Just wait until they restrict your returns because of how much you've had to return highly used, or broken, or deliverer abused, or knock-off, or arrived days later than projected products.
Maybe this is a country thing, or tied into one's wider social credit score in the background, or the specifics of something you returned [0], or something else? I've returned plenty of shit and have never had a real problem. I returned over a dozen 32 inch Dell monitors while trying to get 3 that didn't have dead pixels or scratches out of the box. They were stacked on a pallet in my garage waiting for the pickup. You would think this would throw some flags and end up as some kind of fight. But no, Amazon refunded them all in full, no hassle (apart from the hassle of having to do that scale of logistics merely to obtain working products).
(I would have honestly given up earlier, sent them all back, and gone with a different brand. Except there had been a good one in the first tranche of 3 that I let go past its return date. I hadn't thought the actual failure rate was going to be > 80%)
[0] On my personal account I did have a big red scary warning for a while about "restocking fees", that I think had been prompted by returning a motherboard after having tested it (yet another poorly described product with no way to find out the IOMMU groups short of buying it). I have no idea if it was merely that I had opened/tested a computer component, or if it had gotten smashed up on the way back, or what. But eventually that nag screen did go away.
Doesn't even take that much for some people to be restricted. I had someone steal one box with maybe $50 worth of stuff off of my porch and Amazon replaced it after a ten minute conversation with customer service, but a year or two later someone stole $10 or so worth of an order of clothes laundry/softener toss travel sheets from me (or they just never shipped and I paid for them) after a particularly larger number of orders (I lived somewhere else by then), and Amazon not only did not offer a refund or replacement, they removed any way to request it. I am not sure what their cutoff is or if it has to do with what warehouse it ships from. Maybe people just lie about laundry supplies a lot? Perhaps the cutoff is more to do with the type of products? I had never ordered that sort of stuff before.
It is rather gross to me that they let people return clothes and shoes that have been tried on. My current pair of like $110 trail running shoes that I bought on Amazon had been tried on when I got them, and I was a bit unhappy with that, but I decided to see that as more like a shoe store sorta thing. Clothes, not so much. I decided after trying the clothes returns policy once (never tried it on) years and years ago that if I do not want to get things preworn, I feel I should practice what I preach. It is a weird policy, at any rate.
Happened to me. I ended up holding the bag for about 400 EUR worth of items. Luckily I had legal insurance that tried to convince Amazon to take it back but they wouldn’t, so the assurance bought the box of stuff off me and refunded me.
Fuck bezos and Amazon. Since then, I always look for alternatives to Amazon to buy my stuff. I’ll use Amazon to see if I like it, return it, and go buy somewhere else. If I know the product I’ll just straight out buy it somewhere else. It’s often the same price or very close.
Some stuff you can’t really and practically get outside of Amazon. I don’t have a choice then. Because their quality is so low, I’ll just get 3–4 similar items and only keep the one that’s passably usable.
I try to cost Amazon as much money as I can. I hate to give them my money but by doing this it feels like I’m getting some payback for the way they treat their customers, employees, delivery people…
You had legal insurance that guarantees Amazon returns? I’m very curious what kind of insurance policy is that? Is that one of those custom business liability insurances?
Probably general insurance that pays for a lawyer. Is that not a thing where you live? The insurer in small cases sometimes does "claim settlement via buyout of the matter in controversy", or nuisance value settlement. Cheaper than paying for a lawyer...
No, nothing so fancy. Just general legal insurance that would give legal advice and escalate to threats from their own lawyers, and eventually sue on your behalf or settle directly with you when the amounts aren’t worth their effort (like in this case).
I also had a debacle with Turkish airlines (I will never fly this shitty airline again, and discourage anyone to do so). They tried to get the airline to pay but were stonewalled and eventually paid us what the airline should have (a couple thousand euros).
Then they canceled our policy because we weren’t profitable risks anymore haha.
Enshittification: Customers get screwed because that's where vendors are (even the terrible ones) and vendors get screwed because that's where the customers are (even the terrible ones.)
