Some context here: this is almost certainly a gun store, and this is going to be from the check-in station for when people come to jlhave their guns worked on, a holster fitted, or for gun sales.

I used to work an a major outdoors store and we’d have dozens of customer-owned guns come in a day, and we’d find a round in the chamber a few times a year, and we have them hell over it every time. We also had jar of shame like this one.

The worst that I experienced was when I was mounting a scope on a 300 Win Mag. The rifle was checked in up front, made it through 2 salesmen who helped them select a scope, and then to me for the mounting.

I had the customer shoulder the gun so I could find their eye position, got the appropriate mounts, and took the gun to the back and spent some time.mounting everything.

When everything was mounted properly, the optic zeroed with the bore scope (good enough to hit paper at 100 yards), and the gun ready to go I worked the action to check clearance on the bolt and a nickel-plated round was ejected. The guy at the gun check-in had seen the color of the jacket and assumed it was the magazine follower (they’re supposed to che k more thoroughly, and the next 3 of us in line did the same quick visual check and were fooled by the silver color.

My asshole was puckered for a week, and when I reported the incident to the firearm department manager he threw a shifting at everyone involved (including the customer), but let me off easy since I reported the incident and he could see how shaken I was.

But it also was a great demonstration of the importance of the rules of gun safety. Even though we all “knew” the gun was unloaded, there wasn’t any real danger since we all still treated it like it was loaded at all times.

Safety requires multiple layers. With the 4 rules (treat all guns as if they are loaded, do not point the gun at anything you aren’t willing to kill or destroy, be aware of your target and what’s behind your target, and keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire), you can screw up on any 3 of the rules without anyone being injured.

The CC company makes a killing off your purchases. They charge a fee to the merchant for every transaction. Between that fee and a separate fee for processing the fee, they end up charging between 3.5 and 6 percent more on the transaction, while handing out 2-3 percent in rewards if you’re lucky.

The reason there isn’t a cash discount most places is because it’s actually against the terms of service with the CC company/processors for the merchant to charge more for their customers. The CC company essentially requires that everything be more expensive for everyone whether or not they actually use the cards.

The card companies make absolutely stupid money off those fees.

Yeah - I just knew I was gonna die a few months back, and it was a panic attack. Which is weird because I’ve historically been low-stress. But between work being crazy and the world being what it is right now, things apparently got to me subconsciously.

My chest got tight, my breathing was labored, my arm went numb. It was terrifying.

And thinking you’re having a heart attack doesn’t help with the panic attack. But it was amazing how as soon as the EKG showed normal, everything started feeling better quickly. Just the knowledge that it was panic helped so much.

But you should still go to the ER in those cases, because if you assume it’s a panic attack and dont go, but turn out to be wrong…

What you get out of it is generally less than the processing fees. That’s how reward cards work. The seller has to pay the processor to process the payment, and you get a portion of that as a reward.

It may feel like free money to you, but that processing fee is built into the price of anything you purchase.

You aren’t sticking it to anybody.

Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.

But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.

I was fully prepared to hate the remake.

I played all the FF games I could growing up. I played the original when it came out, and I played IV and VI (as II and III in the US) on my SNES.

I got a PS1 instead of an N64 because I knew FFIV (didn’t know it was gonna be called VII yet) was gonna be on Playstation. I saved up my money for months to buy the PS1, and a few months later my mom (angel of a woman) went to Sears on the release day for FFVII while I was in 8th grade football practice and picked it up for me with my remaining savings.

I devoured the game. It was truly special. When a certain character left the party at the end of disc 1, I was devastated. I was and still am an unapologetic die-hard superfan of FFVII.

When I heard about the remake I was skeptical. When I found out they were taking away the ATB system and making it an action-RPG and bloating the opening chapter of Midgar into the entirety of the game I wrote it off.

But I still bought it, of course, and I have never been happier to eat crow.

The remake is fantastic. It’s an entry point to the story for newcomers that’s somehow both a retelling and a sequel that will keep old fans interested. The expanded Midgar section makes the events of the early game much more impactful as you really get to know the Avalanche crew, and everything about the production design is top-tier. The gameplay is a great balance between action and strategy that does its own thing instead of just copying what had already been done with the first game. It’s a love letter to the original while being an amazing game in its own right.

I still haven’t played the sequel, as I don’t have a PS5, but I understand it’s also excellent.

It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.

Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.

For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).

Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.

Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.

We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.

That’s why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.

I work in government, and the “work on work phone” rule is sacred. If I do any work on my personal phone, my personal phone becomes subject to Open Records.

Scaling goes in both directions.

While nobody is talking about the Intel B580, which was actually spectacular for the price.

Yeah. I think most of them have a lifespan of like 20-30 uses per license.

I think doing this exact post but changing the request could really speak to the inefficiency of AI.

Something like “What is 8x12”, go through the whole sequence, and have it spit out “Eight times twelve is 114”

Last time I was really good at competitive shooters was in my 20s playing MW2, Left 4 Dead, and Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 and Black Ops 1 were when I felt it shifting, and now I just don’t play online shooters anymore.

I feel like multiplayer games need a special chill lobby for verified players over 30. One where you can step aside and deal with the kids without causing issues. A space where you can call it a night without spoiling the fun because it’s 8:15 and you really need to get ready for bed.

Saudi Crown Prince. Trump defended his ordering the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist just this week.

It’s not about homosexuality being wrong. It’s about the hypocrisy of the Trump’s treatment of sexual minorities.

And let’s not forget that it was Clinton who signed an order to eject non-closeted homosexuals from the military.

That name seems a little weirder in context.

It’s like calling a species of wild pig the “Bleeding Black Hog” because of how it reacts to being shot.

I’m a Microsoft user. I don’t want solutions - I want to bitch about stuff.

Has anyone here actually read the book?

It’s not exactly a page-turner.

I knew a guy in grad school who was a hard-core Trumper back in 2015/16 who thought I was too because we both owned guns and were white I guess.

Anyway - I was talking to him one day about an epidemiological analysis I was leading a team on for HHS. I’m a geographer, and our group was analyzing the demographic, spatial, socioeconomic, and temporal distribution of cases of gonorrhea in a major metropolitan area.

I explain that we’re doing multivariate analysis on the demographic stuff because of all the issues caused by covariance showing “fake” correlation between gonorrhea and other variables. I explained that while the strongest indicator of gonorrhea in univariate analysis was whether or not you were black, that was actually an artifact from the fact that being black had a strong covariance with other variables like low income status, low employment rate, low education level, high population density, poor access to preventative healthcare, etc, and that when you took all the covariance into account there was no actual statistically significant correlation between gonorrhea and being black.

He then said something that was etched into my memory:

“It’s just you and me here, [chilie]. You don’t have to be all PC about thisbshit with me. We both know that just like how there’s stupid breeds of dogs, there are stupid breeds of people, and it’s a fucking disgrace that you can’t study that honestly here.”

That racist motherfucker has a Master’s degree.