#retail banking system

[mosaic233]

How Mosaic Development Systems Can Enhance Retail Banking Sales Strategies

In today's competitive financial industry, retail banking sales strategies need continuous refinement to meet customer demands and drive revenue growth. By integrating Mosaic Development Systems, banks can streamline their operations, enhance customer experiences, and improve overall sales performance. This article will explore how these systems can revolutionize the retail banking sector and lead to increased success.

What Are Mosaic Development Systems?

Mosaic Development Systems refers to a comprehensive framework that assists organizations, particularly in the banking sector, in managing customer relationships, sales, and service efficiency. These systems are designed to provide a holistic view of operations, combining data analytics, customer insights, and automation to improve both customer and internal processes.

When applied to retail banking, Mosaic Development Systems can help banks develop better marketing campaigns, increase their product offerings, and respond swiftly to customer needs. This makes them a valuable asset in any bank’s toolkit for creating more targeted and effective retail banking sales strategies.

Why Retail Banking Needs Innovative Sales Strategies

Retail banking plays a critical role in serving individuals and small businesses with essential financial services, from savings accounts to loans. However, in recent years, competition has increased significantly. Fintech companies, online banking platforms, and evolving customer expectations have put pressure on traditional banks to innovate their retail banking sales strategies.

Banks that rely solely on traditional methods are often left behind. Today's consumers are tech-savvy, expect seamless digital experiences, and want personalized solutions. This shift in expectations calls for sales strategies that are customer-centric, data-driven, and adaptable to changing market conditions.

Mosaic Development Systems can assist banks in these efforts by providing them with the tools necessary to analyze customer behavior, anticipate needs, and create targeted solutions.

Key Benefits of Using Mosaic Development Systems in Retail Banking

Data-Driven Decisions Mosaic Development Systems enable banks to harness vast amounts of customer data and use it to shape their retail banking sales strategies. With real-time data analytics, banks can better understand customer preferences and market trends. This allows for personalized offerings, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Automation and Efficiency In a fast-paced retail banking environment, manual processes often slow down productivity. Mosaic Development Systems offer automation features that streamline routine tasks, such as customer service, account management, and sales processing. By automating these operations, banks can free up their staff to focus on more value-added activities, such as relationship building and sales growth.

Enhanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) CRM is at the heart of any successful retail banking sales strategy. Mosaic Development Systems integrate powerful CRM tools that help banks track interactions, identify potential leads, and nurture long-term relationships. By gaining deeper insights into customers’ financial behaviors, banks can offer products and services that truly meet their needs.

Improved Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities Understanding customer needs allows banks to offer tailored products at the right time. Mosaic Development Systems empower retail banks to effectively cross-sell and upsell financial products, such as credit cards, insurance, and loans. With accurate customer profiles and predictive analytics, banks can recommend relevant products, thus enhancing their sales potential.

Implementing Mosaic Development Systems for Retail Success

When integrating Mosaic Development Systems into a bank’s operations, it's essential to have a clear plan. Here are some steps that can lead to a successful implementation:

Evaluate Current Sales StrategiesBefore adopting Mosaic Development Systems, banks should assess their existing retail banking sales strategies. What’s working? What needs improvement? Conducting a thorough evaluation will help identify areas where Mosaic tools can make the most impact, whether it’s customer engagement, sales funnel efficiency, or lead conversion.

Employee Training and SupportEffective use of Mosaic Development Systems requires proper training for employees. Banks must ensure that staff members are comfortable using new tools and technologies. By providing ongoing support and training, banks can ensure their teams are fully equipped to make the most of these systems, improving both efficiency and customer service.

Leverage Customer Insights for PersonalizationOne of the primary strengths of Mosaic Development Systems is their ability to collect and analyze customer data. Banks should use this information to personalize their services. By understanding each customer’s preferences and financial goals, banks can tailor their offerings and communications, leading to more effective retail banking sales strategies.

Monitor Performance and AdaptThe financial industry is constantly evolving, and customer needs change rapidly. Banks must continuously monitor the performance of their Mosaic Development Systems to ensure they are getting the most out of them. Regular performance reviews can reveal new opportunities for optimization and allow banks to adjust their sales strategies as needed.

The Future of Retail Banking with Mosaic Development Systems

As banks continue to innovate their retail banking sales strategies, Mosaic Development Systems will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the industry. With their ability to automate tasks, provide data-driven insights, and enhance customer relationships, these systems are helping banks stay competitive in a challenging landscape.

Retail banking is moving towards a more personalized, efficient, and customer-centric model. Banks that adopt Mosaic Development Systems are positioning themselves for long-term success by leveraging technology to meet both current and future demands.

[rohroy]

ATMs & CRMs – Unveiling Their Benefits in India’s Evolving Payment Landscape | AGS India

Both ATMs and CRMs facilitate various banking transactions, CRMs offer the additional functionality of cash recycling, making them more advanced and sophisticated machines.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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

[reality-detective]

Q Phone or named Pi phone - Information and video demonstration

Say goodbye to all our 'spy phones'.

