where are those startups that are disrupting the glasses industry

zenni and it’s amazing and i love it 40 dollar bifocals fuck yeah

Hey I’m reblogging this again because if you need glasses here’s what I do:

I can’t articulate how many literal headaches Zenni has saved me because I just used to wear my old prescription until I had trouble keeping my eyes open from the strain. Now at the first hint of eye strain it’s like “Not today, Satan!” and I can plan for the $100 expense that’s going to last me potentially years.

Obligatory reminder that a ton of people have added but still, Zenni and other likewise sites (1-800-Contacts) require the prescription be up to date within a year. So yeah plan that in, any time you shop, that script has to be from within the last year. 

I would also like to submit glassesshop.com because, though I shopped Zenni exclusively from 2012-2017, in the last six months I have gotten four pairs of glasses from GlassesShop, and still paid less than a hundred dollars.

The key difference for me was that while Zenni was utterly eye opening (ha, eye pun), they rarely do sales, and GlassesShop is constantly rolling through a variety of sales. There is almost always a wide selection of glasses on Buy One Get One Free promotion, and the free pair includes the lenses, no matter what add ons are on there or whatever kinda prescription you got, as long as its the less expensive pair. 

They also do weekly specials where rotating selections of frames go on clearance-rate pricing, from $6.95-12.95. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the constant variety of sales, promotions, and discounts they offer, and doesn’t include that, also unlike Zenni, if you have an account every purcahse you make accrues points which can be applied in dollar amount to future purchases, even with discounts/sales/promos also applied.

Like Zenni, GlassesShop lets you upload a selfie to “try on” frames you’re interested in, but they have a much wider selection and variety. They take about the same amount of time as Zenni to craft and ship your glasses, and they’re on par as far as quality and accuracy of prescription goes.

I will always be grateful to Zenni for opening the door for me on the online glasses market, because as someone netting less than 20k a year after taxes glasses used to be a “upon pain of death/causing a car accident from blindness” purchase but have become a “well that’s a great sale and I LOVE those frames… I guess I could do with another pair of glasses, there’s $30-50 in my budget!” kind of thing, and that’s incredible.

But I probably won’t be switching back, as after having made multiple purchases, the only thing I like better about Zenni compared to GlassesShop is Zenni has better cleaning cloths.

Regardless, they’re two excellent, amazingly affordable alternatives to spending minimum of $100 at a brick and mortar glasses store, and I’ve turned into something of a proselytizer for both, because people deserve to know they have these options.

It’s bad enough we’re out here paying to see, but too many of us don’t realize we could be paying a lot less to see, and in the cutest glasses best suited to our tastes, instead of whatever’s “cheap” at WalMart.

also gonna throw out eyebuydirect, which does some great sales. I’ve gotten prescription glasses as cheap as $6 and prescription sunglasses for $20.

Ordered from both Zenni and Eyebuydirect before and a great experience every time. I just bought two new pairs from Eyebuydirect. I upgraded to their blue filtering lenses (didn’t expect a huge difference but woah, it was definitely worth the upgrade) and with the sale going on, I paid less than $60.

eyebuydirect is legit

though I still remember the chuckle I got when that resident asked if I had warby parkers and I told him where they really came from

firmoo is nice too

For all spec-tacular followers

As someone almost legally blind who has spent literal shit tons of money on contacts and glasses, and is also currently making under 20k a year, this is important and good information to know and I hope it helps someone. People only get one pair of eyes for a lifetime, and there should be no reason to not make prescription glasses accessible to everyone.

Signal Boost

Zenni is where my wife and I buy our glasses. This year we bought 4 pairs, all with their store brand transition lenses, and it was about the price that I would pay at SVS for a single pair of glasses with Transitions lenses with my insurance discount.

Oliver then proceeded to detail how with $50 and knowledge of the law he was able to successfully apply online to create a debt buying company named “Central Asset Recovery Professionals,” or as Oliver put it, “CARP” named after “a bottom-feeding fish.”

