You can't cancel your reservation within 24 hours. You can rebook it. Okay, rebook it for one week out. Call back a day later, cancel.
Why wait the extra day, Just do it in the same call. They don't get paid enough to give a shit. And if they do, you technically haven't broken any rules.
Don’t be a dick to service workers. Your entire life will be better.
Not really "loophole", more like common sense
Or basic manners. Although, if you want to consider basic manners a loophole, I'm okay with that. It doesn't matter how you get there.
But a service worker knows lots of loopholes, and they can help you take advantage of them or choose not to bring it up if you're treating them badly.
This isn't a loophole--just how any decent human being should behave.
I think working retail should be a mandatory thing like how military service is mandatory in some countries.
Everyone should have to serve their time doing retail so that they can have a bit of empathy
My brother-in-law didn't want to carry his jacket around at Disney World, and he didn't want to get a locker for it, so he had his dad turn it in to lost and found. At the end of the day, before leaving the park, he picked it back up.
Somebody else could've taken that.
The lost and found at my school sometimes gathers interest on some items. Umbrella on a rainy day got 4 people claiming it's theirs. But a golden chain is still winning at 8 people claiming it as theirs.
Ingenius! Even more ingenious: every time you leave go to lost and found and pick up a free random jacket.
Alright, so, in Texas you're not allowed to own an opossum as a pet. There is no license for owning a pet opossum (they're "fur-bearing animals"). However, there is a license that'll let you kill opossums for their fur. Furthermore, said license allows you to trap them. The interesting part is that there's no legal requirement for you to actually kill the opossum if you trap one. You can trap the opossum and take possession of it for however long you like.
So basically a hunting license (might have been a trapping license?) lets you effectively own an opossum as a pet in Texas!
Edit: also, yes, opossums are as soft as they look, which is why people used to hunt them for their fur. I got a chance to pet one and it was about as soft, if not softer, than a cat. Also very boney, like cats.
I kinda get the impression they bite, a lot.
I grew up in FL and had a "pet" opossum for a while. Her mom was hit by car when she was a baby and she crawled up to our front door during a rain storm. My mom was heart broken when she realized what happened so she let us keep her till she was old enough to be released. She was super cuddly and would crawl up on your neck and lick your hair. We partially potty trained her using dog pee pads. The only down side is she liked to borough in our couch so we had to move the couch often and clean it out.
Once she was an adult we would let her out at night when other opossums in the neighborhood were around. She usually came back in the morning and would eat a bunch of food. One day she didn't come back so I hope she integrated with the local opossums and lived a happy life.
they hiss and act like a bad ass but they are naturally bug eaters, not a lot of fight in them
I’ve never hung out with one, but they were common in my neighborhood growing up and they were honestly pretty nonviolent. They just play dead instead of aggressing , but I also never pushed them to interact
Nope, they're mostly all bark, no bite. You have to actually harass them to get them to bite you, even if they're showing their teeth. Their bite strength is one of the lowest among mammals too. That said, supposedly their teeth are actually really sharp.
They like to show their teeth but they don't like to bite
My friend has one and nope, no biting! He pretends he’s a raccoon (she had a herd of raccoons as well)
I've pet a lot of opossums. Not been bit by one... But those teeth are scary.
An 'exploit' along somewhat similar lines works for having a cat (or dog) as a pet in Waahington State:
Tons of apartments or rented out rooms of houses will say that they do not allow cats.
Basically, if you can go to a therapist, counselor, paychologist and tell them hey I really love my cat, he/she cheers me up when I'm down, I'd definitely become depressed if he/she ever ran away or I had to part ways with him/her...
Now this cat is your registered emotional support animal.
This costs you nothing beyond the normal cost of visiting your mental health specialist.
By law, it doesn't matter what a landlord's stance on allowing cats (or dogs) is, if it is officially your emotional support animal, it can live with you, and the landlord is legally barred from charging you a pet deposit or monthly pet rent/fee.
Jury nullification.
Deny defend depose.
I'm on some watch list now.
Back in the day they were “selling” dollar coins through tv. It was legal tender so banks had to accept any deposit of it. The U.S. mint offered free shipping in the continental U.S.A.
Some smart folks started buying them with their credit card that offered air travel miles as a reward. Then they took all the coins and depositing them in their bank and paid off their CC. Rinse and repeat.
