#and 300 dollars was A STEAL

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

THE WOODCUT I WAS GONNA BUY JUST GOT TAKEN OFF THE WALL OF THE STUDIO IM so sad

[thepictoblr]

why would u pay to go to a concert when u can just listen to music for free on ur electronics, this economy shit is easy yall are dumb as fuck

[incogrio]

심재윤 - sim jaeyun who…

jaeyun bf hcs! ~ gn! reader ~ genre: fluff ~ little longer than i meant for it to be

jungwon, heeseung, jay, jake, sunghoon, sunoo, ni-ki

. sim jaeyun who randomly makes you meals and sits across from you smiling widely as he waits for you to try it

. sim jaeyun who lets you put hair ties in his hair just because you coo at him and call him a puppy

. sim jaeyun who lays his head on your chest and places your hand in his hair, silently asking for head scratches

. sim jaeyun who was extremely nervous when you were going to meet layla, if she didn’t like you then that would’ve been it for him (she loves you so much that jake gets a little jealous)

. sim jaeyun who speaks with a thicker australian accent because he knows you like it

. sim jaeyun who also makes you try vegemite and cackles when you don’t like it

. sim jaeyun who, at dance practices, always comes up to you between little songs and kisses you

. sim jaeyun who gets pouty when you refuse to kiss him because of his sweatiness

. sim jaeyun who calls you a puppy, and gets all :( when you don’t call him one back

. sim jaeyun who showers with you when he cannot stand to be far from you

. sim jaeyun who never ever, under any circumstances lets you pay for anything

. sim jaeyun who sends you 300 dollars when all you said was that you were going to walmart for cereal

. sim jaeyun who comforts you when you get teased by the members, he coos at you and lets you hide in his neck

. sim jaeyun who loves that you view him as your protector

. sim jaeyun who literally needs to steal you from sunoo (walks in all pouty and picks you up whilst side eyeing sunoo and walks out despite your protests) because you and sunoo end up gossiping and doing face masks together super often (jakey needs his cuddles :((( )

. sim jaeyun who will spoon feed you when you’re too tired to eat (you spoon feed him back)

. sim jaeyun who bites his lips whenever he smiles at you

. sim jaeyun who pouts whenever you look cute to him (all the time tbh)

. sim jaeyun who swore he hated the cringy, affectionate relationships… then he met you :)

a/n: jake is my bias and i did NOT realize how long this was lmfao

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[dinodanicus]

you can skip this wall of text its just about the scam this illustration was involved in.

This fairly ordinary illustration of two hands holding was involved in a very weird and convoluted scam. Last month I was commission to illustrate this image for invitations meant to go out for a supposed wedding anniversary coming up in March. The whole commission seemed odd to me I mainly draw dinosaurs and aliens. Not many people know I also draw people but the buyer who called himself Petterson Reid was offering to pay 300 up front and 200 after the work was finished. A nice offer for what was a very simple illustration. I took the job and sent him a very rough sketch of the hands to show him what the final image might look like. He liked the sketch and told me to finish the image after he sent the first payment I went ahead and finished the image that night. I held onto the picture to see if he would really send the 300 dollars first. The buyer wanted to send a check by mail which is weird but I thought he might have been a boomer who didn't understand how to use PayPal. His emails and text seemed like something my grandmother would write very proper and overly polite. I was fairly suspicious of him and waited to see if a check would actually be delivered. To my surprise a check did arrive a week later from Petterson Reid except it was for 2,790 dollars. knowing this was far too much money I asked him if it was a mistake. He said the extra money was for a PayPal invoice to the printers involved in the invitations. He wanted me to use the extra money on the check to pay the printers on his behalf. Again very weird but I chalked it up to an old person who didn't know how to pay online. I cashed the check the next day, since it was from an out of state bank they were putting it on hold for 3 days to see if the funds would clear. I told the buyer about the three day waiting period and asked for the invoice I was suppose to be paying and he went absolutely ape shit. He claimed I was trying to steal his money and was threatening to pursue legal action I was completely shocked by the change in attitude. I had to mute my phone because he kept sending wave after wave of threatening texts. At this point I was 90% sure this was some sort of scam but when I called the bank they said there was nothing to do until the hold expired. I was confident it wouldn't then to my surprise the check cleared and the money was in my account. At this point I had the finished artwork and the money so I wanted to get this crazy asshole on his way so I wouldn't have to deal with him anymore. I told him to send the invoice for the printer and I would pay it with the money on the check then I would send the picture and our business would be done. This prick sends some half assed looking invoice with a payable link on PayPal. When I try to pay, it says payment will be held till Feb 7th. Apparently this date is too late for the printers so now that processing payment has been canceled by the printer in favor of a new payment process through Zelle. I was trying to figure out what was going on, if its a scam what is the take the entirety of the check was still in my account it didn't even say it was pending. I go to pay on Zelle and discover the 2,790 dollars has been rescinded by the bank. I call and learn this ass hair had sent a forged check to the bank in an effort to have me pay these fake invoices with my own money. He guessed the bank would deposit the check without fully vetting it for the standard 10 days since I'm a long time member. He knew he had until about five a clock that day before the bank would catch the discrepancy. He was posing as the printer in order to scam 4,740 dollars from me through both attempted payment methods. luckily for me I'm broke as hell right now and didn't have the money in my own account to cover either payment with out the check. everything has been taken care of now I just thought I better share this story since I've never seen a scam like this before. It took an entire month for him to essentially get nothing I really don't know what to think of any of this its such a weird scheme.

