He has it all converted into Krugerrands, which he has piled up in his house. He sits on top of the pile, trickling the coins through his fingers, cackling “Gold, Gold, GOLD!!!”
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@sheralmyst … Kay shera shera?
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Nothing like a filthy rich bum who lives off his friends. I wonder if they get a choice. Auntie’s Choice mostly likely.
When I was a kid, I went with my dad to some of his jobs at various lumber mills. There was usually a really, really big pile of sawdust nearby. He would see the twinkle in my eye and tell me, “Don’t ever climb on one of those. There are pockets of air in there and if you hit one, you would sink so fast, we would not be able to dig you out fast enough. You would suffocate.”
I am certain huge piles of money likely have air pockets in them too.
Sometimes they burst.
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Interesting, I also gave up on radio and TV. If you listen to music or documentaries to relax and then get startled every 5-15min by someone shouting infuriating exaggerations at you, it no longer serves it purpose, good bye.
As kids we said, one day in the future, the radio will have a subscription button that buys the current song, and after x songs, it will burn a CD/tape and mail it to us. And m.m. the same for TV and DVD/VHS… 
How naive of us to believe we could buy ourselves free in the future! 
Now my money goes to patreon. 
But the content creators are still scarily dependent on their hosters and sponsors (YouTube/Twitch/etc.). No matter how good their content is, if they self-hosted all their videos downloads on an independent personal web page, they’d lose all viewers.
I feel like a new variant of the “shut up and take my money!” meme. “I am willing to pay for this content, all of it, and nothing but it, comprende? … Not an option??”
Heh, I liked to let the soft sawdust run through my fingers, too, but I never got near a dangerously big pile. 
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Speaking of radio, I remember when XM satellite radio was a new thing. I listened to FM radio all the time back then. One DJ said the idea was preposterous. No one would ever pay to listen to radio.
Then people began to realize XM was commercial free. No ads…
My previous car came with 6 months of XM for free
I could choose my genre. No ads. No ads.
I signed up and I have not listened to FM since.
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What’s FM? Funky music?
Actually, I have listened to radio extremely little the last few years. Even commercial TV gets very low use. Streaming TV and movies plus Kindle reading and PC and tablet need feeds are my choices now. And playing No Man’s Sky when I can, of course. 
Our local newspaper is switching to digital only as of January. For my wife that’s a big deal, but I’ve usually gotten their news online anyway.
The magazines I used to read on paper I now access online. I have to make sure to get digital plus paper to keep my other half happy, though.
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Just in case, it stands for ‘frequency modulated.’ In the ancient days, acronyms actually stood for things rather than just being names made of random letters, like ‘XM,’ for example.
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And “RT” stood for Radio Telegraphy or Radio Telephone. So when engineers manning help desks wrote “RTFM Failure” on their customer worksheets, it sounded very technically plausible. But “RTFM” actually means “Read The Fu**ing Manual”.
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That acronym allegedly originated from the name of a server folder of user manuals at MIT.
As time matches on inits petty pace from day to day, some terms I thought were common knowledge turn out to be unknown to many folks. Even a senior aged IT-oriented coworker had no clue what BSOD meant.
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I used to listen to AM as well. There was a radio station located in a very small building right beside the river bridge. It sat at a crossroads leading out of town. There must have been a reason
I remember many sleepovers with my girlfriends and we would phone in requests for songs. The later the night got, the more the signal developed this wonderful whine. It would pitch up and down…
Can you imagine the complaints if something like that happened to people these days? They would likely mob up around the station and torch the place
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That acronym originated before there was such a thing as a ‘server.’
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Yes, I first heard it from an RAF radio mechanic in the 1960s.
That’s not to say someone in MIT didn’t borrow it.
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How many things do not even come with a manual any more…
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Everrything comes with a manual - but it’s in the form of a .PDF file on their web site. So you get this:
“My laptop won’t work”
“Better check the manual”
“It didn’t come with a manual”
“The manual is a PDF file on the manufacturer’s web site”
“And how do I open that?”
“Ah, well, you need a laptop for that…”
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They may not be able to find the jewels but they found Fedora Man.
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To all those weird facebook moms who were lusting over a dapper suave 15 year old these last few weeks; kindly turn yourselves in if you hadn’t already done so back when Justin Bieber also happened.
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Interesting. My first exposure to it decades ago mentioned the MIT server.
An AI prompt response:
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First recorded use: The abbreviation RTFM dates back to 1975–1980, emerging in early computing and hacker communities.
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Unix culture: It gained traction among Unix users and programmers, who often relied on man pages (manuals) for system commands. Asking basic questions without checking documentation first was frowned upon.
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Computing and hacking communities? In the late seventies I was waaaaaay ahead of my time because I had access to a TRS-80 model 1 with a tape drive. Not sure that there were computing and hacking communities. But RTFM was already a common use thing in military comm shops. When I went to Navy ET school in 1980 it was the recommended first response to any trouble report turned in by a radioman claiming that their equipment wasn’t working, and it surely wasn’t new.
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That’s the crucial thing. Researchers of quotes and memorable sayings can usually only go back as far as the first reliable printed example - whereas these sayings can circulate for decades as a word-of-mouth in-joke, particularly amongst specialists.. The more niche the specialism, and, in the past, paticularly when it contains an obscenity, the less likely the saying is to appear in print.
Take the phrase “SNAFU” - you’ll find various claimed derivations - but the truth is, nobody knows - and it probably circulated for many years befor anybody wrote it down.
Around 1967 I was an Air Force cadet, with an interest in electronics and radio. On a visit to RAF Wattisham, home at the time to supersonic Lightning nuclear defence fighters, I made a point of talking to the radio technicians. It was one of them who first told me the RTFM joke. Truth be told, it was probably already old when I heard it. How far back does military use of FM radio go? 1930s?
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This reminds me of a navy cook I met in the 90’s. He tried to impress me by telling me he invented shit on a shingle.
I just smiled and said, really?
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