After setting up a rudimentary website for CARP, the satirical, but still real company was offered a $15 million package of medical debt for $60,000.

Oliver explained that the debt was out of statute, which means it is the kind of debt that a collector can only continue to collect, but not sue the debtor for.

Then, instead of chasing down the 9,000 debtors in the debt package as a normal collection agency would, Oliver decided to stage the largest one-time giveaway in television history and work with the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt to forgive the $15 million with no consequences for the debtors.

Okay but now I know what I want to do of I get rich?

You dont have to be rich to do a bit of this actually

RIP Medical Debt is a charity (and therefore takes donations). They buy the rights to medical debt and then forgive them. So far they’ve forgiven over 1B in medical debt.

So a little ray of hope for someone out there today.

Donating $10 buys $1,000 of medical debt. This is real, it works, and we’ve done it ourselves. You can too.

As of June 29, 2024, the charity is still active under a new name, Undue Medical Debt

kids these days don’t know how lethal stagnant water is

If you’re exploring an abandoned building and find stagnant water your next sentence should be either “I am equipping my respirator” or “I am leaving”

It’s the 19th anniversary of Katrina and therefore also the 19th anniversary of me and my family getting Katrina cough

Mold spores and airborne bacteria and algae are not a joke. They kill people. Don’t play in them

DO NOT FORGET THE INSECT EGGS. Soooo many annoying and disease-carrying little insects lay their eggs in stagnant water. Do you want to be carried away by mosquitoes? Are you sure?

it was too much i had to make my own post

line cook here. ACCURATE

if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.

it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.

The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.

So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.

(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)

Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.

More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.

So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.

all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.

while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays

Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.

Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.

The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.

Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself

you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)

If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.

Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there

Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in

oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?

water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.

Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!

The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.

You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)

THE POINT IS

by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.

For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.

if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.

you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.

See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?

those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...

And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...

Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.

In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO

open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.

Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.

It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.

but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.

This applies to almost all businesses, by the way. Closing time should be interpreted as "The time everyone who doesn't work there should be out the door."

"the three dots on the side" call her by her REAL NAME.. Meatballs Menu

im gonna say it now so everyone in my notes stops arguing over this. meatballs menu is three dots side-by-side. kebab menu is three dots up and down. bento menu is an array of 9 dots in a square shape. hamburger menu is three lines horizontally. Yes there are others but none of them are nearly as prevalent so i dont care enough to list them. goot bye

Literally what they're called btw this post isn't a bit

oh wow! hey if you take pills check this out. new medicine taking meta just dropped.

according to these models, out of the 4 tested postures, the best position to digest pills is laying on your right side. standing upright has a similar time to laying in your back at twice as much as laying on the right side, and laying on the left side is the slowest by far.

laying on right side: pill dissolves in around 10 minutes.

standing: pill dissolves in 23 minutes. laying on the back has a similar time.

laying on left side: pill dissolves in up to 100 minutes.

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0096877

definitely worth a lot more research.

if you want your medicine to kick in fast, try laying on your right side! if you want your medicine to kick in slower, try laying on your left side.

This makes sense! I learned from a doc that if you have gas pain or nausea, you turn on your left side to make it easier for your stomach to send stuff through. The goal in turning left is to NOT absorb, but to release.

Turning on your right can make nausea/gas pain worse because it has to fight gravity to exit your stomach/body. So, yeah, lying on your right would make things absorb faster because it's going into the stomach lining, which is the point.

Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey

I was going to reblog this anyway for the useful info but the last addition fucking sent me

ADHD pro tip: Use psychological warfare on yourself.

For example, in order to do long tasks, like folding laundry, I put on the Mario Hat:

The main feature of the Mario hat is that my headset does not fit over it, so when The Bees™ try to put me back in front of the screen, the headset issue forces me to remember why I put the Mario hat on, and back to the task I go

As a bonus, the Mario hat is also a very clear indicator to my housemates that business is getting done, and they have learned not to distract me when I'm wearing the "goofy-ass cosplay hat"

It's not stupid if it works.

wish list for people who don’t want anything

aka possessions which are just possessions, but which have noticeably improved my quality of life: for when people ask you “what do you want for your birthday/Christmas/graduation” and you instantly transform into St Francis and pledge fealty to Lady Poverty because your mind went blank

A few more things!

