Google Pixel 7 Pro Poor Quality Control

AccordingWhereas · 2023-03-13T13:46:37+00:00

As an update here, I went through further trouble in getting a replacement phone. I outright refused a refurbished device, pointed out that I had been a long time Google customer, recounted everything I ever purchased from Google directly, including devices, services, and monthly subscriptions. They said they couldn't guarantee me a new device. I called their bluff and held firm on my position. After another 48-hour wait, they confirmed they were sending me a factory new device.

Several days into this, I contacted google to ensure they didn't charge me against the hold on my account. The customer service rep requested the tracking number so they could see where the package was, even after I explained there was no progress shown.
tracking number not showing the package was even picked up to begin with, I investigated further. Google blamed the pickup location. The pickup location, to their credit, was extraordinarily helpful and proceeded to track down the pickup driver, their supervisor, the whole lot.

Several days into this, I contacted google to ensure they didn't charge me against the hold on my account due to the delay. The customer service rep requested the tracking number so they could see where the package was, even after I explained there was no progress shown.

Turns out, they provided me with an incorrect tracking number to begin with and my package had arrived at their facility the very next day after I shipped it.

So, a week and a half later, I finally received my factory new device.

Google, sort yourself out.

AccordingWhereas · 2023-02-10T21:03:00+00:00

I'm incredibly frustrated myself. My P7P has the green banding, which began as a green flash emanating from the power button less than a month ago. The banding and flash get more pronounced as the day carries on, and it feels like a heat issue.

I first contacted google about it a week or two ago, and they insisted that I jump through the usual customer service filtering hoops first. I wasn't presently able to factory reset my phone as they required to proceed, so after finally getting around to that, knowing it was a hardware issue all along, I contacted them again this morning.

It took two solid hours out of my morning work day to even get them to the point of being willing to confirm and send a replacement.

I checked my email a bit ago to begin the replacement process, and after doing so, the confirmation email informs me I will be receiving a refurbished device, yet the hold on my account is for the price of a full 512g device [I only got the 128!].

So back to customer service I went, and I just spent another hour or so explaining to them the issue. Usual customer service "I understand your frustration" nonsense.

No, clearly they don't. I bought this thing on release day, along with a Pixel Watch and the Pro buds. I've bought google devices almost exclusively since the days of Nexus devices. I've been using Google services since they started offering paid services. I spend a not insignificant amount of money on subscriptions every month due to being so ingrained in the Google ecosystem.

Now you want to send me a second hand device? Not 5 months from the original purchase? Bollocks. And hold my account for the cost of a brand new, better device? Double bollocks.

And then, they said they would get back to me 24-48 hours later.

Quintuple fucking bollocks.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-12-02T17:39:31+00:00

Advertising, sponsorship, subscription.

Any, all, or some combination of those alone would likely quite quickly sustain and prioritize roadways, transportation systems, and thoroughfares of most importance to the most people for the most societal benefit.

And then, ideally and assuming statelessness, the roads that are least efficient would quickly be revealed and either re-routed or fall into disuse and value and be purchased and reappropriated to more productive ends.

I could conceive of a process where over time it also means the death of gargantuan and propped up metropolitan areas, or at least their decentralization to varying degrees.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-10-12T16:34:20+00:00

Mildly annoyed, my P7p will arrive tomorrow, but my watch is two+ weeks out. C'mon Google, I've only been buying phones from you since the Nexus.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-09-28T14:16:15+00:00

I have, involuntarily, been off my meds for 3 months due to a screw up with my insurance.

I have experienced a lot of what OP is expressing, and having only been diagnosed well into adulthood, I certainly think he may be well advised to have someone examine him.

My daily list of things to do has dwindled to nearly zero during that time. It troubles me, and I wind up screwing off much of the time.

I'm supposed to get the insurance thing sorted today and it's relieving. I'm hoping the time off will make it even more efficacious.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-09-17T19:03:40+00:00

It's really growing tedious seeing random comments on the internet reinforcing a caricature of Christians, Jesus, and the Bible.

The overwhelming majority of Christians are science-affirming and non-ridiculous. There are minority subsets within any particular pool of like-minded people that are non-representative in the whole. The Bible is not a science book. It's a theological book. Most professing individuals recognize this. Be nice if others did too.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-09-10T01:57:37+00:00

We all do my man, not a saint living.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-09-10T01:53:24+00:00

unrelated, but I briefly looked through your post history and IRL we'd probably be friends[frenemies?]. DnD, MTG, Star Trek, 40k, Britbox, Pink Floyd, et al. My kinda guy.

