Today I learned...

The first and last line that gripped me from the trailer was "we treat people who pay".

Well fuck you for glorying the culture of getting rich off the sickness of others. 

Fuck you for ignoring that everyone else in your countrys crumbling medical industry is not already doing the same thing without saying it.

Fuck you for ignoring the fact that most other industrialized nations in the world offer FREE BASIC HEALTH CARE. While YOU bankrupt most people for healthcare.

So I put together and alright looking computer as a gift. Not a top-of-the-line motherboard but some AM3 Gigabyte with eight gigs of DDR3, some slightly subpar video card, and a 2 TB hard drive. The system works reasonably well for about six months (although not quite as well as I wanted it to work on some video games), and then it starts to shut off randomly. The BSOD code and the event log messages are very vague but suggested hardware issue.

 So we do the basic troubleshooting disconnecting all components and adding them back one by one but because the issue is so intermittent we couldn't tell if we were eliminating possibilities or simply having unlucky timing. After a few days of testing we decide that it can only be one of the four major components: motherboard, RAM, hard drive, or the video card. The easiest of the four to diagnoses the video card; simply disconnect it, use the onboard video, and wait. After that it was the RAM; disconnect one and wait, reconnect one disconnect the other and wait again. Then the hard drive; we chose to just back up all the data and send it in for warranty replacement. And finally the fucking motherboard.

 After a slight pain in my ass trying to use the website and then being hung up on by somebody processing my RMA claim a second person at Gigabyte finally helped me. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that the motherboard had a two-year warranty. I was very much less pleasantly surprised to find out I would have to ship this motherboard 4000 miles away to take advantage of this warranty.

 Second week of July: I pay the $40 to get it there using the cheapest delivery because something ever so slightly faster would have doubled or tripled the cost. (To get it there in two days would have cost nearly $200.)

 July 14: I call the RMA office directly to confirm that they have received my motherboard. Receipt is confirmed and I am told testing will begin that day.

 July 16: I finally get an e-mail notice confirming that they have received my equipment.

 July 21: A week since my last call: I call for an update. They claim to have found nothing and refuse to replace the board unless they can duplicate my issue. The agent I spoke with assures me he will advocate on my behalf to get the board replaced and promises me an e-mail update the following day.

 July 23: Of course there was no e-mail so I call once again. I am told that testing was completed yesterday and that shipping would hopefully be done that day. This new agent reiterates that they have found nothing and cannot replace the board unless they replicate the issue. He is confused at why certain test isn't done and asks if I would like him to stop the shipment and have them continue testing. I explained that I would like every possible test that will get my board replaced completed but he is suddenly reminded that he is no expert on motherboard testing in the test may have already been completed.

 The call ends with the agent trying to cheer me up by telling me that if this issue crops up again, my next RMA will be a replacement without any need to confirm the issue. I try express to him precisely how not-helpful that information is, when that is exactly what I want to happen now. He explains how powerless he is to change the rules and that is all.

 Several hours later: I finally get an email confirmation that my motherboard is being shipped back… 7 DAY GROUND!!

 Are you fucking kidding me? After fucking around for 2 days before even acknowledging they received my equipment (who knows how long it was before they started testing), spending a week testing, then another 24 hours after finalizing testing to even ship it, they choose cheapest possible UPS shipping?!?

 I’ve been buying Gigabyte boards for years and never really had a problem within the first year. I know they pretend they are a first tier company but we all know that they get their sales from being a hair away from bargain basement products and prices to match (and sometimes not even that hair away). I finally have need of their support and they are as bargain fucking basement as you can get.

 On top of my asking on the phone about replacing the board after a week of testing, I said it to the agent taking down my RMA info on the phone, I wrote it on the RMA form I shipped with it, and I replied to the receipt confirmation with a request to have the board replaced (to which they never replied).

Deal-of-the-day websites have been popular for the better part of a decade but part of the appeal of these sites has been the “of-the-day” part of their name. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, imitators and emulators have sprung up in that time. And although I have sampled one or two from time to time only one has enraged me: the fucking morons at dealticker.com!