Good luggage. Whether it’s a suitcase or a duffel bag or even just packing cubes, it’s all helpful!

Good art. If it’s someone you trust, you can ask them to surprise you with a piece they like, otherwise you can have a few back up suggestions of ideas (I saw a framed piece of just the hands from Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Man and have not forgot about it since)

Good good pillows or fluffy blankets to go along with those nice new sheets from above

Office supplies. Pens, markers, sharpies. All the sharpies.

Coffee travel mugs (can one have too many?). If they say they still want more ideas, also ask for a bag of their favorite beans/tea

Look around your house, what do you have that is still from college? Ask for a better one of those.

And for the future planning, especially if you’re me and forget things: make a document of “things I’d like but don’t want to buy for myself frivolously” and then select items from that for a wishlist.

This has been going around my work and friend group on other platforms, and I thought it deserved a place here too.

#it’s a good limitus test. take out the specifics of drinking or not drinking alcohol vs owning a dog or not #it’s basically 1) would you spend an evening laughing and enjoying conversation with someone and walking away like ‘that was good.’ #and 2) do you trust this person has a basic level of willingness and ability to care for others and repay your trusting in them? #it’s just getting you to tap into the unconscious micro-tells our brains collect about other people #which are by far the most accurate assessment tools we have to judge peoples’ characters on the fly and in general (via purplehawke)

Shoutout to that time someone posted this on one of my servers and multiple people were going “this is exclusionary to people who don’t drink/are allergic to dogs, also it is ableist to expect me to understand the concept of an analogy”

Like yes ok I would definitely have neither 2 beers with you nor leave a puppy with any of you

I love it when assholes self-identify. 👍

USAmericans who are celebrating thanksgiving today (11/23/2023) I encourage us all to find out which native tribe are the historic stewards of the land we're breaking bread on, and then find an action we can take to honor them. beyond buckskin is a great starting point for finding native-owned small businesses you can buy from. native movement has a resources list of various books, articles, podcasts, video panels and short films, etc to educate about decolonization -- not all these resources are available for free online but a good number of them are. you can always google your local tribe(s) and search for nonprofits & other social programming to support with donations of your time or money. please add links to this post if you have other resources to share!

if you live on ohlone or tongva land (specifically 'san francisco bay area' or 'greater los angeles'), there are rematriation/landback conservancies in both places; Sogorea Te' Land Trust, Ramaytush Ohlone Land Trust, and The Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy are the ones i'm familiar with. Sogorea Te' and Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa have a place to calculate gift or guest exchange based on your rent etc (here and here). donation goes to support various landback goals, such as free or affordable housing, social services, cultural and religious centers, and climate/natural stewardship efforts; if you're interested in following their work, i know Sogorea Te' also has an instagram, a resources page, and recommended reading, and Tongva Land has an instagram as well.

During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.  After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on. 

While, at first, I thought these weren’t going to work out, I was very surprised to see just how easy they were to use . My homework at that time was to identify which sort of thinking I used on the regular and which ones would best challenge them for me. So, what do you think? Do any of the maladaptive thinking patterns sound like you? which ways would you like to untwist your thinking? 

Do people know about Vocational Rehab? If you're USAmerican they have this in every state.

It's a program that helps disabled folks access education, training, and employment. For FREE.

You only have to be disabled to qualify (autism, ADHD, mental illness, physical illness, etc) and they cover very broad categories of disability. You do NOT have to be officially diagnosed yet when you walk in - they will even help pay for your diagnosis if you are struggling w disability.

I applied with my suspected autism and fibromyalgia, and they paid for 100% of my formal autism assessment.

