I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.

Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.

Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they’ll never live it down.

“But we need your generous donations and tithes to continue to operate our house of god!!!”

God, huh? The all-of-creation in 6 days guy? The water to wine guy? All the fish that swim in the sea and beasts that roam on the land and birds that sing in the sky? That guy? Seems to me he’d have no trouble magically causing a church to spring forth out of the ground for you if you’re so damn devout, then. At the very least he could keep all his bisops and deacons and popes in clean vestments without having to put it on the congregation’s dime.

No? How curious.

Carefully watch the kid’s glasses.

Now you can’t unsee it. You’re welcome.

Well, they’re MSRP’ing for $199 at the moment if you don’t spring for the AMS Lite filament changer thingamadoo. To be fair that’s less than several pocket knives I own are worth. I’m not a fan of Bambu at all, but I think you could wind up with far worse for not much less money…

Retailer who offers one of those 0% financing schemes, here. TL;DR: It’s from processing fees paid by the retailer and punitive interest after the 0% promotional period lapses.

The lender makes money in two ways. One, a percentage fee is charged on the financed amount, but it’s not paid by the customer. It’s paid by the retailer. For us it is a little under 2%, similar to the fees most credit card processors charge. So as soon as you make your purchase, the bank instantly skims 1-point-whatever percent off the top. You don’t see this, though. It affects the retailer’s bottom line, not yours.

Two, the 0% interest rate is a promotion which provides specified limited time in which to pay off the balance. If you do not pay the outstanding balance in full by the end of the promotional term, the bank whacks you for a monstrous interest rate on the entire original transaction amount – not just the remaining outstanding balance. In our case this is damn near 30%. Look carefully at the promotional signage and literature. It will always say “0% INTEREST FINANCING!!! _{for 12 months.}” That 12 months is important. That’s the end of the promotional terms, after which you pay aforementioned buttload of interest.

And then, the minimum payments on the bills they send you are obviously deliberately structured to trick you into failing to pay the entirety of the balance by the deadline at the end of the promotional period.

If you’re talking 0% introductory rates for general purpose credit cards, the answer is right there in the name. Those are introductory rates designed to entice you into signing up and using the card, but they’re never permanent. Eventually that introductory rate will expire and you will be left with an interest bearing credit card. Possibly a lot of interest. Even if you pay your bill 100% on time every month without fail, the bank still makes money in percentages and processing fees taken on every transaction from every single retailer where you’ve swiped that card. The bank issuing the credit card can continue to comfortably make money even if no one pays any interest, ever.

The other thing is, both towers were plane impact resistant. Both of them took dead square hits from airliners and remained resolutely standing afterwards. What it turned out they were not proof against was an ongoing raging inferno inside that was hot enough and carried on long enough to weaken their critical structural elements.

If the planes had not been laden with fuel and/or if it had not ignited for whatever reason, the towers probably would not have collapsed. They probably wouldn’t have been readily repairable, though, so then the question would be what to do with two massive skyscrapers with giant holes in the middle of them. They’d probably have to be demolished eventually anyway. Said demolition would have killed far fewer people.

Oh boy. I can’t wait for this to backfire in a spectacular and completely predictable manner.

If you got in an actual taxicab, you are correct that the driver would not care about your Uber PIN. Uber is replacing, or trying to replace, the usual pool of taxi drivers hanging around outside the airport terminal with their own herd of “contractors” waiting to do the same thing, only with the totally unnecessary layer of their stupid app being in between.

a lot of people end up using atheism as a an excuse to have shitty values

Citation needed. This is a total straw man argument.

“Morals” are a completely man made concept. With or without religion, it is immaterial. They did not and do not have to come from somewhere else. They come from us.

And what is and isn’t “moral” changes over time as society evolves. As I am positive you know, quite a few things in Judeo-Christian scripture were considered “moral” in their time but are now viewed as unquestionably heinous. Have you ever stopped to think why that is?

You’ve said absolutely nothing of substance, here. Just platitudes. You haven’t explained why Yahweh is legit but, say, Zeus isn’t.

Agreed. And Kefka was way cooler anyway.

(I firmly believe most people gush over FF7 so much only because it was their first exposure to a mainstream console RPG in non-Japanese circles. FF7 as a whole was a fairly meh entry into the series anyway, if you ask me.)

Not only did Kefka have real style, twisted though it may be, he also for all intents and purposes actually managed to win. He fractured the world, scattered the heroes, built his goddamned tower, and was lording it all over everybody with a penthouse view. He didn’t have angst; he was just nuts. It was frankly a complete fluke that he got the shit whacked out of him by a little girl with a paintbrush, a 8x per round attacking Moogle with Genji gloves, a senior citizen, and a mime.

The Doctor.

We get it. You wish a dashing eccentric gentleman with an English accent will appear out of the blue and whisk you away from your situation to a life of adventure. But it’s not going to happen, sweetheart.

It doesn’t help that Doctor Who has always been crap sci-fi, but gets a free ride due to having such a long history stretching back to before anyone knew any better. The series as a whole is one of those I find also dragged down by a subsection of rabid insufferable fans, at least the modern incarnations, right up there with Rick and Morty and Supernatural. (I see I already kicked the beehive.)

You son of a bitch, I’m out.

Because Jesus or any other mythical figure is not required for anyone to have the same or similar values.

Your logic doesn’t follow. Evidence for the existence of Jesus and god – either the Yahweh or any of the other ones – is scant (in the case of Jesus) or nonexistent (in the case of his dad). Sharing similar values to what Jesus allegedly had is not evidence for his existence, nor that of any gods. In this context, the “real” Jesus is as he is depicted in scripture. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was a real person in reality, so don’t get that part twisted. What the poster you’re replying to is interpreting a character as he was written.

It’s exactly the same thing as claiming, “Captain Picard would not do XYZ, because it is inconsistent with how he was written in every single episode.” That may be so, and maybe we all know who Captain Picard is and what he does, but that still doesn’t make Picard a real person. Having a taste for tea, Earl Grey, hot does not require that any person actually believe that Picard physically existed, nor that his published actions were anything more than the fancy of some scriptwriters.

I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

“Homeopathic” does not mean organic, or good for you, natural, wholesome, effective, or inherently safe to consume.

It is, in fact, a code word for no active ingredient.

Ditto on the regular remote. I have one if those keyfob sized ones that goes perfectly in the otherwise useless sleeve pocket in my jacket.

I have probably about a quarter million dollars worth of stuff in my garage between the bikes, tools, and machinery that I busted my ass working to afford. So I don’t need to have my garage door connected to the fucking cloud, thanks. I sure as shit don’t need any software trying to determine when to open the door automatically. One dumbass software glitch, one incident of the door being open and unattended even for a few minutes when I’m not home, and the methheads will be making off with most of everything I’ve ever owned.

Fuck that. When I press the button, or not at all.

Based on this exact comic - which I surely must have read in the newspaper at the time in 1987 – when I was a kid I saved a snowball in the freezer. What I did not know until later, and was mildly disappointed to discover, was that parking it directly on the floor of the freezer compartment put it in contact with the defrost heater mechanism. Which caused it to melt away to nothing by summer.

Darn it.