hotel

I think you mean “all-inclusive” resort (that isn’t all inclusive and actually charges a gazillion dollars in random fees) that makes them feel like they’re experiencing local culture while actually just experiencing the effects of the resort chain exploiting the local population for cheap labor while cheaply imitating the culture.

Don’t worry, we Americans are definitely capable of escaping our cultural bubble! /s

I’d say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG’s filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.

The only things I’ve also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:

• Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
• Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. “thing that has x y and z characteristics” returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)

And of course, there’s always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I’m not getting enough detail.

A few reasons:

1. Market prices are more often determined by speculation than actual intrinsic value. People will say that the market is “efficient” in the sense that everything is valued efficiently based on the value it’s worth, but take one look at meme stocks and you’ll see that prices can easily be influenced by large volumes of purchases instead of any actual intrinsic value in the corporation being invested in. A lot of money being funneled into index funds can lead to the price of stocks continually increasing without actual value of the underlying companies being taken into account as much as you would think.

2. Fascism is supported by, and continues to support capitalism. Corporations benefit from capitalism, especially under a system where safeguards are removed and businesses can make larger profit margins as a result.

3. A lot of the changes Trump is making hurt working people, but don’t hurt corporations. (and often even help corporations directly) For instance, he’s making union busting easier, knows that any tariffs can simply be passed on by the companies without shrinking their margins, (just costing you more), is cracking down on legal immigration to the point that illegal migrant workers are even easier to exploit with the threat of deportation, etc. A lot of the bad things Trump is doing will only affect us, not corporations or the capital owning class.

Because when the norm to these people is media that exclusively panders to them, even one single piece of media that doesn’t represent them is a zero-to-100 change. Going from even 0 to 1 piece of inclusive media is startling, new, and scary to them, because they’re simply not used to it.

It’s the root of the entire conservative mentality (which is why you’ll primarily see conservative men talking about this) since all conservatism is based in a desire for things to remain the same. Change is just scary to these people, no matter how benign the change may be.

Yeah, whether or not someone believes they have gender dysphoria shouldn’t affect if they get therapy or not. I’d recommend it regardless, it helps a bunch.

Of course there are, but as has already been shown through many attempts at creating welfare programs that directly test the means of the recipients, the administrative cost to provide funds to people based on highly specific factors about themselves (e.g. total net worth, rate of income, spending, cost to employ farm employees, profit margins, etc etc etc) can cost significantly more than blanket assistance.

It’s one of the reasons why UBI works so well compared to traditional welfare in administrative costs, since it doesn’t need to be means tested.

Now obviously this isn’t a one-to-one comparison, but let’s say we create an index just like the one at question here, but it’s specifically the “poor farmer’s index.” To do so, we need to:

1. Request extensive documentation from all farmers applying
2. Somebody then has to verify the net assets, income, expenses, etc of all farmers who apply to be listed in the index via that paperwork…
3. …and continue to verify that data over time, as it obviously changes year-to-year. The eligibility of every participant would have to be re-verified regularly, otherwise someone could become not poor, but stay in the index. This is a perpetual expense that grows linearly over time as more people are added to the index.

Who will do that work? Now somebody needs to be paid to do this, or spend many hours doing volunteer work just to verify eligibility. Now, in the end yes, that kind of system would be ideal for determining who needs the most help, and I would pick that system every time over a “black farmers index” if it existed in a functional form.

The problem is that it has significantly higher costs and requires consistent administration over time, something that is obviously hard to expect from a random volunteer project that, based on their staff information, only has 2 “Data Entry and Logistics” roles that are currently filled. Imagine two people handling the ingesting, data entry, and administrative tasks for all the farmers applying to this index across the entire United States, having to verify every single individual’s financial situation. It’s difficult, and costly.

So yes, as I stated just earlier in this comment, and in my original post, of course I’d prefer an index that directly assesses the economic viability of every individual. However, because doing so is costly, and we know that race is a good proxy for the estimation of general wealth, it makes sense to use that for a small, relatively inexpensive, independently run online site, that now only needs to verify one factor, that doesn’t change over time, to get a good enough approximation of lack of wealth.

