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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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

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

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





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

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




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

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




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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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




  • By my read, this is the core of the articles argument:

    But if these billionaires’ largesse was designed to retain the conservative judge on the country’s highest court, the donations might fall outside of the definition of tax-free gifts, which according to the Supreme Court must stem from “detached and disinterested generosity.” If the benefits showered on Thomas were designed to elicit court actions or job decisions, they could be considered taxable income, whether or not there is definitive proof of quid pro quo on Thomas’s part.


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

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

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



  • Just spitballing here, but the “dream job” question might also come down to the destruction of the middle class (and the recognition thereof). 20 years ago it looked a lot more like you could make a good living working for someone else, doing something interesting. Plus there was more trust that employers would “do right” by their employees. There were pensions and quality healthcare benefits.

    Now all that (and the security it brings) has dissolved. It may not be Gen Z people wanting to make it big or be a celebrity, but a desire to live comfortably and seeing that they can’t trust an employer to let them do that. If the only way you can build security for yourself is by building a big pile of money, then people are going to seek that out.

    Edit: and when I say that “20 years ago” these things existed, I don’t mean that they were still functioning like they did another generation earlier, but it was way better than it is now and there was less awareness of what was happening.