That sounds awesome! I definitely vote for clean, refrigerated eggs.

I like to keep things simple and don’t use any separator at all for time.

New users? We should ask the German communities to do the sturgeon thing again, that was fun!

If your main concern is the US currency or just wanting your money to be out of US-based assets, I believe Interactive Brokers provides a lot of flexibility to move your money between assets and currencies. You’re still going to pay taxes and be subject to all US laws.

If your concern is US involvement in your personal financial affairs…good luck. The US has tremendous influence over the global financial system and no legitimate foreign organization is going to work with you unless you have substantial assets. The few countries that do not respect US influence are not particularly trustworthy and trying to do business with them will put you at significant legal risk.

You could also try converting to physical gold, but the US has confiscated gold before, so that’s not a sure bet.

I could probably get a job at either of my local grocery store bakery departments with that.

My void likes to spin in circles while I make coffee in the mornings. Some day it might even catch its tail.

I think the point of the post is that they PAID money to the data collectors to get data they themselves don’t want collected, thus becoming part of the problem. That said, I have done the free version of this multiple times with great success!

1. Start finding names. This can be easy, but if you’re trying to deal with a subsidiary, a private company, or a massive conglomerate, it might be more difficult. You can start with things like CEO & COO. Search for things like VP/SVP/EVP/Head of Customer Service (or Customer Experience). Depending on the problem you’re trying to solve, you might look for more specific job titles like CIO, Technical Operations, Network Operations, Accounts, etc. Get several names for roles that might make sense.

2. Find the email address format for the company. Common ones are first initial + last name, FirstName_LastName, etc.

3. Send an email to all of the names you collected in the company’s email address format. Hopefully several of the names are reasonably distinct to make it likely you got the right person. Of course, it’s unlikely that the CEO is John_Smith3, they’re never going to take the numbered address. Be (somewhat) polite, be specific, be as brief as possible; ideally make a reasonable request to resolve the problem. You don’t want to come across as an unhinged lunatic and you don’t (necessarily) need to threaten any specific action. Just ask for their help resolving the problem.

What happens next? They will likely forward the message to someone who has the ability to solve the problem. That person will contact you and make things happen that everyone else said was not possible. You do need to have reasonable expectations though. If you contact your ISP and tell them their outage cost you $1M in lost business, don’t expect much help. But if you tell them you were inappropriately charged $500 for equipment you returned 6 months ago, they’ll probably fix that for you.

Helpful places to find names:

• About section of the company website
• News section of the company website
• Wikipedia
• LinkedIn
• Quarterly Earnings reports
• Industry-specific news sites
• Google News search

My biggest challenge has been with companies that constantly reorg, so I find a name in a news article from 2 years ago and they’ve already changed roles.

I used to work for a cable company. I remember a coworker telling me a long time ago that one of the challenges they used to have was making sure the caller’s TV was tuned to the correct channel. So, the conversation would go like this:

“Please change the channel to 27” (or any other random number that isn’t a locally used channel) “What do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change it to 3, now what do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change to channel 4” “It works!”

For those that don’t know, there was a long period of time where the auxiliary input into TVs was tuned to either channel 3 or channel 4. There was a good chance that the customer didn’t know which one was correct for their TV and would have assumed that it was already set correctly if you asked.

I tried to sign up for an Apple TV free trial without an Apple device. It let me create the account, but then I had to “activate” the account, and I couldn’t do it on any of my devices (android, windows, the TV that gave me the free trial). I talked to tier 1 and tier 2 support, they couldn’t get it working either.

Then it gets even more ridiculous. The tier 2 agent asks me to upload screenshots of the errors I was getting for the tier 3 (?) engineers to review. Oh, I need an active Apple account to upload anything. I emailed the images and their email system stripped the attachments from the email. Tier 3 closed the ticket and banned my account. I talked to Tier 2 again and all they could do was put in a ticket to request I be unbanned…it was denied.

