Of course it depends on what it is, it's condition, and the time you return it.

But increasingly these days major retailers, like Walmart, Target, and Amazon, are just giving up and when you want a refund, they will give it to you and then just say, "keep the merchandise."

Recently i ordered a 3-pack of boxes of tea bags from Amazon and i received just one box, even though they charged me for all three.

I contacted them and they said, "ok, we're refunding your money. Anything else?"

I asked, "what do you want me to do with this box?" It was unopened and sealed in cellphone.

"Just keep it," they said.

Apparently when you actually return merchandise these days, there's really not much they can do with it.

If they restock it, which costs money, they have to discount it, so they might make little to no profit, or even lose money, on it, and they have to pay people to manage it.

Many items are shuffled off to discount retailers that specialize in selling "previously owned" merchandise, maybe even on eBay, or just thrown away.

Not too long ago a new category was created, online mattress sales.

Since you can't test these in a store, they offer long test-periods of usually 100 days, and you can return them during this period for a full refund.

(Personally i called for a return around 160 days in and they took it no problem, but that was during lockdowns.)

They even send someone to pick it up.

But what do you think they do with these semi-used mattresses? They can't just resell something that a person has been leaking on for months, maybe they give them to charity?

Nope. They just toss them.

So figured into the price of every such Purple or other mattress is the complete loss of the cost of the mattress.

Suffice it to say that it doesn't cost anywhere close to the $1000 you pay to make these things, or these businesses couldn't survive.

I don't actually know, but i wouldn't be surprised if these things cost only $100 to make, and $50 to ship.

Up to now stores like Target have been taking returns and often just tossing them, but increasingly they're saying, "keep it", which just generally transfers the cost of disposal from them to you.

How will they keep savvy people from buying stuff and "returning" it just to get it for free?

So far that's an economic calculation of how much more it costs them to take it back.

But it's interesting to realize that they mostly don't take stuff back so they can get value out of it by reselling it, they take it back to keep people from scamming them with fake returns.

And the landfills just keep growing.

His mother noted this but decided to just let him get a bit older and see if it didn't just work out.

But as he got older he got more insistent, saying things like he wanted to go to a doctor to be turned into a girl.

His mom still held back, but eventually her son got so disturbed about not feeling right around boys that she decided to take positive action and give her son her own estrogen pills.

It's notable that she couldn't just get hormones directly for her son; the things are actually more tightly controlled than many, especially on the right, think.

No one is just getting them for the asking.

This whole situation has turned into another culture war battle with people, mostly but not always on the left, saying that you have to honor and facilitate a child's wishes, while people in the right are strict and say you must simply hold the line and wait for the kids to "grow out of it".

Some people say it's ok to give puberty blocking hormones, because the effect will wear off if they're stopped, but this isn't necessarily true.

At the same time the idea of just "controlling" people because they're underage, a common overall philosophy of the right which is employed in their "abstinence only" sex policy for kids, denying them true sex education, is often not a very effective idea either.

When kids get to a certain age they start to feel their own agency, and realize that they can do certain things regardless of the rules imposed on them by parents and society.

Kids mostly discover that they actually can have sex regardless of what their parents say, and often do.

Also, if they're denied gender affirming care, they know they can run away, or kill themselves, which they often do.

So, is the left wrong about ever allowing puberty blockers, is the right wrong about categorically refusing gender affirming care to minors, both, or neither?

The Australian boy who was transitioning to be a girl decided to detransition back into a boy but there was one problem: he now has fleshy breasts which weren't compatible with being a boy, so he wanted to get rid of them.

Giving puberty blockers turns out to NOT be necessarily reversible as the left often says.

His mother agreed to get him surgery to reduce his breast tissue, but she had to take him to South Korea to get this done.

Despite what Jordan Peterson screams about immoral, criminal "butchers" chopping up children, gender-confirming surgery is ILLEGAL for minors in most countries.

There are NO doctors that will do this surgery on minors in America, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Europe, or Australia, and probably not Japan, which is to say, anywhere Americans can get to.

The right is hysterical and uninformed about facts on this issue.

But at the same time, the left is potentially wrong about puberty blockers being innocuous. They can cause significant permanent changes to the body that cannot be reversed without surgery, and some not even then, like bone growth.

There is a larger issue to consider here though, and that is the fundamental question of choice.

Is it ultimately too much of a burden, especially on children, to even allow them to consider gender a choice as far as it leads to permanent physical changes?

Sometimes in life it's better to accept things even if they're not exactly as you would like them, rather than taking in the responsibility of deciding, and then having to deal with the consequences of that choice for the rest of your life.

