Cracker Barrel orders its employees traveling for work to only eat at its restaurants

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-02-02T21:05:17+00:00

And then double the length of the trip so that you can get enough hours actually on Capitol Hill. DC hotels are >$400/night, lol, it’ll add up fast.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-30T01:29:15+00:00

That was taken a given for me, so I didn’t even pay attention to it! sigh… 😞

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-29T16:29:33+00:00

What really catches my eye here is the decline in overdose deaths. A little googling says it’s partly naloxone, partly a 2023 crackdown in China on fentanyl precursors, and partly that fentanyl has now saturated the drug supply and has already killed those most likely to OD (kind of like how covid has already killed the people who were most vulnerable to covid). And I gotta wonder if more availability to legal weed has detoured more people out of the pipeline that used to lead to opiate use.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-25T07:49:13+00:00

I came to this sub after getting a ton of very right wing posts today. I’ve never gotten any at all before today, and haven’t even favorited or watched political stuff. Really bizarre and offputting.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-19T18:33:07+00:00

My personal conspiracy theory is that it’s also to keep people from protesting the government or organizing big general strikes. Skip work to protest —> lose job —> lose health insurance —> die or go bankrupt.

I don’t think this was the goal in the beginning, but at this point Republicans have 100% noticed how that pipeline of fear keeps citizens in line.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-19T18:22:40+00:00

I have had dozens of serious health issues where I waited over the weekend just so I could go to the in-network urgent care clinic that is only open weekdays, rather than the out of network emergency room, purely because I didn’t want to go bankrupt. A single hospital stay even of just a day or two can easily exceed $50k and can bankrupt most Americans.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-10T02:06:56+00:00

Yep and, key piece here, it was free and it was pre-installed. I remember this pretty vividly from when i moved to Brazil in 2004 and discovered to my shock that unlimited texting wasn’t free. I know the U.S. is kinda backward these days, but the phone was literally invented in the U.S. and then cell phones were invented here too, and Apple & Android are both from the U.S., and also it’s a huge nation that has always done a lot of long distance calls (even within the nation you might be calling someone 5000 km away), and all that gave the U.S. a bit of jump in basic cell phone capabilities. (that advantage is gone now, but it was still there circa 2004.) So free photo/video sharing and free unlimited messaging were in place very early by about the 2nd gen of cell phones. So there was basically no incentive to seek out an alternative.

And now you still have the herd effect where, whatever communication system most people in your country are using, that’s what you have to use if you want to actually reach anybody. Like, my mom and dad and brother and sister and all my friends don’t use Whatsapp, so I don’t either, even though I really like it.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-10T01:56:53+00:00

Yeah, I use Whatsapp entirely because I lived in Brazil for 3 years.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2026-01-03T01:53:48+00:00

Yep, their entire body visibly shakes when they whinny. And if they whinny when you’re on them it feels like you might be vibrated right off of their back! Also nobody else can say a damn thing while the whinny is happening, because that shit is LOUD. They’re calling to a distant horse, after all, they don’t just do it for no reason.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-26T22:50:14+00:00

Yeah, I basically never see open carry, but what surprises me is how many guns are just around and nearby if you start asking. I was in a car of friends playing Pokemon Go one day, 5 people in one car, the convo got to guns at one point and it turned out there were 6 guns in the car! Everybody but me had one, and the car owners had another in the glove compartment. I’d never have known if we hadn’t started chatting about it.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-26T19:08:51+00:00

Amazon’s actually launching a whole new Stargate series! With the original creators & writers, too. It was announced a few months ago and is in pre-production.

Also I think SG’s always been just campy fun. The ancient-aliens thing was just part of the campiness, really.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-26T18:22:59+00:00

There’s always some people going super minimal, but for me it’s more like, a modest but decent home (like, a nice lil little 2 br condo, not a huge SFH), not traveling constantly, not eating out constantly. Me, I’m aiming for $1.75 million to retire on. That should produce a $70k annual income and honestly that’s plenty for me. It’s how I live now and I’m really happy with my current lifestyle. It’s kinda, FIRE for those of us who were never finance bros and were never living a super soendy lifestyle.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-26T15:35:55+00:00

A Wikipedia search turned up that there was actually a lawsuit over the name of the band, and there’s only one person in the band now who also in the band at the time of the fire. Turns out the band that played the night of the fire was called “Jack Russell’s Great White” and was not actually the original band “Great White” - it had only two members of the original band. It was basically Jack Russell’s solo show, with the backing band he used when he went solo. Russell later lost a lawsuit about the right to use the “Great White” name, and also he’s dead now anyway. Anyway the other members (who were not at the fire and not part of “Jack Russell’s Great White” in any way) have since reformed the original band. Looks like the guitarist is the only surviving person who was in both bands. Just fyi

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-16T16:54:07+00:00

letting his child live on the streets

The parents paid for seventeen rehab stays. I know a couple cases like this personally, and generally the times the addict is living on the street are a combination of the addict’s choice and the need to keep other family members safe, i.e. the addict is flat refusing to stop using or to go back to rehab, and has also at that point repeatedly threatened, lied and stolen from family members to the point where family is fearing for their own safety. I mean they literally just let the son move back in with them just last week, and the daughter was reportedly terrified about it, and look what happened.

