pileofcrapola

Today's Morning Shift reported that Chevrolet and Ford are offering unprecedented 72 month loans with zero interest. But is carrying a loan for this amount of time even if the money is "free" a good move?

Read more...

You might think that there's nothing special about mixing bowls. America's Test Kitchen would beg to differ, and in this video they explain what you should look for—and what you should avoid—when buying good mixing bowls for your kitchen.

Read more...

If you have an ordinary shelf in your bedroom or closet and want it to pull double-duty as one you can hang clothes from, a little PVC piping is all it takes to do the job. The folks from The Family Handyman show us how it's done.

Read more...

Keeping yourself, your money, and your possessions safe during travel is important, but can sometimes be difficult due to scams. This can be especially daunting when you stick out as a tourist, making you an easy mark to spot for local tricksters.

Read more...

Most of us having a checking and savings account—that's pretty standard. But there are a handful of other kinds of accounts offered by banks and credit unions. We thought we'd put together a primer on the basic types of accounts, so you can see which ones might work for you.

Read more...

Accommodations are one of the biggest costs when traveling, so if you can reduce or eliminate having to pay for it you can save a bundle! ReadyForZero points out that you can often work in exchange for a place to lay your head at the end of the day.

Read more...

If you're looking to renovate a home or taking a look at new places to live, you should know the pros and cons of various flooring types. This visual guide covers nine different flooring types and how they rate when it comes to cost, durability, difficulty of installation, and how easy they are to clean.

Read more...

Sure, you love your favorite after-hours activity now, but will you love it when it's your only source of income? Turning your hobby into a business is a big decision, and you need to ask yourself a few questions before taking the plunge.

Read more...

It happens to the best of us. You meet someone at a party, then three days later you run into them at the grocery store and can't remember their name. The Atlantic takes a look at why that is.

Read more...

On Monday, we posted an open letter to the management of Gawker Media, our parent company, regarding an ongoing problem that we here at Jezebel could no longer tolerate: horribly violent rape gifs that were consistently appearing in our comments. For months, we asked Gawker Media HQ for help with the trolling — but despite recurring discussions, Joel Johnson, the company's editorial director, didn't fast track a solution.

Read more...

Let's say you're feeling unmotivated, unsure of yourself, aimless, can't find your passion, directionless, not clear on what your purpose in life is. You're in good company—most people are in the same boat.

Read more...

If you're one of the many people out there that does not own an iron, there's a way you can remove wrinkles with something you probably do have: a basic cooking pot.

Read more...

Consumerist reader Kim has been spending a lot of time on the phone lately. Why, you might be asking? It’s not for the joy of listening to Comcast’s hold music and recorded messages, no, that’s not it. It’s because she says her mother was told to pay a previous tenant’s overdue bill, or not get new services set up for herself and have her account sent to collections.

Yes, you read that right: It isn’t Kim’s mother’s overdue bill — it’s a previous tenant’s outstanding balance of $343.72 — a fact Comcast has freely acknowledged.

Comcast even looked up her mother’s two previous addresses where she’d used Comcast and agreed there were no past-due balances. Comcast also provided the name of that guy.

And yet, she writes, her mother’s name somehow ended up on that bill, and she was told that if she didn’t pay the balance her services wouldn’t be restored and she’d be sent to collections.

So with the threat of collections hanging over her head, her mother ponied up the cash, and assumed it would be resolved easily the next day.

But when she called the Billing Department, she was told that only Collections could help her.

And when she called Collections, vice versa. The company was “pulling all kinds of stunts” like transferring her without warning, and disconnecting calls.

Her daughter Kim then stepped in to help her mom get a refund, and writes that she’s spent about 383 minutes, more than six hours, on the phone trying to get someone at Comcast to help her in the last week.

“Every person I talk to gives me a different answer,” writes Kim. “You have to go to a Comcast billing location, you have to call collections, you have to wait 3-4 weeks for a investigation, Oh, this happens all the time, you need to send us your lease…”

Here’s a timeline of events below, detailing Kim’s quest to simply get a supervisor on the phone.

Thursday 8/7/14
Call #1 — 21 minutes: Billing department issues a ticket, gives 3-4 week estimate to investigate the issue.
Call #2 — 12 minutes: Retention department issues a ticket to have a supervisor call her within 24-72 hours. No call yet.

