You wouldn't think someone just orating without singing is entertaining, but it worked. I'm sure Ben Folds did a lot of the heavy lifting to make it great though.
While most people cite Common People as their favorite song on the album, I also like "You'll Have Time" as one of the more philosophically important songs that I've ever heard.
I remember back in high school, everyone would have an Eddie Bauer backpack except the random person with a Jansport. People would always insist on how you had to take advantage of the quality guarantee:
"You have a bent zipper and a small tear after lugging your books for years? Great! Take it to the store and argue with them that it's defective until they give you a new backpack!"
A number of outdoor sports retailers that used to have no-questions-asked return policies and internal repair departments have dropped them. I have known people who basically had a practice of indefinitely returning worn out clothing for replacement. I did return a jacket to Patagonia a number of years back and they gave me a decent credit but, in my defense it had basically completely delaminated.
When LL Bean ended their lifetime return policy, their CEO wrote this:
> Increasingly, a small, but growing number of customers has been interpreting our guarantee well beyond its original intent. Some view it as a lifetime product replacement program, expecting refunds for heavily worn products used over many years. Others seek refunds for products that have been purchased through third parties, such as at yard sales.
People were buying old items on eBay and returning them to the store to get a brand new item.
Bad faith actors ruin everything good eventually. From small things like return policies for retail chains, to the political process of an entire country.
True. I never used their return, but a lot of my newer ll bean stuff has had problems a couple years out, so I stopped buying from there. I feel like they’re using as an excuse to lower their quality.
(Jacket zipper just broke and the buttons that held the inside insulation of a jacket came off, shoe sole issues).
Yup. I've personally known people who, shamelessly, would get a Keurig from Costco, drink all the sample pods, and then exchange for a new one, repeatedly.
Ringing up expensive grocery items as cheap SKU at Whole Foods self checkout...
Going on shopping sprees and then calling the credit card company to report it as fraud...
Buying a fancy dress to wear for a few nights out and then returning it...
All things people close to me have done, or continue to do on a regular basis
Talking about a relatively "privileged" class of people here- multiple homes, multiple cars, kids in private school- not struggling single moms working double shifts to put food on the table.
You've always had some proportion of con artists/grifters of course but anecdotally it does seem that there is a higher proportion of people in the US who will, if not flagrantly steal, will do things like this especially against corporations that they mentally categorize as being evil.
Society can handle a small percentage of grifters, they've always been there and always will be. The change is that enshittification is mainstream in the corporate world and feels indistinguishable from being scammed. People begin to feel immersed in it and stop seeing the world as mostly honest and instead as mostly scams. Then good faith policies like these return policies get burned by way more people who lost trust in the system. Then we lose those too.
I sort of hate the "enshitification" term that gets thrown around way too lazily. But, for a variety of reasons, people are tending to deal with larger corporations for the most part and--hey--if I get some money on the side because of a mistake? Whatever. In a way I wouldn't have at some local store.
I think that's increasingly true. A lot of people want to game the system and you mostly don't want to place the burden of what's reasonable on a low-paid customer service worker. So you set reasonable and (mostly firm) time limits and let the processes take their course. Should be some wiggle room of course. But it's not reasonable to offer lifetime replacements unless people are willing to pay the 2x to 3x prices that implies--which very few will.
I sent an Eagle Creek suitcase in and they honored the warranty even though it's maybe 15 years old. They sent it to a repair place who actually fixed every single issue with it (first a broken wheel, then later a torn pocket, broken buckle, and missing zipper pulls). I honestly can't believe that the repairs are cheaper than just replacing it, but it has worked out really well. It's a shame more places don't do that.
I still use daily the Timberland backpack I got in 2009. Again, some wear and tear (actually just wear, thankfully no tears) but works great at the 17 year mark, even though it has gone through anything from daily use to travel to trekking.
Other backpacks have come and gone when I thought it'd need replacing, but kept trudging on. Now I don't want to have to let go of it, even though it looks "a bit" old.
I know it's not good for business to have long-lasting products. But some items like this backpack, a 2008 Fujitsu workstation, or a 2013 MacBook Air (not to mention the Faber Castell TK 4600) that simply keep on working become something akin to lifelong companion tools.