[a-book-of-creatures]

Can you explain why fly fishing is as bad as golfing? Never heard that before and I'm curious

They're different kinds of bad but they have the same root cause that makes me associate them with each other. Namely, they attract rich, entitled upper-class twits.

Disclaimer: I'm sure there are plenty of fine, upstanding golfers and fly fishers out there. Real salt of the earth folks that wouldn't harm a (heh) fly. This doesn't invalidate the fundamental issues that I'm going to talk about here.

You've probably heard about how golf takes perfectly good land that could be used for parks and turns them into sterile, boring, manicured lawns for rich assholes to toss their balls around.

Fly fishing... there's probably a lot you could say about sport angling as a part and why it's bad for fishes and the environment, but I'm focusing on fly fishing, and this book is largely to blame.

Published in 1895, this accumulation of dead trees was what pushed the idea that a good fishing fly should be made of exotic feathers, the more exotic the better.

And with anglers being a superstitious lot (perhaps as superstitious as professional athletes, who we all know are the most superstitious people in existence), it makes it far more likely that those with the means will shell out top dollar for feathers from rare, even extinct birds. They will buy research skins from museum collections for the sole purpose of tearing them to bits and making gaudy simulacra of insects that may bestow a higher chance of a salmon biting them.

This is what led to a guy breaking into the Tring Museum and stealing almost 300 bird skins to sell off on eBay for fishing fly materials. And it's happened elsewhere too. I know this because one of the museums I worked at had a researcher walk in to look at birds, and when they left a number of skins were gone. There are still enough people out there ready and willing to pay for those feathers that the market is there.

[adobe-outdesign]

(Support me on Ko-fi)

Regional steel/water Gimmighoul line, based off of sunken treasure!

The tarnished patterns on these guys come from the corrosion of actual sunken coins. The item the roaming form Gimmighoul carries is based off of a sand dollar, while its antennae resembles that of an anglerfish. Gholdengo is meant to be a subversion of the original, being slow-moving and eerie instead of fast and friendly. The way it moves is vaguely based off of bivalves like clams.

Instead of evolving by collecting 1K coins, you instead have to knock out 300 Roaming Form Gimmighoul via the Let's Go function.

Dex entries:

Gimmighoul (Chest Form): This Pokemon was mistaken for a regular treasure chest and lost at sea. It uses the light at the end of its antennae to lure in prey, then drains them of their life force.

Gimmighoul (Roaming Form): It lost the coin it used to carry, so it carries around the skeleton of a Pincurchin instead. Chest Form Gimmighoul attack them and steal their energy in order to evolve.

Gholdengo: It didn't have enough coins to form its legs when it evolved, so it drags itself around with its forearms instead. It is said that on moonlit nights, it crawls up on isolated shores and drags beachgoers back to sea with it.

[iandarling]

Lip Gallagher was five when his dad first taught him how to pickpocket

He learned how to steal wallets and watches on the L, how to outrun the mall cops, and avoid the (few working) security cameras

Lip Gallagher can tell the real deal from a knockoff at first glance- the stitching on a bag, the specific colour on a watch, and the feel of the leather on a wallet.

He would jump the turnstiles, move carefully about the train, get off and on again on random stops, never staying long in one place at a time.

Lip is no idiot, he knows his size and blond hair makes him look more innocent and gullible. He doesn’t look threatening, meaning he can stand and sit closer to people than necessary, without raising eyebrows

At age 9 he had already established a routine. After school he would get on the L, not caring about the direction or route - he would get off at the next stop anyway. He would sit next to a white collar man, usually in a nice suit, with a fancy watch or heavy wallet.

Small nimble fingers are difficult to spot when you’re busy reading the newspaper. The watch is one gone in less than ten seconds. Lip gets off at the next stop. The man won’t notice it’s missing ‘til he gets home.

Frank once showed him which Pawn Shops will accept items no questions asked. Lip hands the owner the watch and he’s offered 300 dollars. They both know the watch is worth 500. Neither of them mention it.