Saturday 8/9/14
Call #3 — 27 minutes: Refused a supervisor when speaking with a retention rep. Hangs up and calls back in hopes of getting a more helpful representative.
Call #4 — 22 minutes: Another retention rep apologizes, escalates the ticket and promises her supervisor will resolve the issue and get back to her by Monday at the latest.

Monday 8/11/14
Call #5 —  1 hour: Yet another retention department rep gives the runaround regarding a supervisor. Puts Kim on hold to see why no one has called her back from Saturday, leaves her on hold for 35 minutes without checking in. Kim finally hangs up so she can go to work.
Call #6 — 61 minutes: During the above call, Kim calls again on her cell phone and speaks with another retention rep, who finally transfers her to a supervisor, who seems like a dream come true. He gives her a full name, listens to the entire story and apologizes profusely. After collecting a ton of information, he promises he will look into it and get back to her.

Dream supervisor calls back later that night to confirm it’s Comcast’s mistake that her mom paid the overdue bill in the first place, and says that for it to be resolved he needed to speak with the collections department, which was closed at that time. He says he’ll call at 1 p.m. on Tuesday. Today is Thursday, and he hasn’t called.

Tuesday 8/12/14
Call #7 – 22 minutes
Call #8  — 30 minutes
Kim calls and speaks with the retention department twice, and is refused a supervisor. She explains about the supervisor who gave her a full name — each rep claims to have no idea who he is, where he works and there are no notes about him in her file. Of course.

Wednesday 8/13/14
Call #9 — 23 minutes: Kim calls retention and asks politely for a supervisor again, and is told there isn’t one available. But hey — one can call her back in 24-72 hours! She explains that she doesn’t believe anyone will call her back at this point, so she’d be happy to hold. She just didn’t realize how long she’d be doing so.

“The representative put me on hold and NEVER came back for over an hour,” she writes. “I finally had to hang up.”

Here’s the pertinent audio for that call — we heard the original file and beyond approximately three minutes of talking, the rest of the one hour and 19 minutes is spent playing hold music and the chirpy voice of Comcast’s “I’m Talking To You While You’re On Hold Forever” lady:

Call #10 – 45 minutes: Kim calls the office of Neil Smit, the President of Comcast Cable. She’s put on hold for a long time, then passed to a representative in the Executive Customer Relations department who takes down more information and issues a call escalation ticket. She says an agent from her area will call her back within 24 hours.

It’s now Friday, and any time windows issued over those 10 calls have all been surpassed, and then some.

Should Kim’s mother have ever paid for a stranger’s bill? Probably not — but the threat of collections is a scary one, and not easy to resist. Once Comcast admitted it had made a mistake, the amount should’ve been refunded and the way made clear for Comcast to chase down that errant former customer on its own.

Clearly, that didn’t happen.

“What blows my mind about this whole thing is that Comcast told me the name of the previous tenant, told me it was his bill, told me my mother had no outstanding balances,” Kim says. “They have ALL this information. It’s so cut and dry yet they can’t resolve my problem?”

Imagine losing your cat on the very day that you are planning to move thousands of miles away. And then, miraculously, someone finds your feline friend a few weeks later. But by that point, you’re so far away that you can’t afford to fly or drive back to bring him back.

This is exactly what happened to a woman from Seattle, whose cat ran away on July 4th weekend as she was packing the car for her move to Ohio.

The woman delayed her trip two weeks while searching in vain for Itty Bitty, her 14-year-old orange and white tabby pal. But eventually she had to leave.

Then a neighbor found the cat and called the folks at Seattle cat shelter Kitty Harbor, who wrote that Itty Bitty “was in poor shape, starving, a fresh deep gash in his neck and a bloody mouth with teeth missing.”

With the cat healing in the shelter, his relieved owner and Kitty Harbor went on Facebook trying to figure out a way for someone to help reunite her with Itty Bitty, who was still in too poor health to travel in the cargo section of a plane.

That’s how an employee for Alaska Airlines learned about the situation and figured she could work Itty Bitty’s return into her travel plans.

“We hadn’t seen Chicago yet, so I thought, why not,” she explains. “We can help out, and see the sights at the same time.”

But since Chicago is still many hours’ drive from Dayton, OH, where Itty Bitty’s owner had moved, the airline employee rented a car and drove out to Indiana to meet her halfway.

