I answered that elsewhere, so lemme just cut/paste:
Fair question: I saw they already had a partial spindle of mixed disks for sale. Just the one though, so I couldn't be sure it wasn't a fluke. Turns out it wasn't.
The spindles weren't the only thing I donated, just so we're clear. I just mixed them in with the rest of boxes of stuff, some of it pretty good. Someone can now snag an OG release copy of Bioshock 2 or Doom 3 for a song. Oh, and the entire Half Life Collection.
The people who took care of me were genuinely of God. I suppose YMMV depending if you live in a sane country or not. We do live in the single most atheist country on the planet though, so I guess it’s not globally representative…
Underneath the thin facade of being a charitable organization, they’re really a disgusting Protestant sect of Christianity who loath homosexuality and have a fair share of controversies. There’s a few listed on Wikipedia if you want a starting point: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salvation_Army#Contro…
As a religious organisation, they are allowed to hire based on characteristics that you usually aren’t allowed to discriminate with. They’ve repeatedly supported legislation that would allow them to refuse to hire LGBT people.
Across several countries, they’ve campaigned against the right for homosexual sex, marriages, inclusion in media.
They refused a $3.5m contract from the San Francisco city gov because it would’ve included giving the same domestic benefits to same-sex couples.
They said they’d leave New York if they were forced to offer the same domestic benefits to same-sex couples.
They campaigned against UK local councils including gay people in media like leaflets and the like.
High ups in The Salvation Army has said if you support gay rights you shouldn’t donate to them.
They’re extremely transphobic too, of course.
They did a bunch of child sexual abuse in Australia.
In the UK they own a lot of property that poor people stay in, and the conditions have been so bad that it was unlawful.
For the most part it’s just that they’re homophobic as fuck.
We're not yet at the point where people are huffing drugs made from fermented cow poop, but I feel like that's not as far away as polite society would like us to believe.
The Salvation Army is the shit tier of “charities”. Not only are they anti-LGBTQ but they have a long history of anti-union action and supporting strikebreakers. Ever wonder why so many US Labor Movement songs are to the tune of hymns? It’s not because of their familiar tune. It’s because the Salvation Army would send their band to labor actions and play as loud as possible to try to drown out organizers and make attendees uncomfortable.
I try to be more positive on this platform but with these scumbags, I cannot. They’re in the company of the Pinkertons and other murderers and thugs for hire.
Greenway suggests that the Wobblies stumbled upon this modus operandi as a means of combating the street bands of the Salvation Army and the Volunteers of America, who frequently would drown out Wobbly speakers in a “cacophony of cornets and tamborines.” One enterprising IWW organizer, wishing to combat the forces of obscurantist “pie in the sky” theology, "retired long enough to organize a brass band of his own.
Denisoff, R. S. (1970). The Religious Roots of the American Song of Persuasion. Western Folklore, 29(3), 175. doi:10.2307/1498356
Off the top of my head, I can only think of primary sources. Would need to dive into some academic tools to find sufficient sources for Wikipedia’s requirements. I’ll make a note to do so, when I get the time to do so.
Of course any article can be biased, but this one has cited sources, at least. It would take further digging to determine if those sources are credible.
In my opinion and based on my past reading on the subject, the simple fact that it’s a religious organization is enough to dissuade me from giving them anything. It is no small statistic that religious organizations are corrupt, hypocritical, expect obedience over tolerance, anti-union, anti-LGBTQ, ultra-conservative, and generally support the notion that people must be submissive to their authority.
I’ll continue to donate to secular organizations that do genuine good.
There’s always Charity Navigator, they rate charities based on financial health and accountability, at least. I’ve not heard any controversy with it, for what it’s worth
When charities are written in law as a way to get tax discounts, it’s no wonder the majority becomes scams. Charities are also a great example of the govt failing to do it’s own damn job
That’s my go-to, personally. MSF (Doctors Without Borders) could nearly get away with puppy murder and still be “good”. The amount of risk that they take on to help those in need is remarkable.
Another great charity evaluator is www.givewell.org. Their mission is to find charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar spent, and their findings are research-backed and evidence-based. 100% of your donation goes to the charity you support. They also evaluate the lowest cost to save a human life, which is currently about $3k-$5k. Their top rated charities are involved in malaria prevention:
Child's Play is my go-to. They provide video games and consoles to hospitalized and often terminally ill children who literally can't go out and play. It was founded by the creators of Penny Arcade back in the early 2000s and so far to my knowledge hasn't had a single controversy or hint of anything nefarious. It's just nerds helping other, young, sick nerds/would-be-nerds get their nerd on.
