Oh ok, not an ideal situation under normal circumstances, but it might be for the best if they don’t take the relationship seriously. It might be a good idea to check out some of the resources others have posted in the comments with your daughter just to prepare her. The Leah remini series is a great, comprehensive look at how it affected former members. The South Park episode shows how ridiculous the mythology of their religion is, but from what I understand, most people in the cult don’t even learn about that until you’re higher up and I guess by that point, they’ve invested so much money and resources that they just go with it. There are a few documentaries on streaming services like Netflix and max that cover a lot of it too. It might be worth getting ahead of it in case they start seeing your daughter as someone they can recruit. I don’t see how anyone could join them after watching the Leah Remini series, so that’s probably best.

I don’t have much new to offer here, but it’s 100% a cult and please be very careful with regard to your daughter. My impression is that any relationships with people outside of the cult will result in them trying to bring the outsider in and once they’re in, it can be difficult to break them out. They’ll have information on their members that they’ll use against them leaving, and they’ll at best be labeled a suppressive person and then harassed if they try to leave and at worst further isolated from their outside relationships, including family as their sucked further into the cult that drains them of their money and/or basically uses them ad slaves. Since the family is rich, they may have a little more freedom and be a little more laid back about the religion, but if they have slaves working at their house, they’re probably higher up and may be discouraged from dating outside their cult since they seem to place very high value on money and fame and likely don’t want significant others to break those people out of the cult.

I bet you make incorrect assumptions about people you don’t know regularly.

I never get the first one and rarely the second one. If it says to click all the squares with motorcycles and it’s just the one big picture, am I supposed to click stuff like the tire and mirrors? I always do and never get it right. Then most of the time they ask me to identify motorcycles, they show me motor scooters and what am I supposed to do then? I think I just need to get one of these bots to do it for me.

Does your uncle have room for one more? I’ve been feeling very uneasy about things too. I really don’t know what I’m going to do yet if Trump wins, but even if he doesn’t by some miracle, I feel like we’ll just be in the same situation again in 2028, 2032, etc. I feel like the democrats are not effective at fixing things and the republicans have gotten very effective at breaking them. I don’t think it’s going to be civil war time if he wins, but I do think he’s going to really mess things up for everyone, especially those in blue states again and it’s going to be even more difficult to fix. I’m pretty fortunate to be where I am now in my life and I don’t think I can just uproot everything and move to another country. I also wouldn’t even know where to move other than maybe Canada, but I kinda also don’t want any country that elects Trump as a king to be my next-door neighbor either. I think I just have to keep my head down, keep going and hope things get better then keep voting to try to change things and hope enough people feel the same, but I’m really feeling like they don’t.

I agree and I also wouldn’t mind so much if the ads were in proportion to the length of the video and at natural breaks. I don’t want to watch a 30 second ad to see a 15 second video.

It’s disheartening that he didn’t learn that when you’re poor, even when you start to make progress, everything needs to continue to go your way because if you hit one bump in the road you need to start all over again. It’s too bad his “start all over again” was just “go back to being rich” and he really failed his social experiment.

Wow, I didn’t even realize that it requires a $24.99 per month plan from T-Mobile for voice, texting and data. These companies are getting really brazen.

That’s not a bad idea, but why not just integrate that functionality into a smartwatch?

I used to feel the same, but they do fit a bit of a need for me. They work great as a silent alarm so you don’t wake up anyone else in your room, you don’t have to take your phone out to check time or notifications, and health and fitness tracking is better than what a phone can offer.

Yeah, I can’t imagine they thought this would be a serious product.

I could have told them this was a dumb idea from the start; creating something that doesn’t fill a need, is just another device to carry around and could just be an app on a phone that we already carry around, just to cram it down people’s throats “because AI,” is probably not a good business plan.

Isn’t that what they say now?

Yeah, I just installed and paid for AdGuard pro, which blocks ads on safari. Doesn’t do anything for any Google app that I install but reading news sites is much better since I did it.

I used to push android over iOS until a few years ago when Google became just as bad as Apple, if not worse. I’ve been trying to steadily get rid of Google products that they’re probably just going to either stop supporting or discontinue altogether, or gradually reduce features that I use every day. I switched over to an iPhone because it offers better privacy and allows for ad blockers without having to root your phone. I don’t have any desire to go back even though I still think the android interface makes more sense for me. I also don’t care what color someone’s bubble is.

I’ve been using it as my main search engine for around a year now. I accidentally used google today to look up “best screwdriver sets” and the results were all ads instead of results with screwdriver set reviews. I put the same thing in DuckDuckGo and immediately got relevant results.

The video lives up to the headline: https://youtu.be/bSRqjxpTXzM?si=8dE18ClbO2qa2lej

That’s how it is by me too; very few lines open with an actual person. I’d prefer not interacting with anyone, but the self checkouts are just a reason to hire fewer people. Years ago, they used to have two people at every register at grocery stores; one to ring people up and the other to pack the bags up. You rarely see this anymore unless the cashier is being trained.

In addition to that, on the occasions that I do use self checkout, I almost always have an issue with one of the items and then the one person they have overseeing ten checkout lanes needs to finish what they’re doing and come over to me just to fix the issue so I can finish scanning the rest of my stuff.

So when I’m using self checkout, I’m doing unpaid labor just because the store wants to increase profits and it often ends up being slower depending on how much produce I’m buying.

Doesn’t hurt, but it might just be because of the boxer briefs.

The worst for me is the motorcycles one; half of the pictures are of motor scooters. Does it count those as motorcycles or is it counting on the user to know the difference because they’re not technically the same thing?