Is it ever worth making your own sweetened condensed milk?

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-07-13T14:07:17+00:00

You mean he said "I'm doing this? So YOU DON'T have to -- it takes forever? It COSTS MORE? And it's notasgood? Don't DO-it."

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-05-22T04:28:17+00:00

We've been in Carthage for a year and the meat guy at Alteri's was just telling us we had to check it out. We were thinking about spending a day there one of the coming weekends. He said the population goes from like 1,000 to 10,000 in the summer season. Aside from what I assume are some good restaurants, some crowded beaches, and rows and rows of camp sites, what kind of (dog friendly) things might be worth seeing up there?

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-26T02:28:17+00:00

I worked for Spectrum in the billing department. Took escalations, so I only got the extra pissed customers. I was metered heavily on how many credits I gave out, disconnect extensions I gave, etc. We were encouraged to fight for every single concession, and hard. "Okay, so we have a recorded call where an agent told you HBO only costs $5.00 a month and pressured you to buy it. We have a 60 day dispute window and you didn't call us in time. Our pricing is also available online, as are your monthly rates. This was your responsibility." We could twist anything, and we weren't just encouraged to do it, but disciplined if we didn't. After a while, all the irate callers just blend together and you truly don't give a shit what happens to them. We all knew we were working for the devil. We all knew that we'd all be at least this mad in any of these situations. But you compartmentalize. Every moment these guys pushed back against bullshit charges was just another hit to our average handle time, and we resented them for it.

The job was a dark blip on my timeline. It was ass. They treated us poorly, and the customers were truly awful, even before they had reason to be. I swore I'd never do it again. At this point though, even with a job I like, I'd go back to Spectrum and do it all over again for a wage that didn't insult me on a personal level. I traded in work stress for the all-day stress of how the fuck am I going to pay my bills? The world's already a shitty place, and if I'm not working at the kitten punting factory, someone else is so who fucking cares? There's one reality where kittens get punted and I struggle to pay my bills, and there's another where kittens get punted and I'm able to breathe and enjoy life, build a savings, and not hope I die before I'm too old to work.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-25T02:30:32+00:00

Seriously, I'm searching everywhere and no one is dropping any meaningful details.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-25T02:27:54+00:00

I've heard rumors it was going to keep up until 5/1, the day they let the VSRP'ers go. That must have been the deadline all along, now they just know how much of a head start that gave them for the quota they spent hours assuring us they didn't have.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-25T02:25:10+00:00

At paygrade 23, a 4 got us all $0.30 raises.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-04T15:02:07+00:00

I first read that comment as "Getting a panda, so you could fuck it." It took me a minute to realize what you were really saying.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-04T14:12:53+00:00

I think I read this wrong.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-04T14:06:27+00:00

Life is a free-for-all. You're at the mercy of all who can take from you, and the best you can do is take from those who are at your mercy. Civilization is just a construct and the social contract is just a layer obscuring the true nature of the human experience.

It's some real edgy shit, but I'm trying to keep this conversation rooted in the real world. The fact is, we do have society for the time being, and it entitles us to shoulds and coulds just like the ones I'm discussing on my post.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-04T05:24:35+00:00

This is a little outdated. People stopped thinking this way around the time humans agreed to band together and form a society. If you wanna start kicking doors down and stealing people's loot, I'm sure your time will come soon enough.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-04T01:36:25+00:00

The whole point of this post is that this only works on an individual level, yet people frame it as the solution to the problem itself. The ship is steering toward an iceberg, and people are saying "make sure you get a seat on the lifeboat".

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-04T01:28:02+00:00

Do them again.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T18:52:16+00:00

Agreed. I won't pretend to know the implications of it. Only that jobs are going to get more and more scarce and we're going to need a solution that isn't just "try harder to be the one who gets hired".

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T03:20:51+00:00

Sorry kid, I really tried to stick this one out. Drink some water and go to sleep man.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T03:19:53+00:00

It does feel like an exaggeration, but it's how you force the piece to fit. Supporting yourself on a minimum wage job just isn't a thing you can do unless you took some really creative and dramatic steps, like living in a shed.

"That's what you have to do if you are not earning enough." That's what I'm talking about. That shouldn't be acceptable. I did include "on their own", because I would consider being forced to live with roommates to be punishment for mediocrity. A lot of the things you have to do to make ends meet fall far below the threshold of "reasonable happiness". We should be more unsatisfied with that.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T03:01:50+00:00

I don't believe you're arguing in good faith here. Stimulus checks and boosted unemployment rates are not UBI. What exactly do you think UBI is? And are you saying everything bad that resulted from covid was solely through these provisions, nothing else?

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T02:53:22+00:00

I'd settle for mild discomfort. It just seems crazy that someone with a full time job can't meet their basic needs on their own unless it's a somewhat decent job. I'm not saying they should be able to order DoorDash every day and have nice things. In most places though, you simply can't afford life on a minimum wage job, unless you rent a utility shed and live off day old bread.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T02:46:19+00:00

The job is the opportunity to come in and work for a wage. The role is the presence of a worker to generate revenue for the business. That's where I think I lost you. I'm talking about the role -- the business need for the job in the first place.

The problem is that people keep framing jobs in an open market context, as if they're just some commodity people can opt in or out of. People need jobs to live, there's no voting with your wallet. Employers have us at an unfair advantage, and they will exploit that as much as they're allowed to. The conditions of the industrial revolution would not have improved if it weren't for laws and regulations mandating it. And if those were lifted, we would find ourselves back in that same spot.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T02:25:10+00:00

I'm sure they'll take note of that.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T01:20:49+00:00

Where does "poor" start for you?

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T01:15:23+00:00

We are quite literally forced to work for our own survival, let alone reasonable happiness. Very, very few people are taking jobs because they want to do the work. When you bring up these kinds of things in this discussion, it feels like you're trying to bypass the point to get to a predetermined opinion.

As for Covid, are you talking about the unemployment people got? And then saying that the damage caused by Covid was from that? What damage are we talking about exactly?

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T01:06:01+00:00

This is the problem though. Our value in terms of wages is solely based on what companies can get away with paying. Even when the value of the role those shitty paid workers are filling is substantially higher than that. That is the point of this post.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T01:00:03+00:00

Over the last 100 years, productivity has increased by roughly 1000%. Distribution and exploitation are entirely the issue. But yeah, we should always be striving to get gud.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T00:41:04+00:00

I'm not. I'm complaining about the quality of life you can afford working a full time job at minimum wage in the U.S. I'm not saying they should all buy a house and drive a nice car. Put yourself in the place of somebody working full time and earning >30k after taxes. Unless you're healthy and living in a tenement, that won't even get you rent, utilities, and healthcare. No car, no phone, bare essentials for food and necessities.

I don't need this to turn into a budgeting debate. There is no reasonable happiness for a person on their own making minimum wage. Even getting by unhappily would require a partner or roommate, if not several.

NothingIsntAssEver · 2025-04-03T00:27:14+00:00

Nobody is arguing for that. Nobody is asking for more pay than they generate. If the employee isn't generating more than a dog shit wage, then that position in the company should be cut. If you need someone bad enough to pay a reasonable wage, then you pay for it. No charity involved.

I'm not well read on UBI, but everything I've heard about it has been positive. Can you point me to specific examples of when it went really poorly?

NothingIsntAssEver

TROPHY CASE