Yeah it would be a real shame if some dastardly, evil people were to buy desirable foodstuffs from government subsidized sources, and then turn around and mark those prices up to make a huge profit by selling them to people without that same access…

I mean, those people might even jack up prices 300% due to some Crisis™, and then bring them back down to only 250% when it’s resolved. Can you imagine the gouging if private actors were just completely able to do that with no oversight or regulation??

And even worse, as we often see in these unregulated markets, eventually some of the actors get together and collude on pricing, and they all go up at exactly the same time! And then there would be no way for the regular people that don’t have any other options to be able to continue to afford that food!

They might even get together as some kind of gang and forcibly buy out the other players in the market, further consolidating their wholesale access, pricing, and regional availability! Like some kind of, idk one-sided polar market capture. Wish there was a word for that, because it really does sound like it would be terrible.

What I’m saying is, let’s all do radical leftist (facial) revolutions together in solidarity!

In a similar situation. I can see it coming though, because it turns out I have a very unattractive neck line. So for now it’s stache, clean cheeks, and neck beard. Not ideal but it kinda gives me a Muskateers vibe, which I think is cool.

I’ve always had at least a goatee, but I yearn for the stache only life.

Also want to cut my long hair for something shorter and easier to wear in the heat, but that notion has proven extremely unpopular with the people in my life, so it’s been on hold for a while.

Dang it, we should have infiltrated the great Satan with thousands of sometimes-sleeper-but-sometimes-awake-and-alert-er cells!

I mean if you’re flexible about the specific name of the country, then you’re about 24 years too late on that prediction.

Hell yeah thanks! Found a few sites like this but I’m tryna find one I can download to stick up in my Komga instance.

Still trying to finish up Blame! Slow progress into Spawn, very 90s vibe but it’s cool. Want to check out Absolute Batman, but gotta find a good downloadable spot for it first.

Yeah, except from the reboot. (in age, haven’t seen it yet)

Yeah especially considering the house on the other side of this lawn has a bald eagle nest in the back yard, so the little critters really need all the help they can get!

Agreed. Their lawn is also shit, and I think maybe 20% of this neighborhood has ever picked up a single lawn tool themselves.

These are also the folks that leave the long-dead perrenials growing by their porch in place, so that when spring comes their front step is just covered in gross fuzzy white dead old vines, which then naturally end up blowing into our yard throughout the spring and into summer. So ya know, just real fixated on important lawn business all the time.

I so agree. I was actually really proud of how I’d managed to balance the close-cut lawn I’m required to keep with at least a little bit of growth, and did it in a way that looked really nice and intentional, not like I’d just been missing a spot all year.

I thought it was a great compromise and I loved it. Sadly, the crackers next door disagreed, and I guess that’s what matters to the owner (who has insisted they will never sell this house, so it’s not a property value thing).

That’s all I wanted. There’s a ton of really cool birds and wildlife on this lake, so I’d love to keep their environment as natural as possible.

Also, the yard back there is mostly full of big ol goose turds, so it’s barely even usable for playing with the kids or anything. I’m no ecologist, but everything I’ve read suggests that natural growth would cut down on that more than buzz-cut grass, but sadly I don’t get a choice about it.

Yeah I’ve never had a conversation with these people in the over a year we’ve lived here. Except the one time I passive-aggressively ragged on their teenage grandchildren for leaving a huge doggie dookie square in the middle of our front yard.

Yeah you’re not wrong. In that way it’s probably not a fair comparison, but I’m also unmotivated to do so.

The neighbors launch boats from there, but they also have a full-on in-ground pool on the plateau above this one lol. Nobody swims in this lake, so I have no idea what the beach is for other than not having to do maintenance on the landscaping (valid).

They are the ones with the beach. Ya know, big sandy beach, just like you always naturally find on the north woods lakefront. Wouldn’t want to ruin all that with some ugly local flora, that’s for sure.

The last time I bought a new GPU was long enough ago that it was normal to buy them at (or slightly below!) msrp. So that is to say, at least a decade or more hence.

probably wouldn’t work well in a worthwhile story

Coulda just stopped there.

I mean, it’s like a painter saying they’re not good at picking colors, so they have a computer program that picks the right colors for each part, but they do the rest of the work.

Like yeah, you’re still in there doing a lot of it, and at that level no one would even be able to tell just by reading it, but knowing about it definitely dampens any interest I’d have in reading it.

I think the adage that’s been adopted for other AI use gets some work here - If you can’t be bothered to spend the effort writing it, others won’t be bothered to spend the effort reading it.

Like yeah it’s not the end of the world, but names are part of the fiction. I’d have the same criticism if you were rolling dice on a random name table for similar reasons (except the table also chops down a tree every time you roll).

Yeah we go through an independent agent, so in theory they are shopping around for us on every renewal. I will ask them to look into that one though, so thanks for the tip.

Yeah seriously. I suppose I should have said it only went up by that much, as I assume it would have gone up way more otherwise (despite having no claims or additional coverage between those times).