Yes they were out no money and had thousands of dollars worth airline miles.
One of the sub plots to Punch Drunk Love, and a true story.
don't those coins cost more than their face value? you are talking commemorative coins yeah?
Commemorative coins do cost more that is correct. However this was not those. This was when the US mint was essentially attempting to phase out the dollar bill and replace it with a coin.
Keep in mind this was late 90s early 2000s.
If you get married the tradition is for one partner to change their last name to match so both have the same last name.
We didn’t do that, so we have different last names.
So when you sign up for services that offer (x) months free or discounted cost per unique household, you use one name, cancel, and sign up under the other name. They don’t know you’re married, don’t know if it’s a rental, or don’t know if it’s a roommate thing. So when we were poor AF we could save a lot of $ on services at least for a few months or so. Usually cable tv that offered a 6-month discount.
Even with the same last name they don’t know you’re married. We share a last name and have done this a few times before.
Well played, then.
Where I live you can freely use your maiden name or your spouse's name and switch between them whenever you want.
We didn't like either of our last names so before getting married I legally changed mine so my Spouse could adopt it after the wedding, instead of both of us legally changing it after the wedding.
has not worked for me. most places its by address.
Eh, this was years ago we played this game. We tried to keep it on the DL by not changing immediately after the discount, usually several months later. We also had separate checking accounts and cards, so that probably helped. The policy may have updated since then, but I don’t see how they’d know if one person canceled the policy and another with an entirely different name and payment account opened a new one.
Not drinking isn't one of the 12 steps
12 steps of what?
The 12 steps of drinking. Not drinking's not one of them.
Addiction recovery if I had to guess, in this case alcoholism.
Yep!
But commiting yourself to the idea of surrendering to some kind of God is.
So you can fail AA as a sober atheist, but pass it as a religious, functional alcoholic.
Great system.
Working as intended
Eye, but not drinking feels like a loophole insofar that I've abstained for over 5 years and went from no money to having a down payment for a house saved up, all while improving my health by leaps and bounds. Can't get a beer gut if you don't drink 👌
There was a burrito shop that had a frequent customer card that you could use to earn points towards a free menu item. You could register the card online and for whatever reason you could add multiple cards to the same account.
A friend of mine realized that if you registered a new card they would give you a decent chunk of points just for signing up, then you could merge that account in with your existing account and get free points.
Every chance he got he would grab handfuls of the cards, activate them all, and get tons of free food.
A friend of mine found a loophole at a burrito shop as well. They had some old points system where you'd have to go to a url on the receipt, and enter a code for a free taco. Eventually the promotion ended because they stopped printing the URL, but they never shut down the webpage either. So he continued to get free tacos from the old webpage, but whatever proof of purchase was needed could be used from the same receipt used to get the previous free taco. He doesn't do it too often so no one catches on, but he would eat for free there once or twice a week.
I had a similar thing with a promotional card at a bar called Wurstküche in LA some years back shortly after it first opened. The card said something like "one free sausage" on it. The intent was you use the card once, and then they take it away and next time you want a delicious gourmet sausage you need to pay. All of my friends had one of these cards, and eventually they all were taken away, but they never took my card and we kept going back to that bar over and over again to get sausages and drink beer.
There was a big freeway running over our city with a few exits which always backed up with traffic and didn't go where I wanted. One of the exits led into a convention centre pay carpark, with ridiculous costs per hour.
I realised I could pull in there and if you left within ten minutes they didn't charge you.
It was my personal freeway off ramp for years.
Tried cancelling adobe. They wanted to charge for the rest of the year or something as a cancellation fee. Instead, I "upgraded" to a more expensive package, giving me their 14 day refund policy and was able to cancel immediately and still gave me access to the rest of the month. Fuck adobe
Fuck adobe
Pirating adobe will always be morally correct
Thankfully nowadays, there are good to great alternatives to the Adobe equivalent. Often times they're free to use.
If you want to cancel a subscription for whatever reason, worst comes to worst (dark pattern nonsense like trying to cancel an Adobe subscription) you can call your bank and request for a replacement card
However sometimes they allow cards that are being used for recurring subscriptions to keep going even if you've had the card replaced. I know from experience Chase does this
Specifically ask the bank to revoke authorization codes.
