Amazon lost its way when in started acting as a storefront for others, rather than a bookstore. In other words, a good twenty years ago.
Tech gear in particular is one of the things that's extremely risky to order from there (along with food, meds, and anything for babies/small children), as there are a lot of fraudulent or damaged goods mixed into their supply. Go to a specialist supplier instead. Newegg isn't great, but at least they don't appear to mix inventory from different sellers the way Amazon does.
The problem is maintaining competition. Another thing those MBAs salivate over is the idea of buying out the competition, and their squeeze-the-company-dry method can give them just enough money for just long enough to buy a competing business to run into the ground when the original one starts to give out. Like I said, parasitic fungus: move to a new host as the old one dies. Keeping them from spreading can only be accomplished by stronger government regulation than many people seem willing to see in place, alas.
I'm not saying he won't. He might, but it depends on how well it plays to his base when the election rolls around, which isn't going to happen tomorrow.
Modest profit isn't an issue, but most businesses of more than a certain size accumulate MBAs like some kind of parasitic fungus. They then proceed to wring out as much money as possible in the short term while destroying the business in the long term.
If it's just a local guy making 5% or so a year off his one rental shop, that's no problem.
Plumbing, apparently, is one issue—residential buildings typically need much more of it than office buildings do. Not an insurmountable problem, but costs $$ to overcome.
Usenet started out as a forum-like system, with individual messages grouped into discussion threads (the protocol worked kind of like email, with messages indicating which other message they replied to, so that client software could build a tree for each group). That side of it was eventually killed off by lack of good moderation options or support for embedded media.
People were using this service to put up money to encourage programmers working on open-source software to fix specific bugs that were especially bothering them. For instance, if text in software X didn't scale properly and that was a problem for you, you could use this service to offer $100 to programmers working on X to fix the text scaling. Once they got it fixed, they collected the money.
The service went bankrupt.
When it went bankrupt, some programmers didn't get their promised payment for bugs they had fixed.
The money didn't get returned to the people who had paid for the bug to be fixed, either.
So now both programmers and users have lost money because of this service, and everyone's ticked off.
This has always been the case with the right wing. They believe that wealthy white straight cismen are the perfect expression of humanity, and everyone who deviates from that mold should be punished. Their "freedom" exists only for people they regard as the top of the hierarchy and basically consists of the freedom to be greedy assholes.
I wish people would get this through their heads and stop electing them. It doesn't matter what the talking head du jour does or doesn't say—the Conservative Party of Canada's track record is clear all the way back to the days when it was the Reform Party, and even the most apparently innocuous member of it is complicit.
The Liberals are quietly corrupt in spots and sometimes stunningly inept, but the Conservatives are nasty. It's past time for the NDP to have their chance to screw up the country instead.
In the absence of a local club, I'm not sure. I mean, have a look at the cover on this one—I understand that's considered one of the more reliable and informative guides for the locations it covers, which is why it's still in print after 30+ years, but the only reason that photo doesn't look AI generated is that you can't imagine how they would have come up with the prompt . . .
You're correct: in all fairness, it wasn't you, specifically, who used the word "lawn", and I could have chosen somewhere else to slip my reply into the subthread.
Gravel and cactus is maybe an exaggeration, but I expect there's some kind of native groundcover that would be Good Enough. Or set up a buried greywater irrigation system if you really must have that lawn of imported green grass. Or take the kids and pets to the park to play, like apartment-dwellers do. Or just, y'know, suck it up during the bad years and accept you're going to have a brown lawn from time to time. The ridiculously wasteful setup that exists in most suburbs, where people baby along vast tracts of climate-inappropriate grass cultivars, should never have existed.
In all fairness, there are Boomers out there who are tech-literate. Thing is, they only call for help when they have a real problem, so it's the other ones we remember.
Amazon lost its way when in started acting as a storefront for others, rather than a bookstore. In other words, a good twenty years ago.
Tech gear in particular is one of the things that's extremely risky to order from there (along with food, meds, and anything for babies/small children), as there are a lot of fraudulent or damaged goods mixed into their supply. Go to a specialist supplier instead. Newegg isn't great, but at least they don't appear to mix inventory from different sellers the way Amazon does.