Does anyone get the feeling that Pai & Co. are looking for justifications for not even reviewing deals like this, rather than actually looking for reasons to do their jobs? Maybe it's just me, but I see the FCC and EPA both turning a corner, and making it their mission to protect business interests from regulation rather than to protect citizens from unscrupulous businesses and practices. I hate being the doom and gloom dude, but a lot of things aren't looking so good for us little guys in the near future.
And this is why their budget will be cut again - focusing on expensive, relatively pointless shit that has been done before. SLS is dead, and why shouldn't it be? Incremental advances and dead-end projects are of no interest to bean counters. Of course I'd love to see a small percentage of our defense budget reallocated to double or triple NASA's annual budget, but that isn't going to happen, so trips to drive past the moon without even stopping are not going to happen.
This would be merely an unnecessary step toward using the moon or another orbital base as a launch point for a manned Mars mission, and one which would not generate enough excitement to spur budget increases or wider demand for such projects. I'm all for it, in theory, but the minimal benefit doesn't justify the cost, and heaven forbid it should fail or go way over budget.
$20 items with $150 shipping charges, and non-free shipping advertised as free? I've had plenty of issues with them missing "guaranteed" delivery dates, but I've never seen what you're talking about. Are those through third-party sellers? I pretty much only use them for items they sell and ship themselves, or at least ones they handle the fulfillment on, and never run into that sort of problem.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with Walmart offering free 2-day shipping on orders greater than $35, no membership required.... Under $35, no worries, $5.99.
Walmart also has a reputation for shipping things out promptly unlike Amazon. Amazon is fine if you have prime, but if you choose free shipping, there are times you may wait a week for your item to even ship.
I can't speak to Walmart's rep for shipping promptly, but Amazon has been letting me down on that front way too often lately. I just can't stand Walmart's website, though I'll admit that when you search for something very specific they don't show you as much unrelated garbage as Amazon. I wish you could refine Amazon searches as tightly as eBay searches, since eBay doesn't seem so determined to advertize what they want you to see rather than just what you tell them you're looking for.
I suppose so, but when an online retailer offers an item at the same price as another retailer but offers included shipping, it does benefit you. And one of the big draws with Amazon is that they offer so many items with free/included/low-cost 2-day guaranteed shipping, which no one else does on the same scale. So call it a game if you like, but interpret it correctly rather than oversimplifying it and you'll see that not all "free" shipping is equal, or equally non-free.
they're an eCommerce outfit formed by an ex-amazon guy. Got a lot of capital so they can spend a few years trying to beat Amazon at it's own game of loss leading and.0001% profit margins. It'd be nice if somebody managed to compete with Amazon. I'm not looking forward to a time when they're literally the only retailer in the world.
I've had a lot of luck with eBay, though I won't buy through them when I know I need something quick. I've never bought from Jet, nor do I know anyone who has, and they're owned by Walmart now, IIRC.
Not a Walmart fan, can't stand their website, and have never ordered from them for home delivery, admittedly. I did order online for store pickup three orfour times, and each time was a pain because the employees seemed clueless as to how to find my order and took a surprisingly long time. I wonder whether Newegg will continue to try to diversify their online sales, now that they've changed ownership, too. They've always been quick and reliable for me, though I've only ever ordered computer stuff.
First, if the delivery is via USPS, they consider the item delivered when it arrives at the local post office, not at your house. And they often promise "second day by EIGHT PM", which means that any delivery to a commercial address where the receiving dept. goes home at 5PM is actually at least three day. And they know when an address is commercial.
If they consider my post office my house, they're going to lose me for sure. I get the commercial address thing, since if they've delivered it to the address they really shouldn't be responsible for another company's internal package handling. But I don't have access to the back room of the post office, and they do not deliver to residential addresses after 5:00, unlike UPS. Hell, when they tried to blame USPS the last time, my package was still at a post office in another county on the night it was originally supposed to be delivered, because they took over 24 hours to send it out. I've ordered numerous times from Amazon over the past 5 or 6 years, and they used to always get things to me on time, but now it's become hit and miss.