"The affidavits supporting the applications to track Richardson claimed video showed Fort, Lemon, Richardson, and others “chanting with agitators.” Prosecutors have since conceded that Lemon and Fort did not chant".
Depends on what you meant by "it" here, the prosecutors' have already conceded that at least some of their claims in the affidavit were false, so I would agree that it's hardly settled. (I haven't watched the video nor would recognize Richardson).
The case isn’t about whether it’s “illegal” for the government website to be wrong. It says you as the citizen are held responsible for the actual law, even if you followed incorrect government advice. So the current rule already acknowledges that advice provided by the government may be mistaken and says that’s no excuse.
So the question is is the chat bot better than people trying to understand complicated government websites by themselves?
As much as I disagree with it, graffiti is an interesting topic. A lot of graffiti proponents fully believe that they are beautifying the environment by making it human, and even continue doing it as the level of effort to bypass the consequences go up. They don't believe it to be an awful thing (though I'm sure some do, plus some have other motivations, plus some are lying to themselves about their motivations, etc, I just mean what they say and do).
The article says they're considering removing the federal requirement that state governments even tell their constituents let alone allow public review.
So literally yes you can avoid the review... until you manage to convince your local government to pass their own version of this law, or vote out the existing people if they are against this thing you didn't think you had to care about because it was already law. And the slated time is within a year, so good luck accomplishing that in time.
Also please note the rules of this forum: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
The article is actually saying they've had record sign ups this year and as far as I can see doesn't make any comment about a decrease in sales in the last 2 weeks since the implementation of this regulation. There is a first hand report of someone stopping their shipping really far down on this post, and then someone on that chain links to a reddit comment from someone as well.
I'm sure there's probably a few comments I missed, but idk if I'd say there's proof of countless here or in the article.
It does seem like it'd have a chilling effect if the article's interpretation is correct, and other comments here also stated that the EU commission wanted to have a central registry to minimize the overhead.
You pay taxes in the US? You are directly enabling a country to harm others.
You ever buy a phone? You are directly enabling a chain of groups to harm people (in the name of creating that phone).
You ever give a dollar to a homeless man? You might be directly contributing to them harming themselves (or possibly just letting them buy food/drink).
Heck even your example about your sister, I think some people would argue that it's still the moral choice.
Clearly there's a spectrum here. Black and white thinking and statements aren't helping and shouldn't be the basis for policy decisions.
You can and should be making explicit choices in that framework.
You should not buy phones connected to the mistreatment of the Uighur population - and that is doable.
If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You should not cast your money as to do harm. If your money is the difference between your sister being homeless or not, then stop giving her money and pay her rent. Buy her grocery cards.
But if you directly contribute to harm, knowably, you are enabling that harm. This is not some weird novel part of ethics. It is in fact black and white.
> If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
Well, no, you aren't necessarily without paying a special additional tax to the US government, so it doesn't really solve the problem of believing that paying US taxes is active participation in morally intolerable actions.
> If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
Actually, I have heard that it’s very hard, if possible at all, to surrender American citizenship. It’s a real problem for some people who had the misfortune of being born on American soil.
> And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You maintain this despite all the research showing that this is the most effective way to help people?
Isn't "if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon." kind of self-refuting?
Conventional forces aren't deployed in many instances where regular drone strikes are used, thus the country didn't feel it was the right risk/cost to deploy conventional forces.
At the very least, it's a statement that deserves more debate, and I'd point to the many examples of how reducing cost and risk tends to increase the rate of an activity.
It doesn't fix the spoiler effect (it makes its own version of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze ), and it removes monotonicity. The second one is a big deal for me, at least in FPTP a vote for a candidate always helps them. With RCV, a vote for a candidate can hurt them, and sometimes not voting makes the outcome you want more likely than if you did vote for it.
The 2022 Alaska election was a great example of it failing: https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22/ FairVote called that election a success because people managed to fill in their ballots, even if they didn't get the outcome they thought they were voting for.
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