The Pisces Pothead

just a dude with pisces twitter account

[Owen @Owennfa]

You've paid your mortgage on time for 22 straight years. Never once late. Loan balance climbing down exactly on schedule.

Your homeowners insurance premium still went up 31% this year.

The math behind modern insurance:

2021 Annual Premium: $1,900
2026 Annual Premium: $2,489

When you call and ask why your rate jumped on a house you've never filed a claim on, they quote "regional catastrophe modeling adjustments."

Responsible homeowners are now paying a yearly penalty tax to cover storm damage on properties three states away that they'll never see.

[Owen @Owennfa]

My neighbor paid off his house in 2021.

He was 64, completely debt-free, and so happy about it that he threw a little party in the driveway. I brought the beer.

Five years later, he doesn’t have a mortgage. No lender. No monthly house payment.

But the house still costs him about $1,340 every month.

His property taxes were $6,800 last year after the county reassessed the property. His insurance jumped to $7,200 after two rough storm seasons, even though he’s never filed a claim. Then there’s another $220 a month for the HOA.

And none of that covers repairs or maintenance.

He’s living on Social Security and a small pension. About $3,100 a month.

So roughly 43% of his monthly income is going toward a house that’s completely paid off.

He thought about selling and downsizing, but the smaller places around here aren’t much cheaper once you factor in closing costs and the higher taxes that can come with buying another property.

So he’s stuck.

He can’t comfortably afford to stay, but moving doesn’t really solve the problem either.

That’s the part nobody tells you about paying off a mortgage.

You make the final payment and think you’re finally done.

You’re not.

The mortgage disappears. The taxes, insurance, HOA fees, repairs and maintenance don’t.

You can spend 30 years paying for the house, only to spend the next 30 paying everyone else to let you keep it.

[Amiri King @AmiriKing]

They opened a KFC in Africa and it goes exactly how you think it would.

I’m not even making this up.

[Shadow Intel @TheShadowIntelX]

In 2002, Michael Jackson said this:

"They manipulate our history books."

"The history books are not true, it’s a lie."

"The history books are lying. You need to know that."

"You must know that."

[thiago @iamthimartins]

QUE PORRA É ESSA QUE EU ACABEI DE VER?!

[Owen @Owennfa]

So let me get this straight:

If I lie on my insurance application, that's fraud. Policy voided, possible criminal charges.

But an insurer can deny a legitimate claim, delay it for months, underpay it, and force me to sue them for money I'm owed and the worst case for them is eventually paying what they owed in the first place.

There's a name for it in the industry. Delay, deny, defend. Drag it out until the person gives up or dies.

[Owen @Owennfa]

A guy I know worked maintenance at an apartment complex in Texas for a year and a half.

Part of the deal was he lived on site. His lease came with the job 50% off rent, written right into the agreement.

Then management changed hands.

New company came in. Written warning with no chance to respond. Final written warning with 24 hours to reply. They told him they'd escalated it to corporate and never copied him on the email.

He was fired. Then made to sign a 14 day move-out notice.

Now they've billed him for that last month of rent at full price.

The billing statement itself still shows the discount as active. They're just not applying it.

So he lost his income and his housing in the same conversation, and got invoiced on the way out.

He's looking at small claims because that's the only door left.

Think about what tying your housing to your employer actually means.

You don't have a job and an apartment. You have one thing that can be taken twice.

Fire him and he's homeless in fourteen days. He can't fight the termination because he needs the reference. He can't fight the bill because he needs the deposit.

That's not an accident in the paperwork.

That's the entire reason the arrangement exists.

[middleclassparty @middle_class_us]

Fast food companies are learning a very expensive lesson: The middle class has a breaking point.

They got tired of paying restaurant prices for food that was literally created to be cheap.

Fast food was the exhausted parent's dinner.

The construction worker's lunch.

The cheap meal after your kid's soccer game.

The road trip stop when you didn't want to spend $60 feeding the family.

Then corporations raised prices, cut portions, reduced quality and told everyone to download an app if they wanted the old price.

Now customers are walking away.

Good.

Fast food forgot what business it was in.

The middle class is reminding them.

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: Journalists hid an Airtag in a rare book shipment and confirmed Amazon to be one of the buyers behind the bulk orders destroying rare-books to feed their AI.

They tracked it to Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas, home to VGT3 (see logo below), a scanning operation feeding Amazon's AI training data, where workers say they cut the bindings off books to scan them faster.

Amazon won't say why the books are destroyed.

[BLEESHA MADIA @BLEESHA_MADIA]

@Michael_JK_Q For everyone stealing peoples content and making up their stories, they deserve to be reported and a community note!

[Orwell Day @OrwellDay]

Police chief is furious that people are criticizing his decision to deploy Flock cameras in their town.

Argues they should turn the town into a mass surveillance police state so he can do his job.

Shows his true authoritarian nature by saying: "I ought to do background checks on half the people that made comments."

Chetek, WI

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Footage of McDonalds in 1984 might be the most radicalizing thing you watch today.

How do we get this back?

[skumm🧊 @skumWgmi]

Let's do the actual math nobody wants to show you.

$85,000 salary. $54,000 after taxes depending on your state.

$4,500/month take home.

Rent: $1,900. Car: $520. Insurance: $180. Utilities: $160. Phone: $85. Groceries: $380. Student loans: $340.

You have $935 left.

and then your boomer parents tells you to be more disciplined.

[Owen @Owennfa]

Found out my grandfather turned down company stock in 1978 because he "didn't trust paper money."

Took the cash bonus instead. $2,400.

That stock split nine times.

Guy who worked the same line as him took the shares and retired at 54 with a house in Naples and a boat.

My grandfather retired at 68 with a pension that got frozen two years before he qualified for the full amount.

[Bill @BillWiIdin]

The day I realized that when inflation drops from 8% to 3%, prices aren't actually going down they're just rising slower on top of the already expensive baseline is the day I realized economic headlines are designed to gaslight us.

[GingerSpice❄️💙 @thedesertginger]

You're telling me that Flock cameras have the capabilities to track a woman across multiple states to track if she got an abortion and a man who crossed state lines for weed, but they aren't being used for finding missing kids or get a glimpse of Mitch McConnell returning home?

[Derek Torgerson @derek_torgerson]

@mattvanswol So a guy with actual bombs in Illinois is let go, and in W Virginia they will throw the book at this guy. We are so backwards at this point. Almost as if our judges and political leaders are trying to have the US destroyed from within.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: Nearly TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE are publicly vouching for a man accused of cutting down Flock cameras in a small West Virginia town.

People commented:

- "He was saving my neighbor's dog from a fire all day, couldn't be him."

- "This man is innocent. I saw him serving at a soup kitchen."

-"Couldn't be him. He was helping me replace the roof on a homeless shelter."

The man, Wesley Jackson, has pleaded Not Guilty.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: Police in Winona Minnesota are stunned after EVERY SINGLE ONE of their Flock cameras were suddenly removed in a single night.

According to the police department, all 8 of the town's cameras were cut down and hauled away.

Police are asking for the public's help to identify the individual, but the public has been leaving comments like:

"The Flock cameras tore themselves down"
"Whoever did it, was fishing with me"
"Whoever it was, was at Bible study with me"

[Derrick Evans @DerrickEvans4WV]

Can’t even make this up.

Guy goes to film a Flock office building. He is met by Flock employees who say they don’t feel safe being surveilled.

I’m sorry, what….but they think it’s ok to mass surveil the American people.