Actually, what I would do is check with the carrier, and if it claims to be delivered but isn't, contact Amazon and ask them to overnight a replacement. They'll usually overnight products at no charge if you're annoyed enough to write them to complain about shipping delays even if you're not a Prime member.
Thanks, but of all the times an Amazon delivery has been late, I've never had a case of them claiming it was delivered on time. They usually just say something like, "Sorry, the carrier was delayed," or, "Sorry, we'll look into it." The last time, they ended up issuing a one-month Prime extension, but only after too much whining. I did ask for a refund last time, since it was something I needed before a work deadline and had to scramble and buy a replacement locally, and they told me just to use the normal return process.
Online chat helpfulness seems spotty, with various reps much more reluctant than others to do anything that costs them money. Loosing subscribers and shoppers would cost them more, of course. Just my own experience here, which used to be excellent but has been much different over the last year or so.
Yes, No, Yes and No. These and other questions can be answered on their help pages. Open a chat with them and say "Order # xxxx was due xx/xx/xxxx, but has not yet arrived. The shipper is now estimating the due date as xx/xx/xxxx . Would you please issue me a prime extension for the missed guarantee? Thanks so much." Takes about 5 minutes and "earns" me a tax-free $8.25 off of a bill I would otherwise pay.
Thank you, but as I said, they seem very reluctant to issue any refund or extension, in my experience.
In these cases, you should be entitled to some sort of credit.
Yeah, but from the carrier, not Amazon (who can't control it). Unfortunately, you're not the carrier's customer.
Good luck with that.
In the one incident I alluded to specifically, Amazon took over a full day to ship the item out, then incorrectly blamed the carrier. And I am indeed a USPS customer, though they are not to blame when Amazon takes too long to get things out of the warehouse. And perhaps they shouldn't offer a guarantee that they have no intention of backing.
I'm a Prime subscriber (for now), so I get free shipping on lots of stuff already, with no $35 minimum. But am I the only one whose "guaranteed" 2-day shipping often takes 3-4 days? I can't figure out how they guarantee their "guaranteed" delivery dates, since they miss the mark so often then do nothing for me in return. This didn't used to be the case.
Am I being scammed if I subscribe for the 2-day shipping but barely ever use any other Prime features? I asked a chat rep recently about all their failed 2-day deliveries, and after about 30 minutes of me whining all he would do is say "Sorry, I'll have the shipping department look into it." Right. I finally got pissed off and told him a friend got a free month of Prime after complaining about the same thing, and only then did he offer me the same thing.
Am I missing something about their guarantee, or do I have to bitch and moan every time a late package costs me money? Will they limit this, and do they compensate you in some other way? Last time they sent my package out a day late and the chat rep blamed the carrier for the delay, which I knew was bogus. I can usually wait for personal stuff, but an extra day or two for work-related items can cost me money and be a genuine problem.
Maybe things have changed but Sprint at least used to make it impossible to bring non-sprint phones to their network.
Something did change, apparently: Sprint they decided they wanted to continue to exist as a phone company. That game is pretty much keep up or die now.
you are missing the point. We need a mixture of energy rather than 100% based on wind/solar that so many fools push solely.
That way, when a crisis like this hits, the nation has energy to survive it.
While I agree, I'm not scared by a few volcanoes or any one event. It would take an event orders of magnitude greater than these volcanoes erupting to have a huge negative impact on solar power, whether photovoltaic or concentration, so this is not really a crisis. Same with wind power - it will not be impacted, and though sustained climate change may alter wind patterns, there is no reason to believe we wouldn't still be able to capitalize on wind.
But yes, the more sources we can develop the better. Diversity is security, and more viable options will make us able to phase out fossil fuels sooner, so we should continue working on geothermal, harnessing tides and waves, fusion, fission, biomass, etc., as well as storage technologies, like flow batteries and pumped hydro, to name two
Nuclear winter has nothing to do with radioactivity. It's all about dust kicked up by sufficiently large explosions blocking sunlight. The same effect can be caused by impactors.
True, except for that last part. If it wasn't caused by nuclear weapons, it isn't "nuclear" winter. Such events occurred long before we had nuclear weapons, and have never actually been caused by nuclear weapons.
