Amazon's interesting take on Honest Reviews

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from John F. Jamele on September 21, 2017 Came in three parts, no instructions and after struggling ... Came in three parts, no instructions and after struggling for a while couldn't figure out how to put it together and will be returning then (I bought two to "save money on shipping"- doesn't save me any money if I have to send them back.) I see I am the second customer of the 12 to review this item with this problem. Seems to me that sending instructions would be more helpful than just replying "sorry, return it," especially when you are selling an item specificially to people with mobility issues.

We encourage you to revise your review and submit it again. A few common issues to keep in mind: Your review should focus on specific features of the product and your experience with it. Feedback on the seller or your shipment experience should be provided at www.amazon.com/feedback. We do not allow profane or obscene content. This applies to adult products too. Advertisements, promotional material or repeated posts that make the same point excessively are considered spam. Please do not include URLs external to Amazon or personally identifiable content in your review. "Your review should focus on specific features of the product and your experience with it." I explained how it came in pieces and I was unable to assemble it. Check. "We do not allow profane or obscene content."  Nor did I include any.  Check.  "Advertisements, promotional material or repeated posts that make the same point excessively are considered spam."  Didn't include any of this.  Check. "Please do not include URLs external to Amazon or personally identifiable content in your review."  Check. Someone please tell me how my review violated Amazon's guidelines.  Or just assure me that I am not crazy in suspecting that Amazon has decided that poor reviews are simply not going to be made visible to potential customers because Amazon doesn't make money unless people buy the stuff advertised on it's site.

Ameriprise: Be Brilliantly Entitled

Oh please spare me the wistful musings of entitled rich white people who, having experienced a life which would seem like a magical fairy tale to 99.9 percent of the planet, "finally" get to start living their real dreams thanks to their financial counselors.

Check out this woman.  She's been "fortunate" that her work has allowed her to travel around the world, in the process aquiring artifacts from interesting, exotic and very, very poor nations which she can then display on her 12-foot walls (I can hear the dinner party conversations already- "Oh yes, I picked that one up in Kenya, it's hand-painted teakwood, I think the woman with five starving children asked three dollars but I got her down to $1.25, you know me and my nose for bargains!"

But now, she's done with all that traveling (she looks like she may be pushing 60, after all- what, is she expected to work forever?) and because she's managed to sock so much money away (see the previous paragraph) she can start Living for Herself (she comes pretty close to telling the audience that she sees this as Giving Back, but I guess even she wasn't capable of getting those words past her lips without gagging, so she uses "sharing" instead.)  So she's opening a Bed and Breakfast (the most cliche'd dream of Upper Class white people who are afraid that not enough of us lessers realize how awesomely huge and beautiful their house is- not enough dinner parties...) so she can show off her foreign bauble collection and not incidentally continue to make money as she rides her wings of self-important douchery into old age.

Here's hoping that nobody shows up to stay at her mansion full of appropriated culture artifacts and that she spends the last few years of her ridiculously pampered life sitting on her wraparound porch sipping herbal tea and petting the cat who is the only creature on the planet she hasn't bored into insanity with her pretentious blather.  Which was probably Plan B anyway.

Dr Pepper, Redefining Sad

Even if I were willing to pretend that this fat, loud, disgusting blowhard is carrying around ten pounds or more of Dr Pepper instead of a tray of empty cups, I would never be able to get past the fact that if Larry The Moron Dr Pepper Choad really did work at some stadium he'd have the easiest job on the planet, because nobody in the history of sports held in stadiums has ever, EVER purchased a Dr Pepper from a vendor.   Sorry.  Meanwhile, the guy selling beer doesn't have time to shmooze and bleat slogans at the fans- because he's too busy actually selling beer.

I'd say that this guy has the easiest job on the planet except for two things:  First, Toyota Jan has that gig already.  Second, staving off suicide on a daily basis must tax this guy's energy way more than walking around hawking soda nobody wants to drink.

Which of these Pizza Hut commercials is more detached from reality?

Commercial #1- a guy in traction stands in the middle of the kill floor at his local Pizza Hut to bore- err, entertain- the employees with his exortation to live every minute like it's their last because it may be.  "Living each moment" means watching sunsets, staring at the ocean...and eating Pizza Hut's special brand of cardboard both stuffed and topped with the most disgustingly tasteless mass-produced cheap "cheese" the corporate monolyth known as Pizza Hut could buy by the metric ton?

Who is this jackass talking to, anyway?  Because it sure as hell isn't the people in the room with him. Telling Pizza Hut employees to "live every day" as they struggle to keep up with the demands of decorating plates of dough with sugary crap and shoving them into ovens for minimum wage is pretty low.  Especially when one of those workers is a guy who should be enjoying his golden years with his great-grandchildren but instead is trying to make rent spending them working the late shift at Pizza Hut.  Because Capitalism.

Commercial #2- I guess the punchline of this mess is that Not-E.T has arrived on Earth to complement us on our ability to produce children who have "excellent hiding places" ( I don't even want to speculate on what that means) and to let us know that not only is the universe totally devoid of pizza, but that the alien is just going to punt his search for the best pizza on Earth and stop at the very first place he visited, Pizza Hut.  Because, come on- if Not-E.T. thinks that Pizza Hut is "the best," he has

A.  No taste buds, or
B.  No desire to explore the planet for pizza, having tasted what passes as pizza at Pizza Hut.

If "A" is true, the alien has no business judging pizza.  If "B" is true, the alien is perfectly welcome to return home and let his own race know that Pizza Hut is the best we can do; I won't let the slander bother me.  But he should stop looking into the camera and trying to convince US that Pizza Hut represents the pinnacle of pizza-producing mastery, because we know better.  Because we've eaten pizza produced pretty much anywhere else.

