dual_sport_dork

Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they're going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they're going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they're so smart because nobody's thought of it before.

It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won't install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer's house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.

All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you're stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.

So yeah, that's probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can't just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody's front porch.

On your own property? No it ain't. On the street, sure.

The vast majority of homeless people are not visible, and they are not the stereotype of the drunken incoherent bum sleeping under a newspaper on a park bench like the guy in Back to the Future.

It's startlingly easy to become homeless simply by having a minor upset in your income, which can get you evicted quickly if you're renting and especially so if you live in an area which has weak or nonexistent tenant protections. Lots of homeless people were doing just fine or at least close to okay before something happened. They got injured and thus lost their job. A spouse divorced them and took most of the income with them. Their house burned down but they didn't have enough insurance to cover it. They had to escape from an abusive domestic partner. Etc.

These are just ordinary people who had their home pulled out from under them for some reason. Now they're temporarily living on a friend's couch, or in their car, or in a motel room, or whatever. But the barrier for entry for obtaining housing is so damn high in many places that it's impossible for them to work up the capital to make it over that hump and either make rent plus a security deposit, or magically cough up the down payment on a mortgage.

Many of these people probably already owned a car before whatever it was happened to them and thus they still do. Even if they're still paying off the loan on that car, that monthly payment is almost guaranteed to be less than rent or a mortgage.

I think you have it slightly twisted. If you're mowing your own lawn on your own property as a dude and showing a bare chest, you will find that there are no laws on the books in your locale prohibiting this. If you dare to show boobs while doing so, however, you are certain to cop an indecent exposure charge (or at least the threat of the same) if anyone sees you.

There are some exceptions where being out and about topless as a woman isn't illegal, but these are indeed exceptions in specific states and municipalities, which is kind of the point of this entire thread. Nobody's going to say anything to a guy doing this, even if he's ugly.

Yes, but everything you listed is the kind of crap we should be teaching in high school, and aren't. That's because America has a fascination with transforming our middle and high schools into tiny little prisons and disciplinary systems rather than places where education happens.

In a theoretical correctly functioning modern society, college absolutely should not be necessary to earn a living except if you wish to enter a specialized field where a significant degree of additional training and accreditation is required in order to, among other things, ensure public safety. If you want to be a doctor or dentist, lawyer, architect, critical infrastructure engineer, etc., then yes. Absolutely, there should be a degree for that.

No one should be attempting to demand with any kind of straight face that it should be "required" to have a nonspecific bullshit degree to get a job in sales, marketing, retail or even retail management, graphic design, programming, etc. In fact, the vast majority of both white collar and blue collar jobs in reality have absolutely nothing to do with getting a degree other than showing employers that you're Willing To Play The Game.

A beater car is still probably cheaper than an apartment. Also, you can't drive your slummy apartment away if you don't like the scene wherever it is, nor can it transport you to work. It's also some modicum of space wherein you can lock up what stuff you do own.

If I were placed under the terms of some very specific curse where I had to choose explicitly between a car and a house, I'm sorry to say I would be forced to choose my car. Actually, if I had my druthers I would probably pick my truck over my car, because despite its impracticality for daily transportation it's big enough to live in semi-comfortably as kind of a mini RV and would also allow me to store and transport some tools and stuff. (It'd also be much easier to use my truck to make money than a car, in some manner of hypothetical sudden destitution scenario.)

The right to drink a beer while operating a riding lawn mower in full view of the public without wearing a shirt.

We're probably going to find out eventually. For instance, I have never once in my life had any manner of account for any traditional social media. Just reddit (not anymore) and here. That's it.

So good luck with that, fuckers.

Chip bags are full of air to protect the chips from being crushed in transit.

Your corn is full of... uh, whatever it is that's in there with creamed corn in order to protect your corn. Obviously.

There is no surer way to ruin a work of literature for someone than to force them to write a book report on it.

Or switch Firefox to reader mode (F9), which usually reveals the content of the article with any extraneous CSS trickery removed.

Authoritarian fuckwits making sweeping ultimatums to change typefaces for spurious, racist, and political reasons?

Believe it or not, this has happened before. Perhaps most famously... yes, guess who!