Then we can get rid of those ugly and dangerous cell towers everywhere.

The Q phone has been developed and manufactured in Germany and the UK with final software updates in the US.

This smartphone is three-dimensional and of the highest quality.

It will become one of the main credit tools and most urgent expenditures in daily life for retail consumption and domestic and international commercial business. and is a subserver to exploit and maintain the quantum system with Stellar + Starlink.

This is a $500 billion manufacturing operation in three countries. And some other countries like Japan..

They are built in various warehouses around the world. Q phones will be delivered free of charge to everyone in the world.

This Quantum Space Q Phone will be used for internet connectivity...texting and calling...banking...voting and more.

It has a 3D interactive holographic display. (watch video)

QFS will create a private Internet network running on triple code and perhaps an 8G network for SATCOM. 🤔

[sixth-light]

https://x.com/csoandy/status/1814252032884146636

good commentary on the crowdstrike incident

Yes, this is good technical commentary. It's noticeable that different companies have had very different levels of difficulty managing the incident and preparation will certainly have played a role, along with the timing and the number and distribution of systems.

For the less technical (because I've noticed some confused reblogs): Crowdstrike is an enterprise-level, i.e. for large organisations managing many computer systems, set of antivirus tools. It is very good - this is why many, many large organisations with high security needs (such as banks and airlines) use it. Since it defends against malware and viruses, its tools are constantly receiving automatic updates.

About eighteen hours ago, one of those automatic updates accidentally blue-screened Windows machines and servers worldwide that had one particular Crowdstrike tool installed. This was quickly deemed to be fixable without too much hassle, except for one really major issue: individual systems need someone with technical expertise to start them up *directly, in person* in order to be fixed. Imagine you're an airline with computers at every airport. A bank with ATMs nationwide. A retail chain with computers in every store...

Anyway, this is going to take some organisations a while to fix. It is extremely, extremely fixable! But it's gonna take a minute. And some of the orgs not directly affected are reliant on other ones which are. So yeah, soz to IT teams everywhere about their weekend.

[xaharadesert]

What Crime They Would Commit (Modern) - Headcanon

Arcana Characters (Main 6)

A/N: I got a new phone, so it was time for my single yearly post :) let me know if there are any spelling or grammar mistakes

❤️Julian❤️

Robbing some rich guy’s off-shore bank account

Definitely the kind of person to say it doesn’t count if the victim is rich (he’s right)

He’s gotten away with it dozens of times because he never took enough for it to be noticeable

He got a little cocky because he was trying to impress someone while drunk, hence being arrested

🧡Portia🧡

Blackmail and/or accidental insider trading

She is very much the kind of person to not think these crimes are serious, claims they are just “silly” (she is also correct)

Has been committing these crimes for so long that she doesn’t even bother to hide it anymore (and frankly, most people don’t bother to stop her because she seems harmless)

They let her go pretty quick though

Definitely because she’s innocent, and not because she has dirt on everyone in the legal system

💛Lucio💛

War crimes (canon)

Unfortunately he’s a famous and rich white guy, so he will not be facing consequences for his actions

💚Muriel💚

Committed no crime, was just in the wrong place at the wrong time

Dude has the worst luck; this happens to him all the time because he happens to be a great way of blocking cameras and shoplifters love him for it (they are why he now avoids shopping at busy times of day)

At this point the police don’t even have to question him, they just let him go because they know he’s a good guy

💙Asra💙

Shoplifts from major retail chains (not when Muriel is around, he knows what the poor guy goes through and wouldn’t dare)

Also believes that it’s not a crime (he is right)

Actually does not get caught because the workers are not paid enough to care— he’s actually on friendly terms with most of them

Possibly accidental tax evasion as well (he knows how to pay taxes, but with the strange variety jobs he has he probably writes off a lot of purchases that he’s later questioned about— they have yet to actually arrest him for anything though, he is somehow always right)

💜Nadia💜

Genuinely has never done anything wrong ever

Except

One time when she was a teen, she bricked a police windshield at a protest

Never got caught though, and she knows enough to keep quiet

Would probably do it again if she knew she wouldn’t be caught

[vorenado-m]

happy disability pride month! please consider helping me take back my life as a disabled person!

the TL;DR is that for the last 3 months i have had an absolutely soul-sucking miserable minimum wage retail job that, due to the way scheduling works (and the app being broken as fuck) has prevented me from having access to literally any of the life-saving mental health/medical care i need as a disabled person.

my disability is best managed through a combination of medication, therapy, and casework-- not a single one of which i have had since march! :) contextually, up until i got this job, i took three daily medications and had casework once a week and therapy once or sometimes twice a week. these services are offered at an affordable cost to me through a local organization that is threatening to close my case due to lack of participation.

