Climb down off of your soapbox. Amazon is what it is because of early strategic decision making and long term shittiness. I’m talking about aggregation and exposure to semi-local partners.

I’m trying to use Ebay more often but the source is hard to verify.

I just wish there was an aggregator that isn’t Walmart or Amazon or Temu. I try really hard to spread my shopping around and actually buy local when I can. It just sucks Amazon is so easy.

I take full responsibility for myself. I try to shop independently when possible.

My only comment here is that I run a small business and decisions can occur that I don’t always see up front and with which they negatively impact employees or customers. I also know many large clients where the leadership delegates decisions down to sometimes stupid or misguided staff. The balance here comes to how a leader reacts when they learn of the hurtful actions and is there an opportunity for change.

Yes. There are no whales in Texas.

Holy shit people. It’s a fucking joke. Look at the photo… It’s a Google ad algorithm.

Pi hole FTW.

What is that secondary script on the keyboard. I haven’t seen that before.

Cool idea BTW.

A long time.

The only hope I have is that the next generation will bring more love. There is a lot of disenfranchisement due to the changes over the last 40 years. The lasting effects of coal and steel work reduction, offshoring of jobs, minority rights improving, immigration changing demographics. All of these have been very strange and alarming for a lot of people my age and older. It’s all normal to my kids though.

You’re right tho. Empires rise and fall. The whole world is fucked if we’ve hit our peak.

I normally don’t like to admit this but you’re right. OP needs to move.

Installed pi-hole this week. Number one blocked domain with 1600 queries… Scribe.logs.roku.com.

Makes perfect sense. I’m not as familiar with the admin side of things.

TY for taking the time to explain.

Would you care to expand on this? I understand many of the pieces mentioned but am not an expert on this and am trying to learn.

I talk out of my ass at times, and the bit level statement could be one of them. Nevertheless Spinrite is a little known but amazing tool for HDD and SDD maintenance and recovery. Just go hop over to the forums. I used to be a member in them back in the late 2000s. You’ll see. There are deep drive nerds and they know their stuff.

This is the best I can find in a pinch. It’s possible it reads at the sector level and repairs at the bit level. It’s been awhile since I’ve been knee deep in Steve’s ass and testimonials. Old Security Now episodes have a lot of info on how it works.

https://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm

Data recovery companies work the hardware which can be a point of failure. Spinrite tries to recover the data before the hardware fails. The greater density a disk has, the more failures are expected and error correction just assigns bad sectors as they fail. Between that and the OS, my understanding is that the slow degradation of a drive is managed until it can’t be. Even running Spinrite on a new drive is beneficial because new drives come with bad sectors. By assigning them as bad up front you get ahead of bad sectors and even can catch a lemon before it crashes. I’ve recovered unreadable drives with Spinrite. It’s impressive. It doesn’t solve all issues, but it’s really good.

I think you are mistaken and don’t understand how Spinrite works. It reads at the bit level and only reads once at level 1. If the data is going to be lost at the first read then it’ll crash when read by a professional company.

Buy Spinrite. It’s not perfect but it’s the best thing available for drive maintenance and recovery. I have used it for over 10 years. If the drive is dying it’ll take forever, but I’ve recovered data that was nearly gone due to sector loss. It goes down to the bit level BTW. Someday Steve will release v7 … someday.

Damn. Why didn’t you say that sooner. Now I understand how it works! Thank you.