Minor things that bother you

[hotdogPi]

I'm kind of bothered by the fact that common USA coins now are worth so little that they're essentially useless.  Today, the most that I can buy with one quarter is 15 minutes of time from a downtown Appleton, WI parking meter or 7 minutes of time from a dryer and a nearby laundry that I often use.  That laundry also now charges $3 and more to run an average load of laundry in their medium sized washers.  C'mon guys, give us some coins (ie, 50¢, $1, $2, $5, etc) that we can actually USE in our everyday lives (and get rid of the even more useless pennies, nickels and dimes)!



Mike

I fully agree. Other currencies that are roughly equivalent to our dollar (or cents for the case of yen):
Canada: rounds to nearest 5¢, largest coin $2
Australia: rounds to nearest 5¢, largest coin $2
New Zealand: rounds to nearest 10¢, largest coin $2 (although their dollar is only about 2/3 of ours)
Euro: rounding depends on country (was 0,10€ in Paris, but some places don't round at all), largest coin 2€
UK: no rounding, largest coin £2
Switzerland: rounds to nearest 0.05 Fr., largest coin 5 Fr.
Japan: no rounding that I know of, largest coin ¥500

That said, there are some countries (India and Russia among them) where their highest coin is less than our quarter.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Here in Spain we don't round, although I decided not to carry any coin smaller than 0.05€.

Fun fact: Back when the Spanish Peseta existed, the highest coin was 500 Pesetas, which was actually higher than the current highest Euro coin (just over 3€).

[1995hoo]

In Virginia, we don't register to vote by political party. I'm not registered with any party, and in general elections I've voted for members of both major parties over the years as well as the occasional third-party candidate or independent. We can vote in any party's primary should we wish to do so (but not in more than one primary per election), and I've voted in both major parties' primaries at various times over the years, usually because there is a particular candidate I want to see defeated.

So for some reason, the Democrats have decided I welcome their text messages (I don't, and I never signed up for political crap from any party). My phone has been blowing up non-stop with unsolicited and unwanted Democrap over the past couple of weeks. There seems to be no way to stop it, either, short of getting a new mobile number (which I don't want to do since I've had this number since 1999 and any new number would likely have the wrong area code). I delete it all, report the senders as junk, and block the senders, but of course they just send more using different numbers. I'm reluctant to activate the feature that allows text messages only from known senders in your contact list because that would block important stuff like two-factor authentication messages from the bank or the credit card issuers. I suppose, to some extent, this is a form of the issue in the thread about going back to a simpler time, but it's not quite the same–I think it kind of underscores that every new technology winds up being used as a method of harassment. We've all received junk mail for years. E-mail then fell victim to spam, spoofs, phishing scams, etc. The telephone fell victim to constant robocalls. Now text messages are turning into constant spam.

[hotdogPi]

If it's automated, typing STOP requires them to stop by law.

[ZLoth]

I live right at the southern border of Collin County, Texas near the George Bush Tollway. Since 3 PM yesterday afternoon until 7 AM this morning, I have received:

• 1 Severe Thunderstorm Watch (issued at the county level)
• 1 Tornado Watch (issued at the county level)
• 11 Severe Thunderstorm Warnings
• 2 Tornado Warnings

I live right at the southern edge of the Collin County, Texas. The S.A.M.E. location code for my county is 048085, which means that anything that covers a slight portion of Collin county triggers an alert on my weather radio. Of the 13 warnings issued last night, the two tornado warnings were on the north side of the county, and only 2 of the 11 Thunderstorm warnings covered my specific area. It also has meant that I got very little sleep last night.

Of course, I look at the warnings as follows:

• Severe Thunderstorm Watch - Play closer attention to the weather forecasts, start charging the devices.
• Tornado Watch - Prepare the tornado kit and the shelter room (aka the center bathroom). Thank goodness I have a 12 pack of bottled water and hard hats under the sinks.
• Severe Thunderstorm Warning - Mark sure blankets and pillows are in place. Make sure all doors are LOCKED, especially the patio doors.
• Tornado Warning - Close the doors, the grab the cat before he runs away, head to the shelter room.