ill make another, more detailed post later with some of the services i can offer for money (i draw! i code! i write!) but until then here is a code you can scan if you have a few dollars to spare:

there are more details beneath the cut (idk about you guys but im kinda nosy so i wrote some more stuff in case anyone else is also nosy) but thats the gist of it. you can also always ask for details. i dont have a therapist right now so it might feel good to say things.

my plan is as follows: i would like to take the month of july more or less "off" from work to get my affairs in order, starting with scheduling appointments for therapy and casework and getting back on my meds. i am actively looking for a job, but i would like the ability to be somewhat picky instead of applying everywhere i think might have me for the sake of having money coming in to pay rent.

for the last two years i have made less than $800/mo and i can survive on roughly $600-$650 a month. my july rent ($550) is paid and my august rent (at least $500) is most likely also squared away, through a combination of some cash i was hoarding, a previous donation, my last expected paychecks from my current job, and my brother generously offering to cover whatever is left over. the extra $100ish is for roughly a months supply of the food that is part of my daily routine that i get cranky without (i have tea every morning, for instance.)

i have a fantastic roommate who is not struggling as much financially who will do everything in her power to make sure i have access to staple foods (rice, eggs, etc) so i really just need to buy the things only i consume (kimchi, milk, etc.) there is a food bank i go to, so i am not worried about food, but i can only go to it once per month. we have a barter system where i trade her the things i dont want from the food bank and she buys me things i will eat; alternatively, i sometimes give her things i get from the food bank (eg meat) that she turns into meals for both of us.

i live independently/"alone" with roommates and do not have support from my family pretty much at all. they have never been particularly useful for emotional support and have openly denied me financial support since i was a teenager. moving in with them/getting help from them/talking to them is not an option.

i have emailed my caseworker at the mental health organization i work with as well as my caseworker with the disability vocational program i work with to help me find a new job that is "back of house" and requires less customer interaction. i did this over the weekend, so i expect to hear back from them sometime this week. in the meantime, i am searching for jobs on my own in places like indeed, jobhat, careerbuilder, etc. as well as checking company websites of places like chain grocery stores to see what is available in my area.

my job pool is a bit limited due to the fact that i cannot drive (due to both my disability and the medication im supposed to be taking for it) but i am very well-versed at taking the bus, which is free. getting to and from work is not a concern for me; it is being able to do the job without being driven to the edge of a mental breakdown that is the problem.

the disability vocational program is my ticket out of poverty! last month i had a follow-up evaluation (i had to call out of work for it, but frankly i was at the end of my rope then too) where they approved my career goals as a web developer and we are in the process of deciding what my next steps are! the program will likely (depending on what route i take) help pay for vocational training, too, but i obviously have to pay rent while in training. which i think i can do if i have a job that doesnt make me want to die.

i have some other things that make my life a bit harder (im mixed race, i am nonbinary + gay, etc) but i would say those things dont really impact my ability to get a job as much as the disability does LOL which is why i did not feature them prominently in this post. like, the reason i cant get a job isnt because people dont want to hire me because i have blue hair and pronouns, its because im obviously disabled.

if you have any other questions, no matter how intrusive you think they might be, feel free to send a DM or an ask, and i will try to answer.

[gingerofsuburbia]

BDS Consumer Boycott Targets

Everything here is copied over from the BDS website.

Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)

HP Inc (US) provides services to the offices of genocide leaders, Israeli PM Netanyahu and Financial Minister Smotrich. HPE, which shares the same brand, provides technology for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, a pillar of its apartheid regime.

Chevron (including Caltex and Texaco)

US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main corporation extracting gas claimed by apartheid Israel in the East Mediterranean. Chevron generates billions in revenues, strengthening Israel’s war chest and apartheid system, exacerbating the climate crisis and Gaza siege, and is complicit in depriving the Palestinian people of their right to sovereignty over their natural resources. Chevron has thousands of retail gas stations around the world under the Chevron, Caltex, and Texaco brand names.

Siemens

Siemens (Germany) is the main contractor for the Euro-Asia Interconnector, an Israel-EU submarine electricity cable that is planned to connect Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory to Europe. Siemens-branded electrical appliances are sold globally.

PUMA

Since 2018, we have called for a boycott of PUMA (Germany) due to its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA), which governs teams in Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In a major BDS win in December 2023, PUMA leaked news to the media that it will not be renewing its IFA contract when it expires in December 2024. Until then, it is still complicit, so we continue to #BoycottPUMA until it finally ends its complicity in apartheid.

Carrefour

Carrefour (France) is a genocide enabler. Carrefour-Israel has supported Israeli soldiers partaking in the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with gifts of personal packages. In 2022, it entered a partnership with the Israeli company Electra Consumer Products and its subsidiary Yenot Bitan, both of which are involved in grave violations against the Palestinian people.