Lip hands Fiona the money, she doesn’t ask where it came from. It means she can afford diapers and formula this month. Ian needs a new jacket and the heating was turned off last week.

He doesn’t think it’s wrong; after all, the men he steals from are already rich and can easily replace the wallet or watch they lost. However he does however feels a little guilty when he steals from women; mostly because he has seen first hand from Fiona the amount of stress she is under just existing as a woman in the world…Still, if their wallet is poking out of their handbag or jacket, he will take it.

As he grows older Lip moves on to more complex and rewarding scams. High risk = high reward. He ends up in a few scrapes with the law, but overall he gets away with it. Besides, Fiona is old enough to get real jobs now. But even though they don’t rely on him pickpocketing anymore, he still does it.

A credit card here, and a loose 20 there; it adds up. At the mall, the library, and even at school he will strike if the opportunity arises. After all;

“When you’re poor, the only way to make money is to steal it or scam it”

[misshorrorotaku]

I am not one to put myself into discourse but I really need to explain something to you,

As a Palestinian you need to understand that Hamas aren't killing babies, those 40 Israeli babies were made up, this had been confirmed over and over again. Palestine is older then Israel, Isreal only started existing after WW2, Palestinian's welcomed them but we're faced with Starvation,genocide, rape and bombing in return.

It is currently Ramadan, a time of fasting from sunrise till sundown, yet they have no food nor water to have before this period.

13,000 innocent children have died. Over 300+ not even making it to their first birthday. Girls and woman are experiencing periods and pregnancy without proper supplies. Isreal is not struggling, they have received over 300+ billion dollars in support from the U.S.A alone. You're ignorance isn't some "I'm better and different" stunt. You are actively supporting the death of entire bloodlines and families.

Don't you dare pull "Well, what if their Hamas" Isreal has proved they can bomb a specific room to kill them. This isn't about Hamas, Isreal is wiping out entire families, lives, homes, etc.

They're killing innocent animals too.

To put this in your shoes, imagine if you were bombed, raped and tortured, not knowing if you were going to make it to the next day, you're being starved. Whilst media is actively supporting your nightmare, funding it, even.

Before you pull the Hamas card on me, I have been raised with Western media and in America. I find myself lucky for this even though my people are struggling.

Please, scroll through pro-Palestine tags without bringing your opinion into the matter to see what is going on. I beg.

No, honey, actually it wasn't disproven. The people who tried said "yeah, babies were beheaded, but it wasn't 40 of them." XD

Palestine is not older than Israel. There are references to Israel in the Torah, which is older than Islam. And no, the Palestinians did not "welcome Israel". XD that is blatantly false.

And really? So tell me, why do they know for sure these 13k kids have died but can't name how many of their hostages are alive? Please explain that to me. How is that possible?

Okay? Israel not struggling doesn't mean anything. XD Being weak and having your government steal the billions in foreign aid to make themselves rich does not make a war against you a genocide.

I'm not supporting the deaths of anybody, and It is 100% about Hamas, Israel literally sends warnings in an effort to avoid civilian casualties. Even if Hamas isn't lying (incredibly unlikely) they have killed less than most wars have in the modern era.

Even if I was in their shoes, honey, I wouldn't want people siding with my oppressors because westerners decided the terrorists who'd murder me for speaking against them and consider everyone I know and love to be martyrs they're happy to sacrifice are resistance fighters. And hell, there are Palestinians who hold this very stance, who knows that Hamas is the fucking problem not Israel, westerners like you just ignore them.

You were raised in America and with western media? Cool. Doesn't change that you're falling for propaganda. XD being raised in the West does not make you immune to propaganda.

And no, I will not let idiots spread misinformation, and I will not let them villainize the Jews because Israel is actually defending itself when terrorists attack them and kidnap their people instead of laying down and dying.

I have paid plenty of attention to what's happening, including from the Pro-Pal side, I just happen to know terrorists aren't the good guys just cuz they play to people's sympathy and use their own people as human shields to make Israel look like the villain.

Just cuz it didn't lead me to agree with you doesn't mean I haven't been exposing myself to Pro-Pal talking points and "evidence."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A "secure" system can be the most dangerous of all

Two decades ago, my life changed forever: hearing Bruce Schneier explain that “security” doesn’t exist in the abstract. You can only be secure from some threat. A fire alarm won’t protect you from burglaries. A condom won’t protect you from mass shootings. It seems obvious, but how often do we hear about “security” without any mention of who is being made secure, and from which threat?