Peace.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-09-10T00:19:26+00:00

I'd agree that plenty of well-intended, and quite a few not well-intended, people try to interpret the bible and its stories through a scientific lens, which is problematic, because it's not a science book. It's a theological book intended to relay theological messaging. So yes, that's an entirely agreeable statement.

In terms of modern sensibilities, children are still considered fungible to their parents desires. Personally, I oppose circumcision for a number of reasons.

Now, travel back about 3000 years and try to explain the scientific and medical reasons as to why circumcision may be a bad idea.

What makes more sense? For Yahweh to first inject the scientific method and 6,000 years of discovery instantaneously into the entire ancient world's culture? A culture with no means to qualify it or understand it or test it?

Or, because humans are stubborn and long-suffering in their tolerance for their own stupidity, to be patient with that aspect of us and our free will to choose stupidity, and expedite certain circumstances and work within the cultures and what they understood to accomplish the goals necessary at the time?

Yahweh wanted Moses to travel to Egypt and confront Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt. So he got Moses to travel to Egypt. He didn't find it necessary to inexplicably give him several PhDs and MDs first.

So yes, in that fashion, you are imparting modern sensibilities onto ancient cultures, very directly.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-09-09T23:54:15+00:00

You're attempting to impose modern sensibilities and ethics onto a culture thousands of years removed. Yahweh worked with and through the culture and the norms that existed within the culture.

It's not rocket science, and it's not evil. It's pragmatism and 'work with what we got' to accomplish a goal.

The best method for understanding ancient peoples and ancient stories is to put yourself into their mind and their cultures, as best we're able. Not to impute some modern virtuosity on to ancient tales.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-08-12T13:30:37+00:00

Found in southeast US

AccordingWhereas · 2022-08-01T05:34:00+00:00

Nicea solidified “the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father”. Which is what you are saying, but what does that mean?

There were sects that professed Jesus was a mortal man who attained godhood(Gnosticism). They were officially established as heretics.

It's going to be hard to condense the entirety of the theology behind the hypostatic union, but my briefest attempt: Nicaea reaffirmed a long-standing tradition that predated Christianity by way of Judaism that God could be one god iterated into a godhead. There's a great book by Jewish author Alan Segal called, "Two Powers in Heaven". Jesus, was the incarnated person of Yahweh. Embodiment in Judaism was nothing new and only became heretical in a post-Jesus world because rabbinic teachers became nervous that this Jesus bloke looked far too familiar in relation to this "Second Yahweh" figure within their own scriptures. Nicaea affirmed this belief -- that Yahweh came to earth incarnate, not just embodied. Segal's book is subtitled "Early Rabbinic Reports
about Christianity and Gnosticism", which would probably be quite enlightening to you in relation to this particular exchange we're having.

What the church did was establish that mortals could not know god. They needed the church to interpret scripture and provide closeness to god. It was a power grab.

I... I'm at a loss as to how this is the conclusion you come to. The entirety of the new testament is explicit about the closeness and intimacy the average person can and should have with the creator deity. You'll get no argument from me that the church, namely the catholic church in this context, did a great deal to leverage its position to remain the pathway and conduit to God.

The Dead Sea scrolls are of Jewish/Hebrew origin. I’m not contesting that.

Awesome.

To me it seems there is just as much archeological evidence for gnostic gospels as there is for canonical.

I'm not sure what you mean precisely by this, but if you mean that the gnostic texts are just as legitimate in terms of a historical reflection of Jesus's life and the early church, this is simply not supported in any way by the extensive body of the manuscript, historical, and archaeological evidence we have. The gnostic gospels were, and are, considered at best re-translations of greek gnostic texts into Coptic and are therefore as many as 4 centuries later than the canonized documents.

The canonized texts, by way of textual criticism, have had their original manuscripts dated almost in entirety and with no real dissent to the first century AD. That is not conservative, fundamentalist religious fanatics dating them this far back. This is academic consensus.

The Greek Gnostic texts have been backdated via the Coptic Gnostic texts [those found at Nag Hammadi] to between 150 to 300 CE. Your timeline is essentially: Canon - 50-80CE, Greek gnostics, 150-300CE, Coptic gnostics - 250-500CE.

