this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

My bank's mutual fund let me buy and sell at yesterday's price, so every time the stock market went up, I bought, and when it went down, I sold. I talked to a teller about it, wondering how much money the mutual fund rule designer had pumped out of the bank by then. They quickly changed the rule into a non-insane form: today's price.

I should have just shut up and kept pumping money out of the idiot bank, but I was young and stupid. The bank was in the game, the bank was fair game.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

The best loophole I've ever learned about is closed now.

Early in the Dubya administration they were pushing the dollar coins pretty hard. They went through a whole thing where any government coin-operated machine had to take dollar coins (veterans of the time mostly saw this as it mostly effected military bases but this is why the stamp vending machines at the post office suddenly became useless; they now took dollars instead of quarters).

One of the ways they "encouraged" the use of dollar coins was selling them directly on the Mint's website. You could go on the US mint's website and pay face value for them with a credit card, and they paid for shipping. Spend $500, and 500 $1 coins would be shipped to your door.

So people would order tens of thousands of dollars in coins on a credit card, as soon as they arrived they'd haul the coins to the bank and deposit them, immediately pay off the credit card bill with the deposited currency thus accruing no interest, and then they'd have all those rewards points to spend. The government was taking it up the ass shipping tons of coins to residential addresses, the goal of putting them into circulation utterly failed because they were being taken directly to banks, the credit card companies were taking it up the ass on rewards points that weren't generating enough interest payments to feed the parasites. The policy got canned.

Imagine getting to fuck over a Republican administration and the parasite industry in one perfectly legal move. Too bad I was 14 at the time and wasn't allowed to have a credit card.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Coinage in this country is one of my pet peeves. We should have a 3, 5, an .50 coins in regular circulation. Coins can work great. They can work fast too.

I can't believe people shit all over the coin (Sacagawea dollar piece) like they did. They should have made it bigger though, too similar to a quarter to easily distinguish by feeling.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

A lot of the mistake was made decades earlier with the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which was the same color and basically the same size as a quarter and thus often mistaken for one. The solution? Mint it in """""""gold""""""". It's actually brass, mainly copper and zinc with some manganese and nickel. Brand new it's too yellowy and then it tarnishes. It pretends to be gold way worse than the copper-nickel mix in quarters, dimes and, well, nickels pretend to be silver.

It's still the same dimensions as an Anthony dollar so it still has the problem that it's very close in size and shape to a quarter, most coin op machines either outright won't take them or will accept them as quarters, and we're used to "cents are coins, dollars are paper" that most people didn't care. The republicans hated them because there was a brown chick on it, everyone hated them because they tried to immediately cram them into everyday life, and then the Mint hated them because they took it up the ass shipping tons of them to residential addresses only for them to end up in banks in original mint packaging anyway.

If it were me, what I would do is scrap the idea that there are 100 cents in a dollar because the dollar has gotten too worthless to worry about a hundredth of one. Stop minting pennies, nickels and quarters, let the existing stock circulate for a couple decades without minting more, and then when everyone is naturally standardized on the dime, ditch the cent entirely and make it 10 dimes to a dollar. I am also a raging misanthrope who would bring back burning at the stake, so probably don't vote for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The great recoinage/auto-da-fé of 2025!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

auto-da-fé, what's an auto-da-fé?

It's what you oughtn't a do but you do anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I remember hearing about this one. So simple, so effective, it's beautiful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Go to a climbing gym. "I think I left my drink bottle here last week. It was clear, about this size". Worker pulls out a box of lost and found drink bottles. "Oh, that is it there". Take a dusty one (so you know it's been there a while, and nobody's coming back for it). Now you have a new drink bottle! Give it a clean and go!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Not something I did, but something a former 'friend' did:

Make a shitty dinosaur game, release it on Steam.

Get Steam to support your game's items on the Steam Market Place.

Some other friend wants to buy a game?

You want to buy a game?

Use your admin powers to directly create rare in game items, then trade the items to your friend who then sells them, or you sell them yourself.

I think he managed to functionally defraud Steam of around a thousand bucks doing this.

... This is the 'career path' of a garry's mod rp server admin, who would write viruses into the lua files which would be automatically downloaded and executed (escaping garry's mod and steam!) by any one who joined his gmod server, such that either Garry or Valve had to completely rewrite the way lua was executed in the source engine to prevent this exploit.

Anyway, last time I talked with him, he'd gone fully through the 4chan kekistan to QAnon to actual outright white supremacist fascist, has had several of his Steam accounts entirely VAC banned.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

He didn't defraud Steam, he took advantage of other Steam users who are frivolous with their money, and Steam took their cut of the transaction.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

You're right, this is a more accurate description.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What’s the game? I think I played it. Was it released 10 years ago?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The Isle.

The one with the pedophile groomer sex-pest PR director.

I just now realized I know who Dondi is, as in, I know his real name.

He, like ParadygmShift, used to go by another username back in their gmod days.

I actually met that guy in person once, almost 20 years ago now.

I know his real name too, and he should absolutely be in prison if he isn't.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

ITT: fraud

lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

"Walmart rentals"

If you need a product for a project but can't afford it, go buy it at Walmart, use it, and when you're done return it. Their return policy is pretty no questions asked, especially if you have a receipt. I had a roommate do this with an iPad he needed for a semester in college. I think it was a 14 day return policy, so he'd back it up and take it back every 13 days, then just buy a new one and repeat until the semester was over.

Even if you don't have a receipt, actually. I've returned things I bought at Target to Walmart and gotten a refund. Granted, that was a few years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I'm from the UK but aware of this because of the movie Garden State

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