How can anybody make jokes about this knowing what's at steak?

I'm 99% sure this is fake or that it wasn't UPS who delivered the package. I can see virtually the whole box in this image and it's clear that the package is in pretty decent condition and not covered in mystery stains.

This made me recall an odd bank related situation that happened to me a few weeks ago, and which I am still a bit perplexed by.

Due to a couple of things coming up, I needed to stock up on some bills of various denominations. Nothing all that crazy, in my opinion, 20 $1 bills, 20 $5 bills, stuff like that, a few hundred dollars at most. Where else do you get bills like that? The bank, I assumed.

When I got up to the teller, I explained that I needed to pull out X amount from my account, and I that I needed specific number of each denomination. She looked at me like I was asking something completely unheard of. She even told me, I don't think I have the money for that as she shuffled through some drawers.

Eventually she asked another teller who told her she'd have to go to the central terminal (I don't recall the actual name they used) and make a request for each denomination. So the teller walked across the back of the bank to a computer that looked like it was from the 80s. After about 10 minutes of typing, with multiple people helping her, 2 people came out from a room, walked over to a floor vault and opened it. While one pulled out the cash I requested, the other stood guard. It was surreal. They counted the money twice, the teller counted the money twice, and then finally came back to the counter and gave me the deposit. She seemed to be barely holding back her level of irritation at me.

All that for just a few hundred dollars in cash. It had me really wondering if I was mistaken about the role and services provided by banks and whether I was out of line for asking to receive specific denominations. Was I supposed to leave a tip or something?

Worst that's happened to me is that I was detained and questioned by the cops while they investigated my "grow operation". I had some old school grow lights in my kitchen window for my window sill plants and a potted hibiscus outside on my deck.

It's sad that the cops couldn't immediately tell the difference between hibiscus and weed nor were they aware that people can grow indoor house plants under those pink/purple fluorescent lights which for sure wouldn't be strong enough to grow marijuana to begin with.

It's also funny that my neighbor at the time actually was growing weed on his front patio, and they never seemed to notice in the 5 or so years I lived next door.

My best friend has an unnatural talent for this sort of thing and really enjoys toying with conspiracy theory nuts.

When folks start talking about crazy shit, it makes me very anxious and I tend to shut down. Not my buddy. He eggs them on, encourages it, and gets them to say things or agree with things that are even more outlandish than where they conversation started. Things will start at "China invented covid to kill off old people" and somehow end up at "Hillary Clinton paid to have her chromosomes added to the covid vaccines so that DNA evidence can no longer be used against her in the courts".

Yes, yes, and yes. This is exactly what I'm seeing happen.

Those right leaning folks who were most vocal about how Biden was at fault for the last time egg prices went up are now suddenly fully willing to blame it on bird flu and not worried about it because prices will come back down soon. And already the increasing rate of inflation isn't the president's fault, inflation is high all around the world, there's little the president can actually do to control it, and it's actually Biden's fault. Funny how that works.

I dunno if it is intentional, but there's a an additional layer of humor in this for me:

Where I live, there's a company called Labcorp and they are basically the de facto company for pre-employment and random drug testing. I'm sure they do more than just drug tests, but drug testing is about all non-medical folks know of the place.

I have a family member who told me last year that they believe Christians are the most persecuted group in the USA, even more so than gay people.

In truth it was very challenging to stay calm in the face of someone saying something so blatantly biased and false. Packaged as an opinion, of course, but presented as the truth.

I asked questions and challenged some of the statements being made, but I know for a fact that the only thing I accomplished is that she's unlikely to make that particular statement in front of me again. No minds were changed that day. It's just sad.

As someone who actually IS persecuted in this country for things I cannot change about myself, I really don't get why someone would want to live under the delusion that they are being persecuted when they otherwise aren't. It's not fun and there's no benefit to being persecuted.

When someone asks a thing like this on Lemmy, look up the same thread on Reddit (guaranteed to find it was recently also posted there) and copy-pasta some of the top posts. Guaranteed worthless internet up arrows.

