Episode #199 – Root Problems – Randumb Thoughts Podcast

Going to the dentist, the trump rate, eBay fees and scams, a heart attack on a plate. And more on today's Randumb Thoughts.

Hello and welcome to episode number 199 of the Randumb Thoughts Podcast. You can find us online at R-A-N-D-U-M-B thoughts dot com. I am your host Darren O'Neill and there are a few things to talk about on this show as we close in on episode 202. What a crazy little trip it has been, thanks to everybody that's been along for at least part of the ride of the whole ride here on the show. I hope we're giving you a product and some entertainment in an otherwise insane world.

Wound up at the dentist yesterday. So, I mean, if you want to go along with the episode 200 donation, go with the 230 donation because 230 you wind up at the dentist. And at first I thought maybe this was just some sinus pressure because I've had that happen before and it turns out now had an infected tooth on the right side of this. I needed a new dentist anyway, I may have talked about it here right before COVID happened.

The dentist that my wife and I had been going to, a guy we really liked was a friend of a friend, ended up finding he had lung cancer and passed away fairly quickly. And there's a lot of you know, it could be hard to find a good doctor or a good dentist that you like. It's convenient that you don't have to worry. Is going to tell you you need a whole bunch of work done when you don't.

So it had been a little bit since I had been to the dentist and the tooth was hurting and I'm like, well, maybe it was just sinuses because I've had that before. Took some decongestant that wasn't going away. So yesterday I decided about 11 a.m., you know, this is kind of sensitive to cold too now, so I better go in and get it checked out. I called.

Well, first, you know, I've been looking up online, which I don't trust online reviews overall because we all know they can be manipulated in all sorts of different ways.

And it's interesting, there are still websites out there like Yelp who this is their only thing mainly seems to be restaurant outside Yelp because looking up dentists on Yelp, the reviews were like, well, hey, there's two for this one here, maybe five for this, the high end, maybe 15 or 20 reviews for the dentists in the area here. Two that I looked at Google and there were hundreds and there were two dentists that were close that had nearly spotless records.

And it turns out one of them is on the dental insurance that I'm going to have when the first of the month rolls around. Of course, you know the tooth problems don't wait until that kicks in. So I called up at about 11:00 today. I'm a new patient having a problem with the tooth. I'd like to make an appointment and the receptionist is like given. Sure it's I'm like I will in like three weeks and she thought that was funny. And hey, can you be in at 115 like today? Sure.

So I went in. They took a look. Yeah. I need a root canal, which I've had before. And there are worse things. People make it a big deal. At least the last dentist I had, it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't painful or anything. So you're going to need a root canal and a crown. Luckily, the dental insurance will be kicking in because they are not a cheap procedure but we're still not getting off scot free, but a lot better than not having insurance.

But again, if you want to go with that to 30 donation, feel free. But she mixed up a little thing. Put it on the tooth for a temporary closing of the tooth, gave me some penicillin and early next month it'll be off to have the root canal. But still, I guess I was having a better day. So we've learned how to do these segways professionally. After 199 episodes.

Because I was having a better day than Donald Trump did the other day with the raid of his Morro Largo residence in this thing is interesting to me on all sorts of different levels because I don't think there's any question that this is completely a political thing. And I doubt anybody that's listening to this show has any questions that this is completely a political thing, trying to keep Donald Trump off the board for the next presidential election.

The problem is, I don't know if this is helping or hurting that concept of becoming a reality, because the way I would look at this would be you're just now more and more emboldening Donald Trump and his supporters to come out in mass unless this, unlike the first impeachment and the second impeachment and the Russian collusion, unless this actually has something behind it, which we have not seen yet, which is the problem with Attorney General

Merrick Garland not coming out and saying, hey, here is what we had, because a raid of a former president of the United States of his residence never been done. This is unprecedented stuff. And it seems to me that we had four years of Donald Trump, that the FBI was pretty clearly a large contingent of people in the FBI working against Donald Trump just due to politics. We had the Russian collusion that we found out that was a scam.

The excuse they're using for this raid was, well, Donald Trump took home some classified documents. Remember, Hillary Clinton and the thousands of documents on her phone and personal server? Remember that? Remember that big raid when they went in the FBI to Hillary's residence to know you don't remember that because it never happened. This is not business as usual, and I think there is cause for concern.

