Provocation or no, you shouldn't have burned all those poor people's houses down.
They were dream houses in my head! I never thought this would happen!
I think I thought I saw a blog post by heebie.
Or maybe that was just a dream.
If you tug a dumb thread, a whole dumb dream will unravel.
Headline from today's NYT
Nuclear War Could End the World, but What if It's All in Our Heads?
Coincidence? Or is this the time, long-prophesied by mystics, in which everyone sees through the veil of illusion that is the physical universe?
I dreamed I became Death in my Maidenform bra.
Since my theories of the mind aren't inspiring much conversation, let me share two other things:
1. I ordered some lights off Etsy for the new bathroom. Store is located in the UK.
A week or two later, I get an email from Etsy saying basically that the store is a scam and I can open a case and get my money back. The store no longer exists on Etsy.
However, a day later I notice some shipping label has been created in China. So I decide to wait and see.
A few weeks later, it shows up in Chicago, and then it gets delivered on Saturday. Only it's just the cheap lamp shades, not the actual fixture. So file a case with Etsy. Within seconds, they refund my money. Like an automatic process has been established to do so.
Two days later, a second package shows up from China. There was never a second shipping number or any indication that the rest of my lights were in a separate package. And happy day, it's the rest of the fixtures! Hooray!
If I call Etsy and explain what happens and let them re-bill me for the money, is there any chance that it would actually get to the vendor? If the vendor has shut down ties with Etsy over something, it seems like Etsy will just pocket the money.
I'm okay sending $300 to the vendor, but is that what's going to happen? Or should I just enjoy my free lights?
A geeblet is demanding my attention and so the second item of edu-tainment must wait.
If they don't ask for the money just keep it. In grad school I got my first year class books from some dot com bubble disruptive book selling technology startup which apparently didn't include billing in their tech stack. Never paid for the books.
During early covid, my wife ordered an office chair from Amazon. It didn't arrive for months, and she was patient because covid. But eventually she started to process to get a refund. The chair showed up two days after the refund.
Reader, my ass is on that chair right now.
That's not true. But we still have the chair and actually ordered spare parts and repaired it once.
Do not try to pay for the goods, heebie. It's noble of you, and I guess that's more money than my $16 free towel, but you can make a $300 charitable donation that will be more beneficial than trying to get to a Chinese vendor via a platform that is screwing them over. It's hard to say what anyone's costs, losses, or profits were here, and it's not your job to fix it.
Unrelatedly, if this is an open thread, absolute WTF map of the day. "The more developed precolumbian American cultures"? What kind of thirdhand hodgepodge theory of civilization...?
(I was reading about the Darién Gap. I'm sorry I haven't been following any threads here at all for the last week or two, just popping in at random when I'm at loose ends. This will probably continue. How is everyone?)
Someone waited their whole life to say "Fuck You" to the Mound Builders and saw their chance.
14.2: Wow, that is amazingly incoherent.
I think "Aridoamerica" is intended to include the Pueblos, although the map doesn't reflect it accurately if so.
I've always wanted to live above a cliff.
15. Fine. Thanks for asking. Hope you are well.
My new employee started today and I'm feeling a huge relief already just from having someone to help out.
16-17: so many inexplicable grudges. Maybe it's based on someone's (local museum's) art collection? Only thing I can think of and it doesn't make much sense.
It looks kind of like a version of "Nuclear America" subdivided into regions, with the Northwest and Arctic tacked on for some reason? It's baffling.
It's like Grandpa Simpson and his "I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missouri."
I can now share the second bit of edu-tainment: Jammies' colleague is a sweet young 20-something who got kicked out of a bar in Ft. Worth over the weekend.
Apparently the bar was not very crowded and she was having a drink with a friend, and a man came over and he was mad at her. She was in trouble for not standing up. She was not clear on who the man was or what was going on.
It turned out that he was the owner of the bar, and there was a re-run of a 3 year old rodeo on the TV, and the national anthem was playing. She was supposed to have been standing.
I don't know if her company was standing or how this unfolded, except that she is not a confrontational person. Somehow it ended up with him saying that it was time for her to leave the bar.
I'm assuming teachers are like teamsters, so a bunch of them are going to go back to that bar next weekend and beat up everyone.
Clapping chalk-covered erasers on the wall as they leave.
I'm okay sending $300 to the vendor, but is that what's going to happen? Or should I just enjoy my free lights?
I placed an order from a department store (in the US) and after a few days I noticed that I had two charges, one for the correct total and one for a number that didn't seem to correspond to anything I bought. I didn't have shipping confirmations at that point. I called the credit card company to dispute the charge, they said I should cancel the card and get a new number, so I did.
A few days later, the charge for the total amount was adjusted to correspond to one of the two packages my stuff arrived in, and I realized that the other charge was a weird number because of how a special discount had been applied. So the charges ended up being correct, one for each package, and the store didn't make it clear that that's what happened.
Since I disputed one of the charges, I thought that I might get a letter saying the company had denied the dispute and show the charges were correct. But that didn't happen so I ended up getting the money back. I guess they might have decided as a policy that it wasn't worth countering a dispute of that amount (about $50).
I no longer remember what I got for "free". It wasn't worth having to change my credit card number on something like a dozen accounts. I did cancel a couple of recurring subscriptions, given the opportunity to re-evaluate them.
That explanation doesn't quite work for me because I would have renewed two of the services I canceled if their systems didn't suck. One service never told me that the charge to the old card number was declined, it just stopped working even though the account status in their own app told me I was paid up. Since it was cloud storage I decided I couldn't trust a service that couldn't be bothered to communicate with customers, so I canceled my account. It looked like they were going into the enterprise market and letting everything else go to shit. Anyway, I only figured out what happened by going through my previous year's credit card statements to find my renewal date.