It goes to show the benefits of deep forethought and good design. And, I guess, the stubbornness of some users :)
You did’t even have to argue with Jansport. The threading was coming undone on my 15 year old Jansport backpack, so I mailed it in, they fixed it, and sent it back to me. Still using it almost 30 years after originally buying it,
Your teacher being picky about the project you picked sounds a bit ridiculous. It sounds like she was attempting to force you to work on something you weren't interested in when you could have taught yourself better by choosing your own project.
I think in the 90s a lot of schools didn't have a large pool of qualified teachers for cs classes. In my experience, "programming" from the high school level involved finding a teacher who was available, maybe the person who was responsible for the computer lab, and telling him to crack a book.
I took a CS class in highschool the 2000s, this was about 2005 I think. The CS "teacher" had been teaching CS there for a decade I think. Which sure I think that I was lucky to have that class. But she was just a math teacher, if she had taken a computer science class, it was a single one 20 years prior in the 80s. She didn't really have any actual understanding of concepts and skipped some major parts of computer science even at that level (no concept of structs or objects or heap/stack in a C++ class).
You can see that while Windows 10 numbers are going down over the past few months, the Windows 11 numbers aren't making up for it. About 2/3 of that gap are going to Linux with the other third going to Mac. So Mac is getting more market at the expense of Windows as well. There are a significant number of disgruntled Windows users leaving over the past year.
I know we keep hearing about how their share holders are forcing this change of focus in order to monetize ai. I just fail to see how alienating developers and the gaming community in the process will ever help achieve that.
While it isn't expressly stoic, I'm liking the gray rock tactic more and more as I age. You can just not fight the people who are rude to you and not engage with ideas that frustrate you. When you reduce your personal connections to what you have direct control over and your actual responsibility, the need to argue with most people is very low.
Aside from alcohol and obesity, I don't see:
1. Cancer survivability. If people aren't dying from cancer they will be more likely to die from a fall in a weakened state.
2. Two level homes are a higher percentage of new construction and people are more able to afford it when they're older.
Edit: okay they did mention fewer deaths from other causes such as cancer and heart disease.
The stairs are probably your least likely place to fall. You have a railing. Getting out of the shower or slipping in the kitchen and catching the counter on the way down however…
There is an unmet need for mandatory (stylish) shower bars. Age doesn't matter; everybody could benefit from a solid handhold in that critical in/out transition.
Like anything it depends. I'm terrified at the idea that my mother in law or my mom would slip on my stairs at home. We used to have carpeted basement stairs and I slipped on them several times. They're wood with silicone traction pads now and far safer.
The article did address differences in the rates of 'same level falls' vs. stairs, etc. So they accounted for that too.
We just finally got my 85-yr-old mother to move out of her house into a nice apartment near us with elevator access. She has already had some bad falls. Now we just have to worry about her driving. She shouldn't need to drive as much in her new place, but she probably will anyway.
I think the moral of the story is just don't buy any electronics until you absolutely have to now: your laptop, your desktop, your car, your phone, your tv's. Go third party for maintenance when you can. Install Linux when you can. Only buy things that can be maintained and enjoy what you have.
I got a new Subaru and the touchscreen is making me insane. I will avoid electronics in cars as much as possible going forward.
It literally has a warning that displays every time you start the car: "Watching this screen and making selections while driving can lead to serious accidents". Then you have to press agree before you can use the A/C or stereo.
Like oh attempting to turn the air conditioner on in your car can lead to serious accidents? Maybe you should rethink your dashboard instead of pasting a warning absolving you of its negative effects?
Usually that legalese goes away after ~30 seconds or when you put it in drive, you rarely have to actually hit “OK”. But I haven’t been in a recent Subaru!
How about a recall and replacement for that defective dashboard with one that doesn't cause distractions and accidents since it has buttons that can be felt even by someone wearing winter gloves?
While most people cite Common People as their favorite song on the album, I also like "You'll Have Time" as one of the more philosophically important songs that I've ever heard.
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