I made the choice to move to NM many years ago, so now if there's something i don't like about it, it feels like my fault.

If i had just stayed were i was i could just blame everything on the place itself.

I could say, "even though i may not like it, this is just the way things are."

If you're born a boy and it doesn't feel perfect, you can always say, "it's not my fault, this is what what given me."

But if you transition and there are problems, they are YOUR FAULT.

As Devo put it so long ago, "freedom of choice, is what you got; freedom from choice, is what you want."

The trans kid question is much difficult than we think.

But we do know certain things, like the conservative concept of just forcing things on people, even if they're kids, while it's arguably moral in some cases, is ultimately just not reasonable, because children are people and will pursue their own desires on their own no matter how much "power and authority" their parents think they have.

And Jordan Peterson as usual is just a complete idiot.

In the wake of last night's j6 committee hearing we have people talking about Trump running without any context in history.

The flat fact is that we NEED Trump to run because he's the only Republican we know from history that we can defeat.

The population just hasn't changed that much in four years when we beat him by 8 million votes.

As loud and obnoxious as Trump supporters are, there are no more of them now than there were in 2020. There's no "orange wave" coming, no fresh people aligning behind Trump.

If anything the hearings will probably result in an unknown number of defections from MAGA.

Trump seemed such a danger then that people came out in droves to defeat him.

If anything, after all the hearing plus his own actions and words Trump seems like even more of a threat now.

Some people are crabbing about Biden which only reveals them to be fools. 

Did you really vote for Biden thinking he would be the great progressive hero?

Well you're ALONE.

Biden was elected to not be Trump, and he has done a 100% perfect job. He's a PLACEHOLDER president.

The crux in all of this is if Trump doesn't run, DESANTIS will, and he's an unknown quantity.

If anything he's MORE dangerous than Trump, but voters, especially discouraged Biden voters, could be confused and think he's worth a shot.

But he will consolidate fascism as well as or better than Trump could. If Desantis is elected, this country is over. Christo-fascism will pick up speed and sink our democracy.

We need Trump because we know we can defeat him, because we already did it once.

So just maybe we don't want the DOJ to prosecute Trump, because if that prevents him from running again we could come to regret it.

Trump is a Republican loser, and that's what we need most of all in '24.

More important that Roe, than same sex or interracial marriage, more important than privacy, contraception, freedom of sexual acts.

The Independent State Legislature Theory.

If this is approved, then state legislatures will legally be able to ignore the vote of their state and certify electors for any candidate they wish.

Democrats, being principled, will respect the vote of the people, and certify electors for whatever candidate gets the most votes.

(Democrats would never have the guts to do what Republicans do, they never have, never will. So they won't say, "if the Republicans cheat, we'll chat back.")

Republicans, being completely unprincipled and willing to take any action to gain power, will discard the vote if it doesn't support the Republican candidate, and then verify the electors for their own candidate.

Because we must have "fair, secure" elections.

Once this happens Republicans won't allow a Democratic victory ever again.

The next thing to expect is for the Republicans to repeal the current two-term limit for presidents so they can keep their president in office indefinitely.

That means the next Republican president will serve for at least 10-40 years, and will be replaced by another hand-picked Republican right-wing ideologue.

If we expand the SCOTUS, they will simply cut it back. That's why we should do it immediately, it will only make a difference while there a Democrat in the White House.

Soon, you won't be able to cross a state border without passing a check point, initially as a way to deter abortion tourism, but once in place they will use it to establish loyalty to the party.

Under the most important criteria, Republicans cannot be considered to be American anymore.

But some people from Canada say it's not that easy.

Although abortions will always be legal in Canada because the right is enshrined in their Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the actual political situation makes it a bit messier.

Rules about the dispensing of healthcare are handled at the provincial level which means that province leaders make the rules about how abortions are done.

In some provinces they say that their Medicare, which is their universal free health care system, won't pay for abortions under certain circumstances.

And there can be differences depending on whether you go to a hospital or a clinic, a public clinic or a private one.

(Canada still has private for-fee health care providers too.)

So women in a certain province may even elect to go to a clinic in a different province for their abortion.

I haven't taken the effort to become an expert in Canadian provincial health care regulations and laws, so suffice it to say, it's a fucking mess.

Which makes it difficult for an American woman to just pop up and get an abortion.

In fact it can be so fraught that Canadian women often come the the US for THEIR abortions.

There are no actual restrictions against Americans coming to Canada for health care but of course they have to pay for it.