Because "Palm Beach Research" sounds so legit!

First of all, am I really supposed to trust some guy who feels the need to start his presentation by pretending to shred a Social Security check and then can't figure out which camera he's supposed to be looking into?  Shredding the check makes zero sense and doesn't make anything approaching an actual point- if he was railing against the inadequacy of the minimum wage and tried to "demonstate" his point by shredding a paycheck, would anyone react by thinking "hey, this is someone who has a valid argument, I need to listen to him?"  If not, why would destroying a Social Security check add to anyone's credibility?

I think that the "point" he was trying to prove by pretending to shred a Social Security check is that he's a moron who thinks we're morons too.

Anyway, he goes on to explain that his idea comes from his "friend" Tom Dyson, who wrote a book about an obscure law allegedly signed by Ronald Reagan which we can get for free (just $5 for shipping charges) which I guess will tell us how we can get 70% more per month than that Social Security check we might as well shred because Reasons (Reasons in this case being "it's not very much, so it's nothing.")  His "friend" has "given away lots of free books in the past," which is kind of a non sequitor considering that I know the difference between free and $5 at least as well as I know the difference between a small check and a handful of shredded papers.  This "friend" of Tom Dyson- who I guess was too busy or too wise to the ways of the law to pitch his own scam- wants us to take advantage of this amazing offer but also warns us that his books have been snapped up quickly in the past and if we don't act very soon this one too will probably be gone before we know it so Better Click Right Now.

I suppose this junk is a cheap version of those "If You Live In (Insert State Here) You Can Save $25,000 a Year on Your Mortgage Using This Simple Trick" and "Doctors Hate Him Here's Why" ads which are forever popping up in the margins at Weather.com - just make a quick buck clickbait tossed out there in the hopes of nabbing a few very gullible fish.  This one caught my eye because of the name- Palm Beach Research.  It just sounds so awesome- like the "Correspondence College of Tampa" professor mentioned in an episode of The Simpsons as an expert on The UFO Conspiracy.  It's got the word "Research" in it, so it must be on the level, right?

Oh, and just one more thing- I can't agree that if you're getting a Social Security check, you might as well just run it through a shredder because it's not very much money.  I totally understand that it's not very much money, but you have to be a very special brand of peevish to respond to "not very much" by turning it into "nothing at all."  If your Social Security check is an insult, please cash it anyway and give the money to people with less pride but a lot more common sense than you have.  Let me know if you want my address.  I have kids to feed.

Rocket Mortgage: So simple, even a Girl can use it

Or "Don't ask Sarah about Mortgages.  She's just a girl."

Sarah is a fifth-grade teacher who uses the magic of cliche'd math problems scrawled in chalk on a blackboard to mold young minds (all eight of them in her equally cliche'd tiny class of kids.)

Sarah is also super-cool because she creates robots advanced and powerful enough to win competitions for her Girlbot team or whatever that t-shirt says (I don't care.)  I guess she's a fifth-grade math teacher because she likes making $25,000 a year despite having technical skills that could earn her 3-4 times that much in a starting position outside the public sector.  Whatever, Sarah.  Your life.

But Sarah doesn't know anything about mortgages, because you know that involves math and stuff and Sarah...doesn't know a lot about math?  The subject she teaches and uses to make robots?  Sarah really needs to use Rocket Mortgage and its one-page thirty-year contracts she can read and apply for on her Smartphone because a traditional bank mortgage requires too many pages and too much jargon for her pretty little head to manage?

Is that really the message here, Rocket Mortgage?  Because is sure sounds like it.  Sarah may be a genius math teacher and techie but mortgages involve big numbers (like six figures, scary!) including percentages (even scarier!) and it's not like she's got the kind of Guy Brain she'd need to be REALLY good at math.  Right?

Password Troll. Just another sign of the Very Dumb Times we live in

Four minutes-plus of this cloying, manipulative and self-indulgent crap.  I watch it, so you don't have to.  And I don't even get paid for it.  Maybe someday you'll have the opportunity to thank me.

This entire mess- all FOUR-PLUS FREAKING MINUTES OF IT- is a tale of how ANNOYING and OH SO HARD TO REMEMBER ME BRAIN SO SMALL passwords are.  Never mind that they protect your bank account, retirement fund info, and a lot of other really important stuff (and not just your Netflix and Hulu accounts.)  Don't let that worry your pretty little heads- the important thing is to stop taxing that brain of yours with having to remember stuff that doesn't involve eating junk food.

Passwords- or what us old fogies call "Security," is for losers who have the time to remember junk like letters and numbers did I mention how PAINFULLY HARD THAT IS?  So trust these guys with all that and you'll never have to worry about security- I mean, passwords- ever again.  It's  not like you really care about it now.  It's just that this archaic password stuff still exists even though you don't know why because gosh it really slows you down when you want to buy stuff, man that sucks.

I wrote this blog post in just under two minutes- half the time I spent watching this awful password troll crap commercial the YouTubers think is just awesome because it is so true man it's hard to remember stuff plus it's lame.  Actually, that's a lie.  I didn't watch the whole video.  Because I don't need a "point" jammed into my brain over and over again until I "get" the genius who developed this steaming pile of smarmy crud.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to give these guys my lame passwords and start celebrating the fact that I'll get to my stuff almost 4 seconds faster than you stupid 20th century losers with your security codes.  Right after I contact MyCleanPC.com and get rid of all these registry errors.  Only $39.95.  Awesome deal, and I can do it with just a few clicks.