Tell them it was lost/stolen. Don't dispute any existing charges, but for security reasons they should still block any new charges made against the old card.
I work for a UK bank, and we automatically provide your replacement card details to all subscriptions, for example Netflix, Spotify, adobe, amazon prime, gym and many many others etc. The reason for that is that if you lost your card or it expired, you would otherwise have to spend ages updating the card numbers with all your providers. We call the subscriptions 'recurring visa' and if you ask your bank to place a recurring visa block, it's quick and easy and we won't let your named merchant take further funds. No need for a new card. However, if you are in a contract and you deny the company access to your bank card, they may demand that you pay for the rest of the contract still. They won't be able to get the money from the bank tho.
I learned this because I used to get drunk and lose my credit card.
Use a privacy.com virtual credit card. Gives you full control over each card. I use one for each subscription, especially those I don't plan to renew.
I did this, a gym membership could "only be cancelled by the manager" I just went online and changed the credit card number on file. Moved away never looked back
The trick with Adobe is to use PayPal... you can then cancel the recurring payment yourself.
Sure, but then you need a PayPal account, and fuck PayPal.
In Australia most retailers discount specific items for "members". Being a member is free but you need to sign up with your contact details. They will give you a card but no one carries a million cards so cashier's just ask for your phone number.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority administers phone numbers in Australia and they publish a list of phone numbers which may not be used by telco's and are reserved for the exclusive use in TV shows, films, and creative works.
I made a note of one of the numbers in my phone, and provide that when asked. Loads of other people are doing this so the number is always registered at every shop.
The conversation usually goes:
- cashier: are you a club member?
- me: yes.
- cashier: what's your number ?
- me: <ACMA number>
- cashier: oh. wow. there seems to be hundreds of people with this number. what's your name?
- me: oh really? who's there?
- cashier: uh, nigel, john, luke...
- me: I'm Luke.
I've been doing this on a weekly basis since reading about it in another thread (on reddit) a few years ago. I've never encountered a problem and I've received thousands of dollars in discounts. I would've gotten those discounts anyway but would've had to sign up with my personal number in order to receive them.
"I forgot my card. Can I use the store card?"
"Sure"
Success
One time at Kroger the cashier lady refused to let me use the store card, so I had to sheepishly look back towards the line, and the woman behind me let me use hers. I gave that cashier such a look.
This sounds like a different set up to the way things roll down under.
Cashier's just assume that no one carries their card, and they ask for your phone number to look up your membership. IDK what a store card is.
That's genius. Love it, I'm using it for sure. Thanks!
Issue with that, at least in the u.s. is that stores often give you points that accumulate that can be redeemed for certain dollar amounts or a big discount on a single purchase.
Yeah. This is a potential problem.
I'm not directly aware of this reward points thing actually happening in Australia. I mean they send text messages about sales and member only discounts, but real actual money off something you actually needed to buy isn't something I've seen or heard of.
In the US, this typically works with (zip code)-867-5309
In the United States the same concept has sloshed around a bit; (xxx)555-01xx is the official range of "reserved for fiction, guaranteed not to connect" numbers; most people think it's all of 555. It isn't, there was a directory assistance service on 555-1212 until 2020. In the first Ghostbusters film their phone number is given as 555-2368. I've seen a number of fictional programs give a number as 555-5555. If they ever were reserved, they're not now. The 555 exchange is explicitly NOT reserved in the toll-free area codes, which is how The Last Of Us accidentally included the number of a sex chat line. "I thought 555 numbers weren't real." No it's more nuanced than that.
Then there's 867-5309, made famous by the band Tommy Tutone. They wrote a song about finding a girl's name and number written on a men's room wall and used a valid phone number. In fact, because no area code is given it's several hundred valid phone numbers. Across the United States in the early 1980's a few hundred random people started getting prank phone calls asking for "Jenny". The number remains valid and several are still in use and even specially requested but I don't think they'll issue it sequentially anymore.
In the USA the FASFA is used to determine how much financial aid (grants, or zero interest loans) someone can get for university
Unfortunately it looks at parents assets as well as the adult students assets.
