I saw some truck commercial yesterday where the thing was eighty thousand dollars AFTER all incentives and rebates.

I thought to myself that the people who are screaming about inflation and how the Democrat president is ruining their lives are the same people who are lining up to make crazy monthly payments into a vehicle that will immediately be upside down on the note.

This was my introduction to Bill Gates in 1992

The comments are pretty much all with you save one person. If I were you, I'd calmly walk away with that satisfaction before you get baited into a comment that "proves" you are what has been said of you.

(Note that "proves" is in quotation marks there.)

Are you asserting that nobody should ever have any preferences? Do you meet your own standard?

OP didn't say he's throwing women out of bed for having piercings. He expressed a preference for them not to.

I prefer dark hair. Sometimes it's red or blonde or blue.

I prefer pubic hair. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not.

I prefer a few extra pounds. Sometimes those pounds aren't there. Sometimes a few extra is more like a lot extra.

In no example above did I shut down the interaction, nor did I experience any less pleasure.

But I still have preferences. That's all they are though.

You joke but....

I was in a benefits meeting a few years ago led by the insurance rep for our employee health coverage.

Deductibles came up.

I raised my hand and asked, "So if I go skiing for Christmas and snap my femur on December 26, it behooves me to delay any treatment until January 1, right?"

She didn't miss a beat and said, "Yes, that's correct."

There was a stunned silence in the room from that one.

To the immigrant thing - I was on vacation a few weeks ago and took five Uber rides. None of the drivers spoke English. I wonder if ride sharing is going the immigrant predator route these days.

For clarification, it didn't bother me to have non-English speaking drivers. They were all great.

I looked him up. He's an old session musician. Those guys get particularly bitter about modern studio production.

Did you read my comment at all?

To the consumption part, I have given more money directly to more artists via discovering them on Spotify then attending their shows and buying their merch than I ever even came close to back in the record buying days when record companies were screwing their artists anyway.

I know quite a few bands personally who will never attain Taylor Swift levels of wealth, but they've got a business model of touring and merch down to a science that affords them a nice living doing what they love. This also includes tons of accessibility and fan interaction that very much didn't use to be a thing.

The savvy DIYers are sidestepping the entire record company schematic and using streaming services as effectively free marketing.

That's kinda how I feel about all of his videos. He's a great illustration of latching on to the music of your formative years and firmly stating that everything after that is crap.

In present day, you've got to sift through a lot of crap to find the good new stuff.

What this guy doesn't ever address is that has always been true.

My daughter always said I was lucky to grow up in the eighties because we had the best music. To this I responded that I only played her the good stuff. All the really crappy stuff, of which there was a LOT, kinda got filtered out of collective memory.

Until I saw the picture, I had so thoroughly forgotten about these that your title conjured no mental image.

I remember these mostly as soft drinks served at expensive restaurants as a way to keep the refill inclined riffraff out.

I think I also remember seeing them as mixers for bartenders at catered events, but I'm not a hundred percent sure on that one.

I've already had this talk with my daughter. I'm not presently ill or anything, but I see this as the new American version of estate planning.

Somehow, I've managed to build up a few meager assets to leave to my daughter and I'll be damned if I let American healthcare take it all.

(And please refrain from bringing up misinformed statements on estate tax. I'm a tax accountant. I'm more astute on that stuff than most of the population, and my little pile of shiny trinkets is well below any threshold for any of that to kick in)