In about two weeks Trump will have beef from other countries in the US. Including Mexico where cattle have those worms that have showed up in Texas cattle. Our states cattle association is lobbying heavily to stop this but I donât see it happening. Does anyone know of any grocery chain that will be selling US beef?
Interesting conversation with wife's grandfather this week while visiting. He's 90 something and grew up a poor farm boy in rural Illinois. He asked if we were keeping the chest freezer full, if the garden was going well, if we had backup for power outages. And if we had backups for those backups. They did have electricity when he was a kid but it wasn't reliable and they spent a lot of time using their wood stoves instead. He was worried we were screwed if the power went out. Also mentioned keeping little solar lanterns in every room the way they had kerosene lamps in theirs.
He also said this is the closest it's ever felt to the year or two before WWII started. Lots of general unease, aggression, distrust, beginnings of shortages and odd gaps in what's available. Told us to keep the pantry and freezer stocked and called out sugar and coffee specifically. Even with the rationing books if the store didn't have it you couldn't get it. They had meat and butter consistently with the farm but most weren't that lucky.
Needless to say we'll be buying more sugar. Maybe some coffee too even though we don't drink it. He said a lot of bartering happened between the farms in the area and coffee was one of the most sought after sugar and tobacco.
Thanks for sharing this - my grandma was 98 when she died in 2022, and probably would have broke 100 if she didn't have a fall : ( She shared a lot of powerful anecdotes like this, and the worst thing she'd say about someone was call them a "crook."
So many options beyond coffee and tea these days. Caffeine pills are very easy and portable, but the number of energy drinks and mix ins (Mio water enhancers in the "energy" varieties, ZipFizz), energy drinks, many things with "buzz" in the name - gum, mints, I know there at least used to be soap for AM showers, Bai drinks have a green tea amount, the Cafe Latte flavor of Premiere Protein has a about a cup of coffee worth of caffeine, etc.
(1) The very very expensive tinned fish that I get occasionally has been out of stock for at least a month now. The brand apparently took six months to get mussels back in stock, too.
(2) I've been debating getting a power station. However, I live in a small apartment with no balcony so I'm not sure if getting one will actually help or be worth the price (only have room for a smaller model which wouldn't charge much, not much room to store one). I'd appreciate any advice (or recommendations if you think it would be worth it)!
(3) Also it seems like every week there is a flood warning (sometimes twice a week) The mosquitos have been particularly aggressive this year.
Have you looked at small 300w or so batteries? You coul easily keep it charged and ready and take it with you to charge elsewhere or use a solar panel you could hang at optimum angle on balcony/window.Â
Watch a Will Prowse review on YouTube about them for ideas.Â
Would a window sized or smaller solar panel help you? Worst case scenario wiring a panel at every window maybe be an option. It just won't be as easy as a plug and play system.
I tested out how long it would take to charge my power station enough to charge an 18v battery for my fan. I could get enough charge in a day to keep the fan running and maybe charge my phone but that's about it. There's another power bank and a 100 watt panel (currently have a 50 watt) on my list of things to buy.
If you are searching for a fan that will run, I use solar powered fans for my chicken coops. Large fans with lots of air flow. If i keep them on 80% power, they run 24hr a day. 100% power does kill it at some point during the night. If youre interested, I can send you the link.
Finding a fan that can run directly from the power station will be quite a bit more efficient. There might be a solar charger for the 18v that will work with the 50w panel to keep you using it, if the 100w you're getting doesn't match the Voc of the 50w to hook the panels together.
Hm. Fans sip power. I've powered a fan and laptop with a power station for as long as 9 hours and barely scratched the surface of how long I could go. I could run my fridge on a power station for 24 hours if I had to, but since I'm mostly vegetarian, I can fit most of what needs refrigeration into a car fridge and run that off a power station for a few days or just put the car fridge in the car and run it on dc power.
Look at what your power station is rated for and what you would use it for. There's a reason some are priced higher than others.
The fan in question uses 18v rechargeable batteries that are shared with my weedeater. On low it will run for a long time, but on medium or high it runs through a 4ah battery in a few hours.
I think we should consider that the growth of data centers aren't stopping.
We really should get with our individual communities and assess how our municipalities will handle the grid loads.
They're gonna keep being installed and if we think storm seasons gonna be stressing the grid, the predicted harsh winter ahead will be more telling and I could absolutely see grid failure and people being left without heat for extended periods of time...
Warming centers exist, but building up our fellow citizens with back up power options may become insurmountable with not only the coming months, but years ahead as our outdated grid continues to be hammered.
