Otherbarry

No, not since high school / moving out of the house. I did live in the house for a few years after high school while commuting to a local college and working part-time (full-time during the summer), that certainly helped me get on my own feet even if it wasn’t specifically financial.

My parents weren’t particularly wealthy. At one point they had even declared bankruptcy so I didn’t try too hard to get any school loans through them let alone anything else regarding money.

the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.

Yeah don’t bother doing that. All that will accomplish is them gathering even more information on you, they rarely/never actually unlock your account & let you use it again. You’ve been permanently blacklisted on their service, just move on. And honestly you don’t need Paypal anyway.

Similar stupid thing happened to me too I think about 10-15 years ago, I was using virtual credit card numbers that my credit card company was generating for me & Paypal thought that was suspicious enough to close my account & permanently blacklist me LOL.

Fun fact: I did learn over the years that I can temporarily create new Paypal account(s) as long as I don’t use the same mailing/billing addresses or credit cards/bank accounts. But then it’s just a waiting game, they usually figure it out eventually and close the Paypal account yet again.

I’ve been fully onsite basically the whole time, including during the pandemic, for me it’s been fine. Gets me out of my tiny studio apartment and keeps my work life at work. Also free A/C / heating at work.

The commute is also part of that decision making - for me the commute is a long walk outside to/from work every day. All that walking around outside sort of levels me out mentally & gets rid of any stress I had, not to mention the exercise.

Not yet, hadn’t had a need to consider it since the desktop version does what I need & is cheap enough when on sale.

That gets me curious - is the web/online version ever on sale? Like does the Deluxe+State online version ever go on a $19.99 sale? I get the feeling those types of promotions are usually done via the online retailers (Amazon/Newegg/etc.) but could be wrong.

Nice review!

Way back I used to use TurboTax & eventually switched away from it when they started limiting how many tax returns you can complete with it (at the time I was also helping family do their taxes). It also doesn’t help that Intuit in general is a terrible company.

At the moment have settled on H&R Block Deluxe + State, usually get it for $20 whenever there’s a sales promotion at Newegg/Amazon or wherever. Not fully on Linux yet so haven’t had to think about that aspect but I assumed you could still run it via Wine or a VM running Windows. (though at that point it’s also reasonable to switch to something web based)

Talk to families of unjustified imprisoned people or to the people itself.

Do you actually know & speak to people in El Salvador? Pretty much everyone I know there (family/friends) are ecstatic that there are no more gang members running around unchecked. The country is safer now then it has been in years.

Nothing is perfect of course, poverty is still a major issue, but not having to deal with gang members every time you ride the bus, go out shopping, even just drive around, it’s a huge deal over there.

Sure I get what you’re saying but for most people there it’s been a positive development.

But since he just imprisoned everyone and their relatives, its only a temporary fix – unless he wants to imprison them for life.

True… to be honest I suspect those people are imprisoned for life. No one expects gang members to be let out of prison while Bukele is still running the country, that’s going to be something that gets revisited when/if he’s out of office. It’s a massive human rights issue but at least for now the majority of Salvadorans consider it a net positive.

The funny thing is that this article is about bitcoin & most Salvadorans don’t particularly care about that at all, it’s just kind of a headline that isn’t going to win/lose Bukele any support in the short term at least.

The 1940-1950 era is the rough timeframe when the factory farming of poultry took off, especially once antibiotics started being widely used to group even more chickens together in those factory conditions. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_the_United_States_poultry_farming_industry#History_of_federal_policy_on_antibiotic_use_in_livestock

I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn’t really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.

Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren’t that rare.

Pixel 7, but for me I always look for a phone with stock Android and a good camera. Usually any of the Google Pixel phones covers that well.

I use a sea salt grinder to lightly salt things when cooking. Can’t afford to eat out too often so cooking is my normal routine.

Other people, especially older people, do pour salt on pretty much all meals. Especially with older people who tend to be able to taste things less strongly so their normal response is to add even more salt. And then they wonder why they have high blood pressure, etc.

You mentioned iodine but that’s usually an additive in table salt, not sure how many people eat table salt vs other types of salt… me personally I’ve been using sea salt for years & that type usually does not have iodine.

A lot of people’s dogs are trained to wait inside at the door for their paws to get wiped down before walking into the house/apartment/whatever.

But sure, if the dog did go walk outside with boots/shoes then yeah their owner would obviously take them off once they were back inside.

A quick google search seems to indicate that being mold/mildew. You should really check the humidity in your room/building and correct that, offhand it seems to be high if you repeatedly see mold growing there.