I suspect this is much more preparation that some of my neighbors do.

[1995hoo]

If it's automated, typing STOP requires them to stop by law.

Doesn't mean that works, though. More often that not it seems like doing that just leads to even more spam.

[hotdogPi]

I feel like you might be getting someone pretending to be the Democratic party hoping that getting a whole bunch of spam texts would move the recipient away from it. Actual campaigns of both parties, while they often constantly email/text you (after subscribing, not on their own!), follow laws regarding opting out and don't text from multiple numbers after being blocked multiple times.

[kphoger]

Weird timing.  My wife just had to post on Facebook that her sister's account had been hacked...

The hacker has since deleted my wife's post about the account being hacked, changed the name associated with the account, changed the location to somewhere in England–and then, two days later, PMed my wife with "what's up?" or something like that.

My wife replied, "nothing, what's up with you?".   

Then the hacker asked her to confirm her phone number.   

[1995hoo]

I feel like you might be getting someone pretending to be the Democratic party hoping that getting a whole bunch of spam texts would move the recipient away from it. Actual campaigns of both parties, while they often constantly email/text you (after subscribing, not on their own!), follow laws regarding opting out and don't text from multiple numbers after being blocked multiple times.

Might be. For obvious reasons, I don't click on any of their links. Actually, I don't bother to view most of the messages except insofar as I might need to open one to block the sender.

[Big John]

Getting a loud late-night Amber alert from an incident in Milwaukee, over 100 miles away.

[kphoger]

Getting a loud late-night Amber alert from an incident in Milwaukee, over 100 miles away.

Every time I hear this kind of thing, it makes be glad I've never subscribed to any alerts on any device I've ever owned.

[JayhawkCO]

Getting a loud late-night Amber alert from an incident in Milwaukee, over 100 miles away.

Every time I hear this kind of thing, it makes be glad I've never subscribed to any alerts on any device I've ever owned.

You don't actually subscribe to them. If I'm not mistaken, you can unsubscribe though.

[1995hoo]

Getting a loud late-night Amber alert from an incident in Milwaukee, over 100 miles away.

Every time I hear this kind of thing, it makes be glad I've never subscribed to any alerts on any device I've ever owned.

You don't actually subscribe to them. If I'm not mistaken, you can unsubscribe though.

We turned them off after an amber alert caused our phones to go off at around 3:00 AM when we were stopped for the night at a hotel in Port Wentworth, Georgia, such that we had no idea where they were talking about anyway.

[hotdogPi]

Getting a loud late-night Amber alert from an incident in Milwaukee, over 100 miles away.

Every time I hear this kind of thing, it makes be glad I've never subscribed to any alerts on any device I've ever owned.

They're on by default on my iPhone, but I turned them off.

However, the COVID exposure notification (for if I had come in contact with someone who got COVID and then pressed the button on the phone to say they got it) was opt-in, not opt-out, I opted in, and I never received anything. They've since discontinued it. Interestingly, in early-mid 2020, I got four emergency notifications regarding various towns having high COVID rates, and none of those four times was I in the town listed. One of them was where I live, but I was on a walk and in an adjacent town at the time.

[mgk920]

Wisconsin does not register voters by party, either.   

Mike

[abefroman329]

(my wife sells Scentsy)

MLMs bother me.

Me too, but you know what they say about fools and their money (Mrs. kphoger excluded, natch).

[kphoger]

(my wife sells Scentsy)

MLMs bother me.

Me too, but you know what they say about fools and their money (Mrs. kphoger excluded, natch).

She isn't losing money, if that's what people are implying.  It's income.