This entire discussion revolves not around the ideals of what we should have, but what is feasible. If it is not feasible at the current point in time for such an organization to directly assess the needs of individuals, it makes sense to use a substantially cheaper to assess proxy, instead of not being able to have any index at all.

Group A is historically not discriminated against, and now on average, has a net worth of $100,000.

Group B is historically discriminated against, and now on average, has a net worth of $80,000.

In both groups, some will own more or less than the average, but the largest number of poorer individuals reside in Group B, because the average is lower.

On a per person basis, everyone has $20,000 to spend. Should they give it:

1. Exclusively to Group A? (and “discriminate” against Group B, but raise their average net worth to $120,000)
2. Exclusively to Group B? (and “discriminate” against Group A, but raise their average net worth to $100,000)
3. Split evenly between the two? (bringing Group A’s average to $110,000, and Group B’s average to $90,000)

Which option is most likely to uplift the most poor people to a less poor status?

This is why your argument of “discrimination” doesn’t hold up. The choice to make a purchase from Group A while ignoring Group B only entrenches existing wealth disparities. The choice to make a purchase from both evenly keeps the wealth disparity where it is. The choice to buy exclusively from Group B eliminates the disparity.

This decision is not being made because of race on its own, it is being made because of the common socioeconomic context within which people of color often reside. If white people were the ones who had a history of economic discrimination, even if all other actions regarding past and current racism remained equal, then economically supporting the white farmers specifically would make the most sense, because they would be most economically disadvantaged.

You cannot have a meritocracy when people start on uneven ground, and there is a very demonstrable difference in existing generational wealth between the races, as a direct consequence of past injustices. The way we fix that as individuals, and as a society, is by doing what we can to elevate groups experiencing a disparity until they no longer do.

Should we just stop using statistics then? Numbers don’t matter if they are about people? (I genuinely want an answer here. Should we?)

Statistically, one societal class of people needs more support than the other to have the exact same quality of life, generational wealth, and opportunities. Thus, when deciding who to buy, in this case, produce from, it simply makes sense to purchase from the group most disadvantaged, until their disadvantage is no bigger than the other group, and we can then switch from buying from “small black farmers directly” to “all small farmers directly,” because all of them would then need a near identical level of support, financially speaking, to get the same outcomes.

Because, on average, black people are more economically disadvantaged than white people.

Choosing to explicitly buy from black farmers will, on average, tend to support those with the least financial means out of the general population of farmers, whereas choosing to explicitly buy from white farmers will, on average, tend to support those who are already more financially advantaged.

One side is directly choosing to help those most likely to be economically disadvantaged, the other would be explicitly ignoring those with the least means in order to help those who already have the most, thus the situations are not quite comparable.

I personally would prefer an index that directly assessed farmers based on overall wealth to determine who you should buy from, but because that’s extraordinarily difficult to constantly update & maintain, verify, etc, it can just be easier to divide among racial lines since that still tends to produce a grouping that is relatively similar.

I’ve been here for over 15 years, I have other people who live with me but they never do anything weird when it comes to chargebacks/refunds. I still have no idea why retailers hate my address so much 😭

I’d just never seen this specific flavor of bullshittery from them before. Encouraging sellers to keep prices below the shipping limit is one thing, but adding discounts artificially no matter what the actual seller prices their product at is a whole new level of making things worse for everyone involved.

Sellers have a lower likelihood of a non-Prime member buying their item, users don’t get free shipping.

As another user replied to you earlier, yeah, it’s substantially more expensive after shipping. Nearly 50% more, in fact, but in this specific instance I wasn’t actually planning on buying this specific bit set, the price and subsequent notice of the discount just caught my eye when it was in Amazon’s list of product recommendations.