Maybe once in the last 5-10 years to look up something specific… so basically never.

The one I was at just gathered everyone together to let them know layoffs were coming. I was also part of the tech support for the office so I stayed a bit longer to help them wind down systems, wipe hard drives, that sort of thing. The owners were pretty nice/upfront about the whole thing, basically gave everyone something like 2-3 month’s pay upfront & told everyone the business is winding down.

The owners did try to find a buyer for the tech & maybe break even or recoup some losses but that didn’t pan out. AFAIK the investors just took it as a loss, it’s a startup and sometimes startups fail.

We weren’t in fancy offices or anything like you see in movies & whatnot, it was more like working in an industrial warehouse converted for office use. Like the kind of building that doesn’t provide hot water unless you install water heaters yourself, no central AC, that sort of thing. We had one final party & trashed the space on the way out LOL. I think they just walked away from the lease, it’s not like there was any $$ coming in to pay it anymore.

In the last few months after moving out a few remaining people (the owners, tech support, etc.) worked from within the investment group’s own offices (they gave us a spare room to work in). Mostly to deal with the old systems/hard drives & prep the existing data in case the owners found a buyer.

You mean like a random person at your previous job? Why wouldn’t you get a reference from a coworker/manager/boss that you were friendly with during that employment? Lets be honest, if everyone at that place hated you & you have no one friendly there to give you references then you probably should avoid using anyone there as a reference.

It’s also possible I’m overthinking this, right now I work at a small business whose owner is very spiteful & always talking badly about people he dislikes (employees & otherwise). That would absolutely be the last person I would use for a professional reference if/when I leave the job, LOL. Luckily all my coworkers get along great so I’d have plenty of other references to use there.

How much money are you bringing with you? There are countries that offer golden visa programs to the wealthy. Some of them may still have residency requirements (e.g. live there for x years) but otherwise it would basically allow anyone with money to become a citizen, or at the bare minimum obtain a visa to live there.

https://www.investopedia.com/golden-visa-program-7975290

That’s interesting & somewhat surprising, we are currently testing a Canon MAXIFY GX5020 and everyone in the office hates its color output. It’s in the same MegaTank family that your Canon is in.

I’m trying to figure out if maybe Canon sent us a bad printer or if these Canons just don’t do colors that well. If you have a chance can you do these two color test prints & let me know how yours does?

https://cmyktool.com/cmyk-test-print/ (download the PDF and print it)

https://printtester.com/#print-color-test-page (download the Color Test Page PDF and print it, the one with the color wheel)

What I’ve found is that our Canon does fine with the CMYK Test Print but doesn’t do as well on the Color Test. For us in the color wheel when the colors blend from Blue into Red (e.g. the dark blue / purple / dark red) the mixed colors look sort of dull and generally off. So any images with purple or around that color come out sort of darker/dull compared to our old color laser printer. I can’t really explain colors that well but you get the gist :D

When we first received the printer magenta was barely printing so all the colors were especially bad, after doing the printer maintenance functions that color at least started printing but I wonder if the printer heads are just screwed up on this one, hmm.

Sort of depends on what type of printer you’re aiming towards. At work we’ve been mainly using HP Laserjet (the more expensive business class types with multiple trays) & those things are workhorses, they do last a good while. I also did work for a guy whose office still runs an ancient HP Laserejet from probably 20 years ago & somehow the thing still works (old enough to still have a parallel port on it haha).

On a related note more recently I’ve been testing a Canon MegaTank color inkjet to replace our dying Lexmark color laserjet, so far everyone in the office hates the Canon.

Nothing fancy, I mainly use credit card(s) for grocery spending so with each monthly statement will record that’ month’s grocery spend totals in a spreadsheet for spending/budget tracking.

For price comparison I just take a picture of the price tag for something I’m curious about & bring it up on my phone when shopping at a different grocery store. Not the most advanced price tracking but it sort of works :P

Usually Newegg and Amazon, sometimes NextWarehouse for things I’m not in a rush for (they do a lot of drop shipping from the distributors/manufactures themselves so it’s sometimes cheaper but also slower). B&H is also worth a look, sometimes they do price drops on things & end up being cheaper than the other places.

There’s a local Best Buy near me that’s in a special tax district (lower sales tax) so I could try checking them out but usually the prices there are marked up so much that it’s not worth it IMO.

There aren’t any Micro Centers near me, it’d take a fair amount of travel to get to one.