AXA

Insurance giant AXA (France) invests in Israeli banks financing war crimes and the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources. When Russia invaded Ukraine, AXA took targeted measures against it. Yet, Axa has taken no action against Israel, a 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, despite its ongoing genocidal war on Gaza.

SodaStream

SodaStream is an Israeli company that is actively complicit in Israel's policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of present-day Israel in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.

Ahava

Ahava cosmetics is an Israeli company that has its production site, visitor center, and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.

RE/MAX

RE/MAX (US) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israel’s colonization of the occupied West Bank.

Israeli produce in your supermarkets

Boycott produce from Israel in your supermarket and demand their removal from shelves. Beyond being part of a trade that fuels Israel’s apartheid economy, Israeli fruits, vegetables, and wines misleadingly labeled as “Product of Israel” often include products of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Israeli companies do not distinguish between the two, and neither should consumers.

Non-BDS Grassroots Boycotts:

McDonald’s (US), Burger King (US), Papa John’s (US), Pizza Hut (US), WIX (Israel), etc. are now being targeted in some countries by grassroots organic boycott campaigns, not initiated by the BDS movement. BDS supports these boycott campaigns because these companies, or their branches or franchisees in Israel, have openly supported apartheid Israel and/or provided generous in-kind donations to the Israeli military amid the current genocide. If these grassroots campaigns are not already organically active in your area, we suggest focusing your energies on our strategic campaigns above. 

Recently, McDonald’s franchisee in Malaysia has filed a SLAPP lawsuit against solidarity activists, claiming defamation. Instead of holding the Israel franchisee to account for supporting genocide, we are now witnessing corporate bullying against activists. For both these reasons, we are calling to escalate the boycott of McDonald’s until the parent company takes action and ends the complicity of the brand.

Remember, all Israeli banks and virtually all Israeli companies are complicit to some degree in Israel’s system of occupation and apartheid, and hundreds of international corporations and banks are also deeply complicit. We focus our boycotts on a small number of companies and products for maximum impact.

[workersolidarity]

Three, four years ago I could have told you, and did tell people, that inflation would start steadily going up, and I said even then that it would likely be stubborn, meaning it wasn't going to be an easy fix.

I knew this back then because it was obvious, even years ago, that the BRICS countries, along with many African and South Asian countries and elsewhere were looking for ways to get around using the US Dollar for trade.

They were making moves to expand trade relations outside US dollar transactions and were for many years planning and building the infrastructure for a future Multipolar world.

And that process began rapidly picking up pace three or four years ago.

I began to say then, what I'm still saying now, as that process goes on and trade outside the US Dollar system grows exponentially year-on-year, that's going to begin to have an effect on inflation.

Why? Well, Imperialism really. Because the US for decades has depended on the steady demand for US Dollars to hold down inflation, allowing the US to use debt spending to finance wars, military bases and imperialistic ventures like Syria.

Remember, it was the US in its massively dominant position after WWII that built the Bretton Woods System that made the US Dollar the world reserve currency pegged to gold, and it was the US that unilaterally abandoned Bretton Woods 1 and took the dollar off Gold, allowing for the US to finance wars through debt spending, and created the Petro-Dollar with Saudi Arabia in the 1970's.

This debt spending is essentially the surplus value from the Global South and other poorer countries that must buy US Dollars to fund infrastructure projects, energy consumption, food and medicine imports, etc since it's the world reserve currency and if you wish to use the US Financial System at all, such as the World Bank, or SWIFT messaging system, well you have to use US Dollars.

Basically, it's the sucking of the wealth out of poorer countries to finance their own economic oppression.

But as these countries catch on and with new rising global powers like Russia, China and Iran building the infrastructure for an alternative system, the US Dollar is being abandoned faster than ever.

In 2000, more than 70% of Foreign Exchange Reserves were held in US Dollars. By 2020, that figure had dropped considerably to 59%. And the rate at which it's dropping is only increasing.

Knowing this, I said back in 2019 and 2020 that inflation was likely to become a problem. And if it did become a problem, then we knew exactly what the Fed would do as a result: dramatically increase benchmark Interest rates.

This didn't take any particularly specialized or secretive sources to figure out. It's been obvious for years to anyone seriously interested in economics and geopolitics.

And what happens when interest rates go up? The value of the bonds bought under lower interest rates suddenly go way down, while debts become more expensive. It's like gravity in economics.

So with all that being said, why then did all these banks (Signature Bank, First Republic Bank, and Silicon Valley Bank) continue buying troubled assets and Treasury bonds if they're so smart and educated and knew all this?

I mean, these guys are supposed to be the best of the best corporate bankers, right? On the cutting edge of investment banking, right? That's what everyone said even just months before Silicon Valley Bank failed. (CNBC host and moron of the year Jim Cramer literally praised Silicon Valley Bank less than a month before its failure)

So one of two things must be true here and neither one is good for YOU the average worker.

