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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • MrZee@lemm.eetoNews@lemmy.worldThe rise of the scammy car loan
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    7 months ago

    I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.

    Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.




  • I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

    Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.




  • Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

    It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.



  • Here’s my recollection from my limited research on this a few years ago (in the US):

    -High premiums

    -Insurance company can cancel coverage or jack up premiums if your pet becomes expensive

    -needing pre approval for coverage, so you may be dealing with an extra layer of beurocracy when you need to get your pet treated

    -Notable risk of insurance company rejecting claims

    -Maximumum coverage seemed rather low (ie they cap the amount insurance will pay per year or lifetime, so your coverage may dissolve if you end up having serious pet health issues.

    -high copays, so you’re still paying a lot in the event of large vet expenses.

    Basically, overall, it seemed like a scam in which, even for those that end up needing a large amount of vet care, you are likely to get less benefit from insurance than premiums.

    All that said, I don’t think I did much research. I think I looked at a couple of pet insurance companies that seemed “legitimate”, looked at the details of their policies, did some math, and concluded “lol, fuck no!”


  • Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

    It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

    We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.


  • Agreed. From his statement, it sounds like he was giving a general example, not attempting to recall the specific animals he was shown. I say this as someone who thinks trump sounds like he is mentally unwell. Heck, this is downright coherent compared to a lot of the gibberish that comes out of his mouth.

    “I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”


  • Here is an idea for testing whether a stainless carafe vs glass lined makes a noticeable difference for you:

    1. Set up a water bath at whatever serving temp you prefer for your coffee. A quick search’s says this is somewhere from 140-150f. If you have an immersion circulator (used for “sous vide” cooking), you’re golden for this. Otherwise, you’d have to use a pot of water on the stove with a rack in the bottom to keep your coffee vessels from touching the bottom. then keep adjusting the stove to maintain water temp… which would be a PITA.

    2. get two clean vessels with lids, one stainless, one glass. You could probably get away with using plastic wrap and a rubber bands for lids in a pinch. Preheat the vessels with water.

    3. pour freshly brewed coffee into each vessel, put the lids on, and put them in the water bath for a while (1 hour?).

    4. have someone pour you a coffee from each vessel into identical coffee cups. They need to keep track of which is which. And, of course, you shouldn’t know which is which.

    5. Taste. Can you tell a difference? Which one is better?

    6. repeat until you’re tired of running the test and are sure your answer is solid.




  • I think this is helpful context from the actual report (linked at the top of the WaPo article):

    In 2022, half as many (47%) of adolescent girls and young women acquired HIV as in 2010. Even with this decline, we are not on track to meet our 2030 target to end new HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women.

    The global sex-distribution of new HIV infections among adolescents is driven largely by sub-Saharan Africa, which carries the overwhelming global burden of HIV. In 2022, 33% of older adolescents aged 15-19 years newly infected with HIV lived outside of the region. In the Middle East and North Africa region, the number of young people living with HIV has increased by 13% since 2010. In East Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean, two thirds of new adolescent infections, age 10-19 years, occur in boys. Stigma, discrimination, societal inequalities and violence sabotage the efforts of adolescents and young people to protect themselves against HIV and other health threats. Young key populations are especially vulnerable.



  • MrZee@lemm.eetocats@lemmy.worldNot for drying purposes
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    11 months ago

    You know how new towels don’t absorb water? It’s because there is some shitty fabric softener on them to make them feel really soft at the store. Wash them once or twice with vinegar (instead of laundry soap) to remove the softener and turn them into proper towels. The same technique should work for your cat.