I don't think anybody should be above the law, but this should be cause for concern for one reason when it comes to classify documents, this becomes a very a very interesting way to try to go after a former president of the United States, because as you may or may not know, the president of the United States has unlimited power when it comes to declassifying documents. So to try to charge a president or former president with you took classified documents.

All Donald Trump has to say is, no, no, I declassified those. That's not a problem. And then there's what crime? If those documents are declassified, it seems the FBI agents spent a lot of time looking through Melania's clothing. I don't know. It seems a little bit weird all on its own there, depending exactly what they're looking for. Again, we don't know because we weren't told.

We weren't told that, hey, we believe Donald Trump has X, Y, Z, and we have to go and see now, why aren't we being told this? That's a good question.

If there are documents that Donald Trump may have hidden on a hard drive, USB stick, something like that, I don't even know if it really matters because I would hope Donald Trump would be surrounded by smart enough people to realize that you can encrypt said hard drives and have hidden partitions on said hard drives, which means even if you find the hard drive, you aren't going to find the information on it that you are looking for.

So this is a big question of exactly what they were looking for, why this judge okayed the raid. I mean, let's just forget the fact that the judge was a big time Obama donator who also has ties to Jeffrey Epstein and his cohorts. Let's ignore that.

Let's not say that maybe there's some leverage against that particular judge, Mike Pence, who is not a huge fan of Donald Trump all the damn time in a social media post said, quote, I share the deep concerns of millions of Americans over the unprecedented search of the personal residence of President Trump. No former president of the United States has ever been subject to a raid of their personal residence in American history.

He continued in another post, quote, After years where FBI agents were found to be acting on political motivation during our administration, the appearance of continued partizanship by the Justice Department must be addressed, and Vice President Pence 100% correct in that. He also noted that this undermines political confidence in our system of justice, and Attorney General Garland must give a full accounting to the American people as why this action was taken.

And as of yet, that has not happened. I'm guessing he'll have to say something eventually. But what we're being told right now just does not make sense. This does not rise to the level of raiding a former president's location. Again, Hillary Clinton, we know, had thousands of documents that were not properly being housed, that were transmitted and nothing not even a slap on the wrist. But yeah, there was definitely no raid of the Clintons.

And if I were the Democrats, I would be very, very, very, very afraid. I don't even know if that's enough. Very if the Republicans take the House and Senate and the president see, there could be a lot of raids coming. Hillary might want to get the smug look off her face. She's selling merchandise already about this. He may want to really make sure that she's covered all of her tracks and had a lot of time where the bodies are buried.

Because I think this is just going to open up a whole new level of bad politics, which I don't think is good for the country. But I think it's coming, especially if Donald Trump gets back into the White House, then I don't think there's any chance that that power is going to be used to fully investigate his political opponents. And some people will cheer that one. I don't think it's a good thing for the country overall, but everybody has to be held to the same standard.

And if the FBI's going to go after Donald Trump for allegedly removing documents from the White House, I mean, you may remember Sandy Berger that was back under Clinton. Right. That admitted holding up documents, putting them in his socks, getting them out of the secure area. He didn't even have his house raided. So, I mean, what does that tell you about what is going on right now? I think it tells you everything you need to know that this is 100% about politics and not about law.

And it's because the Democrats realized the hole that they're in.

They realize the current state of the nation. The media is giving Joe Biden a pass where they did not do that with Bush the elder when he said, Read my lips, no new taxes. While Joe Biden was pretty damn close to that, with nobody making under 400,000 as a family was going to see new taxes under my administration. Well, that was a lie, wasn't it, Joe? To be fair, I don't think Joe knows, because his brain is Ovaltine, not even chocolate.

It's like crappy Ovaltine stuff that nobody wants to drink. But this is what they see. They understand that people are hurting. They understand that consumer prices once again up in July, 8.5%. And according to Breitbart, quote, this was the 14th straight month of inflation running higher than 5%, meaning this year's price increases are building on top of the decade's high increases of last year and quote, 14 straight months of inflation running higher than 5%.

How long is Joe Biden been in office? This is a catastrophe of a presidency. This was beyond mismanagement. This was intentional. Whether Joe Biden knows or not and his Ovaltine brain, when he went after the fossil fuel industry on day one, that set this plan into motion, they've tried to blame it on Vladimir Putin. They've tried to blame it on all sorts of different things. But the reality is, when you go to war with the local fossil fuel producers, the prices of gas and energy go up.

