do you do? I'm always curious since truthfully the $200k/y fang jobs sometime make me think I'm the odd one out who's not gonna retire by 40. And as primarily a perl developer on a team of 2 I feel like were in our own world most of the time.

One concert I went to that didn't let you bring water in ended up getting shut down because the only water available was bathroom sink water or tap water in a plastic cup for $8. And they didn't let you bring your plastic cups into the bathroom to refill them.

Probably about a third of the people there had to leave from passing out/dehydration and a bunch left in ambulances. And this was a concert where probably 90% of the people there were on drugs, which in my eyes makes the whole water situation even more irresponsible.

So legal, yeah probably, but also entirely fucked.

When my title changed from web developer to software developer I got a 60% pay increase, but my job hardly changed in reality. I still only make just enough to do doordash on the side as an extra safety net and not as a necessity to afford food.

But when anyone asks what I do for work and I tell them, they immediately assume we're absolutely loaded and I'm picking up the check everywhere we go.

I've noticed that I get the same amount of work done working 5 days a week as if I plan to only work 3/4 days and know I'll have some free time to enjoy life. My work is really project based so as long as it gets done no one cares.

My wife has also noticed that I'm a lot more stressed when I work 5 days a week and need pretty much the whole weekend to recover.