Disclaimer: I am not a physicist; merely an engineer.

seller -> paypal -> card company -> real money

I use this a lot with sellers in the UK. If you ask them directly for a refund because they forget something or sent you crap (dominos are good at this), it is like getting blood out of a stone. Even being polite, some people will just jam the phone down and tell you to fuck off.

If you pay with paypal, they usually don't even respond and the money just gets returned after 2 weeks by default with paypal. If they do respond they usually just refund a portion anyway.

So what you're getting on top is arbitration.

If you use your credit card, you're pretty screwed here in the UK unless the amount is over £100.

The big issue is really setting up manufacturing and supply chain on a large scale when you do get it working.

If we improve physical and mental health over the next couple of generations I think there will be a massive shift away from this failure mode. The problem is that those services are being cut as is the education that supports them. So we're screwed.

Also a 4 year cycle on government before someone comes and erases progress or long term goals instantly and just burns a mountain of cash doesn't work either.

I'm a firm believer that you should never ask your user to make a decision or look over their shoulder. Not once ever. You should listen to their complaints and ideas when they come to you, then build your strategy on that. Be reactive, not prescriptive. That empowers the user, shows respect and results in a satisfactory product that benefits the user which after all is the end game.

Telemetry invades the user's privacy. Feedback does not empower the user because the user expects a reaction from it which is unlikely. A/B testing results in churn for the user which does not show respect, merely that they are a test subject.

Microsoft as a fine example could learn a lot from listening to their users rather than steamroll ahead based on collected telemetry and feedback data.

A fine example: People didn't want UWP/metro and still don't today. I have yet to meet one person who uses that side of windows 10. They wanted shit that worked, was faster and kept out of their way and didn't wreck the workflow that they had invested years in learning or had someone experienced close at hand to help them with it. 90% of the userbase just installs chrome and does everything in there as well so that stuff just gets in the way.

I regularly hear East European stations here in London, UK with a random length bit of wire strung off a home made 40m receiver and into a tree though. Noise here is terrible so I have had to use very heavy narrow bandwidth audio and IF filtering.

If you want long distance, be prepared to use very narrow bandwidth i.e. learn CW though (its not that hard although I have trouble copying some of the faster stations).

I’ve only managed to receive so far due to a cruddy antenna but that was with a $30 Baofeng radio from Amazon.

Note: you need a license but it’s pretty easy to get, at least in the UK and you learn a lot while getting it. It also tends to cost you a lot of money in the end because it’s really interesting :)

Then there was a relapse :(

They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc

In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)