The USDA and FDA regulations make it basically a requirement for food to be processed in the US, hence why there’s so many massive food processing facilities in the US. Based on the recalls they’ve been caught up in, Aldi works with the same white label processors as other grocery chains and quite clearly works with them to set the taste, quality & ingredient expectations and of course the price.

There is a noticeably less sugar in Aldi’s goods than most other brands, but I also see far more packaging errors in Aldi’s goods than other budget brands, for example. Their packaging is also heavier into recyclable materials and uses less plastic

Back in the day when I worked at an American grocery chain they had a rule that you were not allowed to drink water where customers could see. Literally the only person who ever cared was the franchise owner. I’m sorry, I’ve been scanning and bagging hundreds of products for the last 3 hours during a holiday rush, I might need to wet my mouth between customers from time to time.

When they initially put in the self checkouts the delay for scanning was set to similar to a manned checkout, and as someone who spent my formative years cashiering at a grocery store, I greatly appreciated being able to quickly scan through my stuff. They upped the delay between scans after a few weeks, so now its like 10 seconds before you can scan another of the same item, so I’ve just gotten creative in alternating items to scan faster

For me I found they struggle to cook the very center in the microwave, so I’ll usually give them 60 seconds to thaw, cut it in half then another 60 seconds (or was it 30?) to finish cooking. Only problem is my kids very consistently try to steal them from me if I dare to eat them when they’re around so I’m quickly better off just making something else

Yeah I get almost everything from Aldi because the quality is consistently comparable to name-brand while being significantly cheaper. Its also nice that the stores are so small so you can focus more on shopping and less on getting through the store itself

There’s a few items where I do prefer from other stores (particularly meats and fresh fruits/veggies as the Aldi ones tend to go off faster and are lower quality) but generally I’ll hit Aldi, then my local grocery store for the last couple of items from my list, thereby keeping me well-within my grocery budget and getting the best of both worlds. Plus I can usually get it all done within about an hour thanks to only needing to hit a couple of isles in the big grocery store

Hey that’s honestly super awesome. Most folks don’t have that kind of financial discipline when they’re young.

When I was first on my own I was just proud that I was a able to pay extra on my possibly-illegal car loan that I got from a place that was shut down a couple of years later for credit fraud

Ideally yes, but on top of your normal expenses socking away $800/mo is a ton, especially since we’re almost certainly talking about a young adult, fairly freshly on their own who’s probably only making around 30-40k per year. When each paycheck is under a thousand dollars every couple of weeks that money disappears fast especially with the financial discipline one can realistically expect of a young adult

Car rentals are so expensive nowadays. Enough so that I’ve never done it in my adult life. Its always expensive enough that it makes some alternative make way more sense, whether that’s driving our own vehicle somewhere or just winging it with public transit

When I was car shopping at the end of 2024, I quickly realized the best bang for the buck was around $10-12k because at that price you could get a low-mid range vehicle that was around 6 years old with around 100k miles. Obviously some vehicles in that price range would be older with fewer miles, some would be newer with more miles, but that seemed to be about the price range where you’d get a vehicle which you could reasonably expect to be mechanically sound for at least another 2-3 years. Less than that and you got into vehicles that were far more worn either by age or by mileage, so you’d be trading upfront payment for additional maintenance costs.

$10k is a lot of money to save up. That’s about my entire emergency fund right now. That’s almost 3 years of socking away $300 a month, or 2 years at $500 a month. Simply put vehicle ownership is horrendously expensive especially for folks making close to minimum wage

I like the Gay Bar or Steak House one

If you’ve not seen the Blues Brothers go watch it right now. Order the DVD if you have to. Its absolutely worthwhile. Its an SNL spinoff film with a Legendary soundtrack featuring the biggest names in the Blues and Jazz scene. Great soundtrack, brilliant gags, incredible car chases and just a ton of rediculous chaos.

