The Amish have a website:

http://www.amish365.com/

Amy Schumer has remarkably, ironically, thin skin.

 

 

 

http://m.eonline.com/news/732141/amy-schumer-shuts-down-a-slut-shaming-critic-on-twitter-glad-i-took-a-photo-with-you

Amy Schumer has remarkably, ironically, thin skin.

 

 

 

http://m.eonline.com/news/732141/amy-schumer-shuts-down-a-slut-shaming-critic-on-twitter-glad-i-took-a-photo-with-you

I don't know, if she did indeed remember the guy the comment had to suck to read.

The Amish have a website:

http://www.amish365.com/

 

I wrote three paragraphs here in response to skimming through their website but I can sum up my thoughts in one sentence. There goes the "Amish" brand.

The Amish have a website:

http://www.amish365.com/

 

I wrote three paragraphs here in response to skimming through their website but I can sum up my thoughts in one sentence. There goes the "Amish" brand.

We had Amish machine operators at the shop in Chardon.  I guess some sects can use modern equipment to do work.  They might have been Mennonite but I think they were Amish, hats, full beards, bowl cuts, no pockets, and someone drove them.

So to be clear, Bristol Palin actually has 3 children, with her mom raising the first under the guise of being his biological mother. Right?

So to be clear, Bristol Palin actually has 3 children, with her mom raising the first under the guise of being his biological mother. Right?

 

Wrong.  Rumor spread by the conspiracy minded and haters.  For one thing, that would mean she had two kids eight months apart.  For another, Trigg has Down's Syndrome which is way more common among older mothers.

 

Indirect evidence perhaps, but there's nothing nearly as solid to support the conspiracy theory.

 

Well the fact is her family is definitely a mess.  Maybe she needs to pray more, or give more to her church, or something like that. 

You can't have family values if you don't make a big family. Praying and going to church is what causes the kids, just ask my grandparents - the Catholic Church is the reason I had 21 aunts and uncles at the peak.

You can't have family values if you don't make a big family. Praying and going to church is what causes the kids, just ask my grandparents - the Catholic Church is the reason I had 21 aunts and uncles at the peak.

 

Hey now, "family values" can mean many things.  The Kardashians, after all, are a family.

The Kardashians are far less trashy.  That's quite the feat.

The Kardashians are far less trashy.  That's quite the feat.

 

We never hear anything from the daddy.  Could be another Caitlin waiting to happen. 

☥ Bruce and Todd probably are quite similar.

So to be clear, Bristol Palin actually has 3 children, with her mom raising the first under the guise of being his biological mother. Right?

 

Wrong.  Rumor spread by the conspiracy minded and haters.  For one thing, that would mean she had two kids eight months apart.  For another, Trigg has Down's Syndrome which is way more common among older mothers.

 

Indirect evidence perhaps, but there's nothing nearly as solid to support the conspiracy theory.

 

lol We all knew with the reappearance of Sarah Palin on the national stage there would be a commensurate revival of Palin Derangement Syndrome! I'm sure ratings will be up for SNL. I guess if nothing else it'll reignite Tina Fey's career. As I never watch the show who's doing Trump these days?

I can't believe Tina Fey has a career.  She's one of those totally-not-entertaining people who somehow won't go away.  Like Billy Crystal. 

What being an upstairs neighbor means to me as well :)

 

^Yeah, my upstairs neighbor is even worse than this. He's a retired 20-something rich kid with some sort of mental issue. He rearranges his furniture every day, sometimes for hours on end. He also constantly drops heavy items on the hardwood floor on purpose. I've never lived in a building with someone like this before. People have continually complained about him, but he never changes. In fact, he has gotten much worse over the past year. These guys also broke the building rules by buying a dog, but the landlord has pussyfooted around the eviction since they are wealthy and work/worked in tech. Sex in our building is also horrible. There are a bunch of soft tech geeks, so it's pretty annoying. The guy in the unit next to my bedroom is a soft programmer type who is filthy rich, but has a cute girlfriend who moved in for his money. Their sex is terrible and they try to be as loud as possible to piss off people in the building. Actually, I'm not even sure if they're having sex most of the time...

 

On hardwood floors, these guys above us also don't put down any rugs which is basic common sense in any Victorian building. They are by far the most obnoxious neighbors I've ever had outside of Athens, Ohio. Overall, our neighborhood has become a bunch of self-centered, spoiled monsters.

