1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
My bank's mutual fund let me buy and sell at yesterday's price, so every time the stock market went up, I bought, and when it went down, I sold. I talked to a teller about it, wondering how much money the mutual fund rule designer had pumped money out of the bank by then. They quickly changed the rule into a non-insane form: today's price.
I should have just shut up and kept pumping money out of the idiot bank, but I was young and stupid. The bank was in the game, the bank was fair game.
The best loophole I've ever learned about is closed now.
Early in the Dubya administration they were pushing the dollar coins pretty hard. They went through a whole thing where any government coin-operated machine had to take dollar coins (veterans of the time mostly saw this as it mostly effected military bases but this is why the stamp vending machines at the post office suddenly became useless; they now took dollars instead of quarters).
One of the ways they "encouraged" the use of dollar coins was selling them directly on the Mint's website. You could go on the US mint's website and pay face value for them with a credit card, and they paid for shipping. Spend $500, and 500 $1 coins would be shipped to your door.
So people would order tens of thousands of dollars in coins on a credit card, as soon as they arrived they'd haul the coins to the bank and deposit them, immediately pay off the credit card bill with the deposited currency thus accruing no interest, and then they'd have all those rewards points to spend. The government was taking it up the ass shipping tons of coins to residential addresses, the goal of putting them into circulation utterly failed because they were being taken directly to banks, the credit card companies were taking it up the ass on rewards points that weren't generating enough interest payments to feed the parasites. The policy got canned.
Imagine getting to fuck over a Republican administration and the parasite industry in one perfectly legal move. Too bad I was 14 at the time and wasn't allowed to have a credit card.
Coinage in this country is one of my pet peeves. We should have a 3, 5, an .50 coins in regular circulation. Coins can work great. They can work fast too.
I can't believe people shit all over the coin (Sacagawea dollar piece) like they did. They should have made it bigger though, too similar to a quarter to easily distinguish by feeling.
A lot of the mistake was made decades earlier with the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which was the same color and basically the same size as a quarter and thus often mistaken for one. The solution? Mint it in """""""gold""""""". It's actually brass, mainly copper and zinc with some manganese and nickel. Brand new it's too yellowy and then it tarnishes. It pretends to be gold way worse than the copper-nickel mix in quarters, dimes and, well, nickels pretend to be silver.
It's still the same dimensions as an Anthony dollar so it still has the problem that it's very close in size and shape to a quarter, most coin op machines either outright won't take them or will accept them as quarters, and we're used to "cents are coins, dollars are paper" that most people didn't care. The republicans hated them because there was a brown chick on it, everyone hated them because they tried to immediately cram them into everyday life, and then the Mint hated them because they took it up the ass shipping tons of them to residential addresses only for them to end up in banks in original mint packaging anyway.
If it were me, what I would do is scrap the idea that there are 100 cents in a dollar because the dollar has gotten too worthless to worry about a hundredth of one. Stop minting pennies, nickels and quarters, let the existing stock circulate for a couple decades without minting more, and then when everyone is naturally standardized on the dime, ditch the cent entirely and make it 10 dimes to a dollar. I am also a raging misanthrope who would bring back burning at the stake, so probably don't vote for me.
The great recoinage/auto-da-fé of 2025!
auto-da-fé, what's an auto-da-fé?
It's what you oughtn't a do but you do anyway.
I remember hearing about this one. So simple, so effective, it's beautiful.
Not something I did, but something a former 'friend' did:
Make a shitty dinosaur game, release it on Steam.
Get Steam to support your game's items on the Steam Market Place.
Some other friend wants to buy a game?
You want to buy a game?
Use your admin powers to directly create rare in game items, then trade the items to your friend who then sells them, or you sell them yourself.
I think he managed to functionally defraud Steam of around a thousand bucks doing this.
... This is the 'career path' of a garry's mod rp server admin, who would write viruses into the lua files which would be automatically downloaded and executed (escaping garry's mod and steam!) by any one who joined his gmod server, such that either Garry or Valve had to completely rewrite the way lua was executed in the source engine to prevent this exploit.
Anyway, last time I talked with him, he'd gone fully through the 4chan kekistan to QAnon to actual outright white supremacist fascist, has had several of his Steam accounts entirely VAC banned.
