That paper advertising subsidizes most of the post office's operations.... us post office gets no funding from federal tax dollars and email took a huge bite out of their day to day funds... there is a ton of infrastructure required to run a daily mail operation in a country of our size, that money has to come from somewhere.
You must have a ton of free time on your hands to be returning things, or on a super tight budget.
If it takes 30 min to drive to the post office, or the store, then it takes an hour round trip, plus time to wait in line, plus gas, plus depreciation on the car, insurance (miles add up driving around town) etc etc....
if you make $50,000 a year, your time is worth about $25/hour. If you're returning something under $25, just based on time alone, you're losing money returning it. Once you factor in the other costs, like postage, the break-even point is closer to $35-50.
There's good reason to buy brand name things with 4.5+ star reviews, or buy products from Ebay with 99% positive feedback; the chances you will get a defective item, with the price you pay, is very low.
I don't think you could drag me out of the house to return something for less than $100. I have a $200 hard drive waiting to go back, but it's been in the box for a while and is probably past the return-by date.
Besides if you pay with a card, if it's dire enough, they can match the card number with the date and transaction amount. We returned a couch to Ikea and they were able to find the transaction no problem. I've seen this done at smaller stores too.
TL;DR returning single items under $50 is a total waste of your time and money.
looks like there is a solid route between Vancouver and Edmonton, and also Ottowa and Quebec. Toronto to Calgary is a bit of a dry stretch though. Their map shows the rest of that section should be complete sometime by the end of this year, supposedly.
Safeway has "reusable" plastic bags... my experience with plastic bags is that 95% of them blow away in to the forest, street curb etc and end up in the water ways. Maybe the "reusable" bags are heavy enough to not blow away.... Paper bags can blow away too, but they tend to biodegrade in the gutter/forest/pipe to the ocean, or failing that, biodegrade in the ocean in 2-9 months.....
The other big problem with plastic bags is that they don't neatly stand up on their own. Most of our trash/recycle bags are reused paper bags, only the really wet trash goes in the trash can
Different people from different backgrounds, both ethnically and financially have different habits. We had a bunch of interns from singapore who smoked like chimneys. A bunch of people can be seen smoking in chinatown... in lower (very very low) income neighborhoods I drive through I see a bunch of people smoking...
White collar workers will smoke on the weekends at parties, but might never smoke during the week or at the office. Your personal experiences may not reflect all of society.
Lots of compostable, corn-based or other plant-based single use silverware avalible now. It's about 10-15% more expensive, but right now the cost is about $free so,
Paper bags are pretty popular in larger cities, Safeway near my house has tried to introduce thicker plastic bags to meet the "Reusable" mandate by the city, but locals are still requesting paper.
With the sole exception of a business case report i had to write for a software package acquisition in...2014? I can't think of the last time I needed a formal word processor. Even then it wasn't strictly necessary.
Most of my documents now (2017-2019) are written in markdown, which although there are a couple of competing standards, most parsers can accurately render 99%+ of documents legibly. It's no PDF but is a pretty portable standard.
I still use excel-type spreadsheet software to calculate personal finance projects but the sum, average functions are pretty bog standard
After that you have what, powerpoint? Depending on company culture you might do 80% of your real work in an app like this...
Finally there's the mystery meat fourth app, which might be somethinng like MS Access, or MS Project or... MS Notes? Visio? Who the hell knows, whatever it is, you're probably better off using something else instead.
I feel like the word processor is a dead segment, most "documents" I get these days are just well formatted emails, most spreadsheets are generic and interchangable, but powerpoint slideshow apps might be the one vendor lock-in left for office?
Ruby is probably a good language, but the fact that there are 19 different ways to do each thing, plus the mess of magic that is rails, makes Ruby on Rails projects often almost unmaintainable and you spend a lot of time hunting down bugs due to unintended behaviors... Ruby is probably a good language, but a lot of people look at ruby projects as one step above projects written in php... not advisable for long term production use, and/or written by hacks.