“We have two cats and I couldn’t imagine being without them,” said the employee. “They really are part of your family.”

[via SeattlePI.com]

A discount retailer that came under fire last month for its questionable lending and marketing practices received a slap on the wrist from federal regulators for allegedly tricking thousands of servicemembers into paying fees for legal protections they already had and for certain services that the company failed to provide.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced Thursday that USA Discounters, Ltd., which operates a chain of retail stores near 11 military bases, will provide $350,000 in refunds to servicemembers harmed by its fee scam and pay a $50,000 penalty for its actions.

According to the CFPB, the Virginia-based retailer created a fee scam designed to exploit unsuspecting servicemenbers by charging for services disguised as legal benefits.

Previously, the company made headlines for its high-cost financing plans in which servicemembers routinely paid more for items than they would have paid at other retailers. USA Discounters also has a history of suing customers who fall behind on finance payments for these overpriced items.

The company, which sells furniture, electronics, bedding, and appliances, allegedly mischaracterized the protections provided by the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which gives active duty servicemembers protections from debt collection in a number of scenarios.

The CFPB charges that USA Discounters had servicemembers agree in a contract to pay a $5 fee for a company called SCRA Specialist LLC to be their representatives with respect to their rights under SCRA, should they be sued for a debt.

USA Discounters portrayed SCRA Specialists Specialists as an independent business, when the company’s only source of revenue was from USA Discounters’ customers. The company gave nearly $4.50 of each $5 fee to SCRA Specialists, which has generated more than $350,000 since 2009.

Additionally, USA Discounters sold SCRA’s services as a benefit to servicemembers, when in actuality, they only served as tool for the company to more easily sue the servicemembers.

One function of SCRA Specialist was to verify the servicemember’s active military status so that the servicemember could receive certain protections; an aspect touted as a benefit for the consumer. However, USA Discounters used that information to report on the servicemember’s military status in order to obtain a default judgment against the servicemember.

Under the order, USA Discounters must provide $350,000 in restitution to servicemembers for the $5 SCRA Specialist fee and a $50,000 penalty to the CFPB’s Civil Penalty Fund.

Additionally, the company is required to no longer market contracts as a benefit to services members and can not pretend to that SCRA is an independent company.

For consumers who repaid their installment accounts, USA Discounters will mail a check for the full $5 plus interest. For those consumers whose account is in collection, their debt will be discharged the $5 fee plus interest.

CFPB Shuts Down USA Discounters’ Servicemember Fee Scam [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau]

Because we all know the inconvenience of having too much money and not enough stuff to spend it on, you can now kill two birds with one stone: Never worry about getting your spanking white shoes dirty by buying pre-muddied kicks for the bargain price of $215. Saves you time and stress over the inevitable, and provides a way to dispose of that extra income.

Across the pond where they call sneakers “trainers,” ShortList.com notes the utter despair of dirtying up your own new shoes.

That brings us to a joint effort between designer Kazuki Kuraishi and conceptual artist Ryan Gander, along with Adidas Originals, to create these weird shoes/works of art (?) called the Adidas x KZK ZXZ 750 RG 84-Lab.

It’s not real mud that will end up all over your floors (I buy pre-muddied floors, anyway), as the brown stuff is just a clever paint job.

The pair retail for only £129, or about $215 here. But again, mud is free.

Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail… Or is it, here comes lunch, yum, rabbit meat? That’s at the center of a controversy between people who think rabbits should remain our furry friends and not our food, and the move by Whole Foods to start selling rabbit meat at selected stores.

Friends of pet bunnies say they’ll be showing their disapproval with the situation at Whole Foods stores this weekend, reports the Huffington Post, handing out leaflets that highlight the “popular furry companion” side of rabbits as pets.

A nonprofit group called The House Rabbit Society wants participants around the country to be nice when telling shoppers about how awesome and fun it is to have a pet rabbit, and to ask people to fill out comment cards about the rabbit meat or speak to store managers.

You can buy rabbit meat in Whole Foods Stores in certain locations in Northern California, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, north Atlantic, Northeast, South and Pacific Northwest right now.

Whole Foods said in a statement to HuffPo that the company is “sensitive to the companion animal issue,” and that the only reason rabbit meat is for sale is because customers asked for it.