"We" as in Republicans? Absolutely not true.

In my circle, the outspoken Republicans were absolutely convinced that "Hussein Obama" was a radical, socialist, communist, muslim foreigner who had illegally become president because he was the anti-Christ. He was here to kill the babies and white people and he destroyed the country. Practically everything was Obama's fault such that it sparked the "Thanks, Obama" sarcastic meme. He couldn't do anything right. Employment numbers down? Obama did it. Employment numbers up? Obama is lying about it, they're actually down. Osama Bin Laden killed? That makes everything worse, but also, there's no proof it was actually him.

In the third grade, I won the science fair.

The competition was pretty strong. There was a kid who built a contraption to simulate a mini-tornado. Granted, it was probably his dad who built the thing, but still. There was another kid that built and programmed a robotics project. Again, probably his parents did a lot of the work, but the guy was super smart so I'm sure he did some of that work. One girl came up with an experiment to use fungus to grow plastics or something like that, I don't remember. It's been decades.

Me? The afternoon before the fair I had literally nothing. I grew up poor, we had a lot of junk laying around the house because my parents would go to the county dump site, dig through the trash, and bring home anything they thought was valuable or fixable. I managed to hobble together one of the light sensors from a broken night light to the electronics from a toy radio so that it only played when the lights were off. I stuffed that into a cardboard "robot". And the people judging the science fair loved it.

So fuck you Stephanie Petty, Chris McDonald, and Dequan Shaw and your rich ass parents and your entitled ass selves. I won bitches.

I'm a white man in a rural area in the south. Black folks who don't really know me often seem surprised when they hear me say something anti-Trump. And honestly, I understand completely.

I save money by not even using lemons. I simply add a minute amount of dehydroxyl-5-ca carbomethyl-tridiamine hexanepolyethylene which tastes vaguely lemony but also causes elbow cancer. Treatment for which is patented by one of my subsidiary companies, so I make a good chunk of income with the cause and cure for that one specific disease.

There's a saying amongst us ass breathers in regards to all you nose breathing assholes: "they hate us because they anus."

I'm a transgender illegal alien who recently went to jail and got a sex change. Anybody wanna share pet recipes?

I'm just not that "type" of person, so I'm truly holding myself back from saying something about this to my conservative relatives.

Just like when Biden was president, I know for a fact that the price of eggs is not a thing that the president controls, but you would have thought it was based on how conservatives presented things the past 4 years.

All of a sudden my conservative family and friends are either quiet on the topic or they've had a revelation that the prices are due to external factors like bird flu / supply & demand and that the current president has little to do with things. Funny how that works.

They voted for the guy that said he'd lower prices. They voted for the guy that they swear "life was better under".

The difference is, I can afford as many eggs as I want at these prices without even noticing. They can't.

Honestly, my experience is entirely anecdotal, and I completely admit that. I have not read this article yet, so I don't even know what the conclusion is (but I can make an assumption).

Disclaimer being what it is, literally all of the full-on racist people I know or have known are also MAGA conservatives. And conversely, all the MAGA people I know or have known are way more racist than average. I say that from the perspective that, at least in the USA, most people have racial biases to a certain extent.

I've been told things like "You don't have the right skin color to take the bus into the city", meaning because I'm Caucasian with "white" skin, I would somehow be an outlier among the rest of the folks taking the bus. Many, many times I've heard statements like "we can't even say [the N-word] anymore even though that's what they call themselves all the time" and let me tell you the people saying that don't say "N-word" they say the real deal that rhymes with chigger. They'll claim illegal "Mexicans" took their jobs, without a moment's thought about who hired those "Mexicans" or what nationality those "Mexicans" are. There's really no skin color other than white-white that doesn't receive some hate.

Anyway, this is just old man ranting at this point, and it may even be too long to be readable, so let me summarize it with FUCK RACISTS & FUCK MAGA.

I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can't feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.

Editor's Note: In fact, shit will not get real.

No, she was just upset that you were wasting all that time grooming yourself instead of spending it more appropriately on things like petting her.