Don’t ask me, I’ve been asking the same question myself 😅

The only things that had originally come to mind were my accounts on those stores being new (but who makes an account there then just lets it sit for like a week), me using virtual cards to avoid using the same payment info across different sites (but many other people do that with no issues), using my non-gmail email (but other people also do that with no issues), ad & JS canvas blocking (but as needanke mentioned earlier, they don’t seem to have problems), or possibly just something with my address itself making its way onto some shared-around list of addresses not to ship to for some reason, but none of these explanations really seem to make sense.

I’m genuinely just as stumped as you are.

I know, I only took this specific screenshot because it happened to show up as a recommendation within Amazon’s interface and I noticed the price and discount seemed odd. I intend to try buying it (or at least, a similar set made by iFixit) on their own site when I end up actually needing it.

I try to when I can, but I tend to have major difficulties doing so.

I tried Ebay, they restricted my account and said the only way for me to get it un-restricted was to buy a product from a limited set of brand-new partner suppliers (e.g. Logitech, HP, etc) that were all over $100, and nothing I actually needed.

I tried buying some chargers from Anker and they also restricted me and said they wouldn’t let me make a purchase because my email seemed suspicious (I don’t use Gmail), so I had to go back to Amazon and buy it there instead for practically the same price, even though it would have actually been cheaper on Anker’s own website since they had a discount code that would have worked for my order.

I bought something on Target because I’d been given a Target gift card, Target cancelled my order 3 times and made me contact customer service to remove an invisible hold on my account.

I frequently try checking third-party sites for the same products, and the prices are way higher (e.g. A product I plan on purchasing is $80 on the manufacturer’s site, and $58 on Amazon, with the price frequently dropping to $38) because Amazon literally mandates that the cheapest price must be on Amazon. Often times, these price differences are so drastic that I could end up paying double for the same product.

I also tend to get Amazon gift cards from relatives even though they already know I dislike using Amazon when I don’t have to, so it’s often somewhat unavoidable.

Don’t get me wrong, those are just the worst instances so far. I’ve bought quite a few items from elsewhere before without issues, it’s just that I tend to have the occasional issue that makes it practically impossible to buy elsewhere.

Believe me, I do my best to not have to spend money on Amazon, but it’s either so drastically more expensive that it’s simply not reasonable to buy elsewhere, or for various reasons I mentioned before, I’m not even capable of placing an order in the first place.

I’m not sure if this is entirely relevant, but depending on your local climate it could be related to the smell known as petrichor that you will often get when it rains/is about to rain on soil, which could be affected by the moisture in your local area that accumulated overnight then evaporating more quickly as the sun rises.

Always demand a human support representative until it gives you the option to, then the actual human will usually manually process your refund if you complain about how the initial refund never happened.

Bonus chance of success if you’re a Prime member and say you’re thinking about cancelling.

The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.

“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”

That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?

I completely get that.

I mostly have just thought of housing as a different kind of beast, since unlike working a job, I don’t have to invest in real estate to save for a house or retirement, but doing so might make it easier to accomplish that.

The biggest problem is definitely going to be full on landlords and private corporate investors, but I don’t want to add any more to that problem, no matter how small my impact might be.

TLDR; I want to protect against systemic risk factors, as most of my net worth will be in the market, unable to support me during a financial emergency. It could also carry possible tax benefits, and make it easier to sustain mortgage payments on a home.

I’m mostly trying to ensure that if, for instance, my entire emergency fund is drained from a major medical emergency (or something similar) during that time, I have something I can rely on that is generally more stable to sell during that time, which will overall carry lower tax implications on sale than stocks that have already appreciated significantly more.

Plus, once I get to the point of being close to owning a home, I want to ensure no major financial event could potentially significantly impact my ability to afford mortgage payments.

I plan on investing as much of my income as I can to retire as early as possible, which means the majority of my liquid cash net worth will just be in my emergency fund, with a smaller additional amount in savings. I would prefer some level of extended, more stable assets, that will still grow at least a bit over time to meet my financial goals, but won’t be subject to as large drops as the whole market.

I don’t plan on investing much of my portfolio into real estate if I do decide to go that route, only 5-10% total, more as a hedge than as a primary strategy. Most of my investing is still in comparatively high-growth index funds.