Either these bankers are idiots; complete morons who have little to no understanding of basic economics, geopolitics, and monetary policy, something that should be of concern to all of us.

I mean, I'm just a dude working for a small retailer in New Orleans and even I knew this inflation and higher interest rates were coming.

So why exactly are these people paid such exorbitant salaries? If I can understand the basics of their job better than they can, why am I a retailer, and he, a millionaire banker???

So that's one possibility, one I'm virtually certain is actually true, that our ruling Elite isn't particularly smart or well educated in reality, anymore than ordinary people I meet everyday, and any one of us could easily do their jobs just as well or better than they do given the opportunities afforded to them.

But even if in this case, that's not what happened. That these weren't idiots. Well then the alternative is something that should also be deeply disturbing to you: that these bankers knew they would be facing this situation, that they were well aware of the coming inflationary pressures and equally aware what the Feds response would be, interest rate hikes.

And instead of using the last couple of years to shed possibly dangerous assets and shore up the money the banks kept on hand, they continued to do what was personally making them so much profit, at the expense of tax payers, because they were absolutely certain that the government these bankers spend so much money on campaigns for, would swoop in regardless of the recklessness of their behavior, and bail them out no matter what.

These are not the signs of a healthy political, economic or banking system.

[fremulon]

fully agree that the tiktok chase bank "hack" was obviously doomed and that anyone taking part should have thought about it for like 20 seconds before committing fraud

HOWEVER I have also seen people derisively comment that there's no free money hacks in real life, and I disagree because as a 19 year old retail employee I developed a system that could theoretically yield infinite Kohl's Cash

[georgegraphys]

2024 team sponsors recap!

this is completely irrelevant to F1 but i study and do these stuffs for a living sooo 😩😩 2023 sponsors are based on the sponsors that are there at the beginning of the season (new sponsors that join in the middle of the season will be classified as 2024's)

Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team:

New sponsors: Whatsapp, Luminar (American tech company), SAP (German software company), nuvei (Canadian credit card services), Sherwin Williams (American painting company) 2024 data last update: 2024/02/14

Old sponsors that left: Monster Energy, Pure Storage (American technology company), fastly (American cloud computing services), Axalta (American painting company), Eight sleep (American mattresses company) 2023 data last update: 2023/01/07

Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 Team:

New sponsors: Yeti (American cooler manufacturer, joined later in 2023), APL (American footwear/athletic apparel manufacturer, joined later in 2023), CDW (American IT company, joined later in 2023), Sui (American tech app by Mysten Labs, joined later in 2023), Patron Tequila (Mexican alcoholic beverages company, joined later in 2023) 2024 data last update: 2024/02/15

Old sponsors that left: CashApp, Walmart, Therabody (American wellness technology company), Ocean Bottle (Norwegian reusable bottle manufacturer), PokerStars (Costa Rican gambling site), Alpha Tauri (? no info if they're official partners or not but Austrian clothing company made by Red Bull), BMC (Switzerland bicycle/cycling manufacturer), Esso (American fuel company, subsidiary of ExxonMobil), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (American technology company) 2023 data last update: 2023/03/07

More: Esso is a subsidiary of Mobil so there's possibility they merged or something

Scuderia Ferrari:

New sponsors: VGW Play (Australian tech game company, joined later in 2023), DXC Technology (American IT company, joined later in 2023), Peroni (Italian brewing company), Z Capital Group/ZCG (American private asset management/merchant bank company), Celsius (Swedish energy drink manufacturer) 2024 data last update: 2024/02/15

Old sponsors that left: Mission Winnow (American content lab by Phillip Morris International aka Marlboro), Estrella Garcia (Spanish alcoholic beverages manufacturer), Frecciarossa (Italian high speed train company) 2023 data last update: 2023/02/16

More: Mission Winnow is a part of Phillip Morris International. They are no longer listed as team sponsor but PMI is listed instead.

(starting here, 2023 data last update is 2023/02/23 and 2024 data last update is 2024/02/15)

McLaren F1 Team: (Only McLaren RACING's data is available idk if some of these are XE/FE team partners but anw..)

New sponsors: Monster Energy, Salesforce (American cloud based software company, joined later in 2023), Estrella Garcia (Spanish alcoholic beverages manufacturer), Dropbox (American file hosting company), Workday (American system software company, joined later in 2023), Ecolab (American water purification/hygiene company), Airwallex (Australian financial tech company), Optimum Nutrition (American nutritional supplement manufacturer), Halo ITSM (American software company, joined later in 2023), Udemy (American educational tech company, joined later in 2023), New Era (American cap manufacturer, joined in 2023), K-Swiss (American shoes manufacturer, joined later in 2023), Alpinestars (Italian motorsports safety equipment manufacturer)

