Usury was indeed the term that immediately came to mind.

I would agree, but it’s not my life, not my money. You can’t really go around telling people they fucked up every time you see it.

Most of the math I do at work is related to compound interest. Of all the math I believe the general public should understand, the concept of how paying interest to others is a total screw would get my top vote.

I have a co-worker who took out a car loan last week at, wait for it, FIFTY THREE PERCENT INTEREST! No concept of what that was costing her. She could only see, “I can afford the monthly payment.”

(1 + r)^n and its friend 1/(1 + r)^n have been the two most important concepts in work and personal life that I’ve ever learned and applied.

I know several of those. One I don’t see listed is stuff made here. If you’re a fan of backyard scientist, you’re gonna love stuff made here.

Smarter everyday is really a special one. The way that guy involves his kids and his own boyish excitement when he finally gets an experiment right is downright heartwarming. Then there was the whole episode checking in on physics girl. He had no particular incentive to do that. He just really seems to care.

It’s just a thought exercise. There are several reputable YouTube videos on this topic. None of them claim that the speed of light isn’t the speed of light. They’re just demonstrating that we can’t prove it with current technology. Similar to the difficulty it took to finally prove that one plus one equals two. We know that’s correct, but it took years to prove it.

I just took a charter flight that didn’t involve going through TSA or the airport terminal.

Whatever happened on the flight itself was irrelevant as the sheer pleasure of getting on a plane without the standard anal probe far outweighed all other aspects of the journey.

I personally pronounce it fahrenheit

The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I’ve got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.

If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.

I really don’t even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service

Rookies. The real wealth gets to eat sushi off a porn star’s front!

You’ve definitely got no shortage of choices out there.

I was up in the other Portland last week (Maine) and they’ve also got a ton of good options.

That city name must inspire people or something.

When I used to teach European students, they would invariably go out and buy the cheapest crap they could find like cases of pabst genuine draft and then complain how bad the American beer is.

I think the British equivalent would be if I bought a bottle of frosty jack and used it to declare all British cider to be shitty.

You gotta spend some money to get good American beer. Pretty much all the nationally brewed stuff is shit. There’s a lot of local stuff that’s actually good.

I’m not sure how European beer culture works, but one of the reasons to drink shitty American beer water is that you can drink it all day without dying.

One more useless fact: I long thought that adjuncts in shitty American beer like corn and rice were strictly cost cutting measures. There’s definitely some truth to that. But the origins apparently go back to nineteenth century brewers being unable to achieve a clear lager with the barley that was available in America. When they used the barley exclusively, they kept getting a cloudy product.

Mutual disdain was the catalyst. I did it for eight years and probably lost fifteen years of life expectancy from it. Ungodly toxic environment. Fuck big firm accounting. Fuck them all in the most demeaning, painful way imaginable.

I make roughly one third the money today, and I’m much happier for it. I still make a comfortable living where I don’t particularly worry about money, so what would the additional two thirds do for me outside paying medical bills it causes?

No matter how much I try to remove my name from searches, I still get recruited by ambitious young people on a regular basis. I generally make them stop with a response that goes something like this:

I would rather have my eyes gouged out by the white hot barbed penis of Satan himself while he spits in my mouth than return to public accounting for any amount of money.

As a tax accountant, I sincerely hope this gets to a point where a vast majority of the population has no need for my services.

I used to play in the big leagues where none of my clients would ever qualify for this and their returns routinely took upwards of a hundred hours to complete. Those guys need to keep paying.

Now I play down in the minors a couple steps above the Block, and I hate seeing the owner sell these three or four hundred dollar returns that might take me an hour to complete in the first year and maybe thirty minutes in subsequent years.

In my fifties and still have that dream, but it’s worse.

I went to boarding school, so my dreams involve fifty something year old me having to go back to live in the dorm with a bunch of kids.

This year the shipping has gone from two days from ordering to two days from processing to two weeks to maybe we’ll just lose the order entirely.

Add to that that so many of the sellers seem to have migrated over from the eBay “hey look at this cheap knockoff crap that fell off a truck” crowd, and I’m just not seeing the benefit anymore.

My renewal is a week from today. I think I’m going to cancel by then.

I really don’t know where I go from here vis a vis online ordering. Probably just use my boss’ account when there’s something that I just can’t get anywhere else.