sp3ctr4l

@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨94.3° F⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  … either he’s gonna be that flexible, or he’s going to giggle for half a day and not tell you the results of ‘can a thermal camera pointed at a mirror see a fart.’

  … my money is on ‘not really’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Priorities⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  What in the fuck do you need ~5,520 whippets for?

  Precursors for some concoction I’m not enough of a ‘chemist’ to understand?

  Stocking up for P Diddy’s next party?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨94.3° F⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Husband now has fart-o-vision, expect some chores to not get done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, ok then.

  I’m 18, just outta high school, have no money, no friends or family willing to cosign a car, public transit sucks where I live.

  How do I get a job?

  Or car?

  Which one do I get first, when they each require the other?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The average cost of a car is wildly skewed by luxury models and the absurd prices of new cars.

  Yep. And?

  Its also reality.

  Most used cars on the market are luxury cars that are 5 years or less old… because car companiea just largely stopped making non luxury cars.

  This is what the used car market looks like right now, I don’t care that its abnormal, I care about trying to evaluate you statement … in reality, as it currently exists.

  It’s possible to save a few hundred bucks a month.

  This is the idea you’re not getting:

  No.

  Its not.

  Not for half the population.

  Pay is too low, costs of living are too high.

  Savings rates are going down, not up.

  You don’t understand how many people were operating on razor thin margins, and now, huge numbers of people are running net negative, getting stuck in some new poverty debt trap, maybe this time its chaining loans to keep buying groceries.

  Your evaluation of what is possible is again, yes, technically possible, for a very small amount of people… but generally… it is laughably and wildly insufficient, useless to the vast majority of people it is potentially relevant to, because of how much the overall situation has changed, because of how out of touch you are with the basic parameters of the situation.

  The US is a society where car ownership is mandatory to participate in society… and at least half of society cannot actually afford that expense, financed or not.

  We need a systemic solution, otherwise, we will experience a systemic collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  caredge.com/…/used-car-price-trends-for-2025

  In October 2025, the average used car listing price sits at $25,512.

  moneyzine.com/…/savings-statistics/

  Image

  … that’s as of 2022.

  Its worse now, considerably.

  But, even assuming 2022 savings levels… that’s half the population that would need their savings to multiply by a factor of ~x42.5, to be able to afford the average used car, without financing.

  … You are wildly, incredibly out of touch.

  Sure, yes, its technically possible, technically doable, in approximately the same way that it’s technically possible and doable that I could become a millionaire by the end of 2026.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If they close your card without warning, well, then you can’t really do much about that.

  There’s probably some other factors that went into them deciding to do that, late or missed payments, something lile that.

  So… I think Kikoff and Kovo both offer variations on this idea, but I’m familiar with the Kikoff one:

  You pay them $10 bucks a month. For a year. At the end of that, you can eithet renew it, or l, they just give you $120 bucks, they give you your money back.

  While for most people this is probably pointless, if you’ve missed a lot of payments, doing something like this can help chip away at improving your on time payment record.

  Kikoff also has another thing where you can pay them various amounts of money a month, there are multiple tiers, the highest is $35… and they basically set up what appears to credit agencies as a credit card, but you can’t actually use it as a credit vard.

  But, it significantly increases that ‘total available credit’ number, and the various tiers also give you differing levels of access to challenging items on your credit record you think are fraudulent or wrong in some way, gives you access to something lile Aura or DeleteMe, where it periodically checks for and tries to delete your data from data brokers.

  That also takes a while to complete, but the point is that you can do this setup too, and it boosts your total available credit, and of course also counts towards your count/percentage of on time payments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Its a very complex system of math and rules, but it isn’t impossible to … raise your credit score.

  Closing a loan or credit line actually often lowers your score because it lessens the total amount of credit you theoretically could be using, if you maxxed everything out.

  Your ‘Credit Utilization’ is what % of your total maximum possible credit you are using.

  So, when you finally pay off a huge loan of some kind… well, that account closes, and now your relative credit utilization probably goes up, because the system is now only looking at say your credit cards, not them + your big loan.