Old sponsors that left: DP World (Emirati logistics company), EasyPost (American shipping API company), Immersive Labs (UK cybersecurity training company?), Logitech, Mind (UK mental health charity), PartyCasino (UK? online casino site), PartyPoker (American? gambling site), Sparco (Italian auto part & accessory manufacturer), Tezos (Switzerland crypto company)

Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team:

New sponsors: Valvoline (American retail automotives service company, joined later in 2023), NexGen (Canadian sustainable? fuel company), Banco Master (Brazilian digital banking platform, joined later in 2023), ServiceNow (American software company, joined later in 2023), Regent Seven Seas Cruise, Wolfgang Puck (Austrian-American chef and restaurant owner, joined later in 2023), Financial Times (British business newspaper), OMP (Italian racing safety equipment manufacturer), stichd (Netherlands fashion & apparel manufacturer)

Old sponsors that left: Alpinestars (Italian motorsports safety equipment manufacturer), crypto.com (Singaporean cryptocurrency company), ebb3 (UK? software company), Pelmark (UK fashion and apparel manufacturer), Peroni (Italian brewing company), Porto Seguro (Brazilian insurance company), Socios (Malta's blockchain-based platform), XP (Brazilian investment company)

Stake F1 Team (prev. Alfa Romeo):

???? Can't found their website (might be geoblocked in my country???)

BWT Alpine F1 Team:

New sponsors: MNTN (American software company), H. Moser & Cie (Switzerland watch manufacturer), Amazon Music

Old sponsors that left: Bell & Ross (French watch company), Ecowatt (??? afaik French less-energy smthn smthn company), Elysium (French? American? Software company), KX (UK software company), Plug (American electrical equipment manufacturing company)

Visa CashApp RB F1 Team (prev. Scuderia Alpha Tauri):

New Sponsors: Visa, CashApp, Hugo Boss, Tudor, Neft Vodka (Austrian alcoholic beverages company), Piquadro (Italian luxury bag manufacturer)

Old sponsors that left: Buzz (?), Carl Friedrik (UK travel goods manufacturer), Flex Box (Hongkong? shipping containers manufacturer), GMG (Emirati global wellbeing company), RapidAPI (American API company)

Haas F1 Team:

New sponsors: New Era (American cap manufacturer, joined later in 2023)

Old sponsors that left: Hantec Markets (Hongkong capital markets company), OpenSea (American NFT/Crypto company)

Williams Racing:

New sponsors: Komatsu, MyProtein (British bodybuilding supplement), Kraken (American crypto company, joined later in 2023), VAST Data (American tech company), Ingenuity Commerce (UK e-commerce platform), Puma (joined later in 2023)

Old sponsors that left: Acronis (Swiss software company), Bremont (British watch manufacturer), Dtex Systems (American? cybersecurity company), Financial Times (British business newspaper), Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts, KX (UK software company), OMP (Italian racing safety equipment manufacturer), PPG (American painting manufacturer), Umbro (English sports equipment manufacturer), Zeiss (German opticals/optometrics manufacturing company)

[cortosis-ct]

The Bad Batch and their jobs (Modern AU)

In my headcanon they all started out as soldiers. After getting out and accidentally acquisiting Omega, they desperately need money and take any jobs they can get. Eventually, everyone finds something they actually like.

Hunter:

Retail sales associate aka Walmart slave and getting yelled at by Karens all day. He's also doing freelance cleaning jobs, the grosser the better the payment. Think hoarder apartments with fifty cats or scat orgy hotel room cleanup.

He works hard on getting his record cleaned up and eventually secures a job at the fire station. He becomes a firefighter and will eventually be a lieutenant and later captain.

Tech:

Fast food worker which means lots of being yelled at by hangry people who are unhappy with the way their BigMac was stacked. He takes any extra shift he can get.

After several failed rounds of applications, he hacks into a big company's system and puts his name on top of the candidate list. He ends up supervisor for some bank insurance IT stuff with lots of numbers.

Wrecker: Miner. It's hard work and long hours in the dark. He actually earns the most of all of them but that's because it's fucking dangerous and depressing.

The leading instructor for the demolition expert trainees blows up. Wrecker, having had professional training in the military and lots of experience at not getting blown up (again), is their best take so he becomes their new instructor for the new hires.

Crosshair: Nobody is really willing to hire him so he's an unlicensed taxi driver most nights. (He hates everything about it.) He also signed up as a freelance roadkill collector job in Hunter's name and takes the calls when he doesn't have passengers.

He meets railroaders when cleaning up railkill one night. When smoking he mentions how much he hates being a taxi driver and the railroaders recruit him for their company. He becomes a traindriver and finally doesn't have to interact with his passengers.

Echo: They call it online sales associate marketer and customer service advisor. He calls it tele-scam-marketer. Many people yelling at him but at least he can work from home.