 Like other deal-bait websites, they had some pretty good prices on things that would cost 2 to 3 times more retail store, but it was the vaporizer that caught my eye because we were in need of one. So against my better judgment I showed it to my wife who was immediately smitten with the idea of getting something of apparent quality for nearly a quarter of the price.

 The thing that really lured us in was the “5 hours remaining”. This is, in fact, the entire basis for the deal-of-the-day lure. Happy with snagging such a deal we checked back the next day to see what other deals we might get. Shockingly are supposed to deal was back on for another 18 hours. Perhaps we were mistaken, we thought. I day later we find the “deal” had had its hours reset for third time. For a week we watched the intended panic inducing deadline reset daily.

 I finally e-mailed the company and asked when this deal was actually going to end and why they lied to us about it… The response (after three run around e-mails) was that it was the manufacturers request that the deal be extended. (They never answered my demand to know the name, number, or address of the manufacturer.)

 Since their website boasts a five week delivery time, I contacted them after five weeks to find out where my product was. It took another 3 to 4 e-mails of incompetent and unrelated replies to finally hear that either products may take six weeks or more to arrive and that if I was unhappy my only recourse was to ask for credit with this shitty company.

 So I waited two weeks. And here I am, two months after paying for something that I thought would end in five hours and then be shipped in five weeks or less. They sure as fuck took the money off of my credit card instantaneously, yet providing information, support, my product… That needs to take a quarter of the year.

 So my final demand for the contact info for the person they are putting all the blame on? Fuck all! They again blame someone else and again offer me stealticker credit... even though I told them I wanted NOTHING of the sort. They further tell me they are "looking into" "tracking numbers". Again refusing to give me ANY information.

 Looking to get it cheap deal from dealticker? Try responding to one of those “African prince” spam e-mails in your inbox before letting dealticker.com scam you for something they never intended to get to you until the fucking seasons had changed.

Edit:

Since they outright refuse to give me the info I demanded repeatedly, I can only guess at who the original retailer was. As a comparison though, check out a current offer:

http://www.dealticker.com/_29_for_a_discreet_dry_vaporizer_pen_available_in_five_colours__-_taxes_included___160_value__en_31125prod.html

The contact number is "1-844-827-6713"... this is the same as the contact number on the website for the company. I am completely NOT surprised that the number is out of service.

Edit 2: Twice now they outright refused to give me any info and instead offered me fucking useless "dealticker credits" instead of what I paid for. It has been 2.5 months since I paid for my stuff, which they originally said would arrive within 3-5 weeks.

 It's now been nearly 20 years since any old high school kid could get an e-mail address. So when a guy like myself feels like getting a new e-mail address that isn't Gmail and Yahoo Hotmail or any of the other primary or more popular e-mail addresses looking for something rather specific, we'll go with the free option. On one end of the spectrum you can pay 10 bucks for domain and another 5 to 10 for some hosting and for 20 bucks a year you've got an e-mail address that is pretty much any name you can think of at any domain name you can think of. The other end of the spectrum is free, and considering the alternative is $.18 a day per year, you should expect free to be pretty convenient and easy going.

 GMX mail, or as I use the free version of their mail service, Mail.com, has decided to do away with such convenience.

 I was one of the earlier subscribers to the Yahoo! Mail service back in 1995-1996. And back then it was exactly as you would expect of a mail service; you would sign into your mail and see your inbox of potential new mail. Then a few years later they got bought out and things started changing. Suddenly there was news and advertisements before you can get your inbox. Oh well, not much you could do, that were not many alternatives.

 The reason I mention it is because the only reason people didn't care for the obstruction was because they had nowhere else to go (very few places to go). Now with literally thousands of other free e-mail services, Mail.com has grown from a free mail service to e-mail service that offers premium service and harassment to its customers on the “free” service.

 When I first started with their service I didn't mind all that much that when I signed into mail.com I wasn't even shown my mail. Instead I was shown whatever plethora of new stories and advertisements this company decided I should see. Whatever, one extra click. Then a few days later I started getting a message every single time I login that I had not logged out “properly” and needed to click another button before I could continue. If I had joined the so-called free e-mail service for its incredible security network this might seem reasonable but they are not and I didn't. Worse than that, they log you out automatically (as I found out the next day). So not only do they demand that you click a logout button or have to read a disciplinary message before continuing the next time, but they log you out at their leisure even if you have chosen not to close the page or click the logout button yourself.

