There's little hacks for certain foods too if you can't cook worth much or don't want to bother to. For example I don't want to bother with cooking a chicken, so I'll go get one hot off the rotisserie chicken counter at Walmart or HEB. $6 for a whole ass chicken already hot cooked and ready to go, take it home and shred it. If it's hot the skin and legs taste good as a snack of itself while you're processing it and you can hand shred the breast / thighs / etc and save it for using in meals. It's how I make quesadillas or chicken alfredo really quickly.
It sounds silly, but when I'm on business trips I almost really like the Darden style restaurants for this reason. Think like Olive Garden, Chili's etc. Sure it isn't great food but damn is it a lot for a little. I've gotten a big ass bag of chips dipping sauce on top of burgers fries dessert for about the same as a small meal from Taco bell and a quesadilla from there. It's almost double the amount of food for the same price, and they're almost easier to deal with because they now all have online ordering. Place the order online as I'm about to leave work, go stop on the way and go pick it up, done deal and I got something for the next day too. I almost prefer takeout style restaurants like this now over "fast" food that's anything but in their drive thru line.
I'm gonna agree that cleaning sucks ass, as does the time of it.
I made do by usually having to have something stimulating my dopamine-addicted ADHD ass while I'm washing dishes. Youtube documentary video, podcast, whatever is at least 30 minutes so I can just grind thru. Upgrade the dish tools as well, I really like these ikea dish brushes so much more than a sponge because I feel like I can actually clean with it and not constantly go through sponges, and replaced the flip top dish soap with one of those squeeze bottle ones. Big secret is you can refill those with whatever you want, you don't have to buy a new one when you run out.
Yes there is still the time factor with cooking, but I like to cook enough that I can make 2-4 servings so it's more like cook once and minimal work for the reheating. Also as for the time, idk how it is in your area, but where I'm at ever since COVID drive thru and in store times suck ass now for ordering. If you're on an hour lunch break or on the way home where I'm at it always takes them 30 minutes or even longer to get my order ready from ordering to out the lot. At that point, I might as well just go home and cook the damn thing myself, that's what set it for me.
Lastly for food waste, a few things learning to change how much you make so that you "use up" the materials is helpful. Same with freezing things, turns out most things can be frozen and thawed with minimal change to the item. For example I now buy bacon in a bulk pack but split it up into bags of 4 slices, keep all in freezer except one. Now I would only have four slices going bad instead of the whole package. A few other things I do is sometimes dried herbs / seasonings in a shaker are better than fresh ones that will go bad, learn what you use less of so you buy less (like I only buy eggs in a six pack because I don't go through enough), etc.
Stick with easy meals. I really want to make a cajun red beans and rice sometime, but I looked at the list of what I need and said fuuuuck that. I've got a few easy to make items that I like to rotate through: homemade pizza, mac and cheese and hot dogs, got frozen burger patties and a george foreman, burritos with ground beef beans and canned hatch green chile, etc. I also get my groceries delivered, it helps me time and money wise because I'm not shopping in the moment and only buying what I need, and now the whole process of grocery store shopping that I hate is gone. No more traffic to the store, no parking lot spot searching, no walking around the whole store and dodging slow people stopping in the middle of the aisle to have a conversation, no bullshit line for checkout or receipt checks and packing / leaving. Now it's literally just order only what I need and it shows up at my door.
I do like the idea of "take home meals" though, sometimes that just hits the spot I get it. For me sometimes I'll do that and just get some store made chips and queso and fuck it I'm eating that while being a couch potato that night. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough :)
Their burgers are bomb AF, I'll admit that, but my two complains from them are 1) they're small, we're used to big Whataburgers here so I practically have to get two of them and 2) their fries, yes it's oversaid but their fries are just different and not always in a good way. Though I will say they do taste better if you get a salt packet and pour it on.
Where I'm at it's definitely very restaurant dependent. Papa Racist's (Papa John's) and Pizza Butt (Pizza Hut) I avoid like the plague because their decisions have been jack up the price and nosedive the quality. Meanwhile Little Ceasar's is doing a $6 lunch combo and most pies I get there are usually $6-10.
I get it it's Little Ceasar's, but I got one thing to say to the LC haters
Honestly I don't think I've ate at Mcdonald's in the last six months now that I think about it. The enshittification of their app deals, price hikes, quality going down, the whole disease outbreak thing, just really turned me off of them. I know they had a bad quarter recently I hope they have another bad one 🤣
Wendy's is pretty decent, expensive but better if you use their app. I usually still see a code in there somewhere for $2 off or something, and their small frosty's aren't quite at fuck off levels of pricing yet.
Taco bell I feel like every restaurant is different. One near my house used to be bomb AF, then they had a changeover of all their staff and now it's terrible. Even the drive thru is different now they now have an AI taking your order lmao. Another location down the road is better at the food quality, but they fuck up what is supposed to go with your order half the time so at that one I always have to check the bag in the parking lot before I leave.
The older I get the most I just feel like it isn't worth it as much anymore. If I'm going to have to wait a half hour plus in the drive thru line, pay $15 for a meal now or $20+ if I wanted to get dessert or another side item too, and deal with people and the headaches of it, I'd rather just keep driving home and cook something there in about the same time. Plus I can usually get 3 or 4 meals out of that $20 worth if I make it at home so each leftover is faster to make.