At a parent-teacher conference of Omega's school he helps another parent with a technology problem. He's like: "I tried to get rid of that problem for hours and you did it within five minutes. You gotta be a master software engineer." and Echo's like "I get payed to get yelled at as a telemarketer". Turns out the guy is an HR associate at an IT company and gets Echo a proper job.

[rohroy]

Prepaid Cards – Empowering Secure Transactions in India’s Digital Payment Landscape | AGS India

Prepaid card market in India is projected to witness a CAGR of 31.5% during 2021-2025, reaching USD 89.8 billion by 2025, up from USD 30 billion in 2020.

[wanabelsim]

The Sims 4: 12 Must-Have Realistic Mods

The Sims 4 is a highly popular life simulation game that allows players to create and control virtual lives. With extensive customization options, players can create truly unique Sims. Each new update or pack brings more content for players to enjoy, expanding the game further.

12. MC Command Center By Deaderpool

MC Command Center (MCCC) is a mod that offers players extensive control over their Sims' lives. It includes many functions and cheats, allowing players to modify their Sims' jobs, relationships, traits, skills, and more.

11. Child Birth Mod By Pandasama

The Sims 4 offers limited immersive actions for pregnant Sims, such as pregnancy-related moodlets, visual changes, and a few interactions. To enhance the realism of the pregnancy process, the Child Birth Mod provides additional features, including calling an obstetrician and getting ultrasound scans (if players own the Get to Work expansion pack).

10. Have Some Personality Please By LittleMsSam

Have Some Personality Please is a mod that adds more realistic personalities to Sims, making them act according to their traits, age, and relationships with other Sims. This mod is ideal for players who want to create more realistic stories in The Sims 4.

9. Wonderful Whims By Turbodriver

Wonderful Whims is a standalone mod that provides many of the features of the notorious Wicked Whims mod but without any explicit adult content. The addition of Sentiments, Likes, Dislikes, and Sim Profiles to The Sims 4 base game has enhanced its social and romantic aspects.

8. Meaningful Stories By RoBurky

Meaningful Stories is a mod that reimagines how moods and emotions are experienced by Sims. It introduces major and minor changes, enabling Sims to express their humanity better, making life events more impactful and managing their lives more intriguing. This mod is perfect for creating elaborate storylines, dramatic conflicts, and meaningful day-to-day experiences for Sims.

7. Sims Eat And Drink Faster By Bynicol

With The Sims 4 base game now free to play, it has become more accessible to new players. Long-time players know how much time Sims take to complete their meals due to the numerous unnecessary animations designed to make their behavior more realistic.

download:

6. Career Overhaul Suite By Kuttoe

For players seeking a more engaging career experience in The Sims 4, Kuttoe's Career Overhaul suite is worth exploring. While the Growing Together expansion pack introduces features like Work Rivals, Lay-offs, and midlife crises, it doesn't add new careers. Kuttoe's mod, although it doesn't add new careers either, enhances the existing ones, making them more challenging, immersive, and realistic.

5. Slice Of Life By KawaiiStacie

The Slice of Life Mod enriches gameplay by introducing more detailed everyday activities. Players can have their Sims apply skincare and makeup, participate in after-school activities, get sick, and develop varied personalities. The mod also includes the option for Sims to consume alcohol, catering to those who prefer not to use Basemental Mods.

4. Height Slider By Luumia

While The Sims 4 offers extensive customization options for Sims, height adjustment is not included. A mod that allows players to modify their Sims' heights adds a new level of realism, enabling the creation of more diverse and unique Sims. download

3. SNBank By SimRealist

A financial/banking mod aims to mirror reality as closely as possible. It includes features such as owning accounts, transferring Simoleons to other Sims, managing bills and loans, accessing a welfare system, and receiving inheritances.

2. Live in Business By LittleMsSam

Although The Sims 4 offers various ways to earn Simoleons, there is always room for more options. A notable drawback of The Sims 4: Get To Work expansion is that Sims cannot live in their business, and businesses are limited to retail stores. The Live in Business mod solves this by allowing Sims to turn their homes into business hubs, enabling them to run bars, cafés, nightclubs, gyms, daycares, pet daycares, and vet clinics from home.

1. Mortem By SimRealist

The Sims 4 includes the ability to plan and host events like birthdays, weddings, and holiday services, but funeral services are missing. The Mortem mod addresses this gap by allowing players to add meaningful funeral services to their gameplay. It introduces a detailed death experience, where Sims remain dead on the floor until the death is reported, examined, and prepared for burial. Falsely reporting a death results in fines, adding an extra layer of realism.

Note: Just click the name of the mod to download.

[destinedfordiaperstories]

Sammy's Little Problem, Chapter 11

Read Chapter Ten here.

The Little Registration Agent smiled as she saw Alyssa and Sammy return. “How can I help you today?”

Alyssa and Sammy sat in the chairs in front of her. “I’d like to register as her Caregiver. She was just classified as a Level Two Little.”

