Weenie Roast!

[GreenWeenie]

A dedicated thread, in the appropriate place, for people to vent about the GreenWeenie!

[squall458]

u posted some awesome deals, no venting for me

[GreenWeenie]

And while I'm on it, you appropriated someone else's deal for your big claim to fame.

Hey Neil... if you ever show up here... would you mind telling me what my "big claim to fame" was? I'm not here for the glory, but I'm curious as to whose deal you think I appropriated? I always try to attribute credit where it's due.

[GreenWeenie]

u posted some awesome deals, no venting for me

Thanks ... just trying to give people an appropriate place to complain about my non deal posts.

[Degenerate]

Don't know who you are. Never you around before.

[MTL-TechY]

Thanks ... just trying to give people an appropriate place to complain about my non deal posts.

you seem to post great deals, and advice is good too. Also everytime i see your avatar, I have confidence in your advice. keep posting away!!!!!!!!!

[kornstar369]

A dedicated thread, in the appropriate place, for people to vent about the GreenWeenie!

im just curious where it is you got your name from greenweenie? or should i dare not ask?
lol

[fitbrit]

Repost!! Please do a search before posting.

[GreenWeenie]

Repost!! Please do a search before posting.

Although ... I am surprised no one had started a "What an Ass GreenWeenie Is" thread yet!!

GreenWeenie (and the GreenWeenie logo) are from days of long long ago and one of the first networkable fragfest games, Doom. Due to my net cards mac address, I was always the DayGlo Green player. Post game beer discussions were often "this green weenie pops outta no where and starts blasting away." The name stuck, and my friend's wife made me a t-shirt with the GreenWeenie superhero logo. My avitar is a (poor) scan of that tshirt logo.

As to the purpose of this thread... I'm seriously not looking for "We love Weenie" posts. I'm waaaay too old and well past the need of affirmation from others.

However, self reflection is part of life. You learn much more by objectively listening to your critics, then from any praise you may receive.

[konfusion666]

Don't know who you are. Never [seen] you around before.

ditto.

[dealforme]

Re-opened due to valid argument.

[Neil]

Hey Neil... if you ever show up here... would you mind telling me what my "big claim to fame" was? I'm not here for the glory, but I'm curious as to whose deal you think I appropriated? I always try to attribute credit where it's due.

Sure let's have at it, so you know I see this more as a debate of philosophies than personal.

Anyway, I noticed you restating someone else's idea of buying a Staples items one day, then returning on the next day when the Best Buy flyer is in wider release. The idea being to prevent Staples from doing their OOS tricks. When people made a big PM savings you kept posting in the thread about it and eventually started telling people to reallocate some of their savings to a food bank, establishing some kind of tit for tat linkage that "Green Weiner saves me $x, there for I contribute $y to the Food Bank"

Fair enough, but you didn't invent that price matching technique. Plenty of us have been doing that for years. Nor do you identify the upcoming Best Buy flyer deal either. Someone else did in another thread. In fact there's whole sites devoted to publishing these flyers, in some cases earlier than they would normally be delivered.

But due to your relentless spamming, a person that didn't know the history might wrongly assume you were the progenitor of the deal and who knows might also feel some warped obligation to give to the charity of your choice, a food bank.

[WiZZLa]

IB2ndL!

Second hand info tells me you take other peoples advice as your own.

[Neil]

Now to the issue of the food bank, I haven't made up my mind yet about them. I've worked them, I've donated to them, and I've collected for them.

At first I thought they were a brilliant concept, donate when you're flush, draw out from them when you're needy. Except from what I've seen it doesn't happen that way, ever. The people that donate to them I would say never ever ever would withdraw from them. And the people that withdraw never contribute. So it's not really a bank at all, but a frontage for well off people to give food to less well off people. As such, that's not the worst thing in the world, but it's pretty phony to call it a food bank then. Just call it the poor person's food giveaway center or something honest.

Sure you could say "hey wait I know this one family that donated after they got on their feet again" but for every story like that there's 10,000 of the other.

The next point is that from my experience I'm not totally convinced the people utilizing the food bank are necessarily in need. There is no means testing whatsover. My observation was that people were using the food bank as free food to free up their social assistance money for other pursuits like alcohol, drugs, taxis, lottery, and gambling.

Let me be clear, I'm all for liberty and I think everyone should have the right to do whatever they want if it doesn't harm others. I pass no moral judgement on someone that wants to drink, do drugs, gamble, etc. I especially don't care if someone wants to waste their money doing this stuff either.

But I'm a little put out when it's not their money that's being wasted. When tax dollars that turn into social assistance dollars get used for casino, taxi, etc, that's when I have a problem with it. Frankly I'd love to take a taxi everywhere, but I can't afford to. Nor can I afford to waste money gambling, smokes, or on lottery. Should our taxes go to enable someone else to do the things we can't afford to?

So to the argument that food bank actually increases the poverty cycle. I think you'd agree that when free food increases the discretionary people have to waste on alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc that has a direct increased effect on social problems which in turn leads to more poverty. Responsibility for people taking care of their basic needs is diminished and they have less incentive to take care of their situation when free food and housing are provided.

I would almost argue we'd be better off with the food bank giving out free booze, cigarettes, etc to anyone that can demonstrate they are taking care of their basics (food, shelter, etc) with their social assistance money. The giveaways would be an incentive to be self-accountable and a reward to those that aren't milking the sysem. It's a bit radical but I hope you see what I'm saying here.

Canada has lots of social safety nets that I'm not suggesting are overly generous but exist to make sure anyone that needs or wants will get basic food and shelter taken care of for them. Food bank undermines those social safety nets.

Discuss.

[Neil]

OK lastly is about this concept that you are "helping" anyone by telling them about google. Who exactly in the civilized world needs you to tell them about google?

And furthermore, given how manipulated, sponsored, and irrelevant google has become, you're actually doing them a disservice in most cases.

Your signature implied you are an IT manager, I'd think an IT manager would be more up to speed on the rise and decline of google. Recommending it is kind of 2003-ish wouldn't you say?

Now if you made your link special to exclude all the irrelevant, ad-laden, junked up google responses, maybe you might have a molecule of a point there. Maybe read up on how you can add massive exclusion strings to google to help improve the quality of the results.

Or maybe spend some time with your beloved google, find some reliable and relevant links, post them along with maybe a brief excerpt. Now that would be useful.

I would argue that putting "go look elsewhere" into a thread about a given product, item, or vendor is to subvert and degrade what we have going here at RFD. I've been at RFD since the beginning because there is a community of similar like minded people with similar objectives. I like to be able to scan a thread top to bottom at a glance and find out what I need to know.

This place is a likely source to hear about the Canadian or possibly local scoop on things. I don't care what Epinions says about a product that was discontinued in the USA 2 years ago and is appearing at Future Shop this week as a new full priced item. The 2002 reviews on Epinions might be glowing for a product that was useful or novel in 2002 but nowadays would be considered a lump of junk. I want to know from real Canadians who have real experience with the subject item in the thread. And I don't want to bounce around to google or anywhere else to read it.

I want to glance at a thread and a read someone's mini review, someone else's quizing about options, batteries, etc, someone else's input about the features, etc. That is what I'm here for, not to get a lesson in google.

You break out the old 'give a man a fish' cliche, fine I would say that constant parroting of telling people to use google is like giving a man an unwanted stinky fettid fish.

An example of a useful 'fishing lesson' would be the bit at the end about how we can use vbulletin Ignore feature.