Allstate has, by far, the worst customer service I’ve ever experienced from a car insurance company. I personally will not willingly do business with them ever again.

BEWARE

Every time I called, it felt like I was on trial. It was like they were interrogating me, picking into every little detail, looking for ways to prove I owe them more money. At one point, they threatened to increase my rates because I have a parent living with me at the same address. A parent who has no license and is not physically able to get to the car without my help. They forced me to submit documentation to prove all this under threat of having to pay more for my insurance.

When I was looking at renewal, they sent me a quote that was an order of magnitude larger than what any other insurer quoted me. I ended my policy on the spot, and then had to fight to get a prorated refund from them for the remainder of my policy term. They still tried to charge me for the new policy, despite having cancelled.

And that’s not all, that’s just some of the “highlights”.

Good luck to you OP! May the suffering you are about to endure cleanse the karmic debts of your past lives.

The engagement bait, algorithmic nature of social media is up there for me. Everything has to be the most extreme, divisive there’s no room for gradients and equivalency.

I had a phone back in the day where all I had to do is violently flick it abruptly to enable the flashlight. I use my phone’s flashlight a lot, always have.

There are apps that supposedly do the same thing, but I’ve never found one that worked so well, and so reliably as the one that was baked into the phone’s features/OS/whatever. All the free ones I’ve tried have AIDS I mean ads, though it’s been awhile since I last tried any.

Do I think that it is a possibility? Sure.

Do I think that it is likely in the near to medium term future? No.

It’s way too complex for me to boil down to a simple slogan, and ain’t nobody got time to read what I’d need to write to sufficiently explain and I ain’t got time to explain it. Closest I can come is that UBI is “equality” in a system would currently benefit more from “equity”, at least from a US-centric stand point. I am not anti-UBI by any means, just more inclined to say that a strong, need-based social safety net would be more efficient and beneficial than a thin, wide-cast net like UBI.

Contemporary unemployment rates aren’t a great metric to consider for the necessity/utility of UBI. The current unemployment situation in a lot of the world is a symptom of inefficiency and instability in the system (hand wavy gesture). UBI doesn’t address the underlying factors, not that it has to. But at the same time, status quo and inertia are massive forces to overcome, and “different but the same outcome” isn’t the push that’s needed to get over that hump. So, I just don’t think we’re anywhere close to getting over that barrier.

Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.

At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.

Yeah, I heard him say Epsteins as well. Didn’t see the fondling part, so that day was a good day for my brain and eyes.

We’re all mentally conditions on this blessed day.

When I see shit like this, I click the X a little further up at the top of the tab which closes the whole tab and then I never go back because fuck complacent and/or incompetent developers.

So you’ve never heard of … eggs?

This is why I piss into the sink instead. And since I didn’t have to touch any surfaces beside my own wiener, I don’t even have to worry about washing my hands.

I have several. I don’t want them. Please come take them. I’ll give them to you for free to save me the hassle and money of getting rid of them. I didn’t want them to begin with and I don’t want them now. I did not buy them. They do me no good. They make my life worse.

As an old person who knows a lot of old people and has to deal with a lot of other old people, you’re in a bubble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and you may already be aware.

By and large, early gen X and older have a very difficult time discerning what materials are AI generated. Then when you get to a certain age range, maybe 70+, AI to much of that crowd is just another buzzword they know nothing about.

Now, in the pedantic sense of the word “increasingly”, if literally one more old person is against AI or doesn’t trust AI compared to last year, then that’s increasing. But on the whole, I’m not seeing it. In fact, as AI gets “better” and harder to detect, I’m finding that more people just go with it. You basically end up with camps of “the person who accuses everything of being AI”, “the person who has no clue what’s what and doesn’t care”, and “the person who can’t tell if something is AI regardless of how obvious it is”.

I’m glad that folks are in the comments factually educating others about this.

But truly sad that there’s this amount of … ignorance, particularly of the willful kind. I thought that was for the nazis, pedophiles, and their supporters.

ME TOO!

Hot takes are the violent diarrhea of the internet.

Loving this low effort controversy bait! LOVING IT. LOOOOOOOVE IT. NOT.

I’ve only stopped buying specific brands completely, otherwise, I’d characterize my situation as cutting back on things where the price got ridiculous.

Coffee is / was the big one. I used to stock the cheap, store brand stuff for when I needed a morning lift. That was pre-tariff $9. I’d also stock the good stuff, the brand and variety that I really like a lot, usually around $12 a bag. Tariffs kicked in, the “cheap” stuff went to $20 per lb immediately. The good stuff went to $22 (but only like 12 oz or something). So, no more name brand, and I cut way back on coffee consumption. Fucked up part, tariffs are done and the prices dropped, but nowhere near the old price. The cheap stuff is still $14, so $5 more than 1.5 years ago.

My preferred soap, shampoo, and personal care products are largely the same story. I stopped buying the products I like, switched to store brand stuff that doesn’t smell good and doesn’t work as good / dries my skin & hair. But I’m not paying what the name brands want for their shit.

I used to keep a lot of candy and snacks on hand for guests, as we always have someone stopping by, including adult children and relatives. The candy stockpile was super popular. But the prices on that stuff has sky rocketed, and they fill the variety bags with a bunch of unpopular (to us) shit that just sits in the candy basket and goes bad. I haven’t bought any of that stuff, sans once or twice for myself in over a year.

I don’t buy canned tuna at all. Technically, I cut back on that b/c of mercury concerns years ago, but every once in awhile I’d still have a can. It’s gone down to 5 oz from 6 oz. The cans have changed in size so that my strainer doesn’t fit anymore. The prices have gone way up. Canned fish in general I’ve almost completely stopped buying.

I’m trying to hold off on buying new shoes. I desperately need a new pair because the old ones I use for daily outdoor activities are falling apart and stink to high heavens. But I looked at prices recently and said oh hell no. Unfortunately I wear an odd size so even looking around from time to time at the second hand shops hasn’t been successful, and even so I feel weird about second hand shoes.