Tip: Always write over things you don’t want seen in the same color they were originally written in, if you can’t completely redact it. This fucks with our brain’s ability to distinguish a pattern, which is all reading really is anyway.

Good on you for calling your Mom.

Good luck. It wasn’t a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.

I did say “some serious and not serious suggestions”. :P

There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:

About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven to instead be about an Emu.

For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.

Dude, stop getting defensive. Most people aren’t trying to directly belittle you, they’re offering suggestions. It’s okay to take them at pace, my dude. You are allowed to say “I wasn’t able to pick it up due to some long term complications. Man though, dat price. Woo.”

Some serious and not serious suggestions: You could call to order and pay over the phone and then request someone bring it out and place it in the trunk. You could put a couple masks on which will filter a decent portion of the smell. Walk backwards into the wind while carrying it. If your daughter is old enough and you trust her, perhaps she could have gotten it.

There are options. You posted this to point out and complain about the pricing, then get defensive when others point out how to make it cheaper. Most of us are reasonably sure you didn’t apply a coupon, for instance. Did you consider calling and asking if they could wrap the box in plastic wrap to mostly eliminate the smell, and apologize while explaining why? All we got is “Pizza smell too strong. Daughter picky. So pricy.” We get you have an issue and that is shitty though like of course people will offer ways to deal.

That said, I am sorry you’re going through a difficult time. It’s clear we aren’t aware of everything you’ve had to give up. I hope it gets better.

I feel combining this with @PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca likely creates a fairly accurate sense for the place.

India is, well…despite their historical advances in medicine and continued strong cultural fascination with academia, at some point they became nothing but call centers, distribution points, and scam centers. There is certainly more to India, though when I think of hacking, I think of China and Russia. When I think of scams, unfortunately India is top of the list.

I’ve dealt with my share of PC issues and apart from digging in and writing scripts, I’m an advanced end user. One time le tired IT guy needed to remote in for some issue I didn’t have appropriate access to deal with. He seemed rather startled when I opened notepad and said “Hi!”

I also swear I began to get more difficult to recognize fake phishing attempts shortly after.

Dave, if you’re reading this you never caught me with one! Gotta try harder!

I loved it when my local giant ISP kept pushing broadband connections, saying they couldn’t possibly deal with costs associated with Fiber. Then they begged money from the Government to install infrastructure. Queue absolutely no work in my area. Fast forward a few years, a new ISP rolls in with Fiber and like magic my ISP was suddenly able to provide similar services.

Oh well see that would actually require communication and commitment.

We don’t do that. Something about needing that job that they definitely won’t pull out from under us to pay those bills that never go up.

Just about anything is traceable. The trick is making it not worth the effort.

I’ll say this: Grabbed a free month of Prime through Google Play. Went to cancel it before it charged me again and I had so much trouble figuring out how I decided that I couldn’t be the only one and ended up Googling it.

You couldn’t quit in the Google Play Store. It wasn’t even listed.

It wasn’t any form of subscription or listed as a membership on Amazon.

You couldn’t end it by following QR codes or links supplied to you on Amazon itself.

It wasn’t in your Amazon profile or Google profile.

The ONLY WAY to cancel it was by scanning the QR code, following the link, clicking on a “Contact Support” button, clicking on another button under “Help Topics” that said, “How to end your Prime Membership”, and finally you were taken to a page where you could actually end it. Obfuscated like a motherfucker.

@dogsnest Thanks for the heads up.

OP thanks for posting this.

Donated what little I could. Free access to information is absolutely one of the most important things we as a collective can support.

Corps hate looking bad. Especially to shareholders. The thing is, and perhaps it doesn’t matter, most of us actually respect the step back more than we do the silly business decisions for that quarterly .5% increase in a single dot on a graph. Of course, that respect doesn’t really stop many of us from using services. Hell, I don’t like Amazon but I’ll say this: I still end up there when I need something, even if I try to not end up there in the first place. Though I do try to go to the website of the store instead of using Amazon when I can.

Man, this is really downplaying the history that was legitimately made by the incredible people at SpaceX. It actually felt to many of us like we had just gone to the Moon for the first time.

Dunno about anyone else but I was freaking out.

It’s important to remember that the people who are okay with this report probably won’t speak up. Those who find reasons to not be okay will speak loudly. Personally, I take reports like this with a grain of salt and an assumption we are told only the good or neutral bits. I then decide if those bits are enough to constitute good will. In this I feel they are.

So good job: LTT.

Looking forward to the sudden, definitely inexplicable, price increase of specific hardware at about the nine month mark.

Okay, fair enough. I did say worst case, though how you explain it makes sense. I don’t trust that they won’t try eventually, you’re probably right that they won’t do so without outcry. I appreciate the down to earth reaction and explanation!

Obviously there is a difference. However, I am very aware that if something can be monetized, someone will try to monetize and monopolize it. A few years ago, and possibly still today, the word Saga was trademarked. Disney has attempted to trademark common phrases and such in some cultures. Sony has made attempts. I’m certain Apple has tried. The Pokemon Company. Nintendo. A tiny Youtube creator uses their own music and one chord sounds vaguely like some song and they get demolished.

Don’t think for a second that companies haven’t sat in meetings and gone, “Do we think we can trademark the sound of a voice? Can we OWN that likeness?” These fuckers would privatize air if they thought they could get away with it. Sound pissed all you want, the reality is we’ve very likely dodged this bullet once or twice already, so we should be aware.

Yup. People up in arms over this should be reminded that if you want to support SJ here that, in a worst case, you are directly supporting the privatization of vocalization. Like to goof around by talking in Morgan Freeman’s voice? Be prepared to get slapped with a notice to stop. That voice is off limits, and oh also your natural voice sounds like this person.

Is this silly? Absolutely. But dammit we see what’s happened to Youtube so be aware of the risk.