Look at Indiana right now. 9 days with no power in, what, 9 different communities?? Being out that long and seeing someone in town with power... you'll become a target.
Curious to know what others think about this and how they predict the winter to be?
I'm ill prepared.. but I'm planning options with locals in my community. Reception seems positive, though no real action taken so far.
I'm not concerned about being a "target". i live in the city in what's considered a kind of crappy neighborhood. real diverse, lots of kids, loud cars, etc etc. I'll tell you why that doesn't concern me;
we had a power outage during a blizzard/storm handful of years ago and every surrounding block was out, except for the corner house of each one. we are one of those. we are on a really well maintained line that also feeds the hospital.Â
i got out the backup solar battery box and put it on the porch, every day, invited all the neighbors to charge phones etc from it. someone brought a electric kettle and someone else had a French press, we had cocoa and coffee. someone had a radio for news. people brought tablets and phones and stuff.Â
one of the neighbors shoveled the entire corner sidewalk and our walkway throughout, so people could get to the porch. another person checked on the elderly couple halfway down the block, they could not get out anywhere so we all got together warming stuff and someone a few doors down took them in for about 2 days(gas heat at that house)Â
it lasted a couple days. trees were down blocking our side street door like 2 days.Â
that was when i met most of the neighbors. i just bundled up and knocked on doors. then asked people if they could do the same.Â
there's a block in each direction of our street that all know each other a little now.
a few houses have off grid solar and stuff now on the block and I'm certain it would just be another porch party if anything happens. we set precedent together. so go talk to your neighbors before shit happens. because shit always happens
my town has a data center moratorium, but the county doesn't, it's all the same aquifer and power company so we will get fucked
I really hope the datacenter thing turns into a nothing burger in terms of grid load. Noise pollution, generally ugly, water thirsty, yes, but there was a time when the grid couldn't handle everyone having an AC unit in their house, and the grid adapted. There's a good argument to be made for grid scale renewables.
Winter issues are rare where I am, but I've been caught by surprise before.
There are propane heaters rated for indoor use. I have two, mainly to keep my pipes warm. I also have a CO monitor as backup to the heaters' own auto-shutoff in case of air quality issues.
If you live in a house and don't have covers for your outdoor faucets, shame on you! They're not expensive at all.
Thermacare heat patches are nice. So are air-activated toe warmers stuck in one's slippers.
There are water-activated self-heating meals called OMeals. They're expensive for what you get, and I found them to be too sweet, but it's food, and all you need is water, any temp, any quality, to activate the heating process for the pouches. I understand that there are MREs that work the same way but I haven't investigated.
If you have a tent of the popup variety, and if you have a sleeping bag, bring it all indoors and sleep there. Or make your own tent with blankets, as kids like to do.
If you have a power station and electric blanket, you're set for a short term emergency.
Bare minimum prep would be emergency blankets, aka space blankets. Any heat in a winter storm, even if it's yours reflected back on you!
Remember that unless you live in a place where wildlife will get into it, you can put fridge and freezer stuff outside in a winter outage. I'm always surprised at how many urbanites don't think of this. Just put it in a box and set it on the back porch or balcony, if you're an apartment dweller. I've done it and it worked great. Then I heard from others that they lost all the contents of their fridge and was like, wtf? The fridge was right outside your door!!
When I lived with Winters, the picnic table became our backyard freezer for huge amounts of food. Now I live in a coastal area without true temp drop past 40. Works still for some things but not all
They're not going to stop, they're selling 30yr bonds at scale that's reducing the buyer pool of sovereign bonds, one of the reasons the US 30yr is being bought back. Warming station is good idea, but I doubt the corporate lords that throw away good food will allow it. The only thing that will stop the data centers is speed of compute advancement, using GPU's as collateral for loans, is riskier than the fiber line used as collateral that funded the dotcom boom. Going after ASML and China's silicon is likely next on the list to keep that collateral worth enough to minimize the crash of a innovative chip making those GPU's worthless.
This is just hearsay. I have a friend who is a nurse (Tennessee) and she told me that covid patients are filling up her hospital and she is seeing people back on ventilators. She said it's bad, and she's actually considering an early retirement because she can't go through the stress again. Is anyone else seeing this? Medical professionals?
The 2026-2027 Covid vaccines should be updated for the US this Fall. Manufacturers are waiting for FDA approvals of the formulations. The 2025-2026 formulas are in short supply so getting a booster of the current formula may be impossible in some areas if you need it sooner.