Finally, I gave up and asked them to delete my account. They said my account can only be deleted if I log in and use the delete account function. I pointed out how that was not possible and they said there was no other option. The whole situation reinforced my plan to never buy an Apple product.

It’s common in the U.S., especially in apartments, to have rooms with no light fixtures. Instead, there will be one outlet that is wired to a switch by the door. That outlet is sometimes upside down to distinguish it from the other outlets. That gives you the option to connect a lamp to the switch to get the same result as having a light fixture. I would generally prefer that every room has a light fixture on the ceiling, but this is marginally better than having to walk across a dark room to turn on a lamp.

I mean, depending on where exactly you ended up, it could go either way. I’ve watched some British TV over the years and I frequently need subtitles and I assume the actors are enunciating better than the average person.

I hope you’re not using that map to navigate your new home.

“Funny” story - at my prior employer, my department would outsource a bit more labor overseas each year to reduce costs. Year after year we were able to deliver 5-10% cost reductions, mostly through outsourcing. When I started with the company, we were about 40% outsourced, when I left we were over 80%, but it took many years to get there.

Over the years, we could have returned vastly more money to shareholders if we had outsourced more quickly, but our department leadership understood that they have to show improvement every year, so its bad business to save all the money at once (even though the savings would increase profitability permanently).

In the last 2 years, many of those leaders have moved on to other roles, in part because they understood we were nearing the end of the road for that strategy. I would be very curious to see how the next 2-3 years goes for the new leaders, but I also had a good opportunity to leave before things get ugly.

Move to another country? I don’t know, I just use whatever horrible option my employer permits me to have. :(

Sugarbee apples are amazing! Rockits are the only others in the same ballpark. Unfortunately, my grocer frequently charges 50-100% more for Sugarbee, which just doesn’t work for me. Honeycrisp are fine if you can find small ones, but the big ones taste like water. Cosmic Crisp are generally better than Honeycrisp, but I think that’s because I can find smaller ones.

Ambrosia can be really good, if they’re still crisp, but they’re frequently mealy garbage. I may as well get red delicious if I wanted to eat chalk. It’s hard to take the risk.

Jazz or Gala tend to be my “safe” fallback when all the good apples are too expensive. Also, I wish I could buy normal sized apples from the bulk bins, I don’t want the giant monstrosities that all the grocery stores stock. I buy the bagged apples because they are a normal size and, if I go to Sprouts, I like to buy the boxes of teeny, tiny Rockit apples (sooooo good).

I love apples.

Wow, 1st class, I didn’t realize out of context comics paid so well! :)

I’m really impressed with how quickly you’ve made such a huge life change, that takes some serious courage for you and your family. I would love to follow along behind you, but have no path for it, so I’ll have to stick things out and hope for the best (or not worst) here.

lol [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grade](military grade). I never gave this much thought until I bought some “military-grade” weight plates for my home gym. They were FAR lower quality than my other plates, but also cheaper. This isn’t even a matter of “which” military, this is a matter of the cheapest thing that technically meets standards.

I loved this book, so I will definitely check out John Dies at the End. Thanks for the recommendation!

I agree with the others, I would go for a full rack over a half rack to provide better safety for squats and bench. Technically, you could shrug off a failed squat, but I wouldn’t want to do that in my house unless I set up a very solid platform under my rack (a very good plywood + stall mat build and if you’re doing this in your house, new stall mats reek for a long, long time). Similarly, if you don’t use collars, you can dump the plates on a failed bench, but I’d rather not do that to my floors without solid protection.

Used is definitely the way to save money, but you could get a similar setup from Titan Fitness or maybe Rep Fitness for about $1k new. Skip the 15lb plates, but get some 5lb, 2.5lb and change plates. I like microgainz.com for change plates, but I’m in the US and don’t know how shipping to Canada compares.

Oh, that sounds like a sweet deal. I should have been aspired to be a corporation instead of a normal person.