I was going for a sick family member at their request and paid cash. And so what? Still not something we should put up with, membership driven business or not.
Criminal justifies his criminality. 
I agree, but obviously Ankita Singh from Infoholic Research has a worse problem than that. Many, in fact.
The most egregious error of all is the most obvious one. In “Hello Default Value , Hope you are doing good!” we are appalled by the use of an adjective (“good”) instead of the necessary adverb modifying the verb, thus: “doing well”, not “doing good”, the latter of which implies volunteer work at a soup kitchen.
Somewhat less shocking but also irritating are the unnecessary space between the addressee’s name and the following comma, the incorrect capitalization of the “H” in “Hope”, and the rather ostentatious exclamation mark at the end. Not to mention that the entire sentence lacks a subject. Is the expressed sentiment not that “WE hope you are doing well”?
The perfunctory “Hello” is also counterproductive as it serves no purpose in written communication. One may choose to use a traditional greeting like “dear”, but otherwise, the only appropriate salutation would be a reference to the person’s rank, gender, or other official status, if any.
This nonsense would end if I were in charge of the IT department putting out letters. The salutation would definitely read like one of the following, all of which are not only correct, but downright motivating:
Dear Mr. Default Value,
We hope you are doing well. We hope that there is a Mrs. Default Value in your life, and if not, that the prospective Mrs. Default Value is at least providing you with a good time.
Dear Mrs. (or Ms., if you want to be an ass about it) Default Value,
We hope you are doing well. And if you are a Ms. rather than a Mrs., and desiring otherwise, that your fortunes will improve, and may your union be blessed.
Dear Sergeant-Major Default Value,
We hope you are doing well. We want you to know how much we support our armed forces.
Ha! Reminds of my regular grocery store when they insist on putting a “paid” sticker on gallons of milk or cases of soda, and there is NOT someone checking receipts at the door. I’m always amused at the idea that they might have a SWAT type team lurking in wait, about to swoop down on someone without the sticker.
Have you considered that Ankita Singh from Infoholic Research may mean just that? Huh? Anything wrong with doing some good in the world?
I was going to minirant about either the flytipper who keeps dumping stuff on my commute (looks like a stove today, it was three bags of tree prunings last time), or the people who have yet to discover the purpose of those funny flashy lever controlled lights on their car, thus clogging up the roundabout for no reason when it’s busy but I couldn’t decide which.
So, as a micro all purpose combi-rant: selfish idiots, please stop.
I forgot to mention in #163 that in the event that Miss, or Ms, or Mrs Default Value does in fact bear children as God intended when he bestowed fertility upon the female of the species, that she procreate untold numbers of Default Values upon the earth. And if some of the Default Values be irrational numbers, then it is God’s will, though Lord preserve us if they ever get to vote.
They can also be used as emergency potties when you’ve got a 4 year old who “can’t wait any longer!!”.
We wound up doing this with Moon Unit - twice within a week. The second time it happened, as we were looking for a place to park so she could do the necessary, the first lot we came to was at the Iwo Jima Memorial.
Cup used… covered and tossed in the nearest trash can. My husband looked at me in horror and said “We just desecrated a national monument!!”.
My latest, speaking of the Metro: My husband commutes that way. I usually drop him off and pick him up. There’s a lane that cars are supposed to pull over into for that purpose, and two travel lanes just to the left of that.
However, this is evidently too much of a hardship - and I’d say at least half the cars doing dropoff drive to the front, and stop - blocking traffic - to let their passengers out. It’s especially nice when there’s another car wanting to do the same, except moron #1 is blocking the righthand lane - so they pull up and block the lefthand lane.
Then there are the “can’t be driven by my WIFE” fools. The car pulls up to a stop. Sometimes in the correct curbside lane, sometimes in a travel lane. The passenger - female - gets out. The driver - male - ALSO gets out. The passenger goes around to the driver’s side, gets in, and drives the car away while the male goes on into the station.
WTF. guys??? It would be so much easier to just sit in the passenger seat, grab your things and hop out - but no, when you’re travelling with the wifey, YOU have to be the driver.
The Walmart in my town started pulling that shit recently too. If you try to walk out of the store with anything not in a bag (like a box of cat litter), the reciept monkeys leap out of nowhere. I can usually sneak out through the garden center but I noticed they’ve started posting someone there too to catch all the little old ladies stealing the flats of tomatoes they just paid for. :rolleyes:
Illinois Democrats, quick, pull your heads out of your asses! Do you want to know why there’s a perception that Democrats want to raise your taxes and otherwise dig into your wallet?
"A proposed hike in Illinois’annual registration fee for electric vehicles, from $17.50 to $1,000, is being called unfair by current EV owners, and a sales disincentive by manufacturers — just as the new technology is beginning to gain broader traction.
“It’s outrageous,” said Nicoletta Skarlatos, 56, of Chicago, who bought a Tesla Model S five years ago. “I thought Illinois was progressive and would want to encourage EV ownership.”
I agree with you. The EV registration fee is particularly short-sighted and extreme. It provides a punitive disincentive precisely where government should be providing strong incentives. As usual, Democrats have a laudable goal – responsibly maintaining the highway infrastructure – but a piss-poor implementation that Republicans will pounce on. Of course Republicans’ solution to the infrastructure problem is to just ignore it and promise lower taxes, and if a piece of highway overpass breaks off and kills someone, blame Obama.
