What a fantastic piece by a really good author. Worth reading in its entireity, long as it is.

Lets just balace the penny by saying it makes you 100x more likely to succeed.

Im not certain about lemmy communities but look up plexshares or jellyfin shares in reddit perhaps?

Also while I do agree money complicates things, since you are the purchaser, typically it carries less risk.

In either event stay away from shares that do not offer a cheap (few days) or free trial. Then again never sign up for “lifetime” bs, go on a monthly plan so you can drop them if the QoS drops.

Yes. Youll have to find one that works for your region though (local servers will have better latency and b/w)

Na homie that was almost 10 years ago.

Or a reverse Narcos TV show where south american authorities enter and destroy US gun factories.

Here I agree with you. They either got a retun reason like “never used, changed my mind” or simply figured out that for a vast majority of purchases with return codes like this, it is safe to reshelf the object and ship it as new.

Whether the object is to be considered “new” or “like new / used” is probably a gray area. I’m not aware of where most other retailers draw the line on this one (walmart, target, costco, etc.). I’m sure the problem is even harder for online retailers, mostly because its much easier for people to lie on an online return form.

Regardless, my only gripe was people in this thread assuming a conspiracy where they intentionally rotate and peddle defective items hoping someone eats the cost.

Playing devils advocate here but… I suspect what is happening here is a previous purchaser bought it (broke it?), returned it under a different reason (eg. I dint like it) and Amazon decided it is not worth the hassle of rechecking every return labeled as such.

Mind you this is no consolation for someone like you who has go to through this return process, but I cant believe Amazon is “winning” by keeping a defective product like this in rotation long enough for someone to “eat the cost”. Defective products hurt Amazon as well and I’m sure they’d rather take the hit if they could pin point which products are defective.

You could argue that they should bear the cost of validating every return, but clearly someone has crunched the numbers and the program is likely not cost effective.

If I understand correctly, carrier locking is different from Bootloader locking. One implies freedom to use the device on any provider network, while the other is for installing a custom ROM. A Samsung flagship can be bought unlocked by paying full price, but you cannot unlock the bootloader and install Graphene, for instance.

14 year account in the gutter. Exciting times ahead though.