And when the prices of gas and energy go up, everything goes up because everything needs energy and everything that gets into your grocery store is trucked there every thing that moves from point A to point B comes with something that is using a fossil fuel, most likely at this point. And that is why prices continue to go up. I think it's hilarious that the White House is like where gas is come down, man. Did you see like it comes down a lot?

Well, no, but it's still way, way higher than when Biden took office.

But this is, I believe, another intentional use of the Overton Window, which is, well, you know, gas is sitting right about $2, which I believe it was when Joe Biden came in. Now, we want people to pay like four bucks, but they're not going to accept that if we just go from two bucks to four bucks, man, they're going to be pissed.

So using the Overton Window concept, what they do is they go, hey, let's do something where it gets up to $6 and we'll let them pay that for a little while, but will drop it to four. And that'll seem like, Wow, this is great. And believe it or not, there will be some people dumb enough to buy into that too Nazi exactly what is going on. But I believe you do because you're listening to me. So I'm guessing that you are smarter than the average citizen, but that is enough about politics.

I believe for this episode I wanted to talk about a couple of other things, including one that I keep kind of pushing off and I've talked about a little bit elsewhere, but I don't think I've ever talked about it here because I don't see anything tagged with eBay on this particular podcast.

But I wanted to talk about the eBay fees as well as a new scam, or at least what I believe is a scam that I have found recently with looking at items on eBay. One, I remember back in the day selling a lot of stuff on eBay and I know they've always had the fees to put items up for listing, which they've pretty much gotten away from now. And there's always been a percentage that eBay charges when you sell an item, but it seems to me that the percentages are way, way higher than they used to be.

And that seems almost criminal to me the way that they do their payment structure. But as we've talked about with things like Amazon being first to the market really helps because there were a bunch of other auction sites back in the day, including Yahoo! Auctions that tried to compete with eBay and none of them were ever able to do so, which is why eBay can charge pretty much whatever they want.

I may have talked about this a little bit when I ended up with an extra Lego set that had to be sold, and I realized how much higher than the sticker price it had to be sold for just to break even. And the reason for that is that eBay now on almost every thing that you sell, is charging a final value fee of 12.9% on anything up to 70 $500 and then 2.35% over that. So if you're selling something that's under 70 $500, you're paying 12.9% to eBay.

That covers most things, including music, vinyl records, parts for cars, tools and supplies and all of that kind of stuff. But for some reason, if you are selling books and magazines, they want 14.6% of the total sale, up to 7500 and then 2.35% over anything over 7500 coins in paper money billion 12.9% clothing including women's bags and handbags 15% up to $2,000 and then 9% over $2,000.

It is an overall scam, I believe, very similar to what the sports card grading companies are doing when they say, hey, yeah, we'll grade that cheap card or, you know, five or ten or 20 bucks about the expensive card that's going to cost thousands of dollars for us to do the same job, giving you a grading on it. I don't really believe it's fair for eBay to charge a flat fee like that and continue to make a ton more money. When it comes down to it, their cost is the same.

Whether somebody is selling a $5 item or a $500,000 item. So why do they get paid so much more for one? Well, because they can, but they are pretty much the only game in town when it comes to selling a lot of stuff quickly and easily. So people end up paying it. But one thing you do have to watch out for, and this is what I've noticed recently when just doing various searches because you're like, Oh, what's this item I have worth? What can I get for it?

And every now and then I'll do searches for things like CDs. There's some CDs used to go way up. There were some old Waylon Jennings CDs. It used to go for a mint. And now this is where I found out some of the Taylor Swift vital. I have went up from 50 bucks a few years ago when I bought it too. It's selling for 1000 plus now. Well, or is it? That's the real question, because I like to go in and I'll do a search. Taylor Swift, give me all the sold items and sort them by the most expensive.

To the least expensive. So if you have a collection of stuff that's one way to do it, to find out what's selling, what's selling well, what's going for good money, what's not well, with eBay, the way to do this normally is to go and look at these sold auctions because that should give you a price. One would think that would be a legitimate ballpark of what the items are actually selling for. But I've noticed this on a few auctions.

