Yeah, my only major criticism of the game is the way they handled difficulty settings. “Story” mode still requires you to learn the mechanics and play the way they intended. It should have been called “easy” or “casual” or something and had a separate “story” mode that is really just about enjoying the story without any combat difficulty.

I don’t really enjoy turn-based combat or quick time events, so this game would have been a complete pass for me, but I decided to check it out on Game Pass and I really liked the art, music, and story. I ended up modding out all the combat challenge so I could enjoy it anyway, but it would have been better if I could tweak it through the settings and maybe end up with something a little more balanced.

My favorite mod to the game is increasing the parry time.

It drives me nuts that my state has “deregulated” natural gas. All natural gas in the region is supplied to every home by a single company (the same one as before deregulation). I pay at least $35 a month all year just for the privilege of being connected to it.

BUT, I don’t actually do business with that company. I get to pick from a dozen companies that all provide front-end billing for my natural gas. They advertise how much they will charge per therm used (plus an admin fee), but that price is on top of what I pay to the company actually providing gas. If I have an issue with the gas, the supplier comes out to deal with it, not the company I pay every month. And, I have to change companies every 6-24 months to maintain the advertised rates, otherwise they increase my cost after the new customer price expires. Its fake competition that added an extra step to the process and increases prices compared to the regulated version that used to exist.

Semi means half.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semi#dictionary-entry-4

Obviously, twice per sexual would be semi-sexual.

5 forever!

I’ve never asked for time off, only informed my boss that I will be off. I have only had push back twice. Once, when I was in high school my boss said I couldn’t, so I quit on the spot (nothing to lose in a minimum wage job when my parents were still supporting me). A few years later, a shift lead (who was not technically my boss) challenged me, I told him I wasn’t asking for the day off, I was providing advance notice that I would not be there that day.

The irony is that I now manage people who have an attendance policy. I try to make sure people have plenty of opportunity to plan time off so they don’t have to call out. They’re going to take the time either way, I may as well know in advance.

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.

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.

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.

Way back in the late '90s, my first apartment was a brand new development with a T5 connection (I think) that offered each unit 8 glorious Mbps. However, I needed to get that connection shared between 2 PCs in different rooms. Wifi was not an option (expensive and slow), even a router was a major financial investment for me back then. So, I bought an extra network card and a 100 foot crossover cable and ran it down the hallway.

It was so successful, that I continued to incorporate very long cables in my builds for the next 20ish years. Even today, my desktop computer is not wifi capable, but first I migrated to powerline ethernet and more recently mesh wifi with my PC plugged into one of the child nodes.

I suspect its being banned because of people using it in public without headphones or earbuds. I was submitted to that experience for an hour+ in a waiting room one time and now I fully supported the ban to prevent it from ever happening again.

I think in 1995 my dad had pay by the minute internet access and I wasn’t allowed to use it (and didn’t really know what it was anyway). Somewhere around 1996/7 he got a dedicated ISDN line with unlimited internet and I stayed up all night talking to strangers in chat rooms or playing video games. Good times!

Yep, this is such a huge impact on the apparent inflation rate. It is an absolutely valid thing to measure, but I love your point about how the market has essentially shifted to only selling luxury products. You either get to pay luxury prices or do without.

Other challenges with CPI are substitution and owner’s equivalent rent.

With substitution, economists look at changing purchase patterns and adjust the basket of goods included in the calculation. For example, if you used to spend $20 per week on steak, but now you spend $20 per week on chicken, the economists say your preference changed and there was no inflation. In some cases, this might be true, but in others it could be that the price of meat went up significantly and you switched to something cheaper because you can’t afford the higher prices. If you’re talking about the fact that nobody is buying 8-tracks anymore, then substitution is certainly valid, but that’s not always the case.

In the case of housing, up until the early 1980s, CPI included home prices in the calculation. Then they switched to an estimate of what you would pay in rent for your house rather than the price of the house. This flattens out the CPI movement when home prices go up and down. Is it valid? Maybe? Probably to the economists at least, but not to anyone who wants to buy a home. On the flip side, if you already own a home, home price inflation is kind of irrelevant in the short to medium term because your cost doesn’t necessarily change (other than insurance and taxes).

Well, he wasn’t shot, choked to death, or mangled in the back of a police van at the time of arrest, so that’s already a win for him.