What to do? Higher gas and diesel taxes are actually a good thing because the cost of these fuels has never adequately covered their environmental costs, and the US has among the lowest fuel costs anywhere outside of the Middle East oil region. The best opportunity to do this is uniformly at the federal level and redistributing some of it to the states. The US federal excise tax is a fixed amount that hasn’t changed in 26 years. The problem with this solution is that much of the federal government is infested with morons.
If the Queen Mum asks about your reaction we’re in the middle of a Romero movie (the Queen Mum isn’t EII; she was EII’s mother).
I’ll just say that Walmart is famous for pinching nickels until the buffalo screams, so they have undoubtedly lost enough product that it is worth the money to post a minimum wage drone to check.
I explain to the receipt monkeys that if they want to check they’ll need either probable cause or something more intimidating than an old fart in a blue vest. So far; no one has seen fit to make it an issue, but they sometimes threaten to stop me “the next time”.
If I can’t get out through the garden center, I wait until they’re distracted by someone else and sprint through the door.
Yeah, that’s definitely the Bad Idea of the Day.
This is also why I don’t like the idea of special use taxes that are dedicated to this or that purpose. We should levy taxes to fund the operations of government (including, in appropriate cases, taxes on things that we want to discourage the use of, like fossil fuels), those taxes should go into the general fund, and the legislature should appropriate money from the general fund to pay for the things that they, our elected representatives, have determined society needs (and can’t or won’t be properly provided for by the free market). Schemes for specially allocated taxes–like American states do with gas taxes–just create all sorts of perverse incentives, so you get “blue states” wanting to massively dis-incentivize a technology that they damned well should still be seeking to nurture and encourage.
Flying out of Reno today. TSA told me I needed to be patted down. I asked for a private screening. The woman got pissy on me. Asked for a female supervisor to come in. They patted around my crotchal area. I wasn’t happy:(
Oh yeah my mother who lives in an assisted living place had money stolen from her. It’s been an on going thing there. Monday think I raise a little hell. The place she lives in isn’t cheap, and it privately owned.
It was supposed to take one day to get my MRI results back and it took a week of fighting with them to finally get a form e-mail saying “your results are normal. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.” So nothing at all about what to do next. I sent a message to ask and no response yet. I should be happy that there’s no brain tumor or anything, but this means no answers, no plan, no prognosis… and I’m just so drained of any capacity to “hang in there” or “stay strong” or “be positive” or anything. All I’ve got right now is “drink fluids so that you don’t get dehydrated from crying so much” and “stay away from everyone.”
And my very favorite cat, my little soul sister… is getting adopted tomorrow. Again, should be good. It’s not my first rodeo. I know they don’t stay forever. She’s been with us for two years, though, and she’s very opinionated and generally hates everyone but me, so… it’s just a surprise and it’s a good thing, but it’s a loss at a moment when I just can’t handle a loss.
And my animal stories, which had been doing great… getting 60,000+ views, getting hard-to-adopt animals out the door… they’re not getting looked at and not getting the animals out like they were. I don’t know if my writing is suffering, if my pictures suck, what the problem is… I don’t know.
And I can’t get warm. I’m freezing. Space heater, electric blanket… still freezing.
And I hate art. I was never artistic to begin with and now it’s my job because the people in charge at work just somehow decided I was and so I keep trying to be. They ask me to make something and I make it, but it’s just never quite good. And whereas I used to be able to see other people’s art and just kind of admire it the way I might admire an olympic athlete while being completely fine with the fact that I would never be able to accomplish that… now I see even the simplest art and I can’t help but compare. Photography is the same. I hate everything I do. Everything I do is clumsy and inept.
And I hate living outside the range of every kind of food delivery. And I hate not being able to walk or talk or function. I just want to clean my house and go grocery shopping and cook and work.
And I finally told my mom about my broken head (we’re not estranged, but we’re not very close. I would never, say, call her to ask for advice or tell her about my day.) and she’s going back and forth between insisting that I try all kinds of batshit alternative treatments and trying really hard to come up with ways that this is probably my fault.
And I’m so angry that euthanasia isn’t available to humans. With a dog, there’s always the option to say “enough is enough” and draw a line and stop. Quality of life is a consideration and peaceful death is considered better than poor quality of life. It’s reasonable to opt for euthanasia over expensive Hail-Mary treatments or tests based on odds, ability to pay, and the animal’s level of suffering in the meantime. This is a part of my everyday life. This is the healthcare system I’m most used to. Where there’s always a stop button and using it is considered a legitimate and loving option. It’s complete bullshit that it isn’t the same for humans. I know a lot of people have it a lot worse than I do, but I’ve got nothing left and I can’t do this much longer. Some people go years without any kind of diagnosis or relief. YEARS. I can’t. I can barely leave my house and feeding the cats and scooping litterboxes is a huge struggle. I’m a defective piece of meat. Years? I can’t. I want out.
Overall, I’m just not having a good day and every stupid little thing seems like the end of the world and I don’t even drink or smoke pot or anything like that, so I don’t even have that to take the edge off and the cats I do have are semiferal and won’t let me pet them unless they decide it’s time for petting, so I don’t have that either. So I’m just going to… I don’t know, watch the stupid British Baking Show and cry and hope I fall asleep, I guess.
Oh, Dorothy. I’m so sorry for you. Can you get to a hospital? You need to tell them you’re suicidal. You have to get some help. Now. Don’t wait and make another appt. with your GP. They are not helping you. I humbly suggest you go tonight, to an ER.