Skip Navigation
236 comments
  • Currently I found a glitch to get near-free infinite mobile data usable in my country via 3 different mobile carriers giving me far superior coverage as well.

    I got a Czech T-Mobile SIM card with the purpose of receiving SMS verification codes. Unlike cards in my country, Czech ones don't need ID card registration. The cheapest one was an IoT SIM card, so that's what I took. I found I could get signal basically everywhere with it, since they have multiple roaming partners (Slovak Telekom, O2 and Orange).
    For shits and giggles, I've used that 200MB it came with since it's available in EU as well. And that's when I discovered the 64/32 kbps limit after using up the data isn't getting applied outside of Czech Republic. It just still goes at full speed.
    Charged at 0.00CZK:

    The difference with IoT and regular SIMs is that low speed. IoT SIM cards get that reduced speed while regular ones have a hard cut-off with more data amount. Attempt with regular SIM after using up the data:

    So really, I can just fully use 80MB for 39CZK (1.59USD) and keep going:

    But there is a caveat: Permanent roaming charges. If for the past 4 months the SIM is used more than 50% abroad, T-Mobile can start charging these charges. This year it's €1.30/GB without VAT. But I can probably just keep getting new SIM cards each few months.

    But I am being nice and still mostly using my regular carrier with 300GB of data. I rather keep this as backup. The wholesale market data cap is that €1.30/GB in 2025, so the carrier could get charged up to €390 for that same amount by their roaming partner. Regardless, I am not giving them equivalent of €1.55 for just 80MB either.

  • Many years back, at a caravan park games-room they had ping-pong, pinballs, pool, and a cocktail table Space Invaders.

    I had little money for the videogames and pinball.

    Some older kids had figured out that going to Space Invaders and flicking the wall power switch off, for a tenth of a second, would sometimes give an odd-number of free credits.

    We played 7, 21, and then maxed out the registers at 99 credits.

    Everyone played in rotation all day and turned it off with about 20 left.

  • The best loophole I've ever learned about is closed now.

    Early in the Dubya administration they were pushing the dollar coins pretty hard. They went through a whole thing where any government coin-operated machine had to take dollar coins (veterans of the time mostly saw this as it mostly effected military bases but this is why the stamp vending machines at the post office suddenly became useless; they now took dollars instead of quarters).

    One of the ways they "encouraged" the use of dollar coins was selling them directly on the Mint's website. You could go on the US mint's website and pay face value for them with a credit card, and they paid for shipping. Spend $500, and 500 $1 coins would be shipped to your door.

    So people would order tens of thousands of dollars in coins on a credit card, as soon as they arrived they'd haul the coins to the bank and deposit them, immediately pay off the credit card bill with the deposited currency thus accruing no interest, and then they'd have all those rewards points to spend. The government was taking it up the ass shipping tons of coins to residential addresses, the goal of putting them into circulation utterly failed because they were being taken directly to banks, the credit card companies were taking it up the ass on rewards points that weren't generating enough interest payments to feed the parasites. The policy got canned.

    Imagine getting to fuck over a Republican administration and the parasite industry in one perfectly legal move. Too bad I was 14 at the time and wasn't allowed to have a credit card.

    • I remember hearing about this one. So simple, so effective, it's beautiful.

    • Coinage in this country is one of my pet peeves. We should have a 3, 5, an .50 coins in regular circulation. Coins can work great. They can work fast too.

      I can't believe people shit all over the coin (Sacagawea dollar piece) like they did. They should have made it bigger though, too similar to a quarter to easily distinguish by feeling.

      • A lot of the mistake was made decades earlier with the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which was the same color and basically the same size as a quarter and thus often mistaken for one. The solution? Mint it in """""""gold""""""". It's actually brass, mainly copper and zinc with some manganese and nickel. Brand new it's too yellowy and then it tarnishes. It pretends to be gold way worse than the copper-nickel mix in quarters, dimes and, well, nickels pretend to be silver.

        It's still the same dimensions as an Anthony dollar so it still has the problem that it's very close in size and shape to a quarter, most coin op machines either outright won't take them or will accept them as quarters, and we're used to "cents are coins, dollars are paper" that most people didn't care. The republicans hated them because there was a brown chick on it, everyone hated them because they tried to immediately cram them into everyday life, and then the Mint hated them because they took it up the ass shipping tons of them to residential addresses only for them to end up in banks in original mint packaging anyway.

        If it were me, what I would do is scrap the idea that there are 100 cents in a dollar because the dollar has gotten too worthless to worry about a hundredth of one. Stop minting pennies, nickels and quarters, let the existing stock circulate for a couple decades without minting more, and then when everyone is naturally standardized on the dime, ditch the cent entirely and make it 10 dimes to a dollar. I am also a raging misanthrope who would bring back burning at the stake, so probably don't vote for me.

  • Go to a climbing gym. "I think I left my drink bottle here last week. It was clear, about this size". Worker pulls out a box of lost and found drink bottles. "Oh, that is it there". Take a dusty one (so you know it's been there a while, and nobody's coming back for it). Now you have a new drink bottle! Give it a clean and go!

  • My bank's mutual fund let me buy and sell at yesterday's price, so every time the stock market went up, I bought, and when it went down, I sold. I talked to a teller about it, wondering how much money the mutual fund rule designer had pumped out of the bank by then. They quickly changed the rule into a non-insane form: today's price.

    I should have just shut up and kept pumping money out of the idiot bank, but I was young and stupid. The bank was in the game, the bank was fair game.

236 comments