Fast food industry is doing a great job making sure that I stay away as best I can and be inconvenient. The sole exception so far has been Little Ceasars, still $6 for a lunch combo and if you order in the app it's great, get notified when it's ready and I literally just park out front walk in grab my order out of the ready bin and off I go. I don't understand why others haven't pivoted that way as well.
Dark meat at least tastes better and is more desirable where I'm at. Now you just get less meat in general for however much you're spending.
Give it five years and the taco bell quesadilla is probably gonna cost $10 and use the small tortilla instead of the big one. They may have won the franchise wars in fiction but reality is stranger.
That's not entirely the proper response.
I hate that I've already posted the video twice so I'm not going to do it again because I don't want to get marked for spam lol, but check my comment history if you got a minute to see a few lawyers describe what to do.
In essence though, if it's a door knock don't even answer it. There's nothing good on the other side of that door, and in that scenario there are only two options for them: either they can get a warrant, in which case they're coming in anyway with or without your consent so it doesn't even matter, or if they don't have one (far more likely) then they can go pound sand for all I care. If I'm not legally obligated to answer that door then I'm not going to.
If it's a traffic stop, it's a simple amount of phrasing but amounts that are very important to say to exercise your rights. If being asked questions unrelated to the quoted traffic violation, a simple "I'm not discussing my day". If they continue asking questions, ask "Am I being detained or am I free to go". This forces them to either only engage in the stop as needed or, if they do detain, at this point the mystery is now gone and they have to handle things by the book: meaning you are informed that you are being detained, it is for xyz reason of belief, then at this point you can state that you "invoke the fifth" (must be said, but you have the right to not answer questions and not self-incriminate), and then you STFU. If said detainment was ever escalated from there to the point of being thrown in the back of the squad car, it's at this point that you could then request an attorney at the station and IIRC they must provide one. It will likely be an overworked public defendant attorney, but to answer the question there you go.
TLDR Don't be the soverign citizen immediately starting with "I want a lawyer am I detained am I free to go" as soon as they walk up to the window, but know your rights and when to execute them in order. These rights apply to all people in America by the way, not just citizens, so keep that in mind and don't let feds try to scare you into thinking you don't have these kinds of rights. You do.
(I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice from a lawyer, just a local dumbass on the internet, but this is to my knowledge factual information.)
Oh look, it's stfu friday!
(posted it already in another comment but felt important enough to post here too :))
I'd also like to take this moment to remind how to handle a police interaction in the USA, in a one minute video described by a few lawyers: STFU Friday!
The only proper response to a door knock is "come back with a warrant".
Rights are rights for a reason, don't let that shit erode any further.
Honestly if it's a big setup like Spotify or Netflix or etc, "royalties" don't mean shit to the production team / artists / whoever. Unless they're Mariah Carey levels of replayed every year everywhere to the tune of sitting on millions in checks yearly, they aren't going to get shit. Personally I'd rather support them in other ways such as buying merchandise, going to live shows etc but that's just me.
Remember though this is in minecraft, don't pirate irl because that is very bad and you will personally prevent executives at warn-a-brother from buying another learjet. Remember: "pirating is bad and you should feel bad" 😂
It's not a mobile client sadly, but for desktop I've always liked "4k video downloader" (Softonic). It's something you have to download on there, but I copy the youtube link, open the app have it parse the link and then it's downloaded and ready in .mp4 pretty quickly, with .mp3 as an option too for music.
It's a bit convoluted, but I'll usually download albums and tracks on my PC, have it all saved in a music folder then copy it manually to my phone.
We did do that once as bored teenagers on an off day back in maybe 2006. Though the pizza shop let us know it was going to take about two hours, which we were totally cool with, and tipped the driver like 20 bucks (on top of a $15 order) because we knew it was probably hell getting there.
Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do, I get that. But if you're gonna be doing that, please tip your drivers very generously and give them plenty of time and don't be an asshole to them :)
Gonna likely be Houston about this time tomorrow. Good luck and godspeed to whoever braves the roads.
Delivery really is just much more convenient. I've been getting my groceries delivered like this from a certain big box retailer and it's been very nice. No more bullshit traffic, bullshit parking, bullshit walk in and out, bullshit aisle walking around slow people, bullshit searching, bullshit looking for an employee for 20 minutes to help get a $3 stick of deodorant, bullshit line at checkout, etc etc. Now it's just click add to cart and it shows up at my door the next day.
I'm sure it's partly by design because they charge a subscription for the service, but the convenience and money/time saved not having to drive makes it so worth it.
I view this as a self correction in itself as well. Walgreens is losing money because they skewed so far that they're annoying customers into leaving en masse for other options. Now their options are they can either go back to the old model that worked better, or they can keep playing hardball until more stores go out of business, and someone else can take over that corner and sell better.
That's what I would call a bubble. The same has been said for FAANG stocks because they are success stories, and I do think that TSLA and NVDA are large enough with enough assets that they aren't going belly under overnight.
That said, there were stock advisers, people with degrees and decades of work in early 2001 saying "Buy Enron!" Same goes for dot com stocks, same goes for cypto bros. I've made some pocket change off those two companies "mooning" their share values so I am definitely not complaining, but don't rely solely on those two to go "line go up" forever. When they did my decision was not to buy more, my decision was to very smartly sell off a small portion to "make my money back" per se, and now the rest is house money basically :)