 This hypocritical and contradictory issue could have been resolved if they simply explained why there foolish system made sense for even a moment. Nope; when I sent a support request calling their “you did not logout” message a form of spam, some halfwit replied to me that the message was necessary because of something I had done wrong and that if I was receiving spam e-mails I should probably look into why it was I was at fault for those e-mails.

 I was tempted to reply to this pseudo-support until I read some reviews from other so-called free customers and quickly decided against it. First I looked for the phone number to contact an actual human so that I could determine if they were genuinely inapt and incapable of understanding English or deceptively rude and making light of my term spam. I quickly found that their lack of a phone number for free customers to contact support was intentional; the phone numbers only for premium customers and they even have their agents posing as premium customers and belittling free users who complain about them on other websites.

 (And by that I mean the Northern Americas)

  I'm never been a conspiracy theorist. In fact, I have been the antithesis of a conspiracy theorist; preferring if not demanding facts in place theories based on guesses (and I use the layman's definition of theory here, for a real theory is based on facts). And even though I've never been called an optimist I always thought, and often very proudly set it, that Canada would not become like the United Corporate States of America… But I was naïve.

 10 years ago I laughed at the idea that Canada would ever accept some of the policies of the United States government: movie, music, and other corporations were able to force the US government to demand information from Internet companies about their customers. These corporations would then use this information to file criminal charges against individuals. Here in Canada I chuckled, because our government did not act like a Corporation and our companies and corporations did not as easily controlled the government… Or so I thought.

 I despise the word but let's call it faith; nearly 3 years ago it was put to the test when Bell and other major ISPs, with the support of the government, try to introduce usage-based billing (UBB). I was completely shocked that it made it as far as it did, my lack of concern and my trust were shaken. But I felt a small victory in the defeat of usage-based billing.

 A year or two later we find out that the US has convinced, or rather: worst, the Canadian government into allowing United States corporations and businesses to demand information from, and then prosecute about, private citizens of a nation they don't belong to. And finally this year we've just learned that Canada has given the US government free reign on access saying financial and tax information for every Canadian citizen. They claim this is exclusively to find and deal with American companies who have moved to Canada to hide financial information but they didn't seem to have a problem with making the rules a little vague open-ended; it applies to all of us.

 Now I'm not alleging or stating or alluding to any Orwellian or dystopian future, but the truth and fact is that our government no longer protects us from the Corporation that calls itself the United States! In fact, turns a blind eye to actions that infringe on their own Constitution let alone our Canadian liberties.

 I haven't exactly stayed off the grid but I've done my best not to willingly submit my every bowel movement, geo-tagged and hash tagged, for all the world to see. But it has become clear that that is irrelevant; a select few corporations can tell the government what to do, and the government can tell the rest of the corporations and businesses what they must do. This means that it does not matter whether I click the checkmark next to ”I Agree”, my personal information, browsing habits, and entire Internet history, is open to any corporation with enough money and employees.

 Don't believe me? Do I sound like a crackpot? Google anything about “privacy laws” right alongside “Canadian government”, and then click “custom tools” and choose any date before 2011. You'll find that the Canadian government about not wanting to give away our information. You'll find that once the government was on our side, yet for the last three years has been led by the US State Department, dictated by corporations, to freely open up all our databases of citizen information.

 Although I despise those nut job conspiracy theorists, in this respect I'm like them in that I don't have a solution to this problem. I could say “write to your local politician” or “call them”, but we know that is useless, at least in small numbers. I'm just hoping more people realize that they need to exchange information on the phone or in person, rather than over Facebook, twitter, or whatever.

 When Facebook started my problem was that they demanded your genuine and accurate personal information. They still do so today after more than a decade, but now they tell you that it will help you find your old friends and relatives and let your old friends and relatives find you. My decade-old issue still exists; there is no information you can give to Facebook that will truly help you connect with somebody you really want to connect with. If they have a Facebook account, a home address, a phone number, or any e-mail address, you can find his lost friend or relative without having your every word eternally long by a Corporation.