What’s the game? I think I played it. Was it released 10 years ago?
Tried cancelling adobe. They wanted to charge for the rest of the year or something as a cancellation fee. Instead, I "upgraded" to a more expensive package, giving me their 14 day refund policy and was able to cancel immediately and still gave me access to the rest of the month. Fuck adobe
Fuck adobe
Pirating adobe will always be morally correct
Go to a climbing gym. "I think I left my drink bottle here last week. It was clear, about this size". Worker pulls out a box of lost and found drink bottles. "Oh, that is it there". Take a dusty one (so you know it's been there a while, and nobody's coming back for it). Now you have a new drink bottle! Give it a clean and go!
ITT: fraud
lol
"Walmart rentals"
If you need a product for a project but can't afford it, go buy it at Walmart, use it, and when you're done return it. Their return policy is pretty no questions asked, especially if you have a receipt. I had a roommate do this with an iPad he needed for a semester in college. I think it was a 14 day return policy, so he'd back it up and take it back every 13 days, then just buy a new one and repeat until the semester was over.
Even if you don't have a receipt, actually. I've returned things I bought at Target to Walmart and gotten a refund. Granted, that was a few years ago.
I'm from the UK but aware of this because of the movie Garden State
Credit card manufactured spending. Still doable, but I think it's more difficult now.
You sign up for a fancy card with a fancy offer. Say, spend 6k in 3 months, get 1k in points.
Then you go to the local post office, and buy a money order for 6k. They used to be more permissive about letting you charge it on the CC, with only a nominal fee.
Then deposit that money order to your bank, use that money to pay off the charge for 6k. Boom, free signup bonus achieved.
There was a time you could get an AARP credit card that had 5% cashback, you don't have to be a certain age to join AARP in order to get the card. At the same time the federal reserve was letting people buy quarters in bulk without any shipping fees. So, order thousands in quarters, take them straight to the bank, repeat.
In Australia most retailers discount specific items for "members". Being a member is free but you need to sign up with your contact details. They will give you a card but no one carries a million cards so cashier's just ask for your phone number.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority administers phone numbers in Australia and they publish a list of phone numbers which may not be used by telco's and are reserved for the exclusive use in TV shows, films, and creative works.
I made a note of one of the numbers in my phone, and provide that when asked. Loads of other people are doing this so the number is always registered at every shop.
The conversation usually goes:
I've been doing this on a weekly basis since reading about it in another thread (on reddit) a few years ago. I've never encountered a problem and I've received thousands of dollars in discounts. I would've gotten those discounts anyway but would've had to sign up with my personal number in order to receive them.
In the US, this typically works with (zip code)-867-5309
In the United States the same concept has sloshed around a bit; (xxx)555-01xx is the official range of "reserved for fiction, guaranteed not to connect" numbers; most people think it's all of 555. It isn't, there was a directory assistance service on 555-1212 until 2020. In the first Ghostbusters film their phone number is given as 555-2368. I've seen a number of fictional programs give a number as 555-5555. If they ever were reserved, they're not now. The 555 exchange is explicitly NOT reserved in the toll-free area codes, which is how The Last Of Us accidentally included the number of a sex chat line. "I thought 555 numbers weren't real." No it's more nuanced than that.
Then there's 867-5309, made famous by the band Tommy Tutone. They wrote a song about finding a girl's name and number written on a men's room wall and used a valid phone number. In fact, because no area code is given it's several hundred valid phone numbers. Across the United States in the early 1980's a few hundred random people started getting prank phone calls asking for "Jenny". The number remains valid and several are still in use and even specially requested but I don't think they'll issue it sequentially anymore.
Issue with that, at least in the u.s. is that stores often give you points that accumulate that can be redeemed for certain dollar amounts or a big discount on a single purchase.
Yeah. This is a potential problem.
I'm not directly aware of this reward points thing actually happening in Australia. I mean they send text messages about sales and member only discounts, but real actual money off something you actually needed to buy isn't something I've seen or heard of.
"I forgot my card. Can I use the store card?"
"Sure"
Success
This sounds like a different set up to the way things roll down under.
Cashier's just assume that no one carries their card, and they ask for your phone number to look up your membership. IDK what a store card is.