Take the US welfare system. It is very “secure” in that it is hedged in by a thicket of red-tape, audits, inspections and onerous procedures. To get food stamps, housing vouchers, or cash aid, you must navigate a Soviet-grade bureaucratic system of Kafkaesque proportions. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the USA has become a “Utopia Of Rules” (as David Graeber put it), subjecting everyday people to the state-run bureacracies that the USAUSAUSA set endlessly ridiculed the USSR for:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

(The right says it wants to “shrink the US government until fits in a bathtub — and then drown it” — but not the whole government. They want unlimited government bloat for that part of the state that is dedicated to tormenting benefits claimants, especially if its functions are managed by a Beltway Bandit profiteer who bills Uncle Sucker up the wazoo for rubber-stamping “DENIED” on every claim.)

The US benefits system has a sophisticated, expensive, fully staffed anti-fraud system — but it’s a highly selective form of anti-fraud. The system is oriented solely to prevent fraud against itself, with no thought to protecting benefits recipients themselves from fraud.

And those recipients — by definition the poorest and most vulnerable among us — are easy pickings for continuous, ghastly, eye-watering acts of fraud. These benefits are distributed via prepaid debit cards — EBT Cards — that lack the basic security measures that every other kind of card has had for years. These are simple magstripe cards, lacking basic chip-and-pin defenses, to say nothing of contactless countermeasures.

That means that fraudsters can — and do — install skimmers in the point-of-sale terminals used by benefits recipients to withdraw their cash benefits, pay for food using SNAP (AKA Food Stamps), and receive other benefits.

It’s impossible to overstate how widespread these skimmers are, and how much money criminals make by stealing from poor people. Writing for Businessweek, Jessica Fu describes the mad scramble benefits recipients go through every month, standing by ATMs at midnight on the night of the first of every month in hopes of withdrawing the cash they use to pay for their rent and utility bills before it is stolen by a crook who captured their card number with a skimmer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-28/ebt-theft-takes-millions-of-dollars-from-the-neediest-americans

One of Fu’s sources, Lexisnexis Risk Solutions’s Haywood Talcove, describes these EBT cards as having the security of a “glorified hotel room key.” He recounts how US police departments saw a massive explosion in EBT skimming: from 300 complaints in January 2022 to 18,000 in January 2023.

The skimmer rings are extremely well organized. The people who install the skimmers — working in pairs, with one person to distract the cashier while the other quickly installs the skimmer — don’t know who they work for. Neither do the people who use cards cloned from skimmer data to cash out benefits recipients’ accounts. When they are arrested, they refuse to turn on their immediate recruiters, fearing reprisals against their families.

These low-level crooks stroll up to ATMs and feed a succession of cloned cards into them, emptying account after account. Or they swipe cards at grocery checkouts, buying cases of Red Bull and other easily sold grocery products with some victim’s entire SNAP balance.

Some police agencies are pursuing these criminal gangs and trying figure out who’s running them, but the authorities who issue SNAP cards are doing little to nothing to stop the pipeline at their end. Simply upgrading SNAP terminals to chip-and-pin would exponentially raise the cost and complexity that thieves incur.

Indeed, that’s why every other kind of payment card uses these systems. How is it that these systems were upgraded, while SNAP cards remain in mired in 20th century “glorified hotel room key” territory? Well, as our friends on the right never cease to remind us: “incentives matter.”

When your credit card gets cloned, it’s your banks and credit card company that pays for the losses, not you. So the banks demanded (and funded) the upgrade to new anti-fraud measures. By contrast, most states have no system for refunding stolen benefits to skimmers’ victims.

In other words, all of the anti-fraud in the benefits system is devoted to catching benefits cheating — a phenomenon that is so rare as to be almost nonexistent (1.54%), notwithstanding right wingers’ fevered, Reagan-era folktales about “welfare queens”:

https://blog.gitnux.com/food-stamp-fraud-statistics/

Meanwhile, the most widespread and costly form of fraud in the benefits system — fraud perpetrated against benefits recipients — is blithely ignored.

Really, it’s worse than that. In deciding to protect the welfare system rather than welfare recipients, we’ve made it vastly harder for benefits claimants who’ve been victimized by fraudsters to remain fed and sheltered. After all, if we made it simple and straightforward for benefits recipients to re-claim money that was stolen from them, we’d make it that much easier to defraud the system.

“Security” is always and forever a matter of securing some specific thing, against some specific risk. In other words, security reflects values — it reveals whose risk matters, and whose doesn’t. For the American benefits system, risks to the system matter. Risks to people don’t.

It’s not just the welfare system that prioritizes its own risks against the people it exists to serve. Think of the systems used to fight drug abuse in clinical settings.

Medical facilities that use or dispense powerful pain-killers have exquisitely tuned, sophisticated, frequently audited security systems to prevent patients from tricking their doctors or pharmacists into administering extra drugs (especially opioids). “Extra” in this case means “more drugs than are strictly necessary to manage pain.”