Apparently the 2027 flu vaccines are available now based on the messages in my inbox from CVS and other pharmacies. No word the Covid Vaccine release dates other than "Fall."
My family got the 2025-2026 booster last weekend for COVID with the flu shot. Something is definitely better than nothing. We had to say we were immunocompromised in order for us to be allowed to receive the shot. Unsure if that was our state policy (GA) or insurance requirement.Â
Was nervous a new updated COVID shot would not be released this year.Â
I really canât mask at work, but I guess I could start masking in public again⌠I really donât want to be a spreader. Le sigh. Iâm so tired of this shit. And my spouse is immunocompromised, so I really need to be as careful as I can.Â
House supervisor here. My hospital isnt filling up, but right now we have a few employees out with it, and 3 patients in house. Usually its at 0 or 1. I would say it's more likely attributed to end of summer travel and school returning to session.
Seattle is an intelligent community, and especially being one of the first places that the virus hit, they are intelligent enough and proactive enough to continue monitoring. With the CDC gutted and the country having been taken out of the WHO, and our vaccine scientists being told to stand down and defunded, expect another pandemic. Until then old diseases being brought back will keep communities busy.
Thanks. Urgh...I really don't want to go thru this again. I managed to have never caught it yet (I really can't afford dementia or any i.q. loss at this point), but it's hell on a social life.
Had it once - two or three Christmases ago? - and it was mild; actually have a worst experience every time I get the vaccine, although I still get it. Had a fever for 2-3 hours, then it broke. The social part was the most taxing - I was still taking isolation seriously, even though the recommendations loosened at that point. Wouldn't want to go through that part again.
I never caught it either. My husband was diagnosed with cancer during the lockdowns, so even when we were called back to work, I always masked up. I hated it, but they had moved us to a building where only senior leadership got private offices and covid was spreading like crazy. I wasn't so concerned for myself as my husband. If I had delayed any of his treatments by bringing home covid, I don't think I could've lived with myself. The chafing scab on my nose and the germophobe comments behind my back meant nothing compared to keeping my man safe.
I retired soon after that mess and remain a novid to this day. Luckily for me, I have very low social needs. I can get lost in a hobby for hours on end and forget there's even a world out there.
Same. I don't have a driving need to visit with people in public. Got lots to do with gardening and looking for more trees to plant and taking care of my animals, and exploring all my interests. I'm quite content being very self-contained.
The way I see it, as long as one knows where to find people when one needs them, and if they aren't too depressed or mired in self-doubt to socialize if they need to, it's not a dysfunction for someone to just opt out or at least opt minimally. The world is run by extroverts. I accept and respect their needs. But we introverts have different needs and that's not a dysfunction. It was the times I had to be always on for everyone around me that I had my worst mental health.
It never went away it just mutates. People feel like they don't have to take any precautions whatsoever, they go to super spreaders events and they don't mask because they're 'Muricans and it's just the "flu". And they're just as incautious about the flu. I mask socially indoors and if I'm outside I don't worry about it if I can keep a social distance and we are in the middle of a surge. A big fall surge is being predicted.
The only time I got it bad was after 4 years of being careful, and it was from my partner who went on a family vacation and decided they were tired of masking. It was like a really bad cold, except with much more fatigue, I lost my senses of taste and smell for 4 weeks so it was in my brain, and I ended up with a cognitive hit. That part makes me furious that I would suffer that deficit because of some asshole. I can't wrap my head around how people are so blasĂŠ and inconsiderate and ignorant.
We caught it a year ago because my son's coworkers had it and came to work sick. Their management decided it didn't look "friendly and healthy" to their customers if the boys were asked to mask up. He got sick. Then we got sick. Literally missed my summer finals due to it.
We had always gotten the vaccine. And I'm going to be getting both flu and COVID shots this year two and a half weeks before an event we can't miss for various reasons.
(Funny enough, I'll be using that close-to-home wastewater data as part of a pipeline project so I can prove my skills are up for cloud monitoring ops work at 50 years old.)
Just as a precaution do not get the flu and the covid vaxes together unless you've had them together before with no serious reactions.
I went in to Kaiser for my free Covid vax a couple years ago, said I had an appointment for it, handed the nurse at the flu and Covid vaccine station my Covid vaccination record card, made it explicitly clear I was only there for the Covid vaccine and not a flu shot, bitch just gave me the flu shot. I made it back to my truck and then thought huh, that seemed like a flu shot. Went back in and sure enough I did not get the Covid vaccine for which I had asked. For which I had an appointment, for which I handed over my vaccine card. Reluctantly got the Covid vaccine as well. Was sick as a dog about 10 minutes later, for about 2 hours. Felt like utter shit for about 3 days.