The other service botched the renewal by not applying the payment after I updated my card. Instead, they kept emailing me that I needed to change the number. I went in, verified that I'd changed it, got another reminder, decided to cancel my account. In the "why did you cancel" box I told them that they'd failed to charge me when they had the chance.
tl;dr, I'm not letting any f#$#@$g economists call me inattentive.
I had a recurrent donation that I was going to let lapse, and then I got a notice saying that it was going to stop because I needed to update my credit card info, so I thought that was great. I just wouldn't update my credit card info.
It still seems to be using my expired credit card with no problem though, and we're six months past or something.
27: no, just go round with some Bluetooth speakers and start making trouble, and every time the owner heads towards them to throw them out, they hit Play on an iPod and the national anthem starts and he has to stand stock still at attention while it plays. ALL FOUR VERSES. By the time it finishes they've moved over to the other side of the room.
Like Grandmother's Footsteps.
AIHMHB the most blatant credit card fraud I've been the victim of was a gym where we pre-planned to stop after a fixed time. Knowing that gyms will never let you cancel, we gave them a single-use card number that only had funds to cover that period of time. As expected they ignored our requests to cancel membership, but when the single use card failed they went into their files and found a card we had previously used for kids' swim lessons at their facility and started charging that one instead.
35 is remarkable. It does make clear that, "impossible to cancel " is a deliberate strategy.
The Smiling Bob people took that strategy to felonious levels.
I ordered a side table from Wayfair in April 2020. It arrived in May 2020, and when I started to assemble it I realized it was missing an integral piece. I called Wayfair and they agreed to send the missing piece. I got an invoice with estimated shipping in 10 days. 10 days later, I get a notice that the shipping has been pushed back about 2 weeks. Two weeks after that I get a message it's been pushed back to September 2020 (it is still May). I call Wayfair and they tell me the part will likely never arrive and refund me my money. I have 90% of a side table and if I knew the dimensions of the missing piece I could have made my own out of wood so I don't just want to throw it out. Anyways, I figure out who the manufacturer is and I see they sell furniture directly from their website, including my side table (for much cheaper than Wayfair, btw). I call them and explain that I've purchased their side table and ask for the missing part. (It's now about July) There's a bit of back and forth over the course of a week with some miscommunication within the company but eventually they tell me the part is on the way. About two weeks later I get a box that contains an entire new side table. I make a copy of the missing piece out of plywood and then assemble two side tables, in August.
The overall monetary price was free but probably the amount of time and energy spent didn't really make it worth it.
Regarding "In a dream, everyone is you," this looks like an on-topic opportunity to get some intel on exactly how weird I am: I often have dreams where none of the people is me. That is to say, I'm watching something happen to other people, like television -- and sometimes very much like television in that I'm dreaming about the characters in a TV show.
Sometimes I am one of the TV characters; sometimes I am experiencing the dream in first-person as somebody else, but not someone I know; mostly I'm just watching. So how peculiar is that?
39: I lost a screw from a telescope. The nice people at Celestron sent me a screw for free after I described the part and sent them a picture of the place the screw belonged -- but by then I had replaced the screw from a hardware store and now have spares if I drop another screw in tall grass.
I ordered a football jersey from eBay. It didn't come by the outside arrival date. I queried eBay, which told me (without me asking) that I would be refunded my money. I contacted the seller and told him not to send me the jersey because my money had been refunded and I had bought from another seller. He acknowledged receipt of my note, and sent the jersey anyway. I asked him for his contact information so I could send the jersey back. He told me to just contact him via eBay. When I did that, his account had been eliminated. So now my brother will also have a Myles Garrett jersey.
I dreamed I was looking for a bathroom. I'm really glad I didn't find one.
PF is a biblical prophet. Which is in character, I guess.
I can't remember any such dreams, myself.
40. I sometimes have dreams where I have no role in what's happening-- maybe I'm a person watching and maybe not a person, just watching. How stable is wakeful identity? As we outsource our memories to Meta and our social interactions to a fragmented array of servers, does losing one password mean losing a shard of self?
I had term life insurance, with the price guaranteed for some number of years. The insurance company notified me that the cost wold quadruple at the end of the current guarantee period, 60 days away. I cancelled the policy as of that future date. Inexplicably, they sent me a refund for the remaining 60 days on the existing policy, which I had not requested. If I deposited the check I would be accepting that the policy had been cancelled, so I didn't do that. I explained to my wife that if I were to die in the next 60 days, the check should NOT be deposited, and if the insurer claimed the policy had been cancelled, they were wrong and we had the receipts that proved it. I even printed out the relevant document.
60 days passed and I remained alive (my wife not having responded to the obvious incentive). The next day I deposited the check, effectiverly having enjoyed 60 days of coverage for free. Of course, that coverage was worthless anyway, since I hadn't died.
I had term life insurance, with the price guaranteed for some number of years. The insurance company notified me that the cost wold quadruple at the end of the current guarantee period, 60 days away. I cancelled the policy as of that future date. Inexplicably, they sent me a refund for the remaining 60 days on the existing policy, which I had not requested. If I deposited the check I would be accepting that the policy had been cancelled, so I didn't do that. I explained to my wife that if I were to die in the next 60 days, the check should NOT be deposited, and if the insurer claimed the policy had been cancelled, they were wrong and we had the receipts that proved it. I even printed out the relevant document.
60 days passed and I remained alive (my wife not having responded to the obvious incentive). The next day I deposited the check, effectiverly having enjoyed 60 days of coverage for free. Of course, that coverage was worthless anyway, since I hadn't died.