Unless
- over the age of 25
- military veteran
- married
So the loop hole here is obvious, two students should get married, then their financial need will be totally unmet and get the highest level of benefits
I know someone who had to do this. Her parents were abusive and were refusing to do the FASFA paperwork, holding it over her head for something. She had already been in college a couple of years at this point. So, she found a friend she trusted and they got married, allowing her to get the funding she needed to continue to attend college.
I'm fr curious if this can work. If it does, it seems beyond impossible to find a 25 year old college woman who would even want to marry
If your bank can only deposit a certain amount of a check the same day and you need it all just cash it and deposit the cash
Great tip, if you live in the 1980s
WTF
It's still valid today.
Payroll fucked up and I didn't get a deposit a few weeks back. They gave me the choice of waiting 2 weeks and having the deposit added to my next paycheck, which is totally undoable, or they would cut me a paper check that day.
I took the paper check.
I decided it would be easiest if I could use my Bank apps Mobile deposit but it only allowed me to access $500 of it that day, the rest had to wait until the next business day which was Monday.
If I would have thought about it I would have done it this way so I could have had access to the whole check before the weekend.
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.
I remember there was a time when you could use the self-serve kiosk at McDonald's, order a bunch of plain cheeseburgers and remove everything so it was just a bun and it would credit back enough money that you could get a whole meal (plus a bunch of empty buns) for free.
The one big drawback: it's still McDonalds
Calories are calories when you're broke
My typing class had early computers that graded on speed but not accuracy. So you mashed the keys and got 140 keys per second, and an A in the class. So now I'm a 50-something year old who types like a 13 year old. Somehow the rest of the class didnt figure this out.
My typing class wanted me to learn how to type with my hands spaced just right, using different fingers to reach each key. But by then I had already been using a computer and just kind of developed my own way of typing efficiently and quickly mostly just using my index fingers. They'd correct my hand position whenever they saw me type, but I was one of the faster typers in the class, so I'd use my own way for the tests and passed easily. I've tried to force myself to go back and type like they told me, but by now I'm just much more used to my own spurious method. 🤷♂️
Had a computer savvy friend watch me type once and he audibly went "what the fuck"
I used to be exactly like that, could even type blindfolded with my own weird way of typing. I eventually learned touch-typing (i.e. the correct way your teachers were trying to teach you) and a more ergonomic keyboard layout (Colemak), I haven't gained any speed, but I do notice that I get a lot less strain on my wrists and fingers. So if typing is something you do a lot on a daily basis, then it's worth learning to do it properly to not injure yourself in the long run.
Same here
Similarly, in my typing class, they'd have you type the same paragraph a few times. The program didn't notice copy and paste.
Amex can get your money back on anything. Went to the vet they tried to gaslight me into doing an expensive procedure so I dispute the visit fee 75$
If you're not abusing it, credit card companies are more than happy to do charge backs via disputes.
And, what, the shady company that scammed you is going to fight a multi billion dollar corporation?
I've used this a few times when I got fucked and the company doing the fucking didn't respond or didn't care.
There was a time when Discover would give you checks that you could use to transfer debt from other cards or accounts, which had a promotional rate of 0% for the life of that debt. I deposited one check into my checking account that filled up my discover card credit limit, then used that money to pay off my higher rate Discover Card debt. Then I did that a few more times until my entire Discover Card balance was 0%. This made my credit spending look amazing, because I had such a huge amount coming in and going out each month, and I soon started getting offers for much better card rates. Then I paid off my other credit cards while that debt sat there accruing no interest penalty.
Also, the way the accounts worked was higher debt would be paid off first, so until I fully paid off that account, there was always some 0% debt below all the higher % debt.
TL;DR: Discover Card let me my entire credit card debt through my checking account, making my credit score look wonderful and at the same time dropping my interest rate to 0%.
"There was a time when..."
Sounds similar to the tactic of serial debt transfer to one 0% interest card after another. Discover probably realized their program wasn't motivating enough people to use Discover cards for actual spending.
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.
Credit card manufactured spending. Still doable, but I think it's more difficult now.
You sign up for a fancy card with a fancy offer. Say, spend 6k in 3 months, get 1k in points.
Then you go to the local post office, and buy a money order for 6k. They used to be more permissive about letting you charge it on the CC, with only a nominal fee.
