eBay is a major pain these days for small sellers that just want to unload some stuff.

I say that because I’ve tried to get a business going on eBay several times over many years and always run into issues directly with eBay (eventually, even if for short periods it’s ok)

A lot of bad actors go there first to run scams, and eBay just blocks sellers left and right if you do anything that even raises an AI bot’s virtual eyebrows.

Try apps like Mercari, Whatnot, Posh/Vinted (for clothing), and Facebook marketplace. I think you’ll find all of these are friendly to one-off sellers and easy to conduct business.

I agree, shitty landlords exist as well and try to scam people into coming. That’s why I’ll never rent out a place again, on either side, if I can avoid it.

This is wild, but I have at least one guess where they might be coming from with this idea.

At one point I had to move out of a house that I owned for a while so I wanted to let it.

People who want to rent can be super flaky and dishonest. Seriously 4 out of 5 or more are like this.

They make appointments then don’t show up and ghost you. Or they call 5 minutes late to say they’ll be there in 3 hours.

Or everything seems good until you do credit checks and find they were evicted from the last place and haven’t made a payment on their credit card for 3 years plus they have a felony conviction from a few years ago for beating up some guy.

Or when checking their income is sufficient, their boss says yeah, they used to work here but not anymore.

Potential renters never tell you this stuff until you already put hours into talking and going out to show the place to them.

I’m just a regular guy with a job (who does pay his bills) so this takes a lot of time, fuck that noise.

Basically charging people $5 will make them not come if they know they won’t qualify, saving everybody the time.

🤣

Whoa. Not recommended to buy something that someone with an opposing financial interest can “cancel”.

This is intuitive and you can see it everywhere. Rules and laws only have power when they are actively enforced. If there’s nobody there to stop a bad actor, eventually they will figure it out and abuse the flaw.

Getting people to drive at (or close to) the speed limit only takes seeing a couple of cops a day and perhaps having received a ticket or two.

Preventing tax cheats just requires enough enforcement so that you know of a guy who knows a guy who was turned inside out by an audit.

Keeping corruption in government low just requires a few public cases of the right people getting thrown in jail never to come back again. Sadly this is one that’s eroded significantly in recent memory and too many rotten actors are publicly getting away with shady business.

This stuff terrifies me. I’m de-googling as fast as I can and reviewing all my local backups plus add encryption to what stays in the cloud.

I think the fundamental problem with ipv6 is that it’s a bit more complex to learn than ipv4 and not universally deployed at the remote host/server level.

New cloud companies who want to be competitive have to purchase ipv4 blocks at significant cost reducing their ability to compete with the incumbent players.

So if you go 100% ipv6 at home, some percentage of the internet will be inaccessible to you unless you employ some workarounds.

We’ll drop ipv4 quite fast once everything is up on ipv6 because nearly every modern network enabled device supports it.

The only reason I think we’ve not gotten over the hump is because our alternatives are still easy enough to work with and nobody requires it.

Does quicken still sync well with most American banks, investment accounts, and credit card companies?

I used to be a power user as well but then moved overseas where is syncs with nothing.

Now I use gnucash with a ton of custom python scraping and importing scripts. It isn’t perfect but as close as I have been able to find.

I was traveling internationally recently and returning to the USA I didn’t even need my passport to clear through immigration. They had a camera which recognized me and gave me the green light to pass as I approached.

The agent had a few questions and I was on my way.

It was convenient as hell, but the fact that their system can link me to whatever data is stored with my passport records based on a second or two of recognition out of all the faces that must be in there…

actually kinda blows.

It means they can definitely put a street camera system in place and see oh, there’s /u/nucleative. Wonder why he’s at the protest, bank, with that person, driving that car, near a crime scene, or anything else.

Somehow we have zero privacy yet the enforcement hides behind numbers and masks.

I expect that this will just continue to go further and further.

Kids, this is why we needed to push back hard on privacy, random cameras, and facial recognition 20 years ago.

The metaphorical horse is already out of the barn and removing or disabling these systems will probably never happen now.

Are there any resources that compile a good counter-argument to this?

Sales taxes vary based on city, county, and state rates. They can also be waived if you, the buyer, have a reseller permit or are purchasing for a non profit.

It’s not underhanded and is annoying for sellers too because they have to know a lot about sales taxes as well. They could show you the price with local taxes included but then most customers would think their prices are too high comparing to other merchants.

So the price shown on the product in a store or online is only what the merchant is selling it for. The price at the register is what the merchant is selling it for plus the taxes they have to collect (unless you’re excluded for the reasons mentioned above).

The tax is a buyer obligation, not a seller obligation but sellers have to be an intermediary. So buyers should be educated about the tax laws that apply to them (in this system).

The receipt should be clearly marked so you know exactly how much went to the product and how much went to tax. You can itemize and deduct your sales taxes from your federal income taxes if you’re so inclined to track it (and it’s a better result than the standard deduction)

It’s more complex than a VAT system but enables local jurisdictions to levy taxes to pay for various things applicable to their area.

🤷‍♂️

Learning how to do small talk will improve your social, economic, and relationship opportunities in countless ways.

Asking people questions about themselves makes them think of you as likable.

Remember the acronym f o r d: Family Occupation Recreation Dreams

Small talk can be learned and getting in some more practice might make it bearable, perhaps even enjoyable.

When you are running out of topics keep the acronym above in mind and ask a question related to one of those topics. Something like this example:

Q: So, have you always lived in (wherever you are)?

However they reply, follow up with it positive and encouraging response such as: “ah you’re a long timer. I thought there weren’t too many of us left!” and then go right into a follow up Q also related to the acronym but now attached to the new information you have such as: is your family from this area too? What brought you here initially? What do you do for work? Hey since you’ve been here so long, what do you think about (insert local drama that’s been in the news).

The goal isn’t to interrogate, but to smoothly and rapidly sort through topics until you find commonalities. Then you can lift off and the conversation will feel very natural and easy.

I heard about this 20 some years ago and have used it at the start and end of business meetings, on first dates, with strangers, and heck sometimes even with my friends if we’re catching up and I want to cover things that are core to them.

Hmmm, erm71… Interesting attempt to hide

Not only this, but the US has more firepower in the region than the rebel groups by such a wide measure that launching any laughing an attack against the ships is essentially a suicide note for that particular neighborhood block.

I live in a place where its just $2.50. No YouTube ads ever is great.

Anecdotally everyone has an anecdote about this topic because it concerns a basic function of the human body. It’s too bad that so many people believe it’s a moral character problem making the topic nearly impossible to talk about openly.

I use it as an answer engine. Queries like: what’s that css property for xyz, or please summarize this email, or give me the top 25 most commonly used color words in English in a json schema like this.

All of that could be found with a normal search engine but I’d have to work harder and sort through a lot of trash along the way.

ChatGPT just understands what I’m looking for almost no matter how poorly worded my query is and just answers the question.

Gee, I wonder why they have rivals who are taking market share.

The headline should read: “Airline abandons planeload of passengers in the heat - Hero rescues all with quick thinking”