Now that you go and you see a wall that is quite high for that item, I wouldn't have guessed that. And you show is this sold and all of that. And then you go back and you look and the seller is selling the same item again, which is one thing you now have to look for is do a search for that item with the same seller. Because I don't know. I mean, I know there are a variety of ways, especially with the eBay system, where you don't require immediate payment, which is why the whole buy it.

Now thing is or best offer is a issue because with some of the buy it now stuff, you can force a payment and with the best offer you can't. So I believe what a lot of times is happening is, oh, they're accepting a best offer from somebody that they know or, you know, just another shill account that they created themselves that now shows that the item sold for a very inflated price.

And there are a lot of people, myself included, if you're doing this quickly and you're like, Hey, I'm looking for this item. Wow, let me see what it's sold for in the past. Oh, wow. It's sold for $5,000. I just saw another one up at only 3000. I could grab it. I mean, more likely it's about $5 and $3. But you get the idea.

You have to understand at this point now, the bottom line here is that the amount that you're seeing on eBay, even under these sold auctions, are not necessarily actually going to be sold, that you can take those to the bank and believe that the numbers you're seeing there are real, because I do not believe they are. It definitely sends up a red flag when you see the same seller selling these same items and sometimes, okay, you might say, well, they had a couple of those. If they collect them.

But there are other times, if they're things like graded sports cards that you'll notice, hey, wait, no, that's the exact same serial number on that item. So it's something to watch out for. Don't get taken in by all of the scams and understand if you want to sell something on eBay that there is a pretty large vig to be paid.

And if you could find a way to sell this stuff locally, especially because eBay is now completely tied in to the whole government thing and the banking thing, which means if you sell over a few hundred dollars, you will get a tax form from eBay. So if you're looking just to sell some stuff on the side and avoid all of the hassles, I don't really know if eBay is the place to do that at this point. If anybody has a better suggestion, feel free to reach out and let me know what that is.

Now, a suggestion that wasn't good. I mean, I guess it depends how you look at it, but I keep going back and I don't know why to see what the Lifehacker site has on it, because it used to be a really good site. There used to be some very valuable information, even some tech information that you would find there, a new program or a new way to do things. Well, Lifehacker is really hitting the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the information that they're giving. They've gone completely woke.

They've gone completely crazy. But in this article, I thought was kind of funny, how to make canned vegetables taste luxurious. Now, I don't know if you can ever really make canned vegetables taste luxurious, but you know, they're there. They're vegetables. A lot of people don't get enough vegetables in their day, maybe because they don't think they taste good, which is quite often the case.

Now, I would prefer to just throw a little D powder or some kind of seasoning on there that is not going to be a heart attack on a plate, but that is not the way Lifehacker wants to go. According to this genius on Lifehacker, the way to make canned vegetables taste luxurious is Whoa, take two or three tablespoons of butter per can place the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. The water will foam and boil off and you'll see the milk solids fall to the bottom of the pan.

Keep cooking swirling the butter until they turn a deep amber color, then add your canned vegetables to the pan and stir it all together. Season with salt and pepper to taste. It works with peas, beans, potatoes, mushrooms, corn, hominy, carrots and most other canned vegetables. If you want to make your dish look as luxurious as it tastes brown, a little extra butter, a tablespoon or so, and drizzle it on top of the plated product.

Well, okay, so this works great with peas, they say, and all these other vegetables. Just to give you an idea, if you pay no attention to nutritional information, which I know a lot of people don't, I do and have for a while just because I have to look for MSG and things. So you and Panda seeing everything else that's there and I was really annoyed the other day looking at the Meyer product for chicken noodle soup, which could be pretty simple by now. It's a pretty simple recipe.

You just want something that's relatively healthy, low in fat. Now the soups can quite often be loaded with sodium, and sodium is not good for you. And it was really kind of annoying that looking between the regular soup and the unsalted version, the unsalted version had MSG in it. So we're going to take away the salt, we're going to take away the sodium, but we're going to give you monosodium glutamate instead. No, thank you.

But in this case, you're taking a can of peas and I just chose sweet peas. You can choose whatever peas you'd like. Add a canopy's would be about 250 calories for the whole can and 1.75 grams of fat in the whole can. Now, if you're taking three tablespoons of butter and adding it to that can, that's having 36 grams of fat to the peas, which only had 1.75 grams to begin with. So why are you even eating peas? Why not just drink the butter? 300 extra calories?