Then deposit that money order to your bank, use that money to pay off the charge for 6k. Boom, free signup bonus achieved.
There was a time you could get an AARP credit card that had 5% cashback, you don't have to be a certain age to join AARP in order to get the card. At the same time the federal reserve was letting people buy quarters in bulk without any shipping fees. So, order thousands in quarters, take them straight to the bank, repeat.
You can also just prepay on utilities. 6k might be a lot, but maybe if you got another card with a lower spending limit.
A guy i work with does this but he buys visa gift cards.
Yeah, office supply stores will occasionally have sales the fees they charge for visa gift cards, which make that an option.
But visa cards charge a fee, so the quarter idea is probably better.
When I was in high school my friends and I were always finding creative ways to skip school and instead go out and do stuff. But, there was a limit of X days that you could be absent throughout the year, or else you'd have to make up the time by attending summer school.
In a conversation with some school admin staff I discovered that if you attend just one class during the day, any absence for the rest of the day was counted as 0.5 days in the attendance system.
So, we effectively doubled the number of days we could skip school by showing up for the first hour and then getting out to e.g. attend a dentist appointment.
Cool story bro, and yes I would like ketchup and ranch with my fries.
My work has guest WiFi but I don't have access.
However, if i connect to it on my phone, enable my VPN on my laptop, then enable USB tethering from my phone i have unrestricted access on my laptop. lolI went to Catholic school, so probably the poophole loophole
You can get a kindle with ads for cheaper than ask them to remove the ads.
Then just turn on airplane mode and download calibre. Also, talk to a lady named Anna about her archive.
Or install koreader?
I enjoyed paying $1.50/mo for YouTube premium by signing up with a VPN to Turkey 🇹🇷 but that’s not a thing anymore 😢
VPN via Turkey used to work on other subs too. Often something like 1:10 discounts. Most of these loopholes are closed though.
It’s still very possible for iOS in app purchases if you use gift cards and a Turkey iTunes account. Some regional pricing has been adjusted but many have not
Why pay the bastards, just block their ads? Plus you can get sponsor block and bring back youtube dislike
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.
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.
I remember hearing about this one. So simple, so effective, it's beautiful.
The ROTH IRA (USA) requires earned income to be allowed to deposit (add) money. There is no rule that the money earned is the money deposed. If your kid has a job, and you have extra money, look into opening a ROTH with them. Kid spends their money (or not), and deposits your money in their account. Bingo setting kid up for old age.
I am not a tax accountant.
Not sure if these are exactly loopholes, but whatever.
Learning to shave with a straight razor will save you a fuckton of money on shaving products. Shaving soap makes each shave cost a cent at most. The downsides are the initial cost of the razor and strop, the initial learning curve, the upkeep, and the couple extra minutes necessary to shave with a straight razor (it's not too much, but it does take a bit longer).
Learning to roast coffee will cut your coffee costs by 50% if you enjoy high quality arabica beans. Some of the best coffee I've ever had I roasted and brewed myself. The extra time investment and clean up necessary is pretty intensive though, and yeah, there's an initial learning curve and equipment cost (though not too bad, you just need a stovetop, an old school stovetop popcorn popper, and a burr grinder).
You don't have to go all the way to straight razor to get significant savings. Even just a safety razor basically cuts the cost per shave to nothing vs. modern cartridges. And it's much easier to use.
Word. I bought enough safety razor blades for likely the rest of my life for about $75 (on sale)
eyup. just as easy as a disposable really an no real learning. just learn to keep it tight :)
Not loopholes but excellent LPTs!
In general doing anything the old fashioned way takes more time and saves money. But it seems like most people are reluctant to spend the time even if they have it, and will rationalize this in some way.
I just stopped shaving and now trim my facial hair with my hair trimmer. Far easier on the skin and zero extra cost.
Same, I can also shape my beard exactly how I want
These sound clever and make me regret being a tea-drinking bearded dude
Aglet
I had a pager that I didn't want to pay the bill on when I went out of the country. I called them to turn the service off while I was gone. Instead of turning it off they just quit charging me. I realized that when I got back and had a bunch of pages. That continues for several years until I traded it away, still working, still not costing anything.
Nice! But I would call that a screwup on their part, whereas a loophole is a glitch built into the system.