Still it might be better for Americans to go to NY or California, or other blue states to get an abortion, but they should make sure to plan for Canadians coming in and jamming up the schedules.

So plan carefully to make sure someone from Kamloops or Nanaimo doesn't get in ahead of you and mess up your abortacation.

This is not merely slightly off, it's drippy, stinky brown sphincter paste right in your mouth. Or, Typical Tucker.

Which keeps right-wingers coming back for more.

Meanwhile, Republicans are successfully criminalizing abortion, making sure that more white (and black, but they don't care about them) babies will be born to grow up and vote Republican.

THE REPUBLICANS ARE TRYING TO REPLACE US WITH BABIES!

Well, if they think I'm just gonna grow old and die just to let younger people take over this country they're sadly mistaken!

I'm a white American with a vote, and I'm gonna LIVE FOREVER!

"YOUTHS... WILL NOT... REPLACE US!"

(What's that? Oh, they will? You sure?)

Well i still don't like it, not one bit. Babies are RUINING THIS COUNTRY!

Pretty soon we won't have a country left.

(Thanks to DJT for that line.)

But they are ignoring what happened the LAST time.

Trump broke two records: he got the most votes for any sitting president, and he got the most votes AGAINST HIM off any president ever.

In the highest turnout ever.

From experience we can derive a very simple thing: the idea of Trump winning again scares the shit out of MOST voters.

No way over 80 million people, including millions who are generally just too detached to vote at all, got out to elect Biden, these were votes against Trump.

Even Democrats have been unsettled by the Big Lie, they are just as susceptible to the "if so many people are saying it so often there must be SOME truth to it" distortion, which makes them concerned that maybe must voters actually don't care if Trump gets elected again.

But the stakes have only gone up since then.

The idea that Trump could win in 2024 is a complete rejection of history.

Sure, Biden has gone down in the esteem of many, but we must remember: most people never expected much from him besides recognizing him as "not-Trump".

That hasn't changed.

If Trump actually does run, it will be great for Democrats, because it will assure a Democratic victory in 2024.

Not only that, but if anything Democratic voters have gotten more motivated since 2020. They can see the right rising, so of people were freaked out enough to get up and vote for some goofy old white guy before, they're gonna be just that much more driven in the midterms in the wake of the path of the right wing SCOTUS decimation of our rights and culture.

The Democrats are poised to receive a massive backlash benefit that they didn't even have to work for.

Instead of getting anxious, actual normal Americans should just sit back and watch the Republicans destroy themselves.

But then get up and VOTE, like we did in 2020.

After thinking about religion for many years, wondering why it came about and is so popular, and acknowledging that it couldn't be because it actually represents any kind of truth, I've come up with many ideas but none that have really seemed to fit.

But this one seems different.

One might call it, "the myth of perfectability."

At a certain point humans became conscious of their power to affect the environment, which also brought with it awareness of our absolute inability to accomplish many things.

We can't always get what we want, and often we achieve something only to ruin something else, like with climate change.

But we never do anything that is perfect and has no bad consequences.

This true for everything we do, including social relationships where we try to do the right thing but it gets misconstrued, like getting the best, must advanced vacuum cleaner for your wife: it's a great present, why didn't she appreciate it?

We seem to always be wrong about something.

I think this might be uniquely human, because there's no sign that animals are trouble by the things the can't do.

Everyone is always trying to improve, accomplish new goals, overcome boundaries, barriers and personal shortcomings. Everywhere you look there are self-help gurus and books, clubs, religions, that all seem to look to a perfect vision, whether that means you are perfectly in control of everything you do, or you are the perfect disciple of your god.

You eat a proper diet only to find out that the good things you eat aren't that good and the bad things you don't aren't that bad.

You run miles everyday for fitness and health, but then you knees break down, and you have a heart attack anyway.

You memorize the Quran, you pray perfectly and at every appropriate time.

You control your thoughts so you're not thinking of vengeance, or you're not selfish, or maybe you ARE selfish in a perfectly self-actualizing way.

In the East people are working for enlightenment, or nirvana.

In the West you want to get to Heaven because everything is PERFECT there.

It's been thought by many that religion is the default answer to the question, "how did i and everything else get here, and why are things the way they are?"

And this is a very valid idea.

But perhaps even underpinning this is they idea that life isn't perfect, but there must be a way to achieve this.

After all, perfection can be tantalizingly easy to imagine. 

There should be a way to write perfectly bug -free code, but no one ever does.

If you concentrate you can get close to perfection, but like Xenon's paradox, you can never quite get all the way there.