I mean Doctors Without Borders definitely does more important work on the balance, but giving pediatric terminal cancer patients countless hours of joy isn't a trivial thing either.
I try to be more positive on this platform but with these scumbags, I cannot.
Thank you for making this effort, by the way. The community on Lemmy versus the other platform we all know about is night and day because of people like you.
And I absolutely agree. I went to read a bit about the Salvation Army and I had no idea about their stance. I’m glad I came across this post. Truly appalling.
Thank you for making this effort, by the way. The community on Lemmy versus the other platform we all know about is night and day because of people like you.
Thank you too for that bit of positivity. I found myself being negatively impacted, psychologically and emotionally on corporate social media. Life is just too short to engage in that sort of unhealthy behavior. And I know that I’m not the only one who has experienced such - it’s pretty well established in research data.
So, while it certainly makes me feel a bit better, more important to me is the fact that engaging positively with people and encouraging them gives them more opportunities to feel better about themselves (we all need that sometimes, some more than others), grow, and, I hope, be more inclined to spread it about (and make quality shitposts and *nix porn). The world is fucked up enough as it is; lashing out, belittling, and the like only contributes the the problem.
I’ve been through a lot in life so far and close to those which been through even more and know first-hand how dark the depths of despair can get. If I can manage to put even the idea of a smile into the mind of someone that needs one I’ve won more than is possible in getting someone to rage-quit a “debate” thread that’s 50 comments deep.
They are also the shit tier of thrift stores. They’re over-priced and their stuff isn’t as good. If you’re in King County, WA, Value Village is king. I’ve found so many great deals at Value Village. 90% of the stuff in my house is from VV.
Buuuut, you’re still right. They’re absolutely a shit company. I was an assistant supervisor at Value Village a couple of decades ago. First, they’re 100% for profit but advertise in such a way that consumers believe they’re a charity. What they do is buy donations from charities by the pound. Any donations accepted at the store on behalf of a charity are paid at a drastically reduced rate, so of course they push HARD for customers to bring donations directly to the store.
The shit cherry on top was the stores lying to charities about the quality of received goods to avoid paying. If clothes, for example, were soiled, they’d refuse to pay for the entire batch. Stores would find a few dirty shirts, claim the entire cart was crap, claw the money back, and sell the rest of the cart.
The company makes a HUGE profit but pays their employees peanuts. Our head cashier had worked for the company for eight years and capped out at $7.25/hour in 2003, about $14 today. One year, they announced no raises, no reason given. My then girlfriend and I discovered the owners had purchased a cabin in Northern California for use by the c-suite douches. The store manager was pulling in $60k a year, plus bonus, in a very low cost of living area. Me? $8.25 per hour.
What else? They incentivize under staffing by making a supervisor’s paltry bonuses tied to their staffing budget. Staying at budget meant no bonus. They had to come in under budget for any bonus, and the more “savings” the higher the bonus. I got chewed out when I first started scheduling because I used all the hours allotted in the budget. The store went from a shit hole to being fairly respectable but it would eat into my boss’s bonus. Her maximum annual bonus? $2.5k.
So they may not be owned by Walmart, but they’re the Walmart of thrift stores. Fuck those guys.
Yikes! I’ve never thought they were a charity. It’s always been pretty clear to me that they’re a for-profit business, but I wasn’t aware of all those shitty policies. As a shopper, they have a lot of great stuff for dirt cheap. I got a $1000 amp there once for $45. Similar deals all over my house. Oh, we got a $4500 high quality 6 person dining table for 40 bucks, and four chairs worth $600 each for 12 bucks a pop.
The thing about them is their low wages and reluctance to train their employees meant high-end goods were often priced very low. Levi’s jeans were $10-15 a pair while designer jeans were priced at $5. I recall someone donating a batch of Hermés scarves. None of the pricers knew the brand, so they put them out for $1 each. I bought them all for 50% off (employee discount!) and hit eBay. This kind of thing happened weekly so the employees were always looking for things we could resell. We made less than $20k/year, that’s how we scraped by!
I’m not sure how other stores are, but mine was a great example of being a penny wise and a pound foolish.
Oh I forgot all about that. My wife got a Hermes leather wallet that cost $2,600 for like $5. It’s awesome when the employees don’t know what they’re pricing. Haha. We used to sell stuff from yard sales on eBay back when the 08 crash happened, and after we moved here we both noted how we could have been doing really well for ourselves if we had access to VV back then. We lived in a city where the thrift store was basically just a garbage dump though, so that didn’t happen.
