SoleInvictus

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

I looked up the page and it gets worse.

You will need to shop for a car inverter. Find one that is at least 1,500 watts, and it will help you power your refrigerator for up to five hours—usually without damaging your car battery. Considering how much food we keep in our refrigerators, a $200 car inverter is a bargain!

I like that you're thinking of alternatives, though! Don't ever lose that, it's less common than you might think.

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

I'd imagine an increasingly hostile world economy coupled with a then-looming but now beginning climate crisis might have a huge impact there.

Right now, many are! Fight back and retake our rightful place as people with rights above those of corporations.

It'd be bad. Real bad. An algae bloom of massive proportions. It has one huge issue.

Enough algae to make the rivers run green will use up enough oxygen at night to kill off fish and oxygen hungry invertebrates, starting a chain reaction of death.

Now you have a river full of dead organisms, so they start decomposing thanks to microbes. You know what many types of bacteria love? Oxygen. So they start using up oxygen, multiplying all the while. Night hits and the algae need to use oxygen, but a bunch die because there's not enough. Now the river is full of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of decomposing matter. The river largely goes anoxic (meaning there's no oxygen) so things start dying left and right. A bunch of those bacteria can live with and without oxygen, so they use up what they can and keep on chugging without.

Now we've moved from aerobic respiration to anaerobic. You know what the primary byproducts of anaerobic respiration are? Organic acids and alcohols, which smell. The river begins to smell like an infected wound. It's no longer green but deep, murky brown from the suspension of decomposing organisms. This continues until the river flushes everything out, but it kills what's downstream as it continues until it hits the ocean, where it likely continues to kill everything in the vicinity until it becomes dilute enough.

I'm a microbiologist and worked with algae and cyanobacteria as an undergrad. Never underestimate the impact of uncountable billions of trillions of living organisms.

I think a lot of the Internet is going to end up shitted up with this kind of nonsense. While leaving Reddit certainly tackles one issue, having a way to filter out the rest of this shit would be useful.

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.