The New Coffee Room

@LuFins-Dad said in SNAP usage:

What’s your guys’ take on that woman in Michigan that was using her SNAP benefits to buy flour/eggs/milk and such, but was using it to make baked goods that she would sell online as a business? An under the table business at that, which means no income accounting.

TBH, my immediate response was 'good for her'. I don't think prosecuting her is particularly useful, or kind for that matter.

Obviously, rich people love to look down at people on stamps as being worthless parasites, and her entrepeneurial spirit rather undermines that.

Ours were exceptionally polite, almost everyone said thank you. There were a lot of parents.

The reason we get so many is that we are the first housing development as you come in from the rural parts of Rhode Island into a small town.

It also probably helps that while the houses on our street are fairly modest, there are a few streets nearby with a decent number of McMansions.

Next year I'm giving out hand grenades

@Mik said in Annual Halloween head count:

Holy crap.

I'm about to open one of Mr. Coppola's bottles of beverage and retire to the living room.

We had about 300. Down from last year's 400. They're still coming around.

In our last house we used to get about 6.

Don't forget George Washington. If he hadn't bankrupted the French monarchy there wouldn't have been a revolution, and we'd all be happily sipping tea in Boston.

If only they hadn't fucked everything up in 1919 and helped Germany recover along with the rest of Europe....Hitler could have spent his latter years painting people's bedrooms.

Ah, the rose tented mirrored sunglasses of historical after-knowledge.

@jon-nyc said in Shutdown Length:

As Churchill so memorably said he chose dishonor but got war anyway. Not sure how to save his reputation from that.

IMHO Ramsey McDonald and Stanley Baldwin should bear more responsibility for the mess than Chamberlain. Both McDonald and Baldwin seem to be mostly forgotten in these discussions nowadays, but Chamberlain really inherited the shit sandwich that they had carefully put together whilst desperately trying to avoid conflict in the 30's.

@Horace said in Shutdown Length:

which my parody of a bluesky poster unfortunately fell for. Neither you nor Phibes pushed back on that one, but for all dunks there is a time and place.

I have literally never read a single Bluesky post, so the parody went over my head unnoticed.

@89th said in Protecting myself from a dollar crash:

Yeah but doesn't the world use the US dollar as THE reliable and infallible stable currency, whereas whatever currency Ireland uses, pints o'guinness or something, Asia markets couldn't care less about?

Well it's the Euro, so it's not exactly a minor currency.

@89th said in Protecting myself from a dollar crash:

have to imagine in 10-15 years the whole "we pay 1-2 trillion dollars per year on nothing but the interest payment on debt" will eventually cause some sort of massive ripple effect.

It's worth noting that a number of European countries have higher per-capita debt than the US. Ireland's is almost 10 times as much - that's about a gazillion percent using Trump-math.

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

The house across the street from us has a 8 foot high witch a 12 foot high skeleton, and a 15 foot high scarecrow. We simply cannot compete, so we've gone for small black cats and inflatable snowmen.

I'd rather they eliminated the use of ALL CAPS and inappropriate "quotation" marks in official communications, but maybe that's just me.

If the future is anything like the past, the dollar's likely to be a lot more secure than the Euro. Just saying.

@Moonbat said in Moonbat:

Oh? Less political and philosophical vitriol?

We do all the vitriol by PM nowadays, but Horace never sees it of course.

A red hot poker up the arse would be my preference.

Giving "honors" to some guy who just happened to be born into the family is bloody stupid at best, never mind the bloody mansion.

@jon-nyc said in World Series:

Except with Eurovision, everybody loses.

Have you tried watching baseball? They take amphetamines just to stay awake.