Seconded, I use a Define 7 and it’s fantastic. Best big black box I’ve ever owned.

Seriously. If these “media pros” are actually concerned, it appears my personal server adheres to higher standards than their industry.

No no, you really weren’t off base. Even if they were owned by Walmart, I doubt they could do worse.

That’s great, I’m glad you got some deals!

The thing about them is their low wages and reluctance to train their employees meant high-end goods were often priced very low. Levi’s jeans were $10-15 a pair while designer jeans were priced at $5. I recall someone donating a batch of Hermés scarves. None of the pricers knew the brand, so they put them out for $1 each. I bought them all for 50% off (employee discount!) and hit eBay. This kind of thing happened weekly so the employees were always looking for things we could resell. We made less than $20k/year, that’s how we scraped by!

I’m not sure how other stores are, but mine was a great example of being a penny wise and a pound foolish.

So, I’m not trying to be the “ackshually” guy.

Value Village isn’t owned by Walmart.

Buuuut, you’re still right. They’re absolutely a shit company. I was an assistant supervisor at Value Village a couple of decades ago. First, they’re 100% for profit but advertise in such a way that consumers believe they’re a charity. What they do is buy donations from charities by the pound. Any donations accepted at the store on behalf of a charity are paid at a drastically reduced rate, so of course they push HARD for customers to bring donations directly to the store.

The shit cherry on top was the stores lying to charities about the quality of received goods to avoid paying. If clothes, for example, were soiled, they’d refuse to pay for the entire batch. Stores would find a few dirty shirts, claim the entire cart was crap, claw the money back, and sell the rest of the cart.

The company makes a HUGE profit but pays their employees peanuts. Our head cashier had worked for the company for eight years and capped out at $7.25/hour in 2003, about $14 today. One year, they announced no raises, no reason given. My then girlfriend and I discovered the owners had purchased a cabin in Northern California for use by the c-suite douches. The store manager was pulling in $60k a year, plus bonus, in a very low cost of living area. Me? $8.25 per hour.

What else? They incentivize under staffing by making a supervisor’s paltry bonuses tied to their staffing budget. Staying at budget meant no bonus. They had to come in under budget for any bonus, and the more “savings” the higher the bonus. I got chewed out when I first started scheduling because I used all the hours allotted in the budget. The store went from a shit hole to being fairly respectable but it would eat into my boss’s bonus. Her maximum annual bonus? $2.5k.

So they may not be owned by Walmart, but they’re the Walmart of thrift stores. Fuck those guys.

I’m also disabled. We tend to refer to this as the “disability tax”. Anything that could potentially be billed to insurance or for which there are no other options is incredibly expensive. If we can’t afford it or don’t have insurance, we’re always welcome to go die under a bridge somewhere. Gotta pay for the owner’s yacht.

I always wonder how IPtorrents is still running. It’s a bit bigger and has a less than savory reputation, so I figure it would draw more attention.

Same, I just signed up. Here’s the URL for anyone else interested:

https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam

Fuck Nintendo.

I’m guessing because he’s horribly incompetent. I did a cursory Google search and the press is not good. There’s even a change.org petition to get him to vacate his position.

Another another +1 here. Does that make it +3 now?

We don’t print a ton so we bought a basic monochrome Brother laser printer/scanner and used the included demo toner cartridge for almost two years. When that ran out, we swapped it for one big knockoff toner cartridge over four years ago and it’s still printing like a champ.

Pro tip: if a Brother printer says it’s out of toner, it’s only estimating this based on the number of pages printed. You can override it (at least in every model I’m familiar with) and keep on printing.

I did my part and sent them a “do this and I’ll never buy a Haier product” email. Corporations exist to maximize profits. Communities like ours just have to learn how to make it clear to them that shutting us out will hurt their profitability.

I think we should all be really proud of ourselves. We banded together and, regardless of WHY Haier is doing this, got them to open a line of communication. This is a huge win!

Hell yes! My sister-in-law has your same year but the diesel version and that thing is a champ. It’s rated at 45 mpg on the highway but she typically gets 50+, even with nearly 200k miles on it.

I had a 2004 1.8t Jetta for 12 years but I swapped it for a Prius. I love the Prius features and fuel economy but I miss how damn quick that my Jetta was, plus I loved the interior color scheme.

If you were playing Choplifter in elementary school, you’re really not THAT old. Or you are and that makes me old too, but I’m -hypothetically- completely capable of figuring out piracy. Don’t short yourself, there’s always room on the high seas.

It’s good for me because I’m piss poor at programming. In my defense, I’m not a programmer or even programmer adjacent. I do see how it wouldn’t be useful to a pro. It also has occasionally given me garbage advice that an expert would spot right away while I had to figure out in my own that it was ‘hallucinating’ again. There’s nothing better for learning than troubleshooting, though!

Well shit, I almost got through a whole week without crying.