[J N Winkler]

Regarding smartphone alerts:  AIUI, there are some classes that can be unsubscribed from, such as Amber Alerts, and others that cannot, such as Presidential Alerts.

[abefroman329]

(my wife sells Scentsy)

MLMs bother me.

Me too, but you know what they say about fools and their money (Mrs. kphoger excluded, natch).

She isn't losing money, if that's what people are implying.  It's income.

I wasn't implying anything about your wife. 

[ZLoth]

Getting a loud late-night Amber alert from an incident in Milwaukee, over 100 miles away.

You can go into "Wireless emergency alerts" and disable "Amber Alerts". I still keep "Extreme Alerts" (last used March 21, 2022) and "Severe Alerts" (last used March 2, 2023) active because of the weather here in Texas and the time critical nature of getting into a "safe room". But, yeah, getting a statewide Amber alert from Buda, Texas in the middle of the night... 

[skluth]

I'm kind of bothered by the fact that common USA coins now are worth so little that they're essentially useless.  Today, the most that I can buy with one quarter is 15 minutes of time from a downtown Appleton, WI parking meter or 7 minutes of time from a dryer and a nearby laundry that I often use.  That laundry also now charges $3 and more to run an average load of laundry in their medium sized washers.  C'mon guys, give us some coins (ie, 50¢, $1, $2, $5, etc) that we can actually USE in our everyday lives (and get rid of the even more useless pennies, nickels and dimes)!



Mike

I fully agree. Other currencies that are roughly equivalent to our dollar (or cents for the case of yen):
Canada: rounds to nearest 5¢, largest coin $2
Australia: rounds to nearest 5¢, largest coin $2
New Zealand: rounds to nearest 10¢, largest coin $2 (although their dollar is only about 2/3 of ours)
Euro: rounding depends on country (was 0,10€ in Paris, but some places don't round at all), largest coin 2€
UK: no rounding, largest coin £2
Switzerland: rounds to nearest 0.05 Fr., largest coin 5 Fr.
Japan: no rounding that I know of, largest coin ¥500

That said, there are some countries (India and Russia among them) where their highest coin is less than our quarter.

There's a bunch of idiots who are forcing Americans to keep small coins. The penny should been phased out a couple decades ago (the copper within costs more than 1¢). The nickel should probably go too though I'd prefer if they got rid of dimes instead because they're so tiny which I find annoying. That way we could have $1 and $2 coins in regular circulation because cash registers wouldn't need those bins for pennies and nickels (or dimes).

[kphoger]

Mexico currently issues coins down to 10¢ (equivalent to one-half US cent), but I'm not sure I've ever seen more than one or two coins in real life that were of a lower denomination than 50¢ (equivalent to 2 or 3 US cents).  Gas station pump jockeys round to the nearest peso (equivalent to a US nickel), and a lot of grocery stores also ask if you'd like to round up and donate the rest to charity.

[Scott5114]

Of course, I look at the warnings as follows:

• Severe Thunderstorm Watch - Play closer attention to the weather forecasts, start charging the devices.
• Tornado Watch - Prepare the tornado kit and the shelter room (aka the center bathroom). Thank goodness I have a 12 pack of bottled water and hard hats under the sinks.
• Severe Thunderstorm Warning - Mark sure blankets and pillows are in place. Make sure all doors are LOCKED, especially the patio doors.
• Tornado Warning - Close the doors, the grab the cat before he runs away, head to the shelter room.

I suspect this is much more preparation that some of my neighbors do.