What I find odd is that, while most of my credit/debit cards now have the chip, most retailers still do not have the terminals to use the chip. Some chains like Target do have new machines that have a place to insert the chip cards, but they are not yet encouraging customers to use them like that. I actually haven't tried to use it yet, maybe I will do so next time I'm at Target.

 

I'm in Canada for work fairly often, and the chip readers are the only option some businesses have (they have eliminated the swipe readers altogether).  They are most convenient in bars and restaurants - the waiter brings the portable chip reader out to the table and the transaction and tip is completed at the table. It's a much better process than having a waiter disappear for 15 minutes with your credit card. There's also one accurate final transaction - there's no need for the credit card company to show one pending transaction and alter it when a tip is entered later.

 

Many stores I visit in Cincinnati have been switching over the new chip card readers over the past few months but there are still some kinks to be worked out. For example, with my American Express card, I noticed that if I start out by inserting the chip, the machine will tell me to remove and swipe the card, but when I do, the transaction will fail. If I start out by swiping the card, the reader will tell me to insert the chip; then when I do, it will tell me to swipe the card. So I have to swipe, insert, and then swipe again in order for it to go through.

^Yeah, Canada is way ahead of America on this. I noticed that working in Toronto.

Boo-hoo. First world problems.  I don't think I've carried a credit card in my wallet for almost 5 years. 

 

There is of course a ton of evidence out there proving that most people spend more (especially on small day-to-day purchases) when paying with plastic (credit or debit) than they do when spending cash.  What's really bizarre is that people spend even more if a credit card logo enters their field of vision while shopping:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/retail-therapy/201306/why-we-overspend-credit

 

The opposite of all this is having funds deducted from your payroll for retirement and savings accounts.  Most people reading this probably have funds deducted for retirement, but I can't overstate how powerful the psychology is when some earnings are deposited into a savings account with a different institution.  Your mind really loves "having" that money more than what the money could buy, and I find myself afraid to touch it, like I'd be doing something positively shameful if I withdrew any of it for a vacation or frivolous purchase! 

Yes hiding money creatively is a key to savings. My wife puts every single $5 bill she gets into a big crock with a lid. She never ever looks and in fact she buries it under paper so that she can't see how big the pile is. Every spring we have fun dumping it out and counting maybe $750 to use toward a vacation. It saves money cause that's 750 that doesn't goon the credit card.

But if you trust yourself to use a credit card responsibly, there are a lot of benefits. I purchase everything on a credit card and pay it off in full each month. So I never pay a cent of interest, but I earn a lot of points, especially with the business travel I do. I also have a great credit score and high credit limits because I've been using this method for about the past 10 years.

But if you trust yourself to use a credit card responsibly, there are a lot of benefits. I purchase everything on a credit card and pay it off in full each month. So I never pay a cent of interest, but I earn a lot of points, especially with the business travel I do. I also have a great credit score and high credit limits because I've been using this method for about the past 10 years.

 

This is exactly what I do with my credit card. Pretty much every dollar I spend is via credit card, and it is paid off in full every month. You can make use of credit cards in a way that ultimately results in the credit card companies paying you to use their card. Every couple of months I cash out my points for something like Home Depot gift cards.

The owner of my company charges virtually everything the company does to his personal Amex card.  I have no idea how much, but I'm sure it's in the tens of millions.  Yes, he buys a lot of the company's inventory (a warehouse with over $5 million in stuff) with his personal card, which makes his purchase of $150k in electricity each year on credit not so impressive.  So getting the 1% in rewards back actually adds up to a lot in his case.  But for the average well-to-do person, even getting 1% back on $100,000 in annual purchases isn't much at all.  If you have an expense account that's one thing, but there's simply no way people aren't spending more with plastic than they would if they carried cash. 

Rewards aren't taxed and embezzlement laws don't apply to them either.

On the topic of this off-topic, I've been using Simple bank for about a year now, mainly because of the features of their phone app. In the spirit of jmecklenborg[/member] talking about the benefits of automatic payroll deduction, the Simple bank app supports any number of "Goals." It's a really easy way to automatically and without thinking hide your money from yourself and put it into useful categories. I know it doesn't make logical sense, but it really helps me for pretty much any budget item that doesn't come on a monthly frequency. For example, water, real estate taxes, and auto insurance. My water bill, for example, requires me to automatically save almost $3/day into that goal. It just gets deducted from my balance (or in their terminology, what is "safe to spend"). I find it very helpful that when I pay my water bill, I just spend it out of that goal, and it's totally evened out.

