There is a pizza place I pass by often. They have been ranked one of the best in the country. A large plain is $16. A large with 2 toppings is $21. If the pizza is $31 it better be considerably better than one of the best in the country.
Which is largely what I have done. There are a lot of places I prefer to get my news, but CNN is generally faster at least at getting the headlines, especially when it’s US news, than slower and more methodical options like NPR or the BBC.
To be clear, I’m not blaming CNN for seeking profit, but that their style has been ever more click-bait adjacent, in terms of “if you can’t beat them, join them”. It’s apparently (like videos of talking heads and sound bites) what the public wants, or at least a segment has been trained to want, but not for me. 
I’m at the end of a dead-end road, in a quite red district, in a very blue state. Not a location that it would make any sense to spend time and money sending canvassers or pollsters to.
I have gotten several postcards from the local D’s, but none of them were polls. I’ve gotten various poll-ish things in the mail, but all of them required at least one answer that was IMO misleading, and were obviously part of fundraisers for which I have no money to give. So I didn’t answer any of them.
I don’t answer unfamiliar numbers that don’t leave a voicemail, if I’m looking at the phone that displays the info at the time. I think I may have hung up on a robot pollster back this spring, but can’t remember for sure, so voted that I’d likely had calls but didn’t pick up. (If that one I’d picked up had been a live person, I might have talked to them to argue with them about the likely structure of their poll.)
I’ve had a couple of canvassers knock on the door. My dog wasn’t happy. Everything around here is about the local race for Congress which is getting national attention.
I get frequent blind texts asking me to take a poll. I’m certainly not going to follow the links. Same with emails.
$31 for pizza? Maybe in NYC but not at home…& I don’t understand the tip for pizza part. If I were eating it in a sit down & order restaurant I’d tip like any other meal. If I ordered a slice at the counter I wouldn’t tip & I can’t tell you the last year I got delivery but it was probably 200x. I’d either go pick one up or eat a frozen pizza before getting delivery.
5 clocks, including a panic-inducing one when I got in the car yesterday morning & was very late to where I needed to be…until I remembered the clocks changed overnight & I hadn’t touched that one yet. There’s also an old VCR in the den, mainly because it’s used solely as a clock in that room & it’s much easier to leave it as a clock than to move the whole wall unit to get to the power behind it. Sure, I could literally cut the cord & then pull it out but I’d couldn’t replace it with anything powered w/o getting behind the unit.
Hometown newspaper pulls that shit. You click on an article & can see it for about 3 seconds & then it’s replaced with a ::for subscribers only:: overlay. Here’s the thing, that newspaper otherwise sucks. They’re slow to update national stories, hours to a day behind. The weekend version is significantly a rehash of articles from the week, especially the features & non-headline news stories. IOW, it’s mostly not worth paying for except for a handful of user interest stories.
I have a home-made sign at my front door indicating no Canvassers, Proselytizers, or Solicitors (but welcoming neighbors). So far I have seen it work for canvassers - I can see the front entrance to my house from where my home office is set-up. They approach the house but have not rang (rung?) the doorbell. And yeah, it cuts down on how many times per week the dog goes crazy.
Having just spent two weeks canvassing, i ignored “no trespassing” and “no soliciting” signs, but respected ones that specifically mentioned canvassers.
Also, i spoke to several people with “no soliciting” signs and rather to my surprise, most were pleasant and some wanted to talk. They were no less likely to answer the door than anyone else. (Most people don’t answer the door. Probably, most people aren’t home.) The only guy who told me to get the hell off his property did not have any signs indicating that. I guess there was another guy who was pissed that i was ringing his bell a day after someone else had done so, and it upset his dog. I indicated in the app that people should not contact him any more. Hopefully that helped him.
The poll about political canvassers says choose “up to” four options, but the actual poll appears to require you to pick exactly four options. It wouldn’t let me vote when I only picked three.
When a canvasser came to my door the other day saying “I already mailed back my ballot” worked great to shut down any further questions. But I did technically answer all the questions he asked.