The rationale for this is only incidentally medical. Someone who gets a little too much painkiller during a medical procedure or an acute pain episode is not at any particular risk of enduring harm — the risks are minor and easily managed (say, by keeping a patient in bed a little longer while they recover from sedation).

The real agenda here is preventing addiction and abuse by addicted people. There’s a genuine problem with opioid abuse, and that problem does have its origins in overprescription. But — crucially — that overprescription wasn’t the result of wimpy patients insisting on endless painkillers until they enslaved themselves to their pills.

Rather, the opioid epidemic has its origins in the billionaire Sackler crime family, whose Purdue Pharma used scientific fraud, cash incentives, and other deceptive practices to trick, coerce, or bribe doctors into systematically overprescribing their Oxycontin cash cow, even as they laundered their reputation with showy charitable donations:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

The Sacklers got to keep their billions — and people undergoing painful medical procedures or living with chronic pain are left holding the bag, subject to tight pain-med controls that forces them to prove — through increasingly stringent systems — that they truly deserve their medicine.

In other words, the beneficiary of the opioid control system is the system itself — not the patients who need opioids.

There’s an extremely disturbing — even nightmarish — example of this in the news: the Yale Fertility Clinic, where hundreds of women endured unimaginably painful egg harvesting procedures with no anaesthesia at all.

These women had complained for years about the pain they suffered, and many had ended up needing emergency care after the fact because of traumatic injuries caused by undergoing the procedure without pain control. But the doctors and nurses at the Yale clinic ignored their screams of pain and their post-operative complaints.

It turned out that an opioid-addicted nurse had been swapping the fentanyl in the drug cabinet for saline, and taking the fentanyl home for her own use.

This made national headlines at the time, and it is the subject of “The Retrievals,” a new New York Times documentary series podcast:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html

If the pain medication management system was designed to manage pain, then these thefts would have been discovered early on. If the system was designed so that anyone who experienced pain was treated until the pain was under control, the deception would have been uncovered almost immediately.

As Stafford Beer said, “the purpose of any system is what it does.” The pain medication management system was designed to manage pain medication, not pain itself.

The system was designed to be secure from opioid-seeking addicted patients. It was not designed to make patients secure from pain. Its values — our values, as a society — were revealed through its workings.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/13/whose-security/#for-me-not-thee

[Image ID: A down-the-barrel view of a massive, battleship-gray artillery piece protruding from the brick battlement of a fortress. From the black depths of the barrel shines a red neon 'EBT' sign.]

Image: Bjarne Henning Kvaale (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarsborg_28cm_Krupp_cannon_4_-_panoramio.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[apoemaday]

What Women Deserve

by Sonya Renee Taylor

Culturally-diversified biracial girl with a small diamond nose ring and a pretty smile poses besides the words “Women Deserve Better”. and I almost let her non-threatening grin begin to infiltrate my psyche until I read the unlikely small print at the bottom of the ad: Sponsored by the US Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities and the Knights of Columbus On a bus in a city with a population of 553,000, 4 teenage mothers on the bus with me, 1 Latina woman with 3 children under 3 and no signs of a daddy. One sixteen-year-old black girl standing in 22-degree weather with only a sweater a book bag and a bassinet, with an infant that ain’t even four weeks yet tell me that Yes… Women do deserve better. Women deserve better than public transportation rhetoric from the same people who won’t give that teenage mother a ride to the next transit. Won’t let you talk to their kids about safer sex Have never had to listen as the door SLAMS behind the man who adamantly says, “That shit” ain’t his leaving her to wonder how she’ll raise this kid. Women deserve better than the 300 dollars TANF and AFC will provide that family of three or the 6 dollar an hour job at KFC with no benefits for her new baby or the college degree she may never see because you can’t have infants at the university Women deserve better than lip service paid for by politicians who have no alternatives to abortion though I am sure right this moment one of their seventeen-year-old daughters is sitting in a clinic lobby sobbing quietly and anonymously praying parents don’t find out or will be waiting for mom to pick her up because research shows that out-of-wedlock childbirth doesn’t look good on political polls and Daddy ain’t having that. Women deserve better than backwards governmental policies that don’t want to pay for welfare for kids or healthcare for kids or childcare for kids Don’t want to pay living wages to working mothers, Don’t want to make men who only want to be last night’s lovers responsible for the semen they lay. Flat out don’t want to pay for SHIT but want to control the woman who’s having it. Acting outraged at abortion. Well I’m outraged that they want us to believe that they believe that women deserve better. The Vatican won’t prosecute pedophile priests But I decide I’m not ready for motherhood and it’s condemnation for me These are the same people who won’t support national condom distribution to prevent teenage pregnancy. But women deserve better. Women deserve better than back-alley surgeries that leave our wombs barren and empty. Deserve better than organizations bearing the name of land-stealing racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains with no money to give these women while balding middle-aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people’s babies So maybe women deserve better than propaganda and lies to get into office Propaganda and lies to get into panties to get out of court to get out of paying child support Get the hell out of our decisions and give us back our voice Women do deserve better Women deserve choice

