I left a review on the BBB, when I was a student, after being promised a gift card for a video interview of a product for one of the large tech companie's PMs.
I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process.
Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue.
Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.
The BBB is geared for companies, if you have an open issue, it becomes a back and forth ping pong match to see who can outlast each other. Companies HR will respond to the BBB update, they wear you out, and it gets closed as resolved.
Its not.
Its utterly useless.
Same goes for some state agencies, file a complaint, but turns into a response back and forth, until someone finally gives up responding, and default closed.
Systems are designed to make you give up and go away.
Once I requested an insurance reimbursement for a transportation expense of about $20.00, on the basis that their chosen service failed me that night.
The reimbursement was denied, so I appealed. COVID lockdowns were active, and the petty bureaucrat on charge of my appeal barely knew how to use her phone. She said the request was denied due to illegible documentation, which was bullshit.
They announced that the appeal was still undecided, but they wanted to grant themselves an extension of several weeks to study it more closely. I appealed the extension, and presently I was mailed a check for the full amount.
How much is your time worth? Is $20 worth an hour of wrangling bureaucracy?
I would log into the BBB couple times a week and respond, "Still not resolved, did not receive refund", and click the "not resolved". The business would reply "We sent the check", after 90 days, I didnt log in for a week, auto closed as resolved.
I had an eye doctor assure me that my discomfort with my new glasses was normal and that I'd just have to get used to it. After several months of nausea and discomfort, I finally went to a new eye doctor that fixed the problem immediately with a different frame and fit. It turned out that the prescription was correct, but the fit was wrong.
Before accepting daily discomfort and nausea as a new norm, you may want to try having more than one eye doctor look at it, if you haven't already, for alternate opinions for tests and on all the parameters of fit. There's alot that goes into getting your vision corrected and a few tiny adjustments off can end up causing persistent nausea and discomfort similar to what you are describing.
In my experience, no it's not worth it indoors in a relatively clean environment. I built 3 of these for myself with dust, carbon, & hepa filters, and I used them for over a year.
They are louder, use more energy, are less efficient, uglier & cost more money than several store bought alternatives which often include several carbon & hepa filter replacements which is the main expense in building these fans.
They work well in the garage though, and if you don't plan on changing the filters frequently they are the cheapest build option.
I'm a historian and I recently cited Herodotus in one of my forthcoming papers. Is he reliable? We certainly can't assume so. But the same goes for Thucydides and every other source from the ancient world. It's all about triangulating between different sources rather than relying on any one account.
In my case, Herodotus was describing a Scythian practice (the use of cannabis) that we've been able to corroborate, in its broad outlines, using archaeological finds, which to my mind makes it reliable enough to use.
If anyone's interested, this is a quote from the paper, which is a work in progress and not published yet: When Herodotus described the purification practices of Scythians following elite burials, he wrote of a ritual involving the construction of a tent-like enclosure of “wool mats.” At the center of this enclosure, the Scythians threw cannabis onto “red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it.” According to Herodotus, “the Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath.” The term Herodotus used here – κάνναβις, or kánnabis – was a loan-word from Old Persian (kanab). From Greek, it made its way largely unchanged into Latin (cannabis) and from thence into the Romance languages and English." [Citing A. D. Godley, trans. The Histories of Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 4.74-6.]
This is probably outside your wheelhouse, but do you happen to know why the Persian word with a single N would have come into Greek with a reduplicated N?
Not only am I interested to hear that "hot boxing" is an ancient practice, but also the sense of immediacy that I now have with ancient Persia over our shared etymology of kanab.
I love history for that. Just knowing about the past gives me a feeling of connection to places I've never been to or times I'll never get to witness.
As an aside, the Scythians were not in what we'd today consider Persia (Iran). They originated around the north coast of the Black Sea, and extended east and southeast from there along the Eurasian steppe.
It truly is fascinating to follow the flow of cultures through time - sometimes coexisting, sometimes crashing against one another, yet other times melting together.
For a look at the least assimilated remaining descendants of Scythians (who were largely absorbed by early Slavs by the early middle ages) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians
“Reading the literature on the word for ‘Cannabis’ in the languages of Eurasia soon puts one in mind of what one is told frequently happens when the authorities conduct a raid to confiscate Cannabis and attempt to identify to whom it belongs: everyone involved says it belongs to someone else, generally someone conveniently not present at the moment.” [0] Some dictionaries claim a Scythian origin.
0 - Miller, R. A.: Korean Evidence for Three Eurasian-Altaic Wanderwörter Scenarios, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 51/3: 296.
A word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually
in connection with trade, so that it becomes impossible to establish its
original etymology, or even its original language.
Interestingly even back in Egyptian times there was a corroded version with H instead of C:
𓎛 𓆰 𓈖 | H.n | cannabis
Sounds like a magnet for noisemakers to route their trips through while staying just at or under the annoyance threshold -- a threshold which, with increased sensitivity, may be shifting lower.
You'll note that I already suggested a small additional payment in escrow for noisemakers to stay away for a few weeks or whatever. I also doubt even the most noise-sensitive neighborhoods would be willing to pay enough to make regular, special trips just for noise-profiteering worthwhile. If they were, it would probably approach the strength of preference that they'd be willing to fight to change local noise ordinances and get an enforcement push.
Civilians, not only soldiers, were gassed by the German's munitions resulting in long term injuries and deaths. It's surprising this isn't more well known, and that Germany was not internationally censured, tried, & made to pay compensation to the victims of these disgusting actions following their conduct in the Holocaust.
Why's it so necessary for Germany to sell chemical weapons to be used in a warzone anyway? I wouldn't be surprised to see these were the same companies or individuals that acted 40 years earlier.
I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process.
Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue.
Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.