I've played my switch in mobile mode about 6 times, half of them were on my boat either in the marina or at anchor
The vast majority of the time spent playing the thing is playing mario kart with family on the big screen tv in the living room. In fact, other than Hollow Knight, the new Mario game an Civilization 6, they are all 4 player multiplayer games. I'm sure for the under-21 crowd who don't have their own room/tv the switch is probably played mostly mobile, but there's a significant number of adults who have a switch rather than buy a $1500 gaming laptop to play the same indie games on steam
I'm not sure I've ever seen a PS3 or PS4 in person, except maybe through a display window, at a distance. A guy in high school had a PS2 though, back in the day.
I have a couple of 32 and 64GB USB memory sticks from a couple years ago, but I hardly ever use them.
It turns off ads on youtube for roughly $10/mo USD
We watch most of our evening news as clips on youtube, stuff like the late show with colbert, last week tonight, cnn, msnbc, fox news etc and specialty channels all have ads now when you watch a segment.
Also useful for playlists of music, as we use our TV as a youtube jukebox when pandora isn't cutting it.
Netflix - my buddy from college's account, 12-ish years later, still, $free Amazon - $9/mo
HBO now/go - $9/mo
Internet service - $35/mo
$53/mo including internet
We only pay for HBO about 6 months out of the year as there are several months where Game of Thrones and Last Week Tonight run less than 3 weeks a month.
I have never subscribed to cable in almost 20 years as an adult, never plan to
I ran a series of very popular Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 servers for four years, we had a pretty complex signup process (used both steam and origin systems, as steam had a better event popup system) and still had over 3500 people sign up... for Battlefield 3 we had the #2 most popular server according to gametracker (cantaloupe island). I would qualify as one of the most dedicated fans of the series, perhaps.
Did not buy Battlefield 1 until a couple weeks before BF5 was supposed to come out, Battlefield 1 gameplay was so awful that I never bothered to keep track of when BF5 was eventually released. I never bought Battlefield 5. Also there's the whole problem of having to know which version of Battlefield 5 to buy that will have all the map packs built in from the beginning. I just don't have time for that anymore. I even bought a new gaming laptop before it came out, but.... changing release dates and spending time looking up which versions actually ship with all the maps... not worth it. I might buy BF5 in a couple months when all the bugs have been worked out and maps have been released. Maybe.
Costco has big record-sized optical disks hanging in their halls proudly showing off that they had 1TB of customer data way back in.... 1997? maybe 1996 it was a long time ago. Costco has been playing this game far longer and Walmart is able to extract weird facts like people buy more strawberry flavored wafer thins than chocolate ones durring hurricanes. That last fact surfaced back in ~2006 so it's not like this is recent. The reason you have to plug in your phone number or rewards card for your rewards savings is that they need at least one piece of customer data to legally track your purchase... everyone does this and if your card number or phone number has not changed in a decade or more they likely have most all the same data as Amazon.
The microsoft surface is not user-serviceable, make sure you add a very good repair plan to that purchase. I would go the opposite of 17", and buy a large external monitor instead. Your employee can reasonably carry a 13" laptop with them everywhere (and thus they're always working for you) but a 17" laptop, you might as well purchase them a desktop.
Also the Surface still, in 2019, does not have USB-C, or Thunderbolt 3, and given the laptop is literally glued together, leaves you with a very short upgrade path. At least with a modern laptop with modern connectors you can attach a dock, alternate power supplies etc etc.
I wasn't even aware Marshall Fields was still around, I thought they went under in the 1970s.
All my friends did their shopping online this year. Last time we stepped in a mall was end of 2016 to go look for a new bedspread and some pillows... ended up ordering something else online instead, after digging through a bunch of overpriced crap at Macy's for two hours.
I think DerekLyons is correct, Sears lost to big box retailers first, mismanagement second. You can manage your way out of the mismanagement box, but Sears went from being this amazing everythng store attached to every mall in America, to.... this weird everything store attached to every mall in America. Malls became this shopping hell where women went to buy clothes, and big box shopping centers became where you went to buy everything except clothes (and sometimes clothes). I can't remember the last time I set foot in a Sears, except for one time in high school (1999? 2000?) when I went to go meet a girl I liked that worked at JC Penny and I parked at the wrong mall entrance. Nobody under 45 probably actually went to Sears to buy anything on purpose, as Sears had the wrong real estate and the retail market moved towards big box stores.