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

What is the most trouble you’ve ever been in?

when i was twelve, i spent one of my father's allotted weekends with him. he was paying for food and i was able to see the keychain on his keys.

for some fucking reason. for some unknowably insane and extremely stupid goddamn reason. he had a keychain of his debit card. it was just a tiny little version of his actual debit card with the numbers on it. i dont know why the credit card company thought this was a good idea.

anyway i saw my dad's mini card on his keychain and in the span of the 90 seconds it took for him to pay for my Egg Platter kids meal, i memorized the number.

i frequented inuyashaworld.com and at the time they had debuted 'game bots' which were stolen fanart on little bots that could 'learn' from you.

they were $5. i wanted a little sesshoumaru bot. i did not have $5. what i DID have was my dad's card number. in my brain. from six hours ago. i put in his info, and back then all you needed was the name and the card number.

my dad had slow as fuck internet so the page didn't load immediately. i clicked the 'submit' button like 3 to 5 times. it charged my dad 3-5 times. he had roughly 2 dollars in his account. he went negative and was charged an insufficient funds fee of $50. every time. this happened multiple times, until the page finally loaded and i stopped clicking.

when i was caught (almost immediately because his bank called to tell him he was negative by $300) i was told that i had to tell my mom what i did, and he would call her that night to make sure i did.

i was grounded from all computers for 2 months including going to the library, and i was no longer allowed to use the computer at my dads place at all, and i was only able to sneak using the gamecube at night in the dining room while everyone was asleep. my dad's girlfriend had already been treating me like a nuisance and now that i was a full on criminal i was a complete burden to her. i had to sleep on the tile floor in the kitchen because she told my dad i might steal from her house if i was allowed to sleep in a room on a bed. and he agreed with that. my pillow was a throw pillow from the couch and my blanket was the dogs blanket from the couch.

i had to keep the door open when i showered (which was "fine" because the glass was frosted) and when i went to the bathroom, i was timed. and i wasn't allowed to use the bathroom more than once an hour, even if i had been drinking a lot of water. one time i nearly peed myself, got in trouble for breaking the one hour rule, and got a new one hour rule stating i wasn't allowed to have more than one glass of water in an hour. even if it was spilled or otherwise compromised, as her shitheel grandkids often did by sprinkling dog hair and dirt into my cup.

on christmas eve that year i was forced to go to sleep (on the couch--luxury) at 9pm "with the kids", and forced to wake up at 6am. despite the hour, i was not allowed to open my present, singular, until i showered. which was only after the adults showered. then until everyone showered. then because one of the grandkids threw a tantrum it became until after lunch. then until everyone else opened theirs. my gift was a fluffy robe and a pair of socks, in this ugly ashy brown color. the reciept was in the box. it was purchased on december 22nd.

i tried dealing with it for another year before i just couldn't anymore and refused to go to my dads a few months after i turned 13. he didn't even question it, he just immediately accepted it.

the crime was stealing five dollars from my dad at age 12.

the punishment was no longer having a dad.

[forestshadow-wolf]

Can I say something? And honestly I might sound like a prick, but I'm going to say it anyway.

I find it so incredibly selfish for someone to spend other people's money on luxury items that you absolutely don't need. And I'm not talking about being given a gift. I'm saying someone gives ypu their money and says grab [X] from the store and get yourself something, and then you turn around and buy yourself a 300 dollar hnadbag, or a gucci belt, or 200 dollars worth of legos, or a what-the-fuck-ever. And maybe it's just how I was raised, but you never ever get anything that costs more than the thing you were sent out to get. And if you weren't sent out to get anything 300 dollars is still WAY too much to be spending on a single item.

And another thing, if you're eating out at a restaurant and you're not buying, you don't look at the price to see what's most expensive. You just don't. That's so incredibly rude and selfish. You don't order food based on how much more it costs. You don't order a thousand dollars worth of champagne on someone else's card.

And- I don't think I should have to say this, but also you can't just take someone's money without asking them. That's just straight up stealing.

Like I genuinely cannot fathom acting the way some people are openly and actively admitting they are acting online.

I don't care if it's someone you just met, or if it's your mom, or sister, or partner, I don't care if they're rich. You don't spend their money on luxury items that you don't need with your own hands.