  So basically, you should actually never close down a credit account of any kind, after you fully pay it off. Just… use it sparingly, or put the card in a safe, destroy it, who cares, as long as the account still exists.

  (big asterisk on that: unless it has some kind of regular due payment just to even have the account, even if you’re not using it at all)

  Thats also true because another big factor in credit scores is how long you’ve had the accounts you have.

  It literally does just take time to build up that element of it, time of you making regular payments and never leaving a balance that rolls over into the next month.

  Number of regular payments made on time vs number of missed payments is another big factor of credit models.

  ---

  I’m not trying to defend this system, its horseshit, truly evil.

  I’m trying to summarize useful advice.

  I was homeless for 2 years.

  When I finally got a bit more stabilized, I had scores around 520, because yeah, I spent money I didn’t have so that I could eat, and not sleep outside in blizzards and heatwaves.

  Its now been about 2 years since that point, and I’m up to between 670 and 710, the 3 agencies still considerably disagree as to which accounts I even had… as I got mugged and had my identity stolen multiple times, and I was only able to convince different agencies of different amounts and extents of that… and also crippled by those muggings…

  But the point is, its not impossible to rebuild your credit, even while you’re living off of only SSDI as I now am.

  Its exceedingly dfficult to do so, but not strictly impossible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand credit scores⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can use Kikoff or CreditKarma or things like that to regularly report your paid on time bills, and that does, slowly, incrementally, increase your credit score.

  Yeah its still total bullshit that that isn’t just like a pre-baked in part of the credit system, but you can do this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delicious rocks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While it may or may not meet your contextual definition of ‘rock’,… lead tastes somewhat sweet, apparently.

  The Romans boiled grape juice in lead pots to produce a kind of syrup that was used to sweeten wine.

  Lead is uh, a neurotoxin and likely carcinogen, so probably don’t lick the sweet rocks too much.

  According to:

  galleries.com/minerals/property/taste.htm

  … apparently borax tastes sweet and… alkaline?

  Chalcantite is described as ‘sweet metalic and slightly poisonous.’

  Melanterite is apparently ‘sweet, astringent and metallic.’

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GPT⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  God, damnit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some people prefer corn for some ungodly reason ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s a great example!

  You can make a bit of a salad outta that with some kind of leafy green, as a main portion of all that, maybe some croutons or broken up tortilla chips, i dunno.

  Like hell, uh… proper sauerkraut. Korean pickled onions, radishes, cabbage.

  People will just eat that shit as a whole meal, I’ve seen it, even dated someone who did at one point.

  And its usually at least as, if not more pungent than raw onions, unless you just chopped those onions.

  Personally, that’s a bit wild for my tastes, but… I’m not German or Korean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A swing and a miss⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I… …

  I don’t know if having a beard is sufficient to make one trans.

  Also, if gnome women just naturally have facial hair, then it obviously does not make them trans, they just do sexual dimorphism differently than humans do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some people prefer corn for some ungodly reason ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait, why not all three?

  You can reasonably use all three in an omellette or rice based dish or soups or many other possible kinds of meals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some people prefer corn for some ungodly reason ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Mummified zygotes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A swing and a miss⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  … mizznomer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The trick is calming down, and seriously considering, as if you were an outsidd observer of yourself…

  … why you like having a chasity cage clamped on you, what environmemt triggers cause you to desire dommy mommy stepping on them.

  Its kind of a zen thing, sort of.

  (ahem, lol =P)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I do my best, normally, to actually admit and thus learn from mistakes.

  I’m of the age now where I’ve realized I’m probably not going to be able to change my seemingly fundamentally inexorable bullheadedness when I am, for whatever reason, very convicted about something.

  … So, that necessitates the self awareness to realize 1) that I am wrong 2) how I came to be wrong and 3) how I can try to avoid being wrong in the future.

  … currently, my conclusion remains the same: Do not attempt a logical argument when exhausted and very hungry.

  lol.

  … I’m doing much better than a year ago, PTSD is not fun, learning how to disengage from hypervigilance mode … is a skill, hooray for CBT.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, you’re right.