As someone with 32 years of living in Oklahoma under my belt:

• Severe Thunderstorm Watch - no-op
• Tornado Watch - Pay closer attention to the weather forecasts, start charging the devices. How much attention depends on the convective outlook: "marginal" is taken with far less seriousness than "slight" or "enhanced". "Moderate" or "high" is a "cancel all my plans" situation. I will also make an extra data backup to the cloud on "moderate" or "high" days, just in case the sky decides it would be better if my computer were forcibly relocated to Shawnee.
• Severe Thunderstorm Warning - Don't go outside until the storm passes, and save work to disk more regularly than usual to guard against a power blip (unfortunately my UPS died years ago and I haven't been able to afford a replacement). If it's Friday, bring in the trash/recycling bins so they don't blow away or fill up with rainwater. (When I worked at the casino, I would go about getting permission to go out and move my car into the customer parking garage to avoid hail damage. Now that I work from home, my car is always garaged when not in use.)
• Tornado Warning - When the first Oklahoma tornado warnings are issued, I begin pulling Doppler data direct from TLX (the local NWS Doppler) and parsing warning texts for exact wording: the words "radar indicated rotation" mostly tells me that someone over on Highway 9 wanted to share something fun they saw on velocity data, but "spotter confirmed tornado" and "particularly dangerous situation" get the adrenaline pumping. However, Cleveland County, where I live, is roughly shaped like a right triangle, with Norman along its hypotenuse, so many storms that trigger a tornado warning for Cleveland County don't actually threaten my part of Norman. Most Oklahoma tornadoes follow a SW-to-NE path, so if the tornado is headed for Moore or Lexington it is very unlikely to affect me.
• Tornado siren sounding - This is what triggers the actual emergency response out of me, because Norman is quite good at only sounding sirens when a real threat to the city is present. This is when the cats will be corralled into their carriers in preparation for going to our underground tornado shelter. However, because Norman covers such a large area (and because the shelter gets uncomfortably hot with 2 humans, 2 cats, and a dog in it), whether we actually take shelter will depend a lot on where, exactly, the hook echo is.  I will generally only take shelter if the storm tracks given by broadcast media show a reasonable chance of the storm approaching my area.

Even this is seen as overdoing it by some fellow Plains residents. My dad, for instance, takes a tornado warning as a cue to go out back and look at the clouds, and only takes shelter when he sees a funnel. (This approach is definitely not recommended.) In another thread on the forum a while back, a member was asking about a possible trip to the plains in the springtime, and my suggestion of carrying a NOAA weather radio and parking on the east side of buildings to avoid hail damage from storms coming out of the southwest was seen as a bit over the top. (In my defense, since I knew the traveler was from a different region of the country, I figured it would be better to advise him to overprepare rather than underprepare, since knowing which corners to cut on preparedness is informed by knowledge of the typical local geography and weather patterns, which a traveler would not have. For example, someone in Central Oklahoma knows to pay particular attention to the conditions in Comanche County, as supercells that form in this area typically follow the I-44 corridor into the OKC metro, by which point they have often grown into extremely violent storms.)

[kphoger]

My dad, for instance, takes a tornado warning as a cue to go out back and look at the clouds, and only takes shelter when he sees a funnel.

This is pretty much how it was for me growing up.  When a tornado warning was issued, we could pretty much count on all our neighbors being outside looking at the sky and chatting.  I had the advantage of living in a town that's located in a valley, but still.

For us, a tornado warning is our cue to adjust the rabbit ears and try and find the input for the digital converter, so we can watch live weather news.  We usually head to the basement when the sirens go off, especially now that a tornado anywhere in the county doesn't automatically trigger all the sirens in the county.  Before that, it was irritating for there to be a tornado 25 miles away whose path didn't threaten our neighborhood, yet the sirens were all sounding here.  (Wichita is at the east end of the county.)

[Scott5114]

Of course, the "look for the funnel" approach is usually not the best idea because a tornado can be rain-wrapped, occur at night, touch down closer to you than you have time to react to, etc. It also is not all that useful in places with a horizon obstructed by trees, buildings, etc.

Sometimes I worry that my "look for the hook echo on the weather map" approach is just a high-tech version of the same, but even with the more granular approach to tornado sirens that Norman has implemented recently, if I went in the shelter every time the siren went off, I would have spent far more time than is necessary down there.