No I haven't changed my mind about their product; I still think the device is too expensive and never pays itself off, the proprietary retailing of CO2 is a scam, and the way they have lowered CO2 can sizes while at the same time increasing price is deplorable. That said, I've since found out that without discrimination their factory in the West Bank employees choose just as often as Palestinians and women just as often as men. This is a claim that cannot be made by many, if any at all, Palestinian company, or even by any company in any of the countries that neighbor Israel.

 I have to thank Ellen for giving away so many SodaStream brewers or I would not have seen the anti-Israeli and antisemitic backlash. Having spent so much time looking into SodaStream's product I really wanted to know if there was any basis for this pseudo-outrage at Ellen supporting the product. What I found was that of the 1300 odd employees at the factory that enrages so many 600 to 700 or more are Palestinian. Are not discrimination and a lack of inclusion to the very things those against Israel complain about?

 It seems pretty clear to me that anybody who complains about the political nature of SodaStream's factory is either misinformed, or more likely, using the complicated nature of this issue to hide their antisemitism.

I need to start off by apologizing to SodaStream. In my very first post I began by saying that they suck. However, as much as they suck for valuing profits above customer satisfaction (yes, a company does require profits, but as a consumer being devalued for said , it sucks), and as much as they suck for pretending to frame their goal as environmentalism, at least they never outright inconvenienced me, intentionally, to bloat their profits (at least not yet, which is why I will not buy one, but that is besides the point).

  The truth is I don't even drink beer all that much but from time to time I enjoy a few cold refreshing beers on a Sunday afternoon. Back in Montréal, where I grew up, this meant a two-minute walk to the corner store; here in Ontario it means a drive to the closest LCBO or Beer Store. To be honest, I never really wondered why that was. I've been in this province more than 13 years and I always just assumed it was something about how this government worked… not so.

  The real reason behind my inconvenience has less to do with government and more to do with powerful businesses that influence the government. It would seem like common sense that if the Ontario government does not allow any other business to sell beer except the Beer Store or the LCBO then those two organizations would be either government controlled or under strict government supervision… again this isn't true. The beer store is actually own by three foreign and privately held companies. Companies who sell, in their stores, 90% of their own product, while claiming that any alternative would stifle small business.

  Now this might not matter in some unregulated industry or some market where the industry regulates itself, but this is a market where the government has very specifically forbidden anyone else from entering it.

  Some 80 years ago or so the United States decided to try and outlaw all alcohol. It took time, and those laws were repealed, but the country realized that the results were disastrous. Unfortunately for Ontario, the rules and regulations of 80 years ago have not changed and foreign corporations get to dictate where we are allowed to purchase alcohol from.

  Like I said, I don't even drink beer that much, so this whole debacle wouldn't have even meant a whole lot to me until I saw their disgusting ads:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OLn5QojMH8 (Sorry it is a link and not a video... tumblr did not make this convenient)

  So apparently all store clerks are devil worshiping sleazebags (check out the “I love the devil” tattoo at 0:15), and any attempt to even remotely weaken the stranglehold monopoly they have will destroy society (I'm not exaggerating, The Beer Store has painted a picture of a dystopian future if corner stores are allowed to sell beer).

  Although their claims are either lies or misinterpretations, if the evil corporation is to be believed, allowing beer and wine in convenience stores will increase the likelihood of teens drinking alcohol by 10 to 15%. Not that there are any facts to back this claim up, but let's assume it's true that that would happen: if beer and wine are so dangerous to the 17-year-old that it would disrupt the entire province that 10% more of them had sometimes access to it, then what happens on the date this teen turns 19, biologically, that makes this poison less dangerous to them? More importantly, why is it that you don't give a shit what happens to the younger 18-year-olds in Québec when they drink your product, which is being sold by the same convenience stores you will oppose selling your product here?

