‘Tis the season for returning stuff

Retailers have realized that people are more likely to buy something if they can return it later if they are not satisfied. When it comes on online purchases, they are even more likely to do so if the company offers to pay for the return mailing costs. This has resulted in some people taken advantage of this to essentially get free short-term loans of products that they use for a specific occasion or period and then return.

I had thought that retailers simply put the retuned items on the shelves to be resold. But according to Samantha Bee, much of this stuff is just thrown away and ends up in landfills, a tremendous waste.

Live by social media, die by social media

We live in an era when people have the opportunity to broadcast the minutiae of their lives far and wide via social media. It is surprising to me that so many people do not seem to realize that along with the attention they receive, there are also serious pitfalls. In the rush to be in the spotlight and impress their circle of friends and relatives, they seem to lose all sense of judgment. Nowhere was this more evidence on a large scale than in how so many of the people who invaded the Capitol building on January were eager to tell everyone of their exploits.

First of all, they gave the authorities information about their identities that allowed them to be arrested. Secondly, their online posts were effectively confessions of guilt. The best they could hope for was leniency on the grounds that they were too stupid to know that they were breaking the law. But judges are taking their posts into account in determining how harshly to sentence them and they are not amused.
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Don’t they carefully vet the White House physician?

The White House physician is an important job, since he is supposed to supervise the health of the US president. So it is surprising that Ronny Jackson, who held that post under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is a proponent of wild conspiracies, the most recent of which concerns the Omicron variant.

Roughly 24 hours after most people in America first heard about the Omicron variant of Covid-19, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson (R) offered a conspiracy theory to explain what was happening.

“Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant,” tweeted Jackson, who, not for nothing, is also a physician. “They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”

And then there was this from Fox News personality Pete Hegseth: “Count on a variant about every October, every two years.”

The idea here is clear: The emergence of Omicron is a political gambit by Democrats designed to aid them at the ballot box.

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Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving day in the US.

Americans seem to have a love-hate relationship with this holiday. In many families it seems to be anticipated with dread at the thought of a large number of family members who do not share the same views and often do not get along with each other being expected to share a very long afternoon and evening together that can end up with arguments. And yet to not turn up can also cause problems, so it is a lose-lose proposition.

This Saturday Night Live sketch uses the framing of a Target advertisement to make this point.


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