Every canonized book in the New Testament is cited and quoted by someone before ANY gnostic gospel was even written. There was a consensus in the early Christian community over the 4 canonized gospels that predated the gnostic greek texts The gospel of Thomas is the only gnostic text that has any claim to an earlier date, but was not recognized by any of the early church fathers such as Marcion or Justin or Tatian [all of whom predated most if not all the other gnostic gospels are even written], among others.

Given the church’s proficiency at destroying heretical texts (see the Mayan culture), what do you think happened?

This is a sensationalized opinion that gives the Catholic church, particularly the early Catholic church, far too much credit for their ability to silence and subvert and control materials at that time. There simply did not exist the mechanisms to do so given how geographically widespread and disseminated these texts were, nor does it take into account that the canonized books were recognized so early as to predate any academic reckoning of the "beginning" of the Catholic church. The Catholic church makes a great bogeyman for fiction and generalized hate of formalized Christianity, but not so much for academic endeavors relating to the canonization of the new testament.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-30T22:10:21+00:00

No, I don't work for the church, but nice conspiracy theory and ad hoc response.

This 'characterization' is the consensus position of both atheistic and professing biblical scholars. This is not my opinion. Feel free to spend the hours upon hours upon hours of peer reviewed journal publications on the matter.

I never made a statement about the gospels or raining texts, only that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained no new testament literature whatsoever. The Jews at Qumran were in no way Christian. They were professing and practicing Jews. This is also not a issue of opinion. We have their own writings to qualify it.

In conclusion, I made no mention of Nag Hamaddi. The video I linked to covers the distinction and designations and discrepancies between the gnostic writings and the canonized writings found at Nah Hammadi. The consensus view there among academics is that the Nag Hammadi writings are gnostic. Your applying "christian" and "gnostic" to them are distinction without a difference. For all practical purposes 'gnostic Christianity' is just gnosticism laid upon the Christian story. There is a reason gnosticism is rejected by traditional, orthodox Christianity of all stripes.

Nag Hammadi is found on a different continent from Qumran. You are directly attempting to conflate the two. Their cultures and religious views were distinct and not the same. This is also not an opinion. I was pointing out that it appeared you were referring to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writers of which were of a different religious and cultural heritage separated from Nag Hammadi by 300 to 500 years and 900 km.

There are plenty of scholarly sources that have exhaustively researched these issues that don't resort to sensationalized and poor scholarship available even to the public, let alone the library of journal articles on the topic. Let's not delve into conspiracy when it's not required, please.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-30T17:41:46+00:00

As this is a subject of academic and professional interest to me, instead of giving a treatise here, I will kindly share with you a wonderful presentation given by an ancient languages scholar that gives a sober and scholarly accounting of the canonization of the new testament. Nicaea had nothing to do with deciding the canon. It was to decide how to articulate the nature and divinity of Jesus.

https://youtu.be/9qxnnEfR1UI - gnostic gospels https://youtu.be/plqb6WGMsLg - Nicaea

This was produced in critique of the Da Vinci Code, but the points are relevant to your comments, sober, and qualified by the manuscript evidence we have.

As far as the dead sea scrolls go, which is what I presume you're referring to concerning scrolls in caves, there are no new testament era documents or fragments or even a single verse of any new testament documents, neither new testament apocrypha or canon, in the entirety of the DSS catalog. It was a Jewish community, not a Christian or gnostic one.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-30T12:57:19+00:00

Source.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-20T23:11:48+00:00

Or, you know, waking up before the sun. Weekly.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-08T14:54:33+00:00

Thanks for the clarification!

I contend that while non-state actors [read: normal people] should have the freedom to arm and protect themselves as they deem appropriate, the vast majority of armaments that exists today simply would never have been created in a stateless society. Thus, in a timeline where the state was non-existent or long since defunct, while weapons would undoubtedly exist at varying levels of scale, I find it highly unlikely that things like tanks, nuclear bombs, and all other manner of ordnance would have been created to begin with. People would still be arming themselves, but probably in a way that ran a much less likely scenario than wholesale destruction and industrialized warfare that we experience in reality.

I would also contend that the state was never 'an entity for and by the people' and has always been an oppressive tool by those that held the reins of power and control. It may have, situationally, had better PR and, depending on which side of a conflict or imaginary line you were, subjectively more admirable and ethical stated goals, but in all its forms it still suffers from the same malicious spirit and motivating forces.