In our quest we always fail, but we can't stand the idea of just giving up. We keep trying to understand physics, and we keep inventing things that seem to get us closer, but there's always one thing that eludes us, and we never give up because that's too much like death.

We find the smallest thing in nature, the atom, only to find out that it's made of smaller things, which are themselves made of smaller things, so when will we actually know everything?

Believing in a religion helps us feel that ultimately we have a way to get to perfection, even if it demands that we accept supernatural things.

It's the only route to perfection that we can believe is absolute, so that as we thrash around in our lives we can feel like one day, it's possible we'll be perfect.

He sold all this oil to China to a company that his son Hunter has a large stake in.

The problem is that the oil market and process are actually complex but the right thinks it's like selling firewood from the back of a truck.

First, all oil is not the same, and neither are refineries. There's heavy crude, sweet crude, sour crude, and many other variants.

American refineries are best at refining heavy and sweet crude, whereas there are refineries in China that are better handling sour.

Plus at this time, US refineries are running at close to capacity so there's really not much we can do with more oil right now.

Oil is a global market, so if China is running low, they'll divert some away from us.

So if we sell them some of our lower quality oil, they won't be competing with us as much for other oil which could bring our refining volume down.

Suffice it to say that since it is a complex, global market, it doesn't really work to try to just hold it all within our country, that doesn't yield the best results, including low gas prices.

So Biden essentially tweaked the global market and now gas prices are coming down.

IT'S A MOTHERFUCKING GLOBAL MARKET, MORONS!

Republicans seeing gas prices going down will distract from that with scandalous lies about Biden trying to enrich his own family, instead of admitting the possibility that he actually just tried moving some oil to a place that he thought would strategically result in lower prices here, and he was right.

I'm not really sure if all this is true, except i doubt Biden brazenly sold US oil reserves to openly benefit his son, that's just stupid.

But it's a matter of record that we sold some oil to China and now our gas prices are going down.

Plus it makes sense that our refineries can be at capacity. Republicans think you just get more oil and it becomes gasoline that "appears" at your gas station.

They think that if prices go up it's because Biden won't let oil companies drill so we don't have enough, when in fact oil companies are flatly refusing to drill more wells right now because they feel it doesn't support their stock value.

Plus they have thousands of unused leases to drill, so they can do it any time they want. But since the US is a free market country, the government can't "make" anyone still or do anything.

That's called "freedom". In Russia the oil companies are nationalized, but the right calls that "communism" which is true.

So they are always screaming about freedom, but when there's an example about it they scream and blame our government for not FORCING oil companies to do what they think is right.

The right is all about freedom for themselves as long as everyone does what they're told.

Basically, they are children.

At the current moment, Republicans believe that Biden is fucking up everything in the government, but also, he's dead and being played by James Woods.

Trump is actually still president and in control of the military, but somehow he's not responsible for the messy Afghanistan withdrawal, that's the doing of the dead Democratic president.

They are not just children, they are heavily brain-damaged children.

And they're in charge of our future.

Americans are really fucked, even ignoring the fascist theocracy that's descending on us.

It's the housing market.

Banks and investors have noticed how convenient and profitable the single family housing market is, so right now they're starting to buy massive blocks, sometimes entire subdivisions, of regular houses for investments.

Not only do they not have to pay the mortgage rates we do, they mostly don't have to borrow money at all, because they just use cash from their funds instead of buying securities or other investments.

What does this mean? Housing prices are going WAY up, to the point that almost no one is going to be able to afford to buy houses anymore, and everyone is going to have to pay step rent to live in houses.

Not to mention supply will become increasingly constrained as houses are taken off the market, so competition will become extreme and drive prices up even higher.

And that's if you're lucky, because quite often they don't even bother to rent the houses out, it's easier to just let them sit empty.

The silver lining may be that there will be more work for caretakers hired to maintain all these empty houses, but that's pretty cold comfort.

Already there a significant fraction of houses that are sitting empty while people live on the street.

It's going to get much worse.

If you already own a house, good for you. But if you're younger and expect to move for any reason in the future, good luck.

The corporate kleptocracy doesn't care if we live in a democracy or autocracy, because the government works for them no matter what.

Autocracies are typically not that sympathetic to the economic problems of ordinary people, so the odds that we can hope for any kind of government regulation to help us will steeply dive as the conservative fascist minority takes power.

The only speck of cheer we're gonna get is to watch the shock of Republican voters as they realize they've fucked themselves just as bad as they've fucked us.

They won't be enjoying liberals tears because of the massive dilution from their own.

Yes, WAF. Well and truly.