  All of that was rhetorical of course so I'll just make a few points of the things that I learned when reading about this comical idiocy:

  - THE BEER STORE IS A FOREIGN OWNED PRIVATE COMPANY! Owned by three foreign companies, (one of which is Canadian, but barely half Canadian). And it is interesting that most Ontarians don't know they are not government owned (only 13% of Canadians according to a 2013 Angus Reid survey).

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beer_Store

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labatt_Brewing_Company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molson_Brewery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeman_Breweries

   - Hypocrites! Opposed to selling in stores, supposedly, because it will make more kids drink beer, raise beer prices, and lower government tax revenue. The fact is that they continue to sell in convenience stores in Canada, in convenience stores across North America, and in convenience stores across the world. So they hate the rest of the world or they're lying to Ontarians? No, they just hate the idea that a market they control might have some competition… however small.

   - Liars! They claim that it will hurt smaller breweries. Let's pretend that the OCSA (the organization speaking for all convenience stores in Ontario) has not pledged 30% space to smaller breweries... The Beer Stores high shelf prices already stifles competition. Notice how only large breweries are speaking out in their favor. #FunFact: 90% of the beer that TBS sells is beer they produce. http://freeourbeer.ca/home/the-beer-store/. So they don’t support the smaller breweries but are afraid someone else might not as well? Bullshit!

  Anywho, you’re free to look into this yourself and find out that the international and very non-Canadian owners of The Beer Store don’t give a shit about us. Let them cite any skewed studies they’ve concocted all they like, but do yourself the favor of comparing that to their practices in dealing with the close relationship they have with the thousands of Canadian and American convenience stores they work with outside of Ontario.

  One of my favorite comments on this shit mirrors my own sentiments: (paraphrasing) I did not really care about this issue at first, but the more I read the more I want to watch TBS destroy themselves. At this rate they'll convince Ontarians to sell beer in high schools.

Edit:

—Tom Moher, vice president of Mac’s, speaking about this piece of artfully directed pro-Beer Storepropaganda, a screenshot of which is above. Moher was quoted in a Mac’s press release, issued yesterday in response to the thinly veiled attack ad, which basically portrays convenience-store owners as seedy, amoral creeps intent on plying Ontario’s impressionable youth with booze. (Here’s our second-by-second rundown.) Moher went on to defend Mac’s responsible-selling record, claiming that the company’s stores have a 95-per-cent success rate when it comes to checking IDs, according to mystery-shopper tests conducted by an independent third party. He then turned things around on the big, bad booze cartel. “We challenge the Beer Store to make their internal numbers public,” he said. “What penalties does the Beer Store face for infractions? Who enforces the Beer Store?” All good questions.

Let's not play, anybody who has spent more than a few weeks in an office knows that some office coworkers are out to get you down as much as they are out to get themselves a leg up. But to see that kind of selflessness among a group that should show solidarity for one another was disheartening. I actually found myself having to look up of the opposite of altruism to find something better than selfish, and I'm happy to say that all the words I found fit: egotistical, greedy, mean, self-centered, self-interested, and self-seeking.

 To be clear, I'm not saying that doing something for oneself is a bad idea; in fact, it is one of the better ideas a person can have. However, to have oneself in mind at the expense of another is pitiful and deplorable… Especially when what you are doing for yourself does not gain you any advantage yet very specifically sets a coworker at a disadvantage.

  Example:

Statement: well I fucked that up.

Bitchy reply: fucking told you so!

Statement: well I fucked that up.

Human reply: I'm sorry dear/don't feel bad/it's all right/we all make mistakes/[something not asshol-ish].

  I would honestly love to see the private home conversation where someone says to their partner "so at work today somebody took a chance at doing something nice and something went wrong and I totally laughed in their face and said I told you so”. Honestly, what kind of monster would bolster and cheer on this budding psychopath at home? If this is how they treat vulnerable or emotional people in public, what are they doing to defenseless animals in the privacy of their back room. (Chill out Lynette-wannabe, Manson would be proud.)

I probably drink a lot more pop than is healthy, or rather I don't exercise enough for the pop I'm drinking, so finding an at home soda maker that boasts no high fructose corn syrup and less overall calories while saving you money, was an exciting prospect. However, at $90 for the most basic model I had to do a little digging first.