 

I also find it's useful to express some of these costs in this way. For example, water is more expensive for me than auto insurance. I didn't have any idea about that before.

^ I do something similar with my money via an Excel spreadsheet that I've had and continually used since the late 90s when I got my first bank account as a teenager. Virtually every dollar I've ever made or spent in my life is in that spreadsheet, and I use it to budget in a similar manner to the app you described.  If I spent a little bit of time to format the earliest years to match how I have been doing it for the past decade, I could create a bar chart categorizing every expense I've ever had.

But if you trust yourself to use a credit card responsibly, there are a lot of benefits. I purchase everything on a credit card and pay it off in full each month. So I never pay a cent of interest, but I earn a lot of points, especially with the business travel I do. I also have a great credit score and high credit limits because I've been using this method for about the past 10 years.

 

Yeah, I'd be homeless right now if I didn't have perfect credit. Landlords in the Bay won't look at anyone who can't pay pay 12 months up front or doesn't have excellent credit. I can never qualify for a mortgage on my salary, but having good credit has prevented me from being homeless twice in the last three years. In one distance, I beat out someone much wealthier than me offering to pay a 12-month lease up front because their credit score wasn't as good as mine.

 

When you live in a cut-throat city, having good credit is essential to survival. Without credit cards, you can't build up your credit history and get the highest scores. Landlords want to see years of on-time payments and consistent high scores.

 

*A lot of car rental companies require credit cards too, and with all the mobile apps today, it's much safer to use credit than debit. I couldn't get a credit card until I was 28, but it changed my life. Since I had a long history of being poor and rarely signed leases (I could only sublet), I didn't have any credit history. My bank made me set aside about $2,000 in a special savings account I couldn't touch as collateral, and then gave me my first credit card. After a couple of months of full, on-time payments, they let me put that money back into regular savings and upped my credit limit.

 

**I should add that being in my late 20's made me more responsible. If I had a credit card when I was broke in my early 20's, I could easily have seen myself going deep into debt. The reason I knew not to do that was because I saw friends do that. By 28, I was starting to see friends and coworkers wisely use credit cards to rack up points and build strong credit history. I was also seeing my first friends get out of debt and back on the right path (though some are still paying off student loans).

It's my understanding that when you use the "credit" option with a debit card you get all of the protections of using a credit card.  Obviously, if you use a debit card on a scanner with a skimmer, they can clean out your checking account and you have no recourse.  There is obviously a huge danger if you briefly transfer a lot of money into your checking account for a major purchase.  What's really annoying is that the prepaid debit cards that the big banks have (5/3 has an "Access 360 card") you can't buy gas at the pump.  You have to go inside.  I don't know why this is the case but using the prepaid card at gas pumps was the whole reason I got the dumb thing to begin with.  Also, you can use it for online purchases in lieu of a credit or debit card.  You can see what your total is going to be for a purchase and then instantly transfer what you need over to the prepaid card. 

 

 

well this is turning into a horrible friday already this morning, we are having another blizzard in ny and this big crane collapsed in tribeca (church/worth). i think someone was killed, not sure it just happened. this is a stunning view:

 

I saw pix of this on the FDs FB page. As someone who knows this industry a bit, I cannot imagine what happened unless this was built to do work on top of a building and it somehow fell off. The whole machine is upside down so it isn't like the boom just collapsed or something.

i txtd this pic to my wife who got out of the subway at chambers st a while ago and wondered what all the sirens were about -- and then she saw my text, yikes!

 

she has all the bad luck, but dodges it luckily. the first wtc airplane literally flew right over her head and she watched the whole thing happen right from the start. talk about traumatizing. and now this kind of thing too. yeesh.

 

 

i had suggested she not go in anyway as its a slippery mess out there. but hey -- we all gotta work. what can you do but try to be aware and careful?

I cannot imagine how this happened, with the entire machine upside down like that. It sounds horrible. And with the resultant fuel spill and now a water main break because of it, what a mess.

Wow, what a tragic situation, very sad.  Every single day has so many risks, and the only way to really avoid most of them is to stay inside your dwelling unit and not move out and about.

 

 

my wife says she figures she got out of the train 5min after it happened & lucky she didnt walk to work today due to the bad weather -- she likely could have walked by that way -- yipes!

