• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • I live in Texas and when my partner changed addresses for his voter registration, it took like 2 fucking months. It was wild. He was just about to send a new one in when we got the confirmation card in the mail finally.

    I early voted yesterday and the poll worker nearly clicked that I did not have a sufficient photo ID because I was using my passport. Thankfully another poll worker intercepted right before she did because who knows what the fuck happens in the system when that button is pressed even once for you. 12-hr waiting period so I have “sufficient time” to retrieve my “proper” id? Getting on some purge list going forward for “suspicious voter activity”? I wouldn’t put anything past them… And, of course, I was only using my passport because I thought they might hassle me for my license address not matching my registration. They instead got hung up on the fact that my passport doesn’t have an address… Welcome to the South!


  • How do they know when you’re not working your full 40 if you aren’t clocking in or out? I’m not familiar with Canadian labor law so you may very well be right, but it is kind of hard to imagine a legal pay structure where they can dock you for working fewer hours but don’t compensate you for working more.

    Friendly reminder that wage theft is very common and just because lots of people are breaking the law doesn’t mean it’s actually legal. For example in the States, there is a fairly narrow definition of which jobs qualify as overtime exempt but go to a jobs board and you’ll find pretty much anything under the sun. Many employees are incorrectly classified as exempt and are completely unaware they are even entitled to overtime pay.











  • It isn’t about having a bad taste from the past. Policy like this would further disenfranchise vulnerable populations present day. A barrier for entry like this is going to disproportionately impact lower income folks. Hard to study for a test like this when you’re busting your ass at 3 part time jobs trying to make ends meet. That’s not even to mention the inequality that exists within the education system between higher and lower income areas to begin with. “Our system failed you, so now you’re not qualified to vote. Cheers!”

    Three guesses as to who this policy would affect more: white people or people of color?


  • Vyvanse is also having a shortage, caused in part by people not being able to get Adderall switching over. It’s not as bad as it was a few months ago (we called around and couldn’t find a pharmacy with a 30 day supply within a 2 hour radius) but they’re still having trouble getting enough, especially at the higher doses. Source: I literally talked to a pharmacist about this today when I went to pick up my other random-ass stimulant. My doctor told me to just keep asking them about it every month haha.


  • Man, where does everyone in the comments live that it still works like this? Where I’m at, they basically have attempted to replace like 90% of cashier jobs with these machines. There is often either no cashier at all, or one single cashier with like 5 people in their line, each with shopping carts filled to the brim.

    The self checkout lines routinely reach lines of 10+ people with many old people who struggle using the machines forced to use them and gumming up the operations more. I avoid going to the grocery store like the plague during any kind of higher traffic time because I don’t want to wait in line for 15 mins.

    Other issue with self checkout machines is that some places (Kroger, looking at you) weigh the bag every time you scan an item before you can scan the next, which makes things go soooooo slow.



  • I don’t know, I think it depends on a million different factors. I’m around your age and struggled badly financially out of college. I spent more than a year completely unemployed and when I finally got a seasonal retail job, it was a big fucking deal. Took about 6 years busting my ass climbing the ladder in that department store moving cross-country (costing several thousand dollars) before I started making $50k. In the meantime, my $40k principle had grown 25% during the unemployment deferment and my interest started to snowball because despite years and thousands of dollars in payments, my monthly payment didn’t even cover the interest.

    So yeah, while I no longer make a low wage, it was really fucking difficult to claw out of that hole (office jobs treat you with a ridiculous level of skepticism if you’ve been working full-time in retail.) It took the better part of a decade and meeting a partner whose second income helped defray the cost of living before I was actually able to see my amount owed go down. I honestly feel very lucky that things shook out the way they have because I can easily imagine it ending differently and certainly there are many for those it has.


  • Thankfully, Biden’s new IDR plan (“SAVE”) waives any additional accrued interest for the month after you’ve made your minimum payment (even if it’s $0.) This fixes the pretty massive flaw in the IDR plans that were allowing loans to grow out of control, despite payments made on them. As if people barely scraping by will not be unduly burdened by an even more massive debt if they ever manage to claw their way out of the low wage hole. Personally, after a long stretch of unemployment and low-wage jobs, I had like 5 years of payments under my belt and my loan had grown by 25%. Lol… Still hurts to think about even though I’m doing much better these days.

    FYI, idk if anything will actually come of it, but Biden is now trying to do a more targeted loan forgiveness and one of the groups he is targeting are those who owe more than their initial loans. So, I guess we’ll see what happens.