It’s unfortunate that they have such shitty employee policies, because we really love what the store itself has to offer. Heck, it’s so good that Macklemore wrote a hit song about it!
Here in Australian even, tried to donate stuff, and was loading things up, then was told they only accepted clothing that weekend. So had to reload it all back into my car.
Then they said they didn’t want my pots and such.
At least here in Australia, they don’t care about any donations unless they can sell it (they don’t seem to care about actually giving anything less sellable to the poor for free).
They’re not even selling the stuff for cheap either (so its bad for the poor too)
Started giving away a lot of it on Facebook for free… Was extremely painless. And the savers nearby also had no issues accepting a lot of it too.
Never going back there. They suck for donations, for buying they’re too expensive too.
Do you have any advice for burning media to discs? I’ve plenty of media, and have Linux based media servers it sits on. Servers even have disc drives. Not sure if burn capable but just looking for general advice and best practices here
The slower the burn speed, the better. Less chances of error. Aside from that discs are kind of pointless in 2024 when you can have much cheaper, smaller and easier to use flash storage.
Unless maybe you’re archiving something on special, heavy duty DVDs, otherwise why bother?
Burning DVDs I’m not sure I get, CDs though? There’s still people driving cars that lack Bluetooth, and some people like listening to a whole album uninterrupted by phone distractions and there’s something nice about physical media - it makes sense for most of the reasons vinyl makes sense, it doesn’t, but it’s fun anyway.
Most people with old car stereos these days use Bluetooth FM transcievers, I can’t imagine having to burn CDs and then fiddle with them while driving in 2024. It makes more sense to use physical media at home but in the car? I really don’t see the point.
Almost all FM transceivers that aren't put inline with the actual car antenna are crap. FCC rules limit their broadcast strength severely and even crosstalk from an adjacent FM frequency can be enough to overpower them, or at least seriously disrupt them. Inline transmitters don't have that problem, but at that point you have to pull the radio anyway so you may as well replace it with something that has bluetooth or at least an aux input.
The only time an FM transmitter is a good solution is when you're dealing with things like early 2000s Chevy vehicles, where part of the cruise control module is in the stereo. The best practice for replacing one of those stereos is "add a long wiring harness so you can keep the original stereo hooked up and stashed in the back, then wire the new stereo in to the actual speakers and nothing else."
If you are donating stacks of discs to a thrift store, make sure there’s nothing on them you don’t want to give away first. I bought a pack of CDs from a thrift store a while ago. I checked a couple at the top of the stack before I bought them and they were blank. I used about half of them without issue and when I put the next one in the drive, it mounted and opened. Someone gave away a whole bunch of banking info and tax records. I used them for target practice, but someone certainly could have used that info for identity theft if they chose to.
I went through every single disc before I donated them, yeah. Actually I did some organization so one spindle was all Anime, another was all SciFi, so on.
...found a fair bit of porn. I kept the porn. TV series are ephemeral. Porn is eternal.
My backup method was almost entirely optical. Oh well. I’ve kept myself from feeling too bad by keeping in mind that I am waaaaay too lazy to ever go digging through it anyway.
I donated some spindles of burned media and programs to Salvation Army expecting they'd throw 'em out
Good for them for not throwing them away, but if you assumed they would, why "donate" (more like dump) them to charity in the first place? They're not there to provide guilt free disposal for your garbage..
Fair question: I saw they already had a partial spindle of mixed disks for sale. Just the one though, so I couldn't be sure it wasn't a fluke. Turns out it wasn't.
The spindles weren't the only thing I donated, just so we're clear. I just mixed them in with the rest of boxes of stuff, some of it pretty good. Someone can now snag an OG release copy of Bioshock 2 or Doom 3 for a song. Oh, and the entire Half Life Collection.
I honestly thought you were meaning to give them trash. I never feel bad about dropping off old furniture and junk at chain thrift stores making profit run by wackadoos. Dropping off after hours saves me a trip to the dump. Much cheap for me too.
Yeah, I interned at a second hand (can’t remember if charify or not but probably) store for 4 weeks or so when I was in primary school (internships are part of the curriculum), and fucking hell.
People really like dumping a shit ton of clothes and random stuff. I recall testing like 10 pairs of in-ear headphones some of which were pretty disgusting and covered in makeup and often earwax. For some reason, they were apparently sellable. Some pairs looked brand new, but most didn’t. Somehow they even sold quite a few.