And no, this is not about anybody that I personally know or am friends with (I hope)

[etoilesombre]

hi! this is maybe very out of the blue, but - i'm reading 'our feast is but beginning' on ao3, and in a comment on part one you write something about the urca gold being a cursed symbol and that it makes zero economical sense. idk really what i am asking but maybe - do you have posts on hand that deal with that? or would you write down some of your thoughts on that? it sounds really interesting! thanks (:

OOOH I'm so excited to talk about this -- it is actually going to come up more in the final chapter of that series, and it comes up as a major plot point in longfic, because I think its a really great example of how in some ways Black Sails is Just a Story. Which is also to say: none of what I'm saying here is a criticism of the show. The Urca Gold is Pirate Treasure writ large, it serves its function in the narrative, we don't actually need to think about the real world implications of stealing it.

But IF, for instance, you were a fanfic writer and kind of a history and econ nerd, and inclined to 'well actually' stuff, then you might see a couple problems with the gold as a solution for a free and independent Nassau. I think of them basically as problems of scale and form.

Let's talk about scale first. Basically, if you are going to steal and not die, you have to make a few calculations.

If you can steal something big, run away and live anonymously ever after, good for you! No problems. (This was Silver's initial plan. He was smart.)

If, however, you are going to steal openly, and maintain some sort of defended home base (see: bandits, organized crime, pirates) you have to ensure it is not worthwhile for people to come get their stuff back. This is why, as a pirate, it behooves you to have a reputation for extreme violence, and also a remote hideout. Merchant ships have insurance, the right people quietly profit from the fencing of pirated goods; nobody actually wants to die, so piracy is cost of doing business, and the world carries on.

The Urca gold is in a completely different class of stealing. This isn't holding up a truck; it isn't robbing the bank. It's robbing the Federal Reserve. Five million Spanish dollars, in today's money (yes, there are issues thinking of it this way, but the point holds) equals somewhere around 250-300 million US dollars.* There is simply no way that it is not worth Spain's (or England's) time and resources to go get it back. The cache they were fighting over at the end was one share and it was enough to cause all that trouble. The full amount would be worth sending a good chunk of your navy for, and the fact that this did not happen immediately requires some suspension of disbelief. Anyway.

Flint's theory seems to be that it's enough money to allow the pirates to defend Nassau against that threat, and basically establish themselves as a rich colony the empires won't fuck with. This is treated by the show like a reasonably serious proposition. So why does it fall apart? You can buy anything with that kind of money, can't you?

Now we get to the problem of form. Gold is only useful if you can exchange it for stuff you need. This is a problem for the pirates on two different fronts, defense specifically and trade in general.

In terms of defense, the pirates would need, very quickly, enough ships and guns to fight at least one imperial navy. But only the major powers were capable of manufacturing those ships and guns. Even if the pirates bought up all they could in terms of well-armed merchant ships/found a corrupt governor or two to buy guns and powder from, it would always be a losing battle because no matter how much money you throw at them, the powers that make warships are absolutely not selling you any. Why would they, when they can use them to come take the gold instead?

So, if the pirates aren't going to live long once they have this gold, can they at least spend their last months being filthy rich and enjoying themselves?

Not really.

We see Jack's crew members getting huge shares, everyone else on the island taking payment to help with defense when the time comes, as well as Jack paying laborers exorbitant amounts. So there's plenty to go around right?

This is how inflation happens. If we all suddenly have twice as much gold, but there is no more actual physical stuff, almost instantly the stuff will cost twice as much. This problem at least theoretically could be corrected by increasing trade. [Also, realistically, people would leave. But let's say they're staying for belief in the pirate republic reasons.] Because in the wider economy of trade in the Atlantic money is still valued normally, you can just import what you need.

And, maybe. This is more plausible than the rest.

But that sort of correction takes time, and given the whole 'war with civilization' situation, there can't be legitimate and sanctioned trade. It's pretty hard to get enough illegitimate goods in for an economy to prosper --- especially because if you're relying on black market trade during wartime, notoriously there ends up being price gouging and then you're back to square one with inflation.

In conclusion: the show does not get bogged down by this, as it shouldn't. It's fine. But yeah, the gold is fake and makes no sense, and Flint and Jack especially are borderline delusional about what it can achieve for them.

*This is actually not as impressive as I wanted it to be, once I started looking up reference points, eg, how much outstanding student debt is there? how much money does besos have? how much is defense spending? Did y'all know we should fight capitalism and eat the rich?

[mauradersdaughter]

What if Rory went to jail?

So I’ve been thinking, how can someone steal a yacht and only get 300 hours of community service?