“A number of shoppers have been asking Whole Foods Market to carry rabbit for years but conventional raising practices do not meet our rigorous animal welfare standards,” he said. “To meet our customers’ requests for rabbit we needed our own set of animal welfare standards. These animal welfare standards are a direct result of a rigorous four-year process to address the welfare issues in rabbit production.”

Take Our Poll

Whole Foods’ Plan To Sell Rabbit Meat Incites Fury [Huffington Post]

Perhaps it was to satisfy an atavistic desire, connecting across the eons with our hunter/gatherer forebears by gazing in awe as a slab of animal meat cooks slowly, the fat rendering, collagen melting. Or perhaps we’ve reached another stage in the mind’s evolution, with some next-level humans able to divine meaning and narrative out of watching a brisket cook through the lens of a single fixed TV camera. Please let there be some sane, acceptable explanation why hundreds of thousands of people would tune in to watch an Arby’s marketing stunt, and why they would give it more attention than they would the average TV show.

We told you back in May how Arby’s was planning to take over the airwaves of a Duluth, MN, TV station for 13 hours on Memorial Day Weekend, airing recorded footage — that’s right, it wasn’t even live — of an Arby’s brisket cooking in an oven.

It wasn’t even a special camera placed inside the oven. Just an unblinking, record-setting look through the window in the oven’s door.

We don’t know what the local ratings were like in Duluth, but the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that 400,000 people went online to watch the stunt. Even more astounding — though confounding is probably more accurate — is the fact that the average online viewer ogled the brisket for 38 minutes.

38 minutes.

We’re not talking about streaming a new episode of Orange Is the New Black. We’re not talking about watching livestreams of political or social unrest around the world. We’re not talking about people reading a thoroughly researched investigative piece on government corruption.

We’re talking about a brisket. An Arby’s brisket. People who make their own brisket don’t give their meat that much attention — that’s the whole point of cooking a brisket.

The Star-Tribune tries to justify this time wasted watching a brisket.

“It also helped that visitors had a chance to win one of $20,000 in prizes that included a 10-gallon hat, lasso and beef-scented candles,” writes the paper.

No, no it doesn’t. In no world are beef-scented candles worth the 38 minutes of brisket-watching you will never get back.

“Thirty-eight minutes is longer than a lot of TV shows,” Arby’s senior brand experience director explains, while also trying to live with the fact that he is Arby’s senior brand experience director.

More than two years after Beef Products Inc. announced it would permanently close three of its four “pink slime” processing plants, the company is reversing course and reopening a Kansas plant.

The maker of “lean finely textured beef,” otherwise known as pink slime, says an uptick in sales and demand for beef fillers resulted in the company reopening a plant, CNN reports.

It’s unclear just who is purchasing the LFTB and what products it might be found in, but BPI’s Garden City, KS, plant, which once employed 230 workers, is expected to open next week with 40 to 45 employees to produce more of the controversial product.

The increased demand for LFTB comes as beef prices have hit record highs because of overseas market demand and drought conditions in the United States. While critics call the pink slime a filler, the USDA defines the product as beef.

The saga of pink slime and BPI began more than two years ago when ABC News ran a report about the beef filler. While critics of the product called it a salvage product made of trimmings formerly used in dog food and cooking oil, BPI maintained that the beef was safe and made without additives or fillers. However, the company did say the product is heated and treated with bacteria-killing ammonia, which doesn’t sound any more appetizing.

Following the ABC report, BPI sales took a huge hit with many former buyers such as McDonald’s, Safeway and other companies discontinuing the use of the filler in their products.

A short time later, in March 2012, the company suspended operations at three plants in Iowa, Kansas and Texas. Several months after that the company made the decision to close the plants, eliminating about 650 jobs.

The ordeal culminated in a defamation suit filed by BPI against ABC News, which continues to move slowly through the court system. The suit hinges on the company’s claims that the network published 200 “false and disparaging statements” about the lean finely textured beef product resulting in “substantial” losses for the company.

‘Pink slime’ is back and headed for your burger [CNN]

Almost two years ago, Hurricane Sandy caused flooding and property damage in areas that aren’t accustomed to dealing with heavy storms. While one woman in Massachusetts was cleaning up damage from that storm, she discovered some hidden treasure in an attic crawlspace: savings bonds that were more than 30 years old and had been stashed there for safekeeping. The bonds were safe, but they didn’t belong to her. Who did they belong to?