Once your disability is established they will give you career counseling to learn about your interests and skills, and depending on the plan you create with your caseworker they will then help with school or finding employment. They paid for 100% of my college tuition and books, and even provided a laptop for me to use.

You do not have to pay anything for this program. If you make above a certain income, you will have to contribute to educational costs but will still receive assistance.

They will also help with the cost of things like mental health counseling while you work towards your goals, clothing for interviews, etc.

They cannot discriminate based on your race, gender, or sexual orientation.

They won't make you do excessive meetings.

They will allow you to do meetings with your caseworker remotely.

They will not drug test you.

They want you to succeed.

I'm sure that individual experiences vary but my caseworker was exceptionally easy to work with and very kind.

Vocational Rehab is a phenomenal resource every disabled person should be aware of. Here is the list of offices in every state:

If you live in the USA and you're pleading for donations to pay your rent, bills, or get food then dial 211! Please dial 211 before the last minute!

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

https://www.211.org/

Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don't need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it's enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn't do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it's a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.

This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say "I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report" and you bring me just a first aid kit, it's so much more efficient to say "thanks now can you bring me an accident report" than "I asked you to bring an accident report why didn't you bring me one".

Once you've internalized "a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument" you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing

Random pieces of advice

i've been thinking a lot about anorexia prevention and how much it revolves around body image. when i was in middle school and high school the most common attitude i witnessed regarding anorexia was "don't starve, you'll die" followed by "you don't need to starve to be pretty. girls who are too skinny are ugly anyway, you don't want to look like that". it came from both adults (including my relatives) and other students. and i think that's a bad approach for many reasons. first, it associates anorexia to looks and body image when a lot of girls with anorexia don't starve to be pretty. as Naomi Wolf said in The Beauty Myth, anorexia is less about conforming to beauty standards and more about feeling in control of your body, a feeling that a lot of girls experience when navigating a misogynist world -- especially girls who survived sexual assault. sure, beauty standards play a big part in the onset of anorexia and social contagion but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

second, painting anorexic girls as shallow and calling them ugly is just discouraging bonding between girls and women. when i was in middle and high school girls who were suspected of having anorexia were bullied and called ugly for it. they were ostracized and i'm pretty sure being bullied at school is not of great help when dealing with an eating disorder. on the contrary, we should encourage solidarity and friendship between women and girls. anorexia is very competitive and trains you to look at your own body and at other women's bodies in a negative, critical light. i feel most strongly that the way we think about our own bodies, as women, is reflected in the way we think about other women's bodies. i do think that hating your female body will lead to your hating the body of other women. if we want to cultivate a healthy relationship with our own body, we also have to get rid of any competition we may have with other women, and we have to cultivate female friendship and solidarity

third, the consequences of anorexia don't boil down to looking too thin and ugly. it ruins your social life and your physical health to a degree many people aren't aware of. it's particularly harmful because when i started starving i thought the worst thing that could happen to me was death, and beside that the only other bad thing would be not looking very attractive. but i didn't care about my looks and i didn't care about dying either. however i did care about my friends, i did care about my academic performance, i used to enjoy little things like going for a walk or reading a book. now all my friends have more or less dropped me because i'm not fun to be around when i keep fainting everytime we go out, i'm constantly zoning out and i have no memory and no energy and i can't perform simple tasks or focus on anything, when i take a walk the only thing i think about are the calories i'm burning and some days my bones and my joints hurt too much and i can't even walk for too long. talking about anorexia purely in terms of looks is creating a misrepresentation of what it actually is and i do think it's failing many girls and women who may have not developed anorexia if the way we talk about it had been different

+ it also encourages anorexia and completely ignores harm reduction, in a way. lots of girls with body dysmorphia WANT to look sick and frail, so they push themselves to even more limits until it becomes deadly. they’ve been told their entire lives that anorexic girls are deathly thin and super skinny, so this becomes the new goal. and oftentimes anorexics aren’t believed unless they look like they’re inches from death. this idea that eating disorders only have to do with what your body looks like pushes people to extremes.