  KaChilde ran through a more thorough version of my own logic and I realized I am being a stubborn ass, sorry about that lol!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I concur, and realized my logic is flawed.

  … sorry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Welp.

  I tap out, you’re right lol.

  Don’t attempt set theory before breakfast, otherwise you end up making a fool of yourself as I have.

  =[

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you pick A, B is also red, and C is also an irregular 4-gon. So A is not unlike either B or C.

  If you pick B, A is also red, and C is also filled solid with color. So B is not unlike either B or C.

  But if you pick C, while C does have elements in common with A and B…

  (it shares ‘irregular 4-gon’ with A, and ‘solid color fill’ with B)

  … it is also unlike each of them singly, as well as both of them together, in that it is green.

  Only when you pick C do you result in a pair of sets that are cleanly dvided by the same property difference.

  Is that more clear?

  If you pick C, the distinction between C and A is the same distinction between C and B.

  Thus, if you pick C, C is unlike A and B in the same way.

  This is what I would call a clean or clear distinction, or … kind of unlikeness.

  This is not the case, does not occur, if you pick A or B.

  You end up with a picked set of one element that differs from the remainder set in ways that are inconsistent among the elements of the remainder set.

  IE, a muddled or inconsistent distinction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No.

  You are wrong.

  “Select the image that is unlike the other two.”

  The only possible choice that results in a set of 2, and a set of 1, which are seperated cleanly by a distinct property, is picking C.

  The goal is to define a difference between potential sets such that a distinct property exists between the two sets that you create.

  To define two sets where unlikeness exists when they are compared.

  Your job is not to merely compare three elements.

  It is to compare three possible pairs of sets that can be made out of three elements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  … only one choice is green.

  How is this difficult, other than if you are r/g colorblind?

  The correct choice is C.

  If you pick A, B is also red, and C is also an irregular 4-gon. So A is not unlike either B or C.

  If you pick B, A is also red, and C is also filled solid with color. So B is not unlike either B or C.

  But if you pick C, while C does have elements in common with A and B, it is also unlike each of them singly, as well as both of them together, in that it is green.

  C is the only choice where ‘is unlike both of them’, them being the other choices… is true, in any sense.

  It has a distinct property.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WERG WERG WERG⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  God fucking damnit, I already made a carcinisation joke in an nsfw thread yesterday.

  …

  Well now I’m just feeling all crabby.

  frothes bubbles, annoyedly

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon on hacking⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  … i mean… if you store your passwords in… plain text… yes…

  … but I guess most people are that stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon on hacking⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… yes.

  Correct.

  Ever heard of red-teaming?

  Just pretending to be some unnanounced maintenance crew, what, they didn’t let you know we were scheduled for today?

  …and then 9/10 times, blamo, you’re now either in or very close to in a server room.

  This is why its utterly insane to just give other people your passwords and swipe patterns and such.

  Even assuming they never have any malicious intent, ever, the amount that an idiot can fuck shit up unintentionally is potentially unlimited.

  This is why 95% of most ‘hacking’ operations are spearphishing or some kind of social engineering, barely 5% of the actual consistent effort is in… actually developing some package based around one or multiple exploits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you realize it's time to trade in your old sedan for an SUV⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well I was gonna say because less and less Americans have their own pig farms, but sure, ok, that works too I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's basic science⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, I am entirely not trying to be an ass, but in situations like what just happened there, here is what I usually do:

  Christoper Walken Lee (EDIT: Derp)

  Something like that is what I try to do when I make a silly error, but want to showcase that I made the error, and then also accepted and made the correction.

  That way, if somebody in the future, who reads only the edited version of the comment/post/thread sees it, they can understand that perhaps other comment chains based off of the initial error are not non sequiturs.

  It also shows that you are humble and admit a mistake, and make a correction, which imo, are good things to showcase… as opposed to doing a ‘stealth edit’, which leaves no obvious signs of what the original comment was, in the comment itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's basic science⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Walken can tell you about how to smuggle a watch, though.