The current homeowner says that she has spent two years searching for the owner of the bonds, with no success. Most likely, they belonged to one of the house’s previous owners, and she purchased it in 1991. She finally turned to local media, speaking to the Quincy Patriot-Ledger. She gave the name on the bonds, noting that they had been purchased in Texas around 1981. The four bonds had a face value of $200, and were no longer earning interest.

“I’d like her to get her money. It may mean a lot to this woman. Someone has to know this person,” she told a reporter.

Someone did know her. The newspaper story ran on Saturday, August 9. That afternoon, a taxi pulled up in the driveway. The passenger knew the correct address to visit because it used to be her home. Her father, who died in 2006, was the purchaser of the bonds. “I’ve been waiting for you,” the current homeowner told her. She arrived bearing photo ID and her dad’s Socia Security number.

Thanks to 30 years of interest, the bonds are now worth $641.

U.S. saving bonds found in Braintree home returned to owner [Patriot-Ledger]
Braintree woman finds savings bonds in her attic, searches for owner [Patriot-Ledger]

The saga of what happens when you try to cancel your Comcast account continues this evening with a recording of the tail end of a more than three-hour wait on Comcast’s retention line. As far as we can tell, sitting on hold with Comcast for upwards of three hours isn’t a unique experience, but not everyone is creative enough to call Comcast with another phone while still on hold… only to hear a recording informing them that the company has closed for the day.

Three hours is a long time. (For context, during the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong spent 2 hours and 31 minutes walking around on the surface of the moon.)

We suppose there are a few explanations for how such a absurdly long wait time could happen. Perhaps this customer was lost in some mysterious queue. Perhaps Comcast plays that recording after a certain time of day and then finishes up the calls that are already in said mysterious queue. That doesn’t seem to be the case for this guy, however. He says (on reddit) that after being transferred to the retention department, his call was never answered.

Because he was calling to terminate his account after Comcast’s repeated failure to repair his service (multiple no-shows by technicians) there’s probably not much Comcast can do to repair this relationship. We’re just happy to hear that he had another cable provider to which he could switch. Not everyone is so lucky as to have that choice.

Hurry up, people who aspire to take photos of themselves with tigers: today, the governor of New York State signed a bill banning the practice of paying to have your photo taken with a large cat. Yes, this will be commonly referred to as the “tiger selfie” ban.

As radio station WPDH in Poughkeepsie points out, businesses that let you pet and take a photo with tigers and other exotic animals have been popular attractions at county fairs, including the nearby Dutchess County Fair, in years past. You get a sticker that says “I touched a tiger,” and a photo perfect for your online dating profiles. Starting in 2015, exchanging money for tiger photos will now be illegal in New York state.

“It is hard to believe it is not already illegal,” Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, sponsor of the bill, told reporters. The bill is intended to stop small roadside and traveling zoos that charge for contact with big cats. Advocates for the animals say that the zoos take small kittens from their mothers, then discard the big cats when they become too large to handle.

NY Law Bans ‘Tiger Selfies’ [AP]
An act to amend the environmental conservation law, in relation to public safety and big cats [NY State Assembly]
Popular Fair Attraction Now Illegal in New York [WPDH]

Fairfax County Animal Watch Washington Post No incidents were reported by the Animal Control Division of the Fairfax County Police Department. For information, call 703-246-2253. FAIRFAX CITY. The following incidents were reported by the animal control section of the Fairfax City Police Department. and more »

A major international chess tournament in northern Norway ended on a grim note, with one player dying in the middle of a game and another found dead in a hotel room, organizers said Friday.

Nancy Frank could no longer care for her two Chihuahuas so she was glad to find a young man she thought would give them a good home.

The Navy says the commander of the Norfolk-based attack submarine Newport News has been relieved of his duties.

The ride, which remembers those who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks, takes place this weekend.

Federal regulators are considering changing interstate fishery laws to prevent fishermen from removing fins from spiny dogfish before they're brought ashore.

Authorities are looking for the former occupants of a vacant home near Cumberland where nine dead dogs were found.

The Virginia Aquarium is preparing to release three sea turtles that were hooked this summer by recreational fishermen.