That's why we now say climate change, because "global warming" turned out to be indefensible before the facts. But we can argue change forever.
But what we have is global warming. The disruption in current weather patterns and ocean currents will indeed mean that some areas may see cooler climates (The British Isles and some of NW Europe, most notably) though world averages are rising and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Glacier outburst floods are known as "jökulhlaups" in geology, an Icelandic word since it has been the scene of many historic floods of this type.
In 1755 a jökulhlaup from the Katla volcano had a peak flow of up to 400,000 cubic meters/second, about 20 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River, or twice that of the Amazon, making it briefly the largest river in the world.
Completely off-topic: I love hearing people speak Finnish (got a few really old family members and a friend who speak Finnish), but Icelandic is the one language that I marvel over even more because it sounds so cool. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted I just had to learn how to pronounce it, and mention it to everyone I talked to, of course. Bárðarbunga and Grímsvötn might require a little work.
Everyone knows exactly what nuclear winter means. There can be non-nuclear causes but "blotting out 10% of the suns energy" is not as dramatic or concise.
Maybe, but ash and dust have accumulated in the atmosphere enough to significantly reduce sunlight before, though never because of nuclear weapons.
Good thing Bladerunner has gotten almost everything else wrong so far. At the very least it had the timing all wrong, since we're pretty unlikely to have replicants, off-world colonies, lots of flying cars, an inability to buy real snakes, or that level of smog or whatever choking LA by 2019.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone get the feeling that Pai & Co. are looking for justifications for not even reviewing deals like this, rather than actually looking for reasons to do their jobs? Maybe it's just me, but I see the FCC and EPA both turning a corner, and making it their mission to protect business interests from regulation rather than to protect citizens from unscrupulous businesses and practices. I hate being the doom and gloom dude, but a lot of things aren't looking so good for us little guys in the near future.
And this is why their budget will be cut again - focusing on expensive, relatively pointless shit that has been done before. SLS is dead, and why shouldn't it be? Incremental advances and dead-end projects are of no interest to bean counters. Of course I'd love to see a small percentage of our defense budget reallocated to double or triple NASA's annual budget, but that isn't going to happen, so trips to drive past the moon without even stopping are not going to happen.
This would be merely an unnecessary step toward using the moon or another orbital base as a launch point for a manned Mars mission, and one which would not generate enough excitement to spur budget increases or wider demand for such projects. I'm all for it, in theory, but the minimal benefit doesn't justify the cost, and heaven forbid it should fail or go way over budget.
$20 items with $150 shipping charges, and non-free shipping advertised as free? I've had plenty of issues with them missing "guaranteed" delivery dates, but I've never seen what you're talking about. Are those through third-party sellers? I pretty much only use them for items they sell and ship themselves, or at least ones they handle the fulfillment on, and never run into that sort of problem.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with Walmart offering free 2-day shipping on orders greater than $35, no membership required.... Under $35, no worries, $5.99.
Walmart also has a reputation for shipping things out promptly unlike Amazon. Amazon is fine if you have prime, but if you choose free shipping, there are times you may wait a week for your item to even ship.
I can't speak to Walmart's rep for shipping promptly, but Amazon has been letting me down on that front way too often lately. I just can't stand Walmart's website, though I'll admit that when you search for something very specific they don't show you as much unrelated garbage as Amazon. I wish you could refine Amazon searches as tightly as eBay searches, since eBay doesn't seem so determined to advertize what they want you to see rather than just what you tell them you're looking for.
Its all just word play and mind games.
I suppose so, but when an online retailer offers an item at the same price as another retailer but offers included shipping, it does benefit you. And one of the big draws with Amazon is that they offer so many items with free/included/low-cost 2-day guaranteed shipping, which no one else does on the same scale. So call it a game if you like, but interpret it correctly rather than oversimplifying it and you'll see that not all "free" shipping is equal, or equally non-free.
they're an eCommerce outfit formed by an ex-amazon guy. Got a lot of capital so they can spend a few years trying to beat Amazon at it's own game of loss leading and .0001% profit margins. It'd be nice if somebody managed to compete with Amazon. I'm not looking forward to a time when they're literally the only retailer in the world.