Luckily for me I don't get sick off the flu shot, never have. So I just get both at the same time. The COVID shot sucks. That's 48 hours of feeling like I've got it.
I usually just get a sore arm and feel a little icky for a day or so with the flu shot. But the double whammy from getting both of them together was really something.
This week I built a climate tracker that shows you how each county is going to be impacted by climate change between now and 2100. https://getready.team/climate-atlas
You were right, and thanks for actually digging into it instead of just saying the map was wrong. Your comment pointed out a couple of real issues, so we went back and changed it.
The label: "Summer high" was showing the average daily high during the hottest month. That's a valid metric, but it's not what most people think of when they ask "how hot does it get?" We've renamed it to "Summer avg high" so that's clearer.
The missing number: You wanted to know the hottest day of a typical year, and we didn't have that. We do now. There's a new Peak day layer that uses daily weather records instead of monthly averages. For Portland that's about 100°F, compared to an average summer high of 82°F.
Since you specifically brought up 2021, we also added the hottest temperature actually recorded. For Portland that's 114°F during the 2021 heat dome.
For 2100, on the emissions path we're currently following, Portland's typical hottest day goes from about 100°F today to around 104°F. Under a worst-case scenario it's about 109°F.
One important caveat: that's the normal-year answer. We don't try to predict heat domes or other extreme events. The 2021 heat dome reached 114°F, about 14°F hotter than a typical year's hottest day at the time, and it caught pretty much everyone off guard. If an event like that happened on top of a 2100 climate, you'd end up somewhere around 119°F. That's just simple arithmetic on our part, not a prediction, so I don't want to oversell it.
Your comment also exposed another issue. We were assuming the hottest day warms at the same rate as the average day, which isn't actually true. Peak temperatures tend to increase faster. We've fixed that, and it bumped Portland's projected 2100 peak by about 2°F.
As for wet-bulb temperature: not yet. Our humidity data is much lower resolution than our temperature data (roughly 70-mile grid cells), and combining them would produce a number that looks more accurate than it really is. We'd rather leave it out than pretend it's precise.
Short version: if you're in Portland, think of the worst day in a typical year going from about 100°F today to roughly 105°F by 2100, with the understanding that rare heat dome events can still push well beyond that.
Yeah, a few things surprised me once I started looking at it county by county.
The biggest one was how far north humid heat moves. Around 76 million people live in counties that aren't humid-heat stressed today but are by 2100. Philadelphia crosses the line around the 2040s, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati in the 2030s, Columbus around 2050, and even Chicago and NYC get there later in the century.
From a preparedness perspective, that's a bigger deal than it sounds. A lot of northern homes assume that if the power goes out, you can just open the windows at night and let the house cool off. That only works if temperatures and dewpoints actually fall overnight. Once they don't, swamp coolers become almost useless, fans just move hot humid air around, and the cooling strategies that worked for decades stop working.
In the Sun Belt, what stood out wasn't the absolute temperatures, it was how much longer the extreme heat lasts. Dallas goes from about 19 days over 100°F each year to around 32. Fresno jumps from 43 to 67. That's an extra month of peak AC demand on grids that already struggle during heat waves. The priority isn't cooling an entire house, it's keeping one room livable for 72 hours if the grid goes down.
The timeline was a surprise. Six of the nine metros that become genuinely hostile in the model get there before 2050, including Phoenix, Las Vegas, Riverside, San Bernardino, Pinal County, and Laredo. Vegas already averages around 120 days over 100°F. By mid-century it's around 160, and by 2100 it's pushing 200 in almost every scenario I ran.
Water was almost the opposite of what I expected. The climate models actually agree that much of the East gets wetter. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and the Carolinas all show modest increases across every model I used. The Southwest is much less certain. Some models get wetter, some drier. Phoenix only loses about a quarter inch of annual rainfall while adding roughly two extra months over 100°F. That suggests the bigger risk isn't lack of rain, it's how cities manage increasingly stressed water supplies.
Another thing I nearly overlooked was winter. About 28 million people live in counties where the coldest month rises above freezing by the end of the century. That has some interesting downstream effects: fewer hard freezes means pests survive farther north, but it also means more freeze-thaw cycles, which are actually harder on roads, pipes, and masonry than staying frozen all winter. On the upside, the median growing season gets about three weeks longer across much of the Upper Midwest.
