dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Maybe as part of those 100 new stores they can re-open one of the three around me that they abruptly closed several years ago. One of those was one of their “flagship” stores and had about the same square footage as one of the larger REI locations and seemed to be doing a brisk business right up until the end. So I’m not sure what was up with that. My nearest EMS is now 120+ miles away which is a bit silly if all I need is some chalk or something.

I did score some mega-clearance stuff back then, though. So that was neat. Like a pair of Gore Tex Ascent pants for $15 or thereabouts.

They are also the only national retailer that sells AR-15’s.

Eh, what? Cabelas/Bass Pro Shops are certainly nationwide.

Yeah, that turned into a Laurel and Hardy skit in short order. “But it’s ‘lifetime!’”

Uh-huh. You want to bet?

I had their credit card, too, for the simple expedient that you could take the rewards points and cash them out. You can’t do that anymore, because you can’t cash out membership rewards at all anymore. Which to be frank was the only reason to shop there since the pathologically sell everything at 100% full list price all the time. The dodge was you could get your discount in a roundabout way later by combining your normal membership points with the extra from the card, and then cash it out. Now that the membership points are just more company scrip, this is pointless. You may as well just buy the same stuff from somebody else for less, since there’s certainly no longer any ethical benefit to purchasing from REI to make up for paying extra.

Meanwhile, US Bank (the bank which used to issue their credit card before the transition) offers a Visa with precisely the same rewards structure as the old REI card, sans the extra couple of points on specifically REI purchases, which you can likewise cash out. So I just got one of those instead. It seems I wasn’t the only one who figured this out, because the CSR I spoke to in the process told me a lot of people were doing the same thing at that time.

I’d argue it already has. I no longer shop there and haven’t done so for years, nor does anyone else I know in any of my hiking/backpacking/rock climbing/riding circles.

Knowing full well that they measure their “success” via their membership count, I also bullied them into cancelling my membership several years ago. That was an interesting experience.

Not a case of “even REI.” REI revealed themselves into just another boardroom full of bad guys in 2022 and have not improved since.

REI turned corporate or at least pro-corporate shortly after the pandemic. This all went down probably not coincidentally right after they hired an ex-Amazon exec, Cameron Janes, to be their “Chief Commercial Officer.”

They’re turning into another profit motivated shitshow and have become explicitly anti-union, hostile to their own labor, and also hostile to their own customers. They did this in the name of making more money, but given that it pissed off swath of their core customer base who are probably more vocal, left leaning, and activist than the average bunch of consumers who all quit buying from them, I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a net gain.

when a calculator from the 80s can do the same thing.

1970’s! The little blighters are even older than most people think.

Which is why I find it extra hilarious / extra infuriating that we’ve gone through all of these contortions and huge wastes of computing power and electricity to ultimately just make a computer worse at math.

Math is the one thing that computers are inherently good at. It’s what they’re for. Trying to use LLM’s to perform it halfassedly is a completely braindead endeavor.

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, to alleviate the effects of the…Anyone? Anyone? The Great Depression passed the, anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.

I already do. Flip a coin: Heads, the car is operating itself and is therefore being operated by a moron. Tails, the owner is driving it manually and therefore it is being operated by a moron.

Just be sure to carefully watch your six when you’re sitting at a stoplight. I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting right in the center of the lane, because the odds are getting ever higher that I’ll have to scoot out of the way of some imbecile who’s coming in hot. That’s hard to do when your front tire is 24" away from the license plate of the car in front of you.

I have absolutely no idea what I’d do with this but I want one.

There you go.

And the Greeks were reportedly setting ships on fire with sunlight and mirrors millennia ago.

I’m positive competent nerds make up none of their earnings, because we’ve all been pirating Microsoft software ever since we were tall enough to reach the keyboard.

He did what?

Nature really is out of balance lately.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.

I’m not sure pissing off Miyazaki is a great move. He’s an old Japanese man who is famously so bitter that when he chain smokes he gives the cigarettes cancer, communicates largely in contemplative one-liners, and is known to own precisely one sword. And he has a beard. We’ve all seen this movie; we know how that kind of thing ends.

A parallel comment to my rant yesterday, I see the pushback has already begun in Garmin’s reviews against this nonsense. All of the recent reviews of their Android app are now overwhelmingly complaints about the subscription addition, and I suspect iOS is the same. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to blow Garmin up over this on any platform you can get your grubby hands on.

I know posting this here is probably more like spitting on a forest fire; I’m sure the seven or eight nerds here on Lemmy dedicated enough to care have already put Garmin on blast for this (myself included), but it never hurts to make sure.

Pebble, but neither of their upcoming revived models have the same spread of sensors shoved into them as Garmin does if that sort of thing matters to you.

I would happily buy something just like my Fenix without the stupid pulse ox/heart rate monitor, but I understand I am in the minority there. I’d keep the GPS, compass, temperature, altimeter, and barometer functions. But then, I’m probably the sole person on Earth who would be the first to buy a phone without a goddamned selfie camera on it, either.

Not moving any of the previously free features yet. Don’t worry, it’ll happen.

The compute power behind their dumbass “AI” push that nobody wants will not be cheap, and when it inevitably fails to turn a profit (because we all know damn well it never will), they’ll be looking for new ways to squeeze users for revenue.

If I were him I’d just let Putin release the damn tapes, since it seems impossible that anything could actually damage his image with his rabid followers anyway.

But that’d require one functioning brain cell, and if he had that we probably wouldn’t be in this position now to begin with.

And they need to escape unscathed every time. We just need to ensure that our ratio is 2:1 or greater. There are more of everyone else than there are of them.