It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them directly.
All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank will then investigate (however they do that), and eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may include a chargeback).
It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail. Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own rates are affected (or worse).
Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either -- they just want to be made financially whole, however that happens.
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I had a problem once with a local record store where I got charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off. But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem or hand it over to someone who could.
So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and they would investigate. So that's what I did.
The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the problem by refunding both of the charges, asked if that made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked me for my business.
That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my fondness for the business was completely restored.
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Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the vendor did was fix the problem.
The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.
I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands of dollars there over the course of decades, and they knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it was time to take down some release date posters and put up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still kept giving them money until they eventually closed their doors forever because the owner was old and the building got ruined in a flood.
You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on their own. That's all I need to know about the place. Those fuckin' scumbags!
Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to me.
There are rich people who charter private jets instead of own them. Their personal whereabouts aren't being tracked in the air. (They get to skip the entirety of TSA screening for these charters, too.)
But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in Aspen.
Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet, but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the curtain.
Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.
Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would ruin their own lives.
Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.
Flock tracks everyone.
By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals, that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.
Eh, it's probably OK either way. People have been saying since day 1 that Raspberry Pis are not low-power devices and they're probably right.
Everything is relative, though. In terms of maximums, a Pi 4 (for example) can use up to about 7 Watts under load by itself, which adds up fast when operating on batteries.
But a single 1 meter string of 144 WS2812B LEDs can suck down up to around 43 Watts, and 43 is a lot more than 7. :)
Lighting rigs are thirsty. The processing (even if it's the whole Pi) is generally a small drop in the bucket.
50% is probably unrealistic. Nobody really wants to diminish their storage by 50%.
Let's set a fixed threshold -- 100GB, say -- and play out both methods.
Method A: One or more ballast files are created, totalling 100GB. The machine runs out of storage and grinds to a halt. Hopefully someone notices soon or gets a generic alert that it has ceased, remembers that there's ballast files, and deletes one or more of them. They then poke it with a stick and get it going again, and set forth to resolve whatever was causing the no-storage condition (adding disk, cleaning trash, or whatever).
Method B: A specific alert that triggers with <100GB of free space. Someone sees this alert, understands what it means (because it is descriptive instead of generic), and logs in to resolve the low-storage condition (however that is done -- same as Method A). There is no stick-poking.
Method C: The control. We do nothing, and run out of space. Panic ensues. Articles are written.
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Both A and B methods have an equal number of alerts for each low-disk condition (<100GB). Both methods work, in that they can form the impetus to free up some space.
But Method A relies on a system to crash, while Method B does not rely upon a crash at all.
I think that the lack of crash makes Method B rather superior all on its own.
A + B would be best. Warn at 200, file to reserve the last 100 (or 50 or whatever). That way if the fill is too fast to react to in time, you still have a quick way to temporarily gain disk space, if needed to solve the problem.
Indeed. I've been doing that for a quite a number of years now.
I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.
And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.
It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.
Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.
(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)
About a decade ago, I discovered that the HD 530 iGPU included with my budget-oriented i3-6300 CPU was better-performing than the physically-impressive SLI pair of 9800GTs I had been using, at something like 1/10th the power consumption.
I think that's a profoundly balanced perspective on a possible future wherein automation has successfully dealt with most of the mundanities of producing the things we need to live and enjoy life.
It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation, and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to all work together.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
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