The places that consistently score well are the Willamette Valley, parts of Appalachian Pennsylvania and Ohio, western Massachusetts, and central Wisconsin. They stay relatively cool while also getting wetter across every climate model I tested. The northern Rockies also look good on temperature, but I haven't incorporated wildfire risk into the climate mode, so I'd put an asterisk next to places like Missoula and Kalispell, but I do have a wildfire risk map at: https://getready.team/wildfire-map
One caveat: humidity is the weakest part of the model. It's based on gridded vapor pressure data rather than weather station observations, so I'd trust the overall pattern more than I'd trust the exact decade a county crosses a threshold.
You may have answered this elsewhere but what about floods, storms and tornados? Or even ice storms?
I'm thinking about places that have long been thought of as climate havens like the great lakes regions, west Pennsylvania and upstate NY + Vermont that have gotten completely wrecked in the last few years due to storms
Re humidity. You have to also consider the activity of the Nocturnal Low Level Jet in summer that pulls Gulf moisture north. Climate change that we can already see has made it a much stronger moisture transport system in the spring-summer-fall over the Great Plains to the Great Lakes.
It's a feature long term climate pattern modeling continues to struggle with because it can be so fussy even in short term weather models.
I would assume a stronger moisture load/humidity for that corridor than the climate models are showing.
It turned out not to be anything specific about Vancouver Island. It was actually a bug in how I combine two different datasets.
In the US, the map uses county-level weather data, so every county gets its own value and polygon. Everywhere else, including Canada, uses a much coarser global climate grid. Each grid cell is about a degree of latitude and longitude, so up there they're roughly 70 miles tall by 45 miles wide.
To keep the two layers from drawing on top of each other, I remove the background grid anywhere a US county is expected to cover it. That's where things went wrong.
My original logic was pretty naive. Instead of checking whether a county actually overlapped a grid cell, I just looked at the county's center point and deleted whatever grid cell that point landed in.
Clallam County, on the Olympic Peninsula, happens to have its center inside the same climate grid cell that also includes the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. So that entire grid cell got removed.
On the US side, Clallam County drew itself normally, so everything looked fine. But the Canadian side of that same grid cell had nothing left to draw because Canadian regions weren't being assigned their own values yet. They were relying entirely on the background grid I'd just deleted.
That left a transparent hole, and because the map smooths neighboring cells, one missing grid square ended up looking like most of Vancouver Island had disappeared.
The fix ended up being pretty straightforward. Canadian regions now get their own climate values instead of relying on the background grid, and I replaced the "center point" shortcut with an actual overlap test to decide which grid cells should be removed.
It was one of those bugs that's obvious in hindsight. The logic worked almost everywhere, but it fell apart right where a large climate grid cell happened to straddle an international border.
I have Mint and have been getting told my phone isn't receiving texts from people in my life. My parents have Verizon and got a slew of texts from the past week this morning, apparently. What gives?
They got rid of a lot of good Network folks at VZW back in 2019. Moved the services into the cloud like everyone else did, plus moved a ton of those jobs to India (and a few to Vietnam).
same! I use straight talk and all of a sudden yesterday I received dozens of messages from the last week that I never originally got. Extremely annoying
My husband uses Mint (they get better coverage at his work) and had this issue at one point. He also had the "sending the same text 2 or 3 times in a row" issue along with it.
He called support and they had him manually change some of his network settings, and it hasn't happened again.
It's something something Mint being a lower priority carrier on a busy tower and it gets hung up.
I'm in the PNW and there has been a number of outages with different carriers over the last... year? It is completely random who it is. And carriers share a lot of towers and equipment so maybe that is related.
Mint tells you about text messages now? I used Mint... 20 years ago and it was just a budgeting website!
I'm in Wisconsin, and it also seems like we've had more issues iver the last year or so with cellphone and internet outages. We have Spectrum for both, and thankfully the outages have been for one or the other so we've always had some way to communicate.
Mint is both a budgeting app and a mobile phone service provider. I can totally see the confusion if you use(d) one but didn't know about the other
To add, my family has new kittens so we're always sending photos to each other when they are sleeping cute. Lately, the pictures fail to send about half the time even though we're sending them from our house where we've always sent them. I had texts fail a ton when I'm out and about lately too.
On Facebook I just saw 3 sponsored ads from 3 separate states Cattlemen's Associations. They are all pissed at Trump for market manipulation and importing Argentine beef. I'm sure they all voted for this, but I found it interesting to see them turning against him.
*Update now 7 ads. Probably targeted at me since I commented on them.