On my old commute, there was this one really long red light with a u-turn and merging road to the right you could take. Since the merging road was there, a right turn was allowed.
On busy traffic days, you could take the u-turn if the light was turning red and just go and skip it with a right turn. Pretty sure it pissed people off, but it was legal as far as I could tell.
Same thing when there's a really long light with a right-turn lane to a much less busy side street. If you get there shortly after the light turns red just turn right, go partway down the street and make a u-turn, then make another right back onto the main street.
Not something I did, but something a former 'friend' did:
Make a shitty dinosaur game, release it on Steam.
Get Steam to support your game's items on the Steam Market Place.
Some other friend wants to buy a game?
You want to buy a game?
Use your admin powers to directly create rare in game items, then trade the items to your friend who then sells them, or you sell them yourself.
I think he managed to functionally defraud Steam of around a thousand bucks doing this.
... This is the 'career path' of a garry's mod rp server admin, who would write viruses into the lua files which would be automatically downloaded and executed (escaping garry's mod and steam!) by any one who joined his gmod server, such that either Garry or Valve had to completely rewrite the way lua was executed in the source engine to prevent this exploit.
Anyway, last time I talked with him, he'd gone fully through the 4chan kekistan to QAnon to actual outright white supremacist fascist, has had several of his Steam accounts entirely VAC banned.
What’s the game? I think I played it. Was it released 10 years ago?
The Isle.
The one with the pedophile groomer sex-pest PR director.
I just now realized I know who Dondi is, as in, I know his real name.
He, like ParadygmShift, used to go by another username back in their gmod days.
I actually met that guy in person once, almost 20 years ago now.
I know his real name too, and he should absolutely be in prison if he isn't.
He didn't defraud Steam, he took advantage of other Steam users who are frivolous with their money, and Steam took their cut of the transaction.
You're right, this is a more accurate description.
If something you bought broke because of shitty design (like stick drift), buy a new one and return the broken one as defective for a refund with the box and receipt from the new one
Edit: added as defective
In Australia you don't need the box.
You don't even need a receipt.
Simply a bank transaction on your phone to show them. They have to match that to their records.
You can choose to go to the manufacturer, or the retailer. They can't palm you off to each other. You call it. They must act.
Australian people have some of the strongest consumer rights in the world. They just need to use them.
This isn't a loophole, it's straight up illegal. And a dick move to the person who buys it next thinking they're getting a new one.
Nonsense. It's accurately returned as defective. If it's placed back into inventory that's a mistake. No different than the retailer placing a "legal" return due to defect back on the shelf for sale, and that would be obviously fraudulent behavior by the retailer.
They don't just put the product back out on the shelf. Often its sold to a liquidator. They would have to label it as open box and most brick and mortar retailers don't sell open box items.
unethical life pro tip.
I dunno, it only hurts the corporation and it's on them for making a crappy product.
Some retailers (Costco) have very relaxed return policies so you wouldn't even have to do this.
"Walmart rentals"
If you need a product for a project but can't afford it, go buy it at Walmart, use it, and when you're done return it. Their return policy is pretty no questions asked, especially if you have a receipt. I had a roommate do this with an iPad he needed for a semester in college. I think it was a 14 day return policy, so he'd back it up and take it back every 13 days, then just buy a new one and repeat until the semester was over.
Even if you don't have a receipt, actually. I've returned things I bought at Target to Walmart and gotten a refund. Granted, that was a few years ago.
I'm from the UK but aware of this because of the movie Garden State
ITT: fraud
lol
I don't know if it's a "loophole," but I find my phone to be a pretty good eReader. I did the same with an old tablet (just has the eReader and the book(s)). I've never had a real eReader so I can't really comment on the difference, but if you're just trying to read, a good app costs a couple bucks, way cheaper.
Doesn't it strain your eyes tho? I thought the appeal of having an e-reader is having the screen easy on the eyes.
My phone is definitely easy on the eyes because I can see my reflection in the glass.
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
I've always used Android tablets. You need an app that allows you to fiddle with the colors. Mine is dark orange on a black background.
eReader Prestigio has been good to me.
Not that I've noticed. I can usually fiddle with the settings (some even let you program a day and night mode). But I also state at screens all day, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I would call that not a loophole but definitely a nice LPT.
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.
Orbot works with pipepipe
