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When did you last try with the OPC? I also have experience (a few) and noted a sharp decline post covid. My first go was for Freedom Mobile (success) but the representative from the OPC was borderline harassing me to accept the currently (STILL) completely broken authentication. When I tried again it was 'out of jurisdiction' and no sort of appeal process.

Calling it functional is not something I would do. Judges are also extremely critical of the compensation process a have essentially been forced to take it over. It's also still too new and risky so lawyers are reluctant unless it's paid up front.

If anyone with any say is reading this, I can still break into any Freedom Mobile account in under a minute, including the admin ones.


It's reasonable to predict that as physical media is phased out by the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, that the value of offline capable inventory will shift to an investment instead of a liability. Increasing their percent cut as a result.

Their margin was highest on used physical media, which continues to plummet. Physical sales are down from $13b in 2015 to $1.5b in 2025, while total sales of physical + digital went from $23.5b in 2015 to $60b in 2025. Physical media is a tiny fraction of current game sales, even if their margin skyrockets, they're stuck in a tiny kid pool of potential sales.

Not to be harsh on people who like this stuff, but reminds me of whenever people bring up how big vinyl record sales are now. Which is like, yea they're "big" just because it was a tiny market for the last decade and they're profiting mostly on nostalgia. Vinyl's not making some huge comeback, but it will probably sustain some niche resellers for a long time.

GameStop in Canada owns stores in active malls and in standalone locations. Hard to see the store empty, even at 1030am on a weekday in November.

Gamestop in Canada isn't owned by Gamestop in the US. They were also historically unprofitable so people might be in the stores but they aren't buying enough.

Now that you mentioned it, I seem to recall that news. The point stands that in some areas, that type of store can still perform.

Perhaps they would come to an agreement.


Speak for yourself. There's a reason places like Once Upon a Child and their parent stores exist. There's even other entirely digital stores on the sell for pennies instead of donating market.

People are broke. Just not everyone.


Spending days of negotiating on eBay with annoying strangers and packing it all up for a few lousy hundred is not my idea of a good time.

Let the workers at the recycling center sift through the stuff they are welcome to it.


On the opposite end of that is the plethora of psychiatry/psychology professionals whom are terrible at their profession and are likely causing more harm than good.

I see it along the same lines as brands, your typical Great Value psychologist will greatly underperform the Kirkland psychologist who will greatly underperform the ... and so on.

Then there's the subset of the population whom have been abused in the most horrific ways by psychologists.

Not to counter your point, just as additional discussion.


Sure, I've had my share of issues with therapists, but I think the solution is to fix the therapists, not to YOLO it by self-medicating with weed.


Great, how does one fix the therapists? Or is this another one of those tricky systemic generational problems that means that I'll have to YOLO something for my own life before they're fixed?


I'm not claiming I know how to fix it, but I am quite confident that the solution to fixing issues with depression, focus, or any other number of psychological issues is not reading a Reddit post about weed and/or mushrooms and pretending you understand enough about pharmacology to fix these problems.

Therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists require training and as such will still be considerably more likely to help you than weed. Obviously there are bad professionals; I've hired bad electricians before but that does not imply I should try and do all the wiring in my house myself.


You seem to be assuming that everyone can afford a therapist.


If only there were some sort of system where everyone who had money gave it to some organization, percentage based so rich people gave more, and then this organization used it to pay for therapists, and everything had access to therapy and other stuff like that? Totally insane crazy idea, I know. It could never possibly work. But just imagine if it did! Everyone would be able to get the therapy and help they deserve. What a world that would be. Alas.


No, I would say making therapy affordable would be part of fixing it.


I think there exists enough evidence of placebo benefits that it shouldn't be all that surprising. Moreover, regardless of any study or anecdote to the contrary, Those people will exist and see actual benefits, realized or not.


I tend to agree with you on this. I wanted to add however that Meta itself lets so many TOS violating ads in, that it seems like special treatment for ads that are much less undesirable than the ads normally pushed.

It's not just a Meta issue either.


The popup also scrolled down for me and I had to scroll back up to hit the X.


I worked HP CS in Highschool and during my time there I created a HTML/JS replacement for a unbearably slow tree system that made a 10+ second network call every single question(often 20+ questions and a tree copy was required for notes). Mine was instant.

They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.

At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.


Quasi-related but I did the same thing at RadioShack for inventory. It was a long process of scanning each product, looking at the scanner and manually verifying the price on the tag.

The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.

So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.

Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.


> understandably

why?


I was running scripts on their PoS (EDIT: point of sale) terminals to hit an internal service. If I were the sysadmin at corporate, people like me would make me nervous too (even though I wasn't doing anything nefarious).


>my AHT flagged me

Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?


Acronym use here to single being part of an in-group. It is one of the most annoying shift in tech language over the past decade. I partly blame it on all the certification testing that has popped up over that time frame.

It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.


    > over the past decade
You must be young. Do you not think there were similarly acronym infested tech speak in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s? All of those decades also had plenty of certification testing.


This one is a call center metric. Similar to after call work or first call resolution. This one, I believe, is average handle time.


This comment is so spot on, it’s also big in military circles, especially over past 15 years. It can even be said that frequent (over) use of acronyms is based in insecurity



That highly prestigious in-group of call-center workers....

It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.


If you're not part of their industry, just look up the acronyms instead of getting mad. "Audience" is laughable, they are not posting solely for your entertainment.

And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.


Average Hold Time


Average Handle Time actually


If yours was instant, why would your AHT decline? Shouldn’t you be way faster? On many questions you would have saved over 3mins on network calls alone.


I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.


The AHT value indeed went down 3 minutes below the average, which is generally a good thing so long as you are doing everything well still. All outliers get checked and mine was the lowest. I was honest about the tool, including that it was offline. Their supposed policy was no personal tools and as it was during "probation" (first 90 days in Ontario), they could fire without cause, and did, immediately.


A good business would have promoted you to the dev team so they could reduce that metric for everyone.


As an intern at @bankcompany I decided to go one step further than what my ticket was asking for and decided to implement something that crunched data in a very obvious way. Was nicely asked to revert it, because @bankcompany already had several fulltime employees doing exactly the same thing.


I've seen this in many groups. Every time I laugh thinking about private enterprise efficacy. Then I shed a tear. Distribution problem.


AHT?


Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.


Average Handle Time


Assistant Head Teacher


> made someone look bad

That, or that it DoS-ed the database.


It was offline.


And making each click trigger a 20 second DB query doesn’t?

How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?


If you prefetch all those options in the background, I bet the DB would be unhappy.


It's been a while but as a 12 year old I completely broke the library system, installed cracked Starcraft, and refroze DeepFreeze afterwards.

Not to counteract your point, just as an anecdote I like remembering.


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