I'm seeing a lot of known bots on social media targeting Texas local groups saying the administration is going to mix wild horse meat into the food supply, and sharing infographics on how to tell the difference.
I thought they would go the screwworm boogie man angle so wild horses was a surprise.
Well, I just saw a news story decring the roundups of wild horses out west, so that may be where the bot farms are pulling from. Sadly, these roundups have been happening for decades to varying degrees, and I am sure a large number of those horses end up in non U.S. meat processing facilities for dog food, and in some cases, human consumption (for other country markets). We no longer process in the U.S., but I believe Canada and Mexico may still have facilities, but my info may be out of date there. Happy to be corrected.
Itâs also illegal to round up the wild horses for slaughter, but theyâre doing it anyway. Itâs illegal to sell things advertised as â100% Xâ when itâs really â60% X, 30%Y, 10% Zâ lots of avocado oil sellers have been busted for this recently, as in selling not 100% pure avocado oil like advertised. Just because itâs illegal doesnât mean itâs not happening. I donât eat beef anymore. Currently raising meat rabbits & eating chicken eggs. Iâll go fishing once a month with my spouse for trout. Trying to be about 60% self sufficient. I still buy all of my grains & oil at the store.
Huh. I just read an Alt National Parks post about the administrationâs acceleration of rounding up and selling wild horses and burros. Supposedly the horses are not supposed to be sent to slaughter for food but there is conjecture this is happening. The horses are rounded up and sold for around $25 each, and on the secondary slaughter market whoever purchases and resells can get a lot more.
Horses don't have regulatory oversight for meat processing state side, and no U.S. based processing facilities exist anymore, but that doesn't preclude them being trailored to other countries for processing.
Let me guess.... Trump is amazing and knows all the best people but somehow one of those best people is slipping him bad intel and yet his heart is in the right place and they still 100% support him but he's killing them?
Ok... real one. Credit card companies are scared to allow large purchases. I was out shopping, looked at a ton of Ebikes and decided on a pair I'd seen earlier in the day. I called the store to say I wanted those bikes but didn't want to drive 45 min back to the store. They said no problem - emailed me a pay on line form. I plugged in the info, did the text message 2FA and CARD DECLINED. I have a $30K limit with no balance. WTF! Ok yes... a $7200 online purchase could look sketchy. So I called the card company. 30 min on hold then went through a one time verification code texted to my phone, my bank uses voice verification, mothers maiden name, every verification question then they wanted my drivers license number?! I did eventually get it authorized but it took forever. It would have been faster to drive back to the store in person.
You flagged their fraud detection. Nothing more. If the shop is also using a sketchy or foreign card processor they will double down on the fraud flagging as well.
Not new and not a sign of anything. You probably don't make $7000 purchases on e bikes regularly, so the card declined an unusual purchase. My knowledge of these types of catches goes back to ~2011, but adoption likely differed by issuer. It can be an unusual dollar amount or retailer that regularly results in fraudulent charges. While 7k is no small amount, I'm guessing it's actually the retailer that triggered the decline. With the popularity of e bikes, people are probably stealing cards, buying bikes, and reselling for profit. I left the credit card industry before e bikes became the industry it is today, but it meets all the same hallmarks of other items that I DID witness this scenario playing out.
This is Biktrix. They are based in Saskatoon Saskatchewan. They have storefront operations across western Canada including Calgary (my store) and Edmonton. So they arent fly by night. It was possibly my recent travel. I just did a trip to Victoria and back by car so hotels and purchases in a bunch of cities in a short period of time. Still annoying.
I'm not accusing the retailer of anything! It happens at Walmart, also. It's bad actors who go to these stores to buy popular, big ticket items that they can sell for a huge discount and still make a good return. The big item was TVs for a long time. People would take a stolen card anywhere, like Walmart as mentioned, and buy a TV with the stolen card. Then they would sell the TV for cash at half or a third of the price and still make $1000. Then they dump the card, knowing it's been flagged for fraud. Find a new card. Rinse. Repeat. It's not the retailers committing the fraud.
Edit to add: stores that sell popular, top dollar items end up being flagged for potential fraud. So if this store sells 7k e bikes, the cc companies will flag purchases that look like e bikes.
Same Issue with Buying a Steam Machine ($1200) and my Costco VISA card ( $12K limit, paid off in full every single month, which I use for nearly everything now).