 The two things that most people will probably care most about are the taste and how well it works (or perhaps just how easy it works). Personally I don't give a shit about the taste, as long as it mildly resembles something like 7up, I'm cool. But for those who do care about the taste it looks like it does a pretty good job of mimicking the flavors of many popular sodas. Ease-of-use also seems to live up to their claims. Although every taste tester I have seen says the recommended level of fizzing this is nowhere near that of fresh pop.

 I'm not really going to get into the calorie side of things, let's just call it broadly how healthy it is, because frankly I don't really care all that much. I read through a 30 page 5 year-long debate over the fructose and sucrose and all these other minute factors (check out the amazon comments section for the SodaStream kit at your peril), and I'm not convinced it is any better or worse than regular soda. I will make one exception however, the diet version looks like it has a scary additive and from what I'm I've heard taste like shit.

   Without knowing any of the above the deciding factor was ultimately the cost. SodaStream says that using their product carbonated water will cost you $.20 a liter or $.25 for the final product of soda. This might very well be true if not for three factors:

   The ones size of CO2 cartridge the system requires says that it fills 60 L worth of water with carbonate. Unfortunately I have not read a single review out of hundreds that agrees with this. That was one or two that suggested it might come close but most said it fell short by anywhere from 20 to 30 L.

 Falling short by a few liters might not matter so much if the recommended dose was exact or even close to the amount of bubbles you need you quickly find out however that this is not the case. To get soda water that tastes anything like fresh pop most people say you need an additional two pumps on top of the original three to get it right. This cuts the potential 60 L the canister could fill by close to a third.

 In addition to the nutrition debate was also a lengthy debate about the price of getting the CO2 cartridges refilled. The first thing to note, and I just found this out this morning after apply from SodaStream themselves, for at least one model of the product the first canister the system comes with is only filled to 17 L. this seems pretty slimy to me. Like selling you a car that's running on fumes while at the same time generously offering to sell you gas from the very same lot. More importantly, let's say it had been fully filled, there are only two ways to get it filled back up. The first is to find a participating store and exchange your empty canister for a filled one at a cost of about $18. The other is to exchange your canister directly with the company by mailing it to them this again costs $20 plus probably about the same in shipping fees.

 Without getting into the debate over so-called “food-safe CO2”, it is rather shady to make the refilling of these canisters so proprietary. I understand the need to make a profit but it becomes less and less understandable at this point. Especially when they're marketing now very clearly implies that they have some environmental agenda.

  So without making this any more complicated it boils down to the system being able to make a liter cost me anywhere from $.50 to a dollar. Like I said earlier though I don't really care too much about taste so unless my wife orders me not to I usually buy the $1 - 2 liter bottle of no-name crap soda. That means I'm already paying $.50 a liter. So what am I saving with SodaStream? the convenience of walking to the corner store? I like the walk, I already recycle every single pop bottle I throw out, and the system wouldn't even eventually pay for itself.

   This means it's not helping me save the environment, it's not saving me money, and I don't care for the convenience. Three strikes and the idea is out.

   I don't even want to bring this part up (because it is largely irrelevant to the product, for most... looking at you iPhone users) but in addition to all the other factors I should mention that there is a great deal of controversy with at least on of their factories. The company is based out of Israel and at least one of their factories is located on land that the United Nations has declared as illegally occupied. Without getting into “who owns the land”, you may or may not want to get involved with a company mired in this type of human rights controversy. I'm sure this company did not directly have anything to do with taking over the lander kicking anybody out of their homes but it seems that they are now part of the outcome of those two things.

    Cons:

   Expensive to get into

just as expensive as your average cheap pop to maintain

either inconvenient or expensive to refill the poor quality CO2 cartridges

the company has a history of lowering the CO2 cartridge size while raising the prices repeatedly over the years

   Pros:

     Fresh pop at a moments notice

  ignoring the price of the initial kit, it is indeed inexpensive (or at least no more expensive than your average no-name store brand)

once everything is set up it is very convenient and easy to use

for those too lazy to enjoy a walk, saves me having to walk two blocks every day or two, as well as saving me from having to store and then walk to the corner with a recycling bag filled of pop bottles once a week