Yeah, they royally screwed themselves over the last 10 years, but 25 years ago they needed to be competing directly with lowes and best buy. This mismanagement stuff in the last 10 years was basically rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Way more systemic stuff was happening long before we got to the point you are trying to argue.
I went to school in two different parts of america, we did 5 paragraph essays starting in late elementary school, all of middle school and probably the first half of high school.
If I had to guess they were borne out of a need for people to be able to summarize some data in to a report that their manager could read. They definitely existed in the 80s and 90s, and probably some decades before that.
For writing emails to upper management, the one thing I did get from that writing style is to preface the first sentence of each paragraph of a plan as first, second, third, finally etc etc.
What would have been more helpful though, was learning how to do an executive summary, as that seems to be the most important skill for getting promoted; I tend to get bogged down in the details when summarizing things.
I find the technical channels on youtube to be far superior in quality to broadcast, actually. There are a bunch of technical channels run by engineers, so the dialogue is quite a bit better, production quality is the same if not better. There are a bunch of retired engineers sailing around the world these days producing their own youtube videos about sailing, or rebuilding sailboats, making a ton of money doing it..
My takeaway from this has been that most people working on broadcast reality TV are shit-for-brains monkeys, be it writing, editing or camerawork. Now granted, they are probably in the top 1% of youtube channels, but it is amazing to see the quality that comes out of some of these channels with one or two regulars, a laptop to edit it on, and a DSLR to shoot it with.
I think that is the great part about the youtube channels though, you can focus on a very specific skillset, and provide excellent weekly videos with high quality content for a reasonable cost (support that one to two people) to a smaller audience, and better tailor the content to that audience.
Slashdot Mirror
That paper advertising subsidizes most of the post office's operations.... us post office gets no funding from federal tax dollars and email took a huge bite out of their day to day funds... there is a ton of infrastructure required to run a daily mail operation in a country of our size, that money has to come from somewhere.
You must have a ton of free time on your hands to be returning things, or on a super tight budget.
If it takes 30 min to drive to the post office, or the store, then it takes an hour round trip, plus time to wait in line, plus gas, plus depreciation on the car, insurance (miles add up driving around town) etc etc....
if you make $50,000 a year, your time is worth about $25/hour. If you're returning something under $25, just based on time alone, you're losing money returning it. Once you factor in the other costs, like postage, the break-even point is closer to $35-50.
There's good reason to buy brand name things with 4.5+ star reviews, or buy products from Ebay with 99% positive feedback; the chances you will get a defective item, with the price you pay, is very low.
I don't think you could drag me out of the house to return something for less than $100. I have a $200 hard drive waiting to go back, but it's been in the box for a while and is probably past the return-by date.
Besides if you pay with a card, if it's dire enough, they can match the card number with the date and transaction amount. We returned a couch to Ikea and they were able to find the transaction no problem. I've seen this done at smaller stores too.
TL;DR returning single items under $50 is a total waste of your time and money.
looks like there is a solid route between Vancouver and Edmonton, and also Ottowa and Quebec. Toronto to Calgary is a bit of a dry stretch though. Their map shows the rest of that section should be complete sometime by the end of this year, supposedly.
Safeway has "reusable" plastic bags... my experience with plastic bags is that 95% of them blow away in to the forest, street curb etc and end up in the water ways. Maybe the "reusable" bags are heavy enough to not blow away.... Paper bags can blow away too, but they tend to biodegrade in the gutter/forest/pipe to the ocean, or failing that, biodegrade in the ocean in 2-9 months.....
The other big problem with plastic bags is that they don't neatly stand up on their own. Most of our trash/recycle bags are reused paper bags, only the really wet trash goes in the trash can
Different people from different backgrounds, both ethnically and financially have different habits. We had a bunch of interns from singapore who smoked like chimneys. A bunch of people can be seen smoking in chinatown... in lower (very very low) income neighborhoods I drive through I see a bunch of people smoking...
White collar workers will smoke on the weekends at parties, but might never smoke during the week or at the office. Your personal experiences may not reflect all of society.