I always have to chuckle when it’s a site I’ve never been to before, and likely never will visit again. “Yeah matey you are WAYYY overestimating your site’s indispensibility to my existence. Bye.”
Yeah, a mod gave me a heads-up, chalk it up to my mild dyslexia. It showed what I wanted it to show tho; if the non-reponse rates are the same for the general population…wow.
My coin change in the jar. If I have to order and pick up myself, I tip that or a buck or two in the jar.
My mat says “Unless you have tacos, tequila, Girl Scout cookies or my Amazon package - GO AWAY!”
I’ve had to point it out to a couple of pig-porkers from Spectrum, but most others get the hint.
Did you ask where your tequila was?
For immediate family members voting, I said yes, but with some mental caveats. I know my mother, father, step-mother and step-father’s stated intents, along with my wife, brother, and half-brother. I am reasonably certain of my sisters in law, but haven’t actively talked to them about it.
My biggest caveat is I know what one or two family members have said, but I have some doubts about at least one of them. Mostly my dad, who has clearly said he won’t vote for Trump, because he’s an idiot, but he is sympathetic to Republican desires for lower estate taxes, wealth transfer, and Israel. And he could just be saying he’s not going to vote (which is better than voting for Trump at least) because he knows I, my brother and my step mother won’t approve.
I may have gotten poll questions by email or snail mail, but probably wouldn’t have noticed.
I know these aren’t your views, but your father’s. But, lower than what? There are no taxes at all for the first $13.6M. That seems pretty fair to me.
I don’t think I know what this means
Yeah, I guess some people believe the dems are not supporting Israel.
I’ve come to the conclusion that voters use issues to justify their decisions, but they don’t actually influence their decisions.
How to put this. My father and step mother aren’t rich by their standards, but are absolutely have more wealth than they care to spend (other than some travel and eating out they don’t have expensive hobbies). My father wants to transfer as much of this inheritance to myself and my brother without the government taking a bite, and feels the current laws prevent him from doing so, short of his own death.
My father ALSO despite his age (85 this year) has still be buying, renovating (most of this done by his people these days) and selling properties at a profit. Which is fine, but he complains all the time about the costs associated with code, delays and out-and-out ripoffs from local government on zoning, utility work, and the taxes and fees associated with that business as well.
A single example, he purchased a property for 80k, and while renovating it (while incomplete) the area wanted to tax him at 3x that sight unseen. I believe he ended up putting in about 60k in work and sold it for just below 200k, which is still LESS than the city wanted to tax him for while it was being restored.
Yes, he’s a very selfish individual, although there are some very legitimate complaints about the local government and utilities mixed in as well.
And all that means (plus the Israel thing) that he’s more comfortable with the classic Republican agenda - he loathes Trump as a phony businessman, hates the Christian nationalism that’s been endemic to the (R) team for a while, and those are the two things keeping him from voting (R) right now, but he won’t support Harris either.
But I think that’s about as much as I would want to share in this thread. Basically, it’s a mix of mostly unjustified feelings about “It’s my money, I should be able to give it away without BS!” and slightly more justified complaints about state and local government and taxes.
My SO and in-laws are not citizens, so I have only one family member who can vote. That’s my sister who lives in another state, and I know how she will vote (already voted early this time) in pretty much any election. We vote almost identically anyway, though I have a more ideological bent.
A couple of times I have known exactly how she voted. She’s one of those people who ignore down-ballot races no matter how much I harangue her about it. So a couple of times I accessed her sample ballot, researched the candidates as much as possible, and emailed her a list.
I kinda voted twice
My father strictly adhered to never speaking about politics and not saying who you vote for. My family is pretty much like this. If this were a normal election I might be able to guess but I wouldn’t know for sure. This year it’s obvious no one likes Trump.
They are just trying to earn a buck doing a job. That doesnt mean you have to like it, but the invective is unnecessary.
They’re trying to earn a buck by bothering & interrupting him when he’s already stated, via his mat, that he doesn’t want to be bothered. Maybe he was napping, or maybe his dog was napping & is now barking it’s head off. When your job is to create unwanted intrusions I agree that you are a pig-porker.