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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Coincidentally, I just got a knock-off Soda Stream from Phillips. It’s over $150 cheaper and works 2x-3x times better. I wanted to build something similar for a homemade soda bar concept, and discovered how truly cheap it can be to make soda and carbonated water at home. I was shocked at what a simple concept it is, and how much of a profit these sodas water companies make. Phillips even charging $50 for their system is a total rip-off.

    Truthfully, I think the increase in quality in the Phillips machine is due to fewer parts is an “exception that proves the rule” as these in-bottle carbonators seem to work better with fewer parts. It’s just a pressure hose connected to a co2 tank. Literally, all of $6 if you were to build one yourself from parts on Amazon (or $3 if you got he Alibaba route)

    I truly believe that the fewer parts the better in any DIY or commercial product due to the less chance of a failure in a part if there are fewer parts. This works fantastically for the “lower quality” producing companies, like Phillips.

    My inventive and engineering entrepreneur friends and I call this “fewer parts the better” concept, a “Murphy’s law compensator” as the fewer parts there are, the fewer parts that can statistically “go wrong”





  • It’s rare, but every time it’s incredibly unpleasant. It’s expecting to bite into a nice soft food, but instead chomping on a piece of metal, praying that you didn’t just break a tooth.

    It happened to me a few times one year when I started getting neurological disorder. It stopped once I started paying attention to what I eat, cherishing every bite.






  • I parents owned a cockapoo while growing up, and my siblings and I didn’t like it because it was aggressive as hell and my mother treated it like an actual factual babby.

    Once my sister was eating a hot pocket, and the dog wanted it, so it mauled her badly. It jumped up on the table randomly and mauled her face. It took several surgeries to get her face back to normal. My mother lied and told the police she had it destroyed.

    About 3 years later, it became paralyzed from the waist down after it attacked me. It jumped for my face and landed wrong. It didn’t die, and my mother blames me for the incident to this day, 30 or so years later.

    It would piss and shit all over everything until it died of old age about a decade later. All the while, my mother treated it more and more like a baby because it couldn’t get away, and it wore diapers when my mother wasn’t too lazy.

    I’m sure most of my issues with the dog were due to the owner being a shitty person.

    Though after it ate part of my sister’s face, I’m convinced that it saw everyone but my mother as “meat,” which is why I couldn’t get along with the dog. I mostly tolerated it until I emancipated myself early.


  • I’d rather remain comfortable not buying games from Ubisoft and EA.

    I refuse to waste a single dollar on every game from both companies, since we were all bent over and continue to get bent over because they just don’t care about anything but making more money.

    A good example from Ubisoft is the handling of the Driver series. They kept on releasing the games in the series in a near unplayable state before when most people had dial up.

    A good example with EA was the failed DRM with Spore. They only let you install the game 3 times, which glitched out to the point where people had to turn to piracy (warez and crackz) to play a game they paid for.

    We vote with every dollar spent, which gives me hope when people rally around good companies that do the right thing.




  • “There is no point in reinventing the wheel” is my favorite saying when it comes to things like this.

    If something has been done over and over again, there is no point in doing it yourself from scratch. It wastes time, money, and effort that could be spent on creating something new.

    Humanity’s greatest strength is being able to add to the previous generation’s knowledge base, too!

    If we had to relearn how to do the same things in the same way, in every generation, we would still be in the stone age…

    When I manage folks, I expect them to steal if its already been done and especially if it’s been done to death.


  • This is exactly why I look at companies and corporations with a side-eye of doubt when they claim to have some sort of “do not be evil” motto baked into thier company culture.

    It doesn’t matter if a gigantic company has a hundred philanthropy focused CEOs, all ot takes is one greedy or evil one to destroy a company’s dogma

    After the investors, managers, and profiteers taste easy money, they will continue to demand to be fed that blood flavored stew.

    Once that happens, they either need to be lobotomized or put down for the good of all lest those who are not in the know continue to put money into the frothing imitation it has become.