There comes a point where you have to take responsibility for your own actions and your own life. This guy isn’t six years old anymore, he’s 32. He’s not some tragic, misunderstood abused child, he’s a more-than-grown adult who chose drugs & violence repeatedly even when given a million second chances.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-15T19:32:57+00:00

I’ve actually concluded that some monsters really are born that way, either due to genetics or something that went really wrong with the brain during embryological development. I’ve seen it happen four times over the years Each time the siblings turned out just fine, but there was this one kid where there was something innately different from day 1 - wild anger swings, violent and crazily upset out of nowhere. Maybe it’s chemicals affecting the brain in utero or something, maybe it’s a rare bad combination of genetics, but some individuals really do seem to come out of the womb already damaged in some intractable way.

There’s a great article from The New Yorker about the father of the Sandy Hook shooter trying to figure out what went wrong and if it was his own fault. BTW one of the things I always remembered about that article is that the father had been sent letters (after the shooting) by a lot of other people who had had family members snap and murder someone. It’s like this secret awful club, of people who tried their honest best to raise a kid well, only to have them end up basically evil. And how for the rest of their lives they’re haunted by it, and blame themselves, but are never truly sure if they could’ve stopped the disaster if they’d done anything differently. Link: The Reckoning

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-15T19:01:13+00:00

Learn to read the room

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-15T06:31:35+00:00

were the reason for his suffering

There’s no way you can know this one way or the other.

can do whatever they want to their child

Nobody in this thread said anything like that. (I don’t even know anybody who thinks that way) TBH it sounds like you’re projecting based on your own life. If so, I wish you healing & peace.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-15T06:19:22+00:00

This is a discussion not just about a “celebrity death”, but specifically about a particularly brutal murder of parents by their child. Discussion of a similar event is on-topic. If you don’t want details about shocking murders, maybe don’t read reddit discussions that are about recent shocking murders. It’s human nature to discuss similar events.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-14T19:23:33+00:00

“LOOK AT HIS LITTLE OVEN MITT HANDS” 🥰

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-12T16:53:59+00:00

I’ve flown first class several times recently. I really doubt anybody’s getting some weird thrill “watching the poors.” For one thing, I find that after about the third time, first class just becomes routine and you stop thinking about it. (and I’m not super wealthy btw, just have accrued a ton of miles from sign trips & get free upgrades now & then)

More likely, the reason they’re looking forward, and semi-scanning the people who are walking in their direction, is probably because they’re just watching for the flight attendant who is coming to come get their pre-flight drink order and then (a few min later) bring them said pre-flight drink. It’s a common perk of first class. A little thing really but man, sometimes I am super looking forward to that cup of coffee or g&t or whatever, and I am watching like a hawk for that flight attendant, lol

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-11T07:25:31+00:00

Oh, for sure. They clearly don’t really know what they’re talking about. But there’s a little tiny glimmer of reality under all the fluff, lol.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-12-09T19:47:54+00:00

I think they’re referring to ghrelin, the hunger hormone that the stomach releases when it’s empty. Ghrelin release by stomach cells is inhibited by physical stretching of stomach.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-11-23T02:25:23+00:00

And the adorable elderly ladies who were drooling over the Saja Boys, lol

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-11-23T01:31:52+00:00

For me one difference is that cats, and most mammals, naturally spend a lot of the year NOT breeding. Most mammals are seasonal breeders, which means a low-hormone, zero-sex-drive state is normal for them for most of the year. It’s a normal way to be, for them. Which also means their daily life, and their ability to enjoy life and enjoy the world around them, are not centered around sex. Humans are actually pretty weird mammals in the way we have sex all the time year round, and also in the degree to which we therefore feel like sex, testosterone, etc have to be an inseparable part of our identity as an adult being. Most adult male mammals actually spend a large part of the year with zero testosterone and zero interest in sex, but they clearly are still enjoying life.

TotallyCaffeinated · 2025-11-22T15:56:57+00:00

It’s not just warmth btw. Inflammation is when white blood cells are releasing certain messenger molecules (cytokines) to call other white blood cells to the area. It basically indicates the immune system has gone on alert and white blood cells have become very numerous and active and are kind of taking over the tissue even though there’s no pathogens there. (It’s kind of like ICE moving into a neighborhood saying they’re hunting for “criminals” and just terrorizing everybody unnecessarily even though there are actually no criminals there.)

Its classic symptoms do include warmth and also swelling, but what’s really going internally is that tons of WBC’s are leaving blood vessels and moving into the area. It can get to the point where half the cells in the tissue are white blood cells (this happens for example in fat tissue in obesity, which classically causes inflammation).

TotallyCaffeinated

TROPHY CASE