15% sounds about right to me.
Lots of compostable, corn-based or other plant-based single use silverware avalible now. It's about 10-15% more expensive, but right now the cost is about $free so,
Paper bags are pretty popular in larger cities, Safeway near my house has tried to introduce thicker plastic bags to meet the "Reusable" mandate by the city, but locals are still requesting paper.
With the sole exception of a business case report i had to write for a software package acquisition in...2014? I can't think of the last time I needed a formal word processor. Even then it wasn't strictly necessary.
Most of my documents now (2017-2019) are written in markdown, which although there are a couple of competing standards, most parsers can accurately render 99%+ of documents legibly. It's no PDF but is a pretty portable standard.
I still use excel-type spreadsheet software to calculate personal finance projects but the sum, average functions are pretty bog standard
After that you have what, powerpoint? Depending on company culture you might do 80% of your real work in an app like this...
Finally there's the mystery meat fourth app, which might be somethinng like MS Access, or MS Project or... MS Notes? Visio? Who the hell knows, whatever it is, you're probably better off using something else instead.
I feel like the word processor is a dead segment, most "documents" I get these days are just well formatted emails, most spreadsheets are generic and interchangable, but powerpoint slideshow apps might be the one vendor lock-in left for office?
Oh, wow, I thought you were joking, but then I wasn't so sure, and I google it... D:
Ruby is probably a good language, but the fact that there are 19 different ways to do each thing, plus the mess of magic that is rails, makes Ruby on Rails projects often almost unmaintainable and you spend a lot of time hunting down bugs due to unintended behaviors... Ruby is probably a good language, but a lot of people look at ruby projects as one step above projects written in php... not advisable for long term production use, and/or written by hacks.
I've played my switch in mobile mode about 6 times, half of them were on my boat either in the marina or at anchor
The vast majority of the time spent playing the thing is playing mario kart with family on the big screen tv in the living room. In fact, other than Hollow Knight, the new Mario game an Civilization 6, they are all 4 player multiplayer games. I'm sure for the under-21 crowd who don't have their own room/tv the switch is probably played mostly mobile, but there's a significant number of adults who have a switch rather than buy a $1500 gaming laptop to play the same indie games on steam
I'm not sure I've ever seen a PS3 or PS4 in person, except maybe through a display window, at a distance. A guy in high school had a PS2 though, back in the day.
I have a couple of 32 and 64GB USB memory sticks from a couple years ago, but I hardly ever use them.
It turns off ads on youtube for roughly $10/mo USD
We watch most of our evening news as clips on youtube, stuff like the late show with colbert, last week tonight, cnn, msnbc, fox news etc and specialty channels all have ads now when you watch a segment.
Also useful for playlists of music, as we use our TV as a youtube jukebox when pandora isn't cutting it.
For us,
Netflix - my buddy from college's account, 12-ish years later, still, $free
Amazon - $9/mo
HBO now/go - $9/mo
Internet service - $35/mo
$53/mo including internet
We only pay for HBO about 6 months out of the year as there are several months where Game of Thrones and Last Week Tonight run less than 3 weeks a month.
I have never subscribed to cable in almost 20 years as an adult, never plan to
I ran a series of very popular Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 servers for four years, we had a pretty complex signup process (used both steam and origin systems, as steam had a better event popup system) and still had over 3500 people sign up... for Battlefield 3 we had the #2 most popular server according to gametracker (cantaloupe island). I would qualify as one of the most dedicated fans of the series, perhaps.
Did not buy Battlefield 1 until a couple weeks before BF5 was supposed to come out, Battlefield 1 gameplay was so awful that I never bothered to keep track of when BF5 was eventually released. I never bought Battlefield 5. Also there's the whole problem of having to know which version of Battlefield 5 to buy that will have all the map packs built in from the beginning. I just don't have time for that anymore. I even bought a new gaming laptop before it came out, but.... changing release dates and spending time looking up which versions actually ship with all the maps... not worth it. I might buy BF5 in a couple months when all the bugs have been worked out and maps have been released. Maybe.
A lot of airports have rejected TSA in favor of private security; TSA security is not required by law at airports, just security.