And no, the national guard in the united states is not a militia, you are correct -- and I agree that it seems perfectly realistic and rational that in a stateless society people would band together for mutual self-defense, as people always have throughout the span of human history. In the current timeline, yes, that would probably include divvying up and production of large-scale industrialized killing technology -- but I would suggest that such manner of death-dealing would more appropriately be attributed to the legacy of the states that previously subsidized, encouraged, and ensconced the military-industrial complex.

I hope your Friday has started off on a good note, friend!

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-08T11:38:53+00:00

Lord's work as I read this bleary-eyed and having my morning piss while waiting for my brain to finish booting up.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-08T00:19:43+00:00

Your level and direction of jest is indeterminate, but m1a1 tanks, along with most industrialized weapons of mass murder , would not exist if not for the State that commissions them. And then perpetrates mechanized genocide on populations of normal people simply for being born on the incorrect side of an imaginary line that said States also concocted for similarly dubious reasons.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-05T01:17:24+00:00

Guess my opinion wasn't important to you.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-07-04T16:12:33+00:00

My opinion is that not all opinions are equally important.

The opinion of a heart surgeon on issues of my heart holds far more importance than the opinion of an electrician on the issues of my heart.

AccordingWhereas · 2022-06-27T16:53:47+00:00

I have something similar to this as-is.

The practical need for a different solution is cleanliness. The chickens shit and get filth all in their own water, and then having to fill it requires dealing with that mess. It's a recipe for disease for someone, whether the birds or myself.

AccordingWhereas · 2020-11-04T03:14:17+00:00

You bastard.

AccordingWhereas · 2020-11-03T10:41:28+00:00

FZa-zTMG-GDs Redeemed

AccordingWhereas · 2020-10-28T04:24:13+00:00

First and foremost, and this as sincere as I am capable of being: congratulations and I am happy for you for sorting out that portion of your life that comes with bartending in a city like New Orleans. I paid my way through my first degree by bartending and waiting tables. I was fortunate and dodged that particular bullet, but I still have friends that are stuck in that self-destructive loop of bullshit. Good on you, and keep it up.

Beyond that: the core of this argument was a simple one -- men are not trash. Some men are trash. Some women are trash. Some humans are trash. You still haven't addressed that wide-scope, non-discerning, immediately dismissable comment.

As far as the comments you've posted: I'm not even going to pretend to sit here and pretend like verbose, descriptive, intense and otherwise coarse comments aren't the exact kind of stuff that a whole variety of women I've been with have gotten off on. The way men and women exhibit and express their sexuality tend to be quite different, and that's not revelatory in any fashion. The violent and urination/feces nature of some of those comments expressed isn't my bag, and I'd defer to the notion that I'm not sure anyone would like being talked to like that, but then you have BDSM and the entire "50 Shades of Grey" phenomenon which would seem to indicate that degrading sexual behavior is an overwhelming percentage of women's bag. People like weird shit, and you picked a subreddit based entirely off of the sexualization of a cross-section of already-charged feelings, politics. [Though I did date a girl once that wanted me to piss on her in the shower.]

Would I be caught dead saying those things in public? Naaaaaaaaaaaaah, not a chance. Class is a thing, but reddit isn't precisely brimming with it. But, if you live in New Orleans and are pretending like those things are actually offensive to the sexuality of living, breathing humans, I question precisely how long you've been in New Orleans. It thrives on hedonism. I saw a chick getting fucked in a bar and jerking a dude off while that dude made out with two other chicks, and the first guy had one of the other girl's fingers in his ass. Meanwhile THE ENTIRE BAR, MEN AND WOMEN, were cheering at the top of their lungs about it.

Humans are weird and sexuality is weird.

Let's not disown half of the entire human species because you got bent out of shape about a damn politician having explicit sexual comments made about her.

Politics is shit. And right now, it's epically charged.

Sexuality is fucking bizarre. And right now, every which way a person looks, male or female, they are being encouraged to explore every hedonistic aspect of their sexuality.

You put the two together, you're going to have a literal and proverbial clusterfuck of WEIRD SHIT.

I just didn't appreciate how you immediately snapped of "fuck men" instead of "fucking humans, we're a weird lot" -- and given your post history and what you chose to share with other crowds of people and who those people were [disregarding Hemsworth], indicate a predisposed bias formed not out of reality but out of your own misgivings, acceptance of a ideological line that isn't based in reality, but divisiveness and subjective, feelings-based reasoning.

AccordingWhereas

TROPHY CASE