I've had a lot of luck with eBay, though I won't buy through them when I know I need something quick. I've never bought from Jet, nor do I know anyone who has, and they're owned by Walmart now, IIRC.
Not a Walmart fan, can't stand their website, and have never ordered from them for home delivery, admittedly. I did order online for store pickup three orfour times, and each time was a pain because the employees seemed clueless as to how to find my order and took a surprisingly long time. I wonder whether Newegg will continue to try to diversify their online sales, now that they've changed ownership, too. They've always been quick and reliable for me, though I've only ever ordered computer stuff.
First, if the delivery is via USPS, they consider the item delivered when it arrives at the local post office, not at your house. And they often promise "second day by EIGHT PM", which means that any delivery to a commercial address where the receiving dept. goes home at 5PM is actually at least three day. And they know when an address is commercial.
If they consider my post office my house, they're going to lose me for sure. I get the commercial address thing, since if they've delivered it to the address they really shouldn't be responsible for another company's internal package handling. But I don't have access to the back room of the post office, and they do not deliver to residential addresses after 5:00, unlike UPS. Hell, when they tried to blame USPS the last time, my package was still at a post office in another county on the night it was originally supposed to be delivered, because they took over 24 hours to send it out. I've ordered numerous times from Amazon over the past 5 or 6 years, and they used to always get things to me on time, but now it's become hit and miss.
Actually, what I would do is check with the carrier, and if it claims to be delivered but isn't, contact Amazon and ask them to overnight a replacement. They'll usually overnight products at no charge if you're annoyed enough to write them to complain about shipping delays even if you're not a Prime member.
Thanks, but of all the times an Amazon delivery has been late, I've never had a case of them claiming it was delivered on time. They usually just say something like, "Sorry, the carrier was delayed," or, "Sorry, we'll look into it." The last time, they ended up issuing a one-month Prime extension, but only after too much whining. I did ask for a refund last time, since it was something I needed before a work deadline and had to scramble and buy a replacement locally, and they told me just to use the normal return process.
Online chat helpfulness seems spotty, with various reps much more reluctant than others to do anything that costs them money. Loosing subscribers and shoppers would cost them more, of course. Just my own experience here, which used to be excellent but has been much different over the last year or so.
Yes, No, Yes and No. These and other questions can be answered on their help pages. Open a chat with them and say "Order # xxxx was due xx/xx/xxxx, but has not yet arrived. The shipper is now estimating the due date as xx/xx/xxxx . Would you please issue me a prime extension for the missed guarantee? Thanks so much." Takes about 5 minutes and "earns" me a tax-free $8.25 off of a bill I would otherwise pay.
Thank you, but as I said, they seem very reluctant to issue any refund or extension, in my experience.
In these cases, you should be entitled to some sort of credit.
Yeah, but from the carrier, not Amazon (who can't control it). Unfortunately, you're not the carrier's customer.
Good luck with that.
In the one incident I alluded to specifically, Amazon took over a full day to ship the item out, then incorrectly blamed the carrier. And I am indeed a USPS customer, though they are not to blame when Amazon takes too long to get things out of the warehouse. And perhaps they shouldn't offer a guarantee that they have no intention of backing.
All your mom to take care if it, little snowflake.
All your English to make sense, bloated pancake.
I'm a Prime subscriber (for now), so I get free shipping on lots of stuff already, with no $35 minimum. But am I the only one whose "guaranteed" 2-day shipping often takes 3-4 days? I can't figure out how they guarantee their "guaranteed" delivery dates, since they miss the mark so often then do nothing for me in return. This didn't used to be the case.
Am I being scammed if I subscribe for the 2-day shipping but barely ever use any other Prime features? I asked a chat rep recently about all their failed 2-day deliveries, and after about 30 minutes of me whining all he would do is say "Sorry, I'll have the shipping department look into it." Right. I finally got pissed off and told him a friend got a free month of Prime after complaining about the same thing, and only then did he offer me the same thing.