Costco has big record-sized optical disks hanging in their halls proudly showing off that they had 1TB of customer data way back in .... 1997? maybe 1996 it was a long time ago. Costco has been playing this game far longer and Walmart is able to extract weird facts like people buy more strawberry flavored wafer thins than chocolate ones durring hurricanes. That last fact surfaced back in ~2006 so it's not like this is recent. The reason you have to plug in your phone number or rewards card for your rewards savings is that they need at least one piece of customer data to legally track your purchase... everyone does this and if your card number or phone number has not changed in a decade or more they likely have most all the same data as Amazon.
The microsoft surface is not user-serviceable, make sure you add a very good repair plan to that purchase. I would go the opposite of 17", and buy a large external monitor instead. Your employee can reasonably carry a 13" laptop with them everywhere (and thus they're always working for you) but a 17" laptop, you might as well purchase them a desktop.
Also the Surface still, in 2019, does not have USB-C, or Thunderbolt 3, and given the laptop is literally glued together, leaves you with a very short upgrade path. At least with a modern laptop with modern connectors you can attach a dock, alternate power supplies etc etc.
Most people use their garage to park their cars, their kids bikes, and stuff not valuable enough to store in their climate controlled house.
I'm like you though, my arc welder, milling machine, brand name hand tools etc are worth way more than my TV.
I wasn't even aware Marshall Fields was still around, I thought they went under in the 1970s.
All my friends did their shopping online this year. Last time we stepped in a mall was end of 2016 to go look for a new bedspread and some pillows... ended up ordering something else online instead, after digging through a bunch of overpriced crap at Macy's for two hours.
I think DerekLyons is correct, Sears lost to big box retailers first, mismanagement second. You can manage your way out of the mismanagement box, but Sears went from being this amazing everythng store attached to every mall in America, to.... this weird everything store attached to every mall in America. Malls became this shopping hell where women went to buy clothes, and big box shopping centers became where you went to buy everything except clothes (and sometimes clothes). I can't remember the last time I set foot in a Sears, except for one time in high school (1999? 2000?) when I went to go meet a girl I liked that worked at JC Penny and I parked at the wrong mall entrance. Nobody under 45 probably actually went to Sears to buy anything on purpose, as Sears had the wrong real estate and the retail market moved towards big box stores.
Yeah, they royally screwed themselves over the last 10 years, but 25 years ago they needed to be competing directly with lowes and best buy. This mismanagement stuff in the last 10 years was basically rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Way more systemic stuff was happening long before we got to the point you are trying to argue.
Remarkably solid advice, thanks sir/madame
I wish I had mod points, best post I've seen in months and months on slashdot.
I went to school in two different parts of america, we did 5 paragraph essays starting in late elementary school, all of middle school and probably the first half of high school.
If I had to guess they were borne out of a need for people to be able to summarize some data in to a report that their manager could read. They definitely existed in the 80s and 90s, and probably some decades before that.
For writing emails to upper management, the one thing I did get from that writing style is to preface the first sentence of each paragraph of a plan as first, second, third, finally etc etc.
What would have been more helpful though, was learning how to do an executive summary, as that seems to be the most important skill for getting promoted; I tend to get bogged down in the details when summarizing things.
I think modern life is probably less structured than agricultural life. Maybe you meant to reference hunter-gatherer life?
I find the technical channels on youtube to be far superior in quality to broadcast, actually. There are a bunch of technical channels run by engineers, so the dialogue is quite a bit better, production quality is the same if not better. There are a bunch of retired engineers sailing around the world these days producing their own youtube videos about sailing, or rebuilding sailboats, making a ton of money doing it..
My takeaway from this has been that most people working on broadcast reality TV are shit-for-brains monkeys, be it writing, editing or camerawork. Now granted, they are probably in the top 1% of youtube channels, but it is amazing to see the quality that comes out of some of these channels with one or two regulars, a laptop to edit it on, and a DSLR to shoot it with.
I think that is the great part about the youtube channels though, you can focus on a very specific skillset, and provide excellent weekly videos with high quality content for a reasonable cost (support that one to two people) to a smaller audience, and better tailor the content to that audience.