I have no clue what MultiPlex theaters are

So back in the earlier days of cinema, you’d go to the Cineplex to see a movie. A Cineplex would only have a single screen for viewing movies while the multiplex would have multiple screens for seeing movies on. This started with the first duplex theatre in 1915 and later the first triplex in 1966, shortly followed by theatres with 6+ screens which is around when the term “multiplex” started being used. Basically for anyone born after the 80s (therefore anyone under the age of about 40) the term is largely obsolete since most theatres have at least 4 screens and qualify as multiplexes, plus the industry has seen so much consolidation that smaller independent theatres with 1-2 screens are pretty uncommon now

Around mid-2020 I worked at a callcenter. The organization I worked for had lower tiers of support via a callcenter in the Philippines and higher tiers via the stateside callcenter I worked at. When everyone went remote some of the staff at the Philipines callcenter emigrated to other countries and there was one particular member who always had some very noisy chickens in the background of their calls. It seriously reminded me how nice remote work can be for folks because this guy was chilling at home with his chickens nearby instead of in a stuffy office with a bunch of other unhappy underpaid callcenter workers. It was funny though how some customers reacted to it, sometimes it would just be one more thing for angry customers to complain about and other times it would be a wistful thing a customer commented about in a later positive review

To shreds you say

To be fair, most languages end up using English words for stuff that’s tech related. For example, I’ve been learning Italian and actually laughed out loud when I learned that the Italian word for coach (which seems to be used for both buses and trains) is “Pullman” it gets even more obvious when it’s a computer-related technology

Probably next year I might try to learn a bit of German because I keep encountering Germans writing in German on various parts of the internet and it would be fun to join the club (plus I’d love to visit Germany sometime so that would remove one barrier for sure)

I absolutely have been, but holy crap this job market sucks. I’ve gotten so close on multiple interviews just to get passed up at the last minute (or scarier, they’ll announce they’ve decided not to fill the role at all!)

On the upside, with this contracting gig I’m making more than I made when I worked for them full time while only working ~30 hours a week fully remotely so it’s not a bad gig at all. I’m just frustrated that my boss wants to get me a job offer, the CTO wants to get me a job offer, I have the director of safety saying he wants me to get a job offer, but the CFO just isn’t budging

lawmakers were really putting the peoples’ interests first, they would have just said that for a part-time job the employer would have to provide benefits based on the fraction of 40 hours the employee worked (e.g. 20 hours is half-benefits).

Then shitty jobs would only give people up to 10 hours per week so they’d have to work 4 jobs to get close to 40 hours, and of course that quarter benefits wouldn’t cover jack shit. Quarter benefits and people working 4 jobs would also make it a 75% chance that any employee you hire and schedule at ~10 hours per week doesn’t accept the benefits thereby saving the business money

Better solution would be single payer healthcare, i.e. Medicare for all, plus expanding social security to pay more than a starvation amount would also be ideal. I’ve also previously outlined the thoughts of expanding SNAP/Foodstamps to all, housing assistance vouchers to all and Social Security to all to effectively reach UBI based entirely off of existing programs that tens of millions of Americans are already on right now. Work becomes how you fund hobbies and a better lifestyle and economic downturns don’t hurt normal people as much

Korea wasn’t legally considered a war for bullshit political reasons for far too long and as a result veterans and families of veterans were denied benefits they should have received after giving some or all for the country now fucking them over

For similar reasons in my current independent contractor role I’m limited to working less than 32 hours per week, presumably to prevent claims of being misclassified as a contractor.

Now as for why I’m an independent contractor and not a full time employee that’s down to freaking corporate politics following being laid off, leaving for another role and then being begged to come back because they needed my expertise and organizational knowledge (I’ve been heavily trained to pick up the torch for an employee who’s retiring in 2 years, which with the amount of undocumented nonsense and organization-specific decisions it would take a solid 2 years just to get anyone trained up on everything and I’m the only one with the technical and organizational knowledge in the organization right now) so in short they’d greatly reduce costs by bringing me on full time but the CFO won’t approve the job offer (and that’s literally the only stakeholder holding it back)

So honest question, what is everyone’s hopes with the increase in Linux desktop use?

Like when I think about it the only thing I really care about is that I have decent hardware/driver support and holdouts for anti-cheat give up on requiring other operating systems (mostly so that my wife and eldest child stop complaining that I can’t play Fortnite with them) as well as other random stuff that flat-out blocks use with Linux and requires either extra configuration or to keep a spare computer around with Windows.

Basically I hope that Linux can be where MacOS was about a decade ago, a second platform that vendors are aware of and will put in some amount of effort in to support (and will be clear about limitations/lack of support otherwise) and it won’t be as weird to employers or schools if you have a preference for the platform