“No problem,” the agent responds, “can I see both of your IDs? Thank you.”

The agent starts typing in the information into the computer. “Okay, yes, I have her file here. Samantha is listed as an L2. And you said you’d like to register as her Caregiver, not Guardian, correct.

“Yes, Caregiver,” Alyssa responds.

“No problem,” the agent responds, “you have read and understand all the obligations and responsibilities that registering as a Caregiver entails, have you not?”

“Yes, I have,” Alyssa responds.

“Okay,” the agent says as the printer whirls to life, “I’ll need both of you to sign here…great. And I will notarize it now. Done. Okay, as soon as I scan that in the system, you will officially be registered as Samantha’s Caregiver.”

Tears well in Alyssa’s eyes as the notarized paper is scanned. She looks over at Sammy. Sammy timidly smiles back, grabbing Alyssa’s hand as she notices Alyssa’s tears.

“Thank you, Allie. I love you so much. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

“I love you, too, Sammy. Always.”

“Great, now that that is finished, you are officially a Caregiver, Alyssa! Now, just a few more things and you’ll both be done. First, we need new pictures of you both for your updated ID cards.”

With the pictures taken, the agent leaves to collect the new cards. When he comes back, she hands one to Alyssa.

“Your ID is essentially identical to your last, Alyssa. Same basic driver’s license, but with your Caregiver status listed there along with Samantha’s information.”

The agent hands the second one to Alyssa. “Here is Samantha’s Little Identification Card. It is important you carry it with you. Or whoever is caring for Samantha. Obviously, Samantha’s previous driver’s license has been rescinded. This new ID reflects her Level Two Little status, your information as Caregiver, and can be used as a bank card to cover any expenses if necessary. You may connect it to your bank later.”

Sammy looks at the card, more tears welling in her eyes. She didn’t even think about driving. But now it’s just another privilege she lost. She tries her best to not cry again.

“And finally,” the agent says, “here is your government stipend card for all new littles. The government covers most of the initial expenses for new Littles. It should cover the cost of one month of diapers, a new bed or crib, a changing table, the government mandated Little’s car seat and installation, as well as a head start on a new wardrobe and any accessories.”

“Thank you, understood,” Alyssa says.

“Now, you have 72 hours to schedule your car seat installation. If you fail to do so, you will receive a daily fine. And if your Little is not riding in it after that time, you will receive a hefty fine and ticket. You can arrange installation at Littles’R’Us, the government’s preferred Little’s retailer.”

“Understood,” Allie says.

“Now, unless you have any other questions, you are all set!”

“Nope, none from us. Thank you for your assistance!”

As they walk out of the Littles Registration Office, Alyssa stops and gives Sammy a massive hug and a kiss on the forehead. “I know that was all so much to handle all at once, Sammy. I’m so proud of you! You were so mature about all of it.”

Sammy just sighs. The whiplash for the last hour and a half clearly overwhelming her.

“How about this, Sammy. We don’t need to worry about any of this for the rest of the day. We can handle everything later. How about we go back home, you take a nap and forget about everything. I’ll call my parents and Lindsay and we can have a movie night. We can go shopping for you later if you want. How does that sound?”

“W-will I have to wear my diapers there, Allie?” Sammy whines.

“Let’s see how you do for the rest of your day. But if you do, I promise I won’t tell my parents or Lindsay you’re in diapers. It will be our little secret.”

“Okay, Allie. A movie does sound fun!”

Twenty minutes later, Sammy is fast asleep. Alyssa calls her parents.

“Hey Mom, it’s official, I’m a Caregiver!” Alyssa rejoiced.

“Oh my gosh, honey, I’m so proud of you! I’ve always known you’d make the best Caregiver when the time came! Sammy doesn’t know how lucky she is!”

“I’m the lucky one, Mom! But listen, today has already been extremely difficult on Sammy. I think I made a mistake by bringing her to the Littles Registration office so soon. Sammy got one look at all the Littles and had a very messy accident right in the waiting area.”

“Oh, the poor thing. How did she handle it?”

“Not very well, not that I blame her. I never wanted her first time in diapers to happen so publicly. But I think it’s safe to say she’ll be in diapers full time from now on.”

“I’m so sorry sweetie, I know you’d hoped for a bit longer before that happened. But it was inevitable.”

“I know, but it’s here now. And listen, to calm her down after, I told her I’d see if we can do a movie night as a family—and that I wouldn’t tell any of you about her diapers. So can you let Dad and Linds know so they can pretend Sammy’s not in diapers, at least for tonight?”

“That’s very sweet of you, Alyssa. I’ll let them know. What kinds of movies should I pick out? Do you only want movies appropriate for Littles tonight?”

“I think she deserves one last night of normalcy, Mom. We can worry about Little stuff in a day or two.”

“Sounds good, she is your Little after all! I’m still so proud! I’ll see you both tonight!”

Go to Chapter Twelve.