Am I missing something about their guarantee, or do I have to bitch and moan every time a late package costs me money? Will they limit this, and do they compensate you in some other way? Last time they sent my package out a day late and the chat rep blamed the carrier for the delay, which I knew was bogus. I can usually wait for personal stuff, but an extra day or two for work-related items can cost me money and be a genuine problem.
Amazon Quietly Lowered Its Free Shipping Minimum (for Star Trek shit) to $35
problem solved. :-)
Can we get it on that for the good stuff (Star Wars shit)?
I don't see this option on Verizon's site at all. They're still pushing 45/line/mo for each of four lines.. $180/mo is very different to $90/mo.
You don't see it on Verizon's site because that's Sprint's deal. Verizon's is 45/line for 4 lines, or double the cost of Sprint, which was the point.
Maybe things have changed but Sprint at least used to make it impossible to bring non-sprint phones to their network.
Something did change, apparently: Sprint they decided they wanted to continue to exist as a phone company. That game is pretty much keep up or die now.
you are missing the point. We need a mixture of energy rather than 100% based on wind/solar that so many fools push solely. That way, when a crisis like this hits, the nation has energy to survive it.
While I agree, I'm not scared by a few volcanoes or any one event. It would take an event orders of magnitude greater than these volcanoes erupting to have a huge negative impact on solar power, whether photovoltaic or concentration, so this is not really a crisis. Same with wind power - it will not be impacted, and though sustained climate change may alter wind patterns, there is no reason to believe we wouldn't still be able to capitalize on wind.
But yes, the more sources we can develop the better. Diversity is security, and more viable options will make us able to phase out fossil fuels sooner, so we should continue working on geothermal, harnessing tides and waves, fusion, fission, biomass, etc., as well as storage technologies, like flow batteries and pumped hydro, to name two
Nuclear winter has nothing to do with radioactivity. It's all about dust kicked up by sufficiently large explosions blocking sunlight. The same effect can be caused by impactors.
True, except for that last part. If it wasn't caused by nuclear weapons, it isn't "nuclear" winter. Such events occurred long before we had nuclear weapons, and have never actually been caused by nuclear weapons.
That's why we now say climate change, because "global warming" turned out to be indefensible before the facts. But we can argue change forever.
But what we have is global warming. The disruption in current weather patterns and ocean currents will indeed mean that some areas may see cooler climates (The British Isles and some of NW Europe, most notably) though world averages are rising and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Glacier outburst floods are known as "jökulhlaups" in geology, an Icelandic word since it has been the scene of many historic floods of this type.
In 1755 a jökulhlaup from the Katla volcano had a peak flow of up to 400,000 cubic meters/second, about 20 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River, or twice that of the Amazon, making it briefly the largest river in the world.
Completely off-topic: I love hearing people speak Finnish (got a few really old family members and a friend who speak Finnish), but Icelandic is the one language that I marvel over even more because it sounds so cool. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted I just had to learn how to pronounce it, and mention it to everyone I talked to, of course. Bárðarbunga and Grímsvötn might require a little work.
Everyone knows exactly what nuclear winter means. There can be non-nuclear causes but "blotting out 10% of the suns energy" is not as dramatic or concise.
Maybe, but ash and dust have accumulated in the atmosphere enough to significantly reduce sunlight before, though never because of nuclear weapons.
Have they figured out a way to prepare it that doesn't taste like crap and hippy sweat? That would be news.
Once again, Scifi foretells the future.
Good thing Bladerunner has gotten almost everything else wrong so far. At the very least it had the timing all wrong, since we're pretty unlikely to have replicants, off-world colonies, lots of flying cars, an inability to buy real snakes, or that level of smog or whatever choking LA by 2019.
*Deckard
But yes, my thoughts immediately jumped to Bladerunner upon reading the title.
Then they think they are changing the world and you and your users get to move on.
*Shadowban is not really a ban, and is therefore legal, because we said so.
You can take the nerd out of his mother's basement, but you can't take the basement out of the nerd.
I prefer to look at it this way: You can take the nerd out of his mom's basement, and Peter Thiel is still a know-nothing dumbass.