 

i saw this so far:

 

NEWS

TriBeCa crane collapse on Worth Street kills 1, injures 2, FDNY says

 

By Jamie Reysen  [email protected] February 5, 2016

 

One person is dead and two are in serious condition following a crane collapse in TriBeCa on Friday morning, the FDNY said.

Emergency personnel responded to the accident at 40 Worth Street between West Broadway and Church Street just before 8:30 a.m.

 

One victim was pronounced dead at the scene, the FDNY confirmed on Twitter.

 

It was not immediately clear if the crane was being operated when it collapsed.

 

in other breaking nyc news, two clowns jumped into an empty conductor booth on the subway and announced, "this is isis taking over!" yesterday and some nj idiot crashed a drone into the 40th floor of empire state bldg -- this is just a sample of the kind of nerve-racking nonsense we have to put up with around here all the time on top of the real tragedies like this crane collapse. :(

 

http://www.amny.com/news/drone-hits-empire-state-building-new-jersey-man-arrested-cops-say-1.11431966

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/straphangers-r-train-claim-isis-article-1.2521096

Dang.

Seems like falling cranes or other similar construction accidents have occurred fairly often in NYC in recent years.

To be fair there are also around 1,000,000 buildings in NYC. When you have hundreds of towers going up in a handful of years things get sloppy.*

 

I wonder how, proportionally, this compares to other cities.

 

*not even remotely justifying it though*

True, but I don't hear of similar frequency of construction accidents in Chicago or Toronto where I have friends and follow their development closely. But I'm basing this only on appearances (which can be deceiving!), not data.

in other breaking nyc news, two clowns jumped into an empty conductor booth on the subway and announced, "this is isis taking over!" yesterday and some nj idiot crashed a drone into the 40th floor of empire state bldg -- this is just a sample of the kind of nerve-racking nonsense we have to put up with around here all the time on top of the real tragedies like this crane collapse. :(

 

http://www.amny.com/news/drone-hits-empire-state-building-new-jersey-man-arrested-cops-say-1.11431966

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/straphangers-r-train-claim-isis-article-1.2521096

 

A friend of mine is from Northern NJ and says the reason everyone from NYC has such a good sense of humor is because you have to have one due to all the crazy stuff that goes on there.

^ ain't that the truth!

 

now they actually have video of this thing going down -- i can't believe it fell straight across the street instead of on a building, but i guess they set'm up that way:

 

http://nypost.com/2016/02/05/crane-collapse-in-manhattan/

 

 

btw these things dont happen fairly often, more like once a year. they say this company had no violations. i dk, but generally you hear its safe even though big cranes always look scary and untrustworthy and i do try to avoid them that is for sure.

 

also, as for other places, keep in mind you would have to combine the building permits of chicago and toronto to even approach nyc's. probably throw an austin and miami in there too. apparantly this crane wasnt even up for construction, it was replacing something on a roof. at the very first i heard it was the nearby 56 leonard st jenga tower crane, but i knew that couldnt be it.

OMG I can't believe someone got a video.

even more -- now here is a video by somebody who came upon the scene just when it happened and saw the first responders and two of the victims, the guy in the car who will be ok and the person next to it in the street who was killed. that guy is grayed out, but still its tragic and i would say not appropriate for work viewing:

 

http://www.tmz.com/2016/02/05/nyc-crane-crash-rescues-video/

Apparently the crane operator was in the process of trying to get it into a safe position when significantly higher winds than predicted moved into the area. The fact that it had no load seems to support this. It collapsed when an intense gust moved across the rooftops and that was that.

It's my understanding that when you use the "credit" option with a debit card you get all of the protections of using a credit card. 

 

I didn't get theft protection when an item I ordered was stolen from my mailbox last week. 

Apparently the crane operator was in the process of trying to get it into a safe position when significantly higher winds than predicted moved into the area. The fact that it had no load seems to support this. It collapsed when an intense gust moved across the rooftops and that was that.

 

ahh that makes sense because i just read the crane operators are cooperating. they would probably clam up and lawyer up if they were operating the crane. the weather was just a horrible white out this morning and we were all saying at work here we did not see that kind of wind and weather coming.

Yeah it sounds like they were in the process of getting ready to lift stuff to the roof of the building they were working on but never made it that far when they realized winds were picking up and they needed to get the crane into a safe position to attempt to avoid exactly what happened.

God how horrible.

Got it. So these accidents really do happen a lot in NYC. Thought so.