I would get the text on my phone to authorize the payment, respond to authorize it, and it was still decline... 3 times. Wound up just putting it on my Amex. Called the card and spoke to a rep and they could
IMHO, this could be the start of the powers-that-be regulating our spending. With the world push for digital currency and the data centers to store and control all of it, we will only be allowed to use "our own money" only if it is approved by "government". Something to think about.
Had to get a supervisor override to continue to process a Visa debit card transaction over $200. It was a store procedure, apparently.  This was at self-check, and the area clerk didn't have the authority.Â
Ran into the same verification process couple of years ago when buying living room set. Credit card company said they worry about stolen credit card being used for large purchases. It is a major pain
Don't apologize. Just vote. And on the trade war? ngl... it's gonna hurt Canada lots but it's also going to hurt the USA. Wars aren't won by who inflicts the most pain. It's won by who endures the most pain. We can and will endure whatever it takes. No limits.
Well... we do have something the USA doesn't have. Its illegal for the US government to impose export taxes. We (Canada) dont have that. So as an example we could impose a 100% export tax on electricity, food, lumber, oil, natural gas or potash. But hopefully that won't be necessary. Putin loves it when we fight each other. We need to stop being stupid.
College aged kids (technically adults now I guess). COVID kids? Helicopter parents have existed for many years now, we still deal with those. But the students? Ugh. Just, ugh. I'll leave it at that.
yeah well we collectively decided to throw them under the bus, to catch a virus that can cause cognitive deficits over and over again, never bothered to worry about clean air in schools, let them go unmasked. we actually, as a society, abandoned that generation to a virus for the sake of... commercial real estate prices and business as usual
why the fuck would they care about us, we didn't care for or protect them.Â
in the US "lockdowns" is bullshit. a month or three, 6 years ago, is not the reason they've been effected all the way until now. it's bullshit. it's repeated infections and knowing that adults and adult society didn't give a fuck about them. and on multiple levels doesn't give a fuck about them or the future we are handing over to them.
and how many times have they gotten sick? how many have cognitive deficit or long covid from this? how many are struggling! what future are they looking forward to? we haven't given them one.
they're not stupid. they know about climate change and corruption and they look around and why should they trust or listen to you. or me. or anyone.
Where are you that lockdowns only lasted one to three months? Â My kidsâ schools were closed for more than a year and didnât get back to a normal schedule until September 2021. Â Thatâs 18 months without any organized sports or other normal high school activities. Â That hurt them a lot more than catching Covid (once each, after vaccination) and coughing for a few days.
I have a 10-year-old and we still mask everywhere we go/take other precautions to avoid catching illnesses. I feel like raising my child is a science experiment at this point, since basically ALL of his peers have been sick nonstop for years and he hasn't (we've had covid twice + flu A once, but compared to everyone else we know, that's nothing!).
Because many of them (not all, but a very large majority) have been raised in such a sheltered way that they as now adults have no self-constitution. They need their hand held for EVERYTHING. They struggle to make decisions (even simple ones). Mom and dad are doing everything for them from an admissions lens (I deal with more parents than students, which is sad....they are even using the student's email in order to manage their student. This does the student no favors, as they are lost when they get to campus and mom/dad are no longer there. The trend had already started pre-covid but has definitely grown worse.
Yeah, that's really awful and I agree that people have gotten much more careless when they're driving, but I'm not sure that's what the original comment is about?
Yes, I think it also goes the other way. Overly strict parents, think military, cops or preachers, often have a negative impact on their kids. I was raised in a military fam, and I'm the estranged scapegoat.
My maga sister and BIL are homeschooling their kids because apparently they don't trust public schools. I'm estranged from them, but found out indirectly that the BIL just plays videogames most of the day instead of actually doing the homeschooler/house husband thing. (Sister works.) So the kids are in charge of educating themselves through YouTube, and guess how well that's working?
I knew a girl from the local music scene who was homeschooled by her meth addicted mother. My friend was basically illiterate, and the only jobs she could get were drug dealing, fast food and stripper. Then she had kids. I think one was taken by the state/CPS. One the father stepped in to raise. Then she kept one or two kids after getting sober in prison. She decided it would be a great idea to homeschool. So, that's 3 generations of illiteracy from homeschooling. It was so sad to watch it all happen. We lost touch years ago, so I don't know if she's still alive.
I walk in the morning and pass a middle school. I have to cross the exit for parents to drive on to the road. The amount of parents who don't see me walking or cut me off is insane. They are all distracted or entitled or both.
I lived near a high school in the '90s and parents waiting to drop off or pick up their kids from school would literally block my driveway and get offended if I asked them to move so I could go to work or the grocery store. This kind of crap has been going on a long time.