And I'm not sure if the other butter they wanted you to brown to put over the top was in addition. But I understand butter makes everything taste oh so delicious but it is doing nothing but adding fat to make anything taste better. Adding fat probably will work for the average human. We'll be like, well, that taste better. There's more fat in it. Which is why when you take something like ice cream and you strip out the fat, it doesn't quite taste like ice cream anymore.

It's the fat that makes it taste so good, but it's also the fat that makes it bad for you. So if you're eating vegetables and you think you're doing something good and then you're loading it up with three tablespoons or more of butter, then some people throw like cheddar cheese on top of it, you're kind of losing the healthy aspect of the dish. I highly recommend going the route of adding a little bit of a hot sauce, adding a little bit of a spice, rather than overloading it with fat.

Try a few different things. See what you like. I mean, you know what your flavor palette is. But I've learned just from the broccoli that it's like it's green giant or somebody has there's a Tuscan seasoned broccoli. Then it's like, Hey, wait, this makes a lot more sense. Just make the broccoli and throw some seasoning on top of it. You don't have to throw butter.

You don't have to throw salt just to give it a little bit of an extra oomph, a little bit of an extra taste, and try to keep it in the healthy realm rather than having a complete garbage dish loaded up with fat thanks to adding the butter. But these are the kind of tips that Lifehacker is giving. And I don't know, maybe they have a deal with the local hospitals and people coming in needing angioplasty or bypass or stuff like that. Does it? Certainly not.

Something you want to do with regularity is loading things up with butter. Sugar is the same way you want to avoid sugar as much as possible. And it was interesting because I read that dark chocolate will help lower blood pressure and I haven't had dark chocolate in a while and I figured, well, I'll order some of the jeera that way. I believe it was the little squares that are 92% kcal, which is what they make the chocolate out of undertone. It does not taste good at all. It is very bitter.

I mean, that's it. It doesn't taste good at all, but it is very bitter. It's not like, oh, you're having a chocolate bar that you remember as a kid. It's not a Hershey bar. It's a very bitter experience, but there's a lot of antioxidants, so that in moderation could be a good thing. I like to take them now.

One of those little squares, break it up in a coffee cup, turn on the courage and say, Hey, give me the hottest cup of coffee you can, which is one of the reasons I love the new courage, because you can adjust the temperature, melt the chocolate right into the coffee, which of course, now coffee there was a study is good for you. Everything it seems at one point was bad for you is now good for you. We try to keep up everything in moderation. Listen to your body.

You know, when you're to start hurting, go get it taken. Have a taken a look at and don't let the things fester. If you are having a problem because most things, when you first start feeling them, the symptoms can be taken care of fairly easily. And this case of the tooth not so much. It's already at the root canal stage, which if not for my dentist dying and then COVID would have never gotten to that point. But I digress.

It's on me and I will pay the penalty of sitting in a dentist chair for an hour or so and having the root canal done. I mean, you can take your part in come in with the 230 donation.

This is a value for value podcast and that means we put the shows out there. There is no cost. You get to decide if you've gotten any value out of this show whatsoever. Put that into a number and get it back to us. Go to our website. Randumb Thoughts, R&D web thoughts, dot com slash donate. You can use the donate button for a one time or monthly donation. You can use the QR codes or wallet addresses to do the crypto thing, and you can use the P.O.

Box address if you want to go the snail mail route. You can also go to Patreon e-com, slash random R&D, D, B, thoughts. If you are already in the Patriot ecosystem, they are all very much appreciated. We have nobody to thank on today's show. I mean, I know first the dentist to thank nobody donating to this show, but I'm hoping that's because the next show is episode number 200, the extravagant Zone.

And you can come in hopefully and support that show or send in something, send in a note, sending a message. Darren Darien at Randumb Thoughts dot com.

We'd love to hear from you where you're listening from any advice you took from the show that worked out and he took that didn't anything we'd love to hear from you and I do hope that everything is good where you are that you're avoiding the dental chair, that inflation has not put you into a really bad place, credit card debt going up, that you're able to put food on the table, take care of your family.

I am not an oracle, but I do believe things will start regulating themselves and getting a little bit better over the next few months. But for that we will have to wait and see. And because of that, I will be back again next week on Wednesday with another edition of the Randumb Thoughts podcast. I am Darren O'Neill. Thanks for listening