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| Amazon: the shittiest, most ghastly company on earth |
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| T3sl4co1l:
--- Quote from: Gyro on June 29, 2021, 08:56:14 am ---The logical (and ridiculous) extension of this is telling Amazon 'I don't want this item, but give me a refund and I'm prepared to dispose of it at no further cost to you'. --- End quote --- You say that like it's not already SOP for a lot of sellers/products. :) Tim |
| Gyro:
Actually that's true, it certainly seems to be the way that most international sellers on ebay work. :) |
| NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: tooki on June 29, 2021, 07:45:13 am ---FYI, all Macs ever made have a DAC — Macs don’t have, and never have had, a beeper. The sound named “sosumi” was added, IIRC, when they added an audio input. --- End quote --- The G4 Cube doesn't - audio output is via an external USB DAC instead. |
| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 29, 2021, 08:47:32 am ---The reaction clip, of course, is just mimetic gold; but it's based on a true story, of suppressed science, distilled over the years through a conspiracy-theoretic lens, down to the simplest possible description. They're not "gay" of course, that's an abuse of language, but hermaphroditic deformities -- intersex is the proper term(?) -- were found; the effects were causally proven; and the science was discredited by big agro as well as they could muster, because obviously, they have a financial stake in this. --- End quote --- A biochemistry lecturer I used to know (Dr. John P. Sumpter, Brunel University) was researching this in the late 70s/early 80s and by the time I first knew him circa 81/82 the effect was established science. His research had moved on from "does this happen" to "what other agents can cause this to happen". (BTW as far as terminology used goes, the effect most often observed, and described as such, is feminisation in males of aquatic species.) --- Quote ---Another, albeit less extreme, statement comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution". Now, it's perfectly true -- see, it's easy to laugh at this statement, or question it morally -- and rightly so; but it works because it works. The problem is not that a company is releasing toxic chemicals per se, it's that enough of them are doing it, in great enough quantities, that, over anything from local areas to entire ecosystems, concentrations rise to dangerous levels. And often those levels are unimaginably small (~ppb, even ppt for PFAS, dioxins, etc.), and the effects on various species are unpredictable. --- End quote --- Some agents still have an effect even when diluted beyond homeopathic levels. One of first agents identified as troublesome was synthetic human oestrogens, which have a feminizing effect on male brown trout after they have been consumed as birth control pills by human women (whole body dose 20-100 micrograms/day), excreted, passed through waste treatment facilities and passed back into watercourses - a dilution ratio of billions or trillions to one. One of the things Sumpter discovered was that there was a synergistic effect between oestrogenic pollutants and detergents that were present in treated waste water. So the problem isn't just single compounds, but the whole chemical soup of many compounds present as pollutants. |
| TimNJ:
--- Quote from: james_s on June 29, 2021, 02:32:56 am --- --- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on June 28, 2021, 08:30:07 pm ---Guess you'll starve then. Supermarkets do the same thing... At least there's a chance they mark down or donate old items? Tim --- End quote --- When food is rotting there is not much else you can do with it unfortunately, it's perishable. They do try to distribute it though, a while back I volunteered with a bunch of my coworkers at an organization that collects all the expired and about to expire food from Costco, sorts through it and then donates some of it to food banks and sells other stuff at deeply discounted prices at market that sells low cost food to low income people. The stuff that would not survive the process was composted which turns it back into highly fertile soil. My mom has a friend who belongs to another organization that does a similar thing with supermarket foods, they end up with so much excess that I end up with all kinds of random food for free, it's far from perfect but at least they're trying. They don't destroy perfectly good stock just to keep it out of someone else's hands. --- End quote --- For the last 20 years, once a week, my parents (and I, when I was younger) pick up the *just* expired bakery items from Costco and bring them to a local pantry. (The bakery items are put in freezers to preserve them.) Costco basically assumes no liability if the food items go bad, covered by some sort of Good Samaritan law. I think they probably get some sort of tax write-off too. I don't know how this could be applied to other (non-food) items, but it would be better than trashing them. |
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