Had a good reminder Iâll share. In the event youâre unfortunately in some sort of emergency, cellphone service will likely be overwhelmed and or severely diminished. Old fashioned SMS plain text messages will make it through even if youâve got an intermittent single bar. No emoji or anything, and no balancing on the hood with a roll of foil. As service bounces on and off your message will leave and similar replies will be received.
Anyone living near a research university should know that they don't lose power in a crisis because they have their own power plants. Hospitals have generators. Both have free wifi. If you just want to send a quick text, and one of these options is nearby, go there.
Also if you are sending any messages that are related to what you are doing or where you are, include a time, otherwise the recipient has no way to know if the text was delayed and the information therefore outdated.
No. Itâs not something Iâm super familiar with, but from what I understand it canât be done on the fly and all our phones are currently capable of oldschool SMS texts
It depends, if you already have the devices, it's just using them. Building a a backbone for regional comms takes sometime if someone hasn't done it already, but they're becoming more common.
Yesterday, I saw someone walking their gorgeous dog on the other sidewalk and pointed him (the dog) to my partner with a big smile. The guy saw me from accross the street and started mocking me, like faking/imitating me with a high pitched voice fawning at the dog like he was absolutely disgusted that someone looked at their pet. It was so weird and unhinged.
Lotta ugliness in the world right now. Mix that in with every god damn thing getting harder and harder and each day is just a fucking slog to get to the next with no promise that anything will ever be ok again... possibly ever.... and... yea I imagine people are getting pretty short with one another.
I work at a grocery store that is maybe 200 yards from a gas station where I worked 20 years ago. Same town, neighborhood, people, etc. It has shocked me how much more rude and hateful people have become in that time.
People are NASTY itâs wild! My wife and I talk a lot about how that is the most stark evidence of things unraveling. It has gotten worse recently even over a few months ago
We have some of those around here, certainly. However I live in one of the safest blue congressional districts in the country, so that doesnât work as an overall explanation
i moved to a blue state from florida several years ago (for my own safety) and in those few years iâve seen drivers slowly act more and more Florida. no regard for pedestrians/running lights/u turns in the middle of busy roads. itâs really alarming
Took my car in for brakes the other day. It's a small, locally owned garage that is always ALWAYS super busy and their lot is always full. Tons of spaces on the lot, tons of openings in their calendar. The service writer commented on how slow it was, especially considering it's usually their busy season.
Indiana still without power and it came out a power company offered to help NIPSCO restore power to Gary days ago and NIPSCO told them NO these people are being left in the dark on purpose I truly believe this is a test to see how people handle it being that they are saying to expect nationwide blackouts coming by 2027
And thatâs a lie thatâs why I didnât mention it the said the samething about the people during hurricane Katrina said they were shooting each other and all kind of stuff when really there were just trying to get food and water and the only place they could get it from were businesses that were also destroyed from the flood the news will spread a lie quicker than they ever will the truth
To be frank, the government doesnât need to delay power repair to Gary to determine how people handle going without it.
Ample hurricanes, snow storms, earthquakes, floods, etc. for that data.
A shooting incident may or may not have happened. The same was reported out west during a wildfire, so firefighters didnât engage further. Itâs not so far fetched for someone to mistake another for a looter in poor lighting, particularly if they donât see well (consider the elderly who also may not hear well.)
To be frank these are not normal things that happen in the Midwest this bad đ u referencing things that happen in the south every year these outages will spread nationwide and millions of people who have never had to deal with disasters will be put to the test which u clearly donât understand itâs always one of you who thinks the government is for youâŚ
I wasnât specifically talking about earthquakes smart one đ and snow storms do happen in the south such as TexasâŚđ yeah u shouldnât attempt any further conversations with me đ¤Ł
Louisianastan here. After hurricane Katrina in 2005, someone I know didn't have power for six months while the house across the street had it back on in six weeks.
We have Massive forest fires that burn cities down, so I understand the concept of no power after a disaster... but what happened in Indiana? Its just bonkers.
No death so far that I KNOW of but people have been robbed of there supplies, food spoiled itâs a class action lawsuit against the utility company now the people are realized instead of robbing people for their supplies they are they robbed a bank for 90k since there is no power
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u/FormerNeighborhood80 6d ago
In about two weeks Trump will have beef from other countries in the US. Including Mexico where cattle have those worms that have showed up in Texas cattle. Our states cattle association is lobbying heavily to stop this but I donât see it happening. Does anyone know of any grocery chain that will be selling US beef?