For those who don’t know, if you steal something lower than $5,000 dollars, you can get maximum two years of jail time. But, according to “NOLO”, in the state of Connecticut, when you steal something over $20,000 dollars, it’s a class B felony. Crimes like that are punishable by 1 to 20 years in prison and up to $15,000 dollars fine. Now, small boats under 40 ft can start at $46,000, however, the value of a yacht is dependent on its size and appointments, but most will have a value greater than $20,000.

Rory, however, was charged with Third Degree Criminal Mischief, a misdemeanor, instead of a felony, a.k.a, a less serious criminal offense. I do believe that her grandparents’ lawyers did use the fact that she and her family never had a problem with the law before to get her to have a simpler sentence. Typically, the penalties can go from fines and/or probation to incarceration. But still, 300 hours in six months is a ridiculously low probation. Even more ridiculous is the Gilmores thinking she‘d get only 20 hours. Rory’s charge may not have been a felony, but it still would have carried a fine and up to six months in jail.

I wonder if that would’ve been her wake up call. Her boyfriend getting no punishment and her going to jail. Would that rage her? The entire Gilmore family on fire, Lorelai visiting her kid in jail, Richard noticing how he failed sooner, Emily having panic attacks, Jess hearing from Luke what happened. It at least would be a good plot line.

[wickedsick]

The Price of a Banana

In this post by @spitblaze, I analyzed the price of a banana in Solistia.

However, I made a mistake.

I assumed that the "Healing Grape" item, which I based my calculations off of, referred to a bunch of grapes. Mostly because the icon has a bunch of grapes in it.

This was wrong. There's a separate item called a Healing Grape Bunch.

50 leaves is the price of One.

Singular.

Grape.

Therefore, I'm making this post as a correction.

To get a more accurate price, we'll also be taking a look at the other prominent fruit in Solistia-- plums.

Lychees and Pomegranates are also available, but their real-world prices are characterized by high import costs that aren't reflected by their in-game price. Olives, meanwhile, have the opposite problem. One olive costs ten times as much as a healing grape, but their real prices are far closer.

Nuts are also a no-go, since the rare nuts you can acquire throughout the game are notably impossible to cultivate.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, bananas cost around 60¢ per pound, plums cost 88¢ per pound, and grapes cost $2.40 per pound.

There's three bananas in a pound of bananas, seven plums in a pound of plums, and 80 grapes in a pound of grapes.

Healing grapes cost 50 leaves each, while inspiriting plums cost 240 leaves. This means a pound of grapes costs 4000 leaves, while a pound of plums costs 1680 leaves.

4000/2.40= 1667, giving us our grape ratio.

1680/0.88 = 1909, giving us our plum ratio.

The average of these two numbers is 1788, so we can approximate a pound of bananas at 1072.8 leaves. Since there are three bananas in a pound, each banana costs 357.8 leaves.

Of course, since grapes and plums have restorative properties, we're likely overestimating.

The only fruits that aren't notably restorative (that is to say, they're not sold as a restorative item) that we can acquire in Solistia are raspberries. Octopath 1 let you steal apples from Therion's final boss, but that's irrelevant to the current discussion.

Raspberries are 20 leaves each and can be purchased from NPCs in Cropdale, where they grow.

Since raspberries are a seasonal fruit, their price varies throughout the year. At rural farms or pick-your-own areas, they can go for around 2 dollars a pound. There are about 135 raspberries in a pound, so a pound of raspberries costs 2700 leaves.

2700/2 = 1350, giving us our raspberry ratio

If we use this ratio, a banana would cost 270 leaves. If they were sold in general stores, they would cost a bit more due to import costs, but the steam engine may make that cheaper- so bananas would cost around 300 leaves each.

There is, however, another fruit we could use as our metric. However, it's the most expensive fruit in the game.

Alrond Rondwell costs 160,000 leaves to hire. The average 35-year-old man weighs around 208 pounds, giving Alrond a price of about 770 leaves per pound, a fair bit cheaper than any other ratio we've discussed. However, you can only hire him, not buy him outright, and slavery is illegal in the United States, so an actual price is impossible to derive.

Therefore, we can conclude that, if you were able to buy bananas in Octopath Traveler 2, they would cost around 300 leaves.

[fvck-around-find-out]

Our last job was a fucking shitshow that I refused to be a part of. But now we've quit, and the boss owes us like $300 fucking dollars because he's been paying us below minimum wage and underpaying us for time worked and we had enough and are demanding compensation.

But this guy's on another fucking frequency or something. He's literally still trying to intimidate us by telling us to come in so he can "talk to us" like he's some fucking authority in our lives. Just give us what you fucking owe us.

We're going to have to bring in a witness because he just says the most fucking illegal shit right to our face.

We really need a job right now too. We would have literally let him steal some of our wages if he was at least fucking pleasant about it. Fuck.