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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2025

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  • In the 90s I was a teenager and I took a friend with me visiting family in Japan. I can’t read more than about 100 kanji, probably less now.

    We found a vending machine, a small one not the usual fridge size ones, just on the street. I was trying to figure out what it was selling, it didn’t look like anything I recognised. We both smoked so I could just about recognise the words for pregnancy and something negative or anti, like a health warning.

    We were there for a good 10 minutes and a few elderly people had taken notice of us and were giving us weird stares, proper WTF faces. My virgin ass finally figures out they’re condoms, the kanji are the equivalent of Contra, Ceptive, and we bolt.





  • My company had a client who did those financed schemes where people buy furniture and TVs and stuff and pay in installments. The one bit of information that stuck with me was they expected 50% of customers to default. They went under.

    I was about to say how can you run a business like that but it just clicked. The execs were running a scheme on the company itself. The company tricks financially illiterate customers (I sympathise, not denigrating) into debt and bankruptcy, ruining their lives, while the owners pay themselves handsomely and buy cars and mansions running the company into bankruptcy. But they walk away with all their toys paid for by the broken finances of their victims.

    Fucking parasites.