And no, I didn’t stick the headphones in my ears, fuck no.
Dude never donate to SA. They’re profit driven religious wackadoos who have no idea how to run anything. The charity angle is just another religious scam.
This is false and dangerous misinformation to spread. The Salvation Army will absolutely not deny services to LGBTQ people. They even run initiatives to help rescue trans people from sex trafficking, and run a trans dorm in Nevada.
The problematic part of the SA is that they lobby against gay rights in politics. So you should vote with your wallet and not support them. But if you are homeless and need help, they WILL help you.
Theyre the only people to help during actual disasters though. Good luck getting the fucking Red Cross out short of anything but a federally declared disaster.
Also, frankly, here in the Reno area it's basically impossible to find a thrift store that's not run by incredibly religious wackadoos. Best you can do is Goodwill, which is far from irreligious. Salvation Army is one of the few that isn't blasting Jesus Rock on the speakers when you're in there.
They often have no damn clue what they're selling and clearly just make up prices on the spot. I've flipped a few things for a 500%+ profit from the super-ultra-Jesus-ey thrift stores. Computer hardware in particular is something they just don't grasp the value of. If you ever need a managed switch or a spare monitor, check the thrift stores.
Got Wii Sports for $1 at a thrift store like that, whereas their glassware was usually significantly above comparable eBay listings (despite the labels sometimes claiming otherwise). Unfortunately, at least where I live, the odds of computer stuff showing up are few and far between.
You can act according to your faith and still be a nice and accepting human being. Doing charity only as a promotional device would be a negative for conscience at least.
There are three in my town of <9,000 people. One benefits the homeless shelter, one helps fund things for people living in the old folks home, and the other is for disabled veterans. I know the employees make money (one of them is 100% volunteers) but no one is getting rich from them.
“Thrift” doesn’t mean it’s a charity either, take for example Value Village. There are also a ton of “consignment stores” that are for profit businesses and will get real mad if you call them a thrift store.
Well yeah, consignment stores and thrift stores are inherently different business models. A thrift store owns the donated items they’re selling. A consignment store offers a storefront for items that people want to sell. Sort of like Facebook marketplace or eBay. The consignment skims off the top for operating costs and service fees, and then sends the rest of the money to the actual seller.
Say you have an item that you know is worth $250 on the market, but you don’t have an easy way of selling it yourself. You take it to a consignment store, and they add it to their shelf listed at $250. It sells. The consignment store takes $25 from the sale, and sends you the remaining $225. You made less than if you would have sold it yourself, but you were willing to pay $25 for the convenience and foot traffic of a storefront. Because again, you didn’t have the means to list it yourself, so you found a place that was willing to list it for you.
Who would? You think reps from the music and film industries would shut you down for selling stacks of CDs from a table? Lol. Would they roll up in front of your table in black vans?
Seattle, too. As far as I can tell from my time spent there during multiple years of PAX the only thing the Seattle cops do is harass the homeless and local rappers trying to push their demo albums.
i agree that it shouldn’t be a police priority; but i would still not visit a pub using black market meat… i like cheap food, but i love my intestines more lol
No I wouldn’t either and the place was a dive but the meat wasn’t being sold for the pub to serve, police went in there trying to sell to anyone that would buy, the land lady just happened to be the one interested in buying the stollen meat
I haven’t seen a library with software to lend since I was a kid, I used to go and get a ton of games n random software and rip them all lmao. But there was a lawsuit from software companies (ofc, can’t have any fun in this world) at some point in the mid 2000s against a library district and it all got pulled. The lawsuit was based on the fact they had to share non-transferable, non-shareable license keys to make it work, which is why we still have movies and console games at libraries, because there’s no license key involved.
Yep, loaning physical media with software isn’t a thing anymore for that exact reason. Any software or digital platform we offer (ancestry, language learning, ebooks, etc) we either have a ‘one copy one user’ licence which essentially functions like a physical copy, we’re directly paying for each time something is accessed, or we have a subscription specifically made for libraries. We can loan out things like Kindles loaded with ebooks that we’ve purchased, but there’s still a grey area with loaning out a tablet that has the major streaming services installed (with accounts paid for by the library), so we haven’t gone down that route yet
Thrift stores are getting in on the piracy game I guess. Can't say I'm disappointed.
Look, I might have better copies now, but if someone wants to spend $3 and get the first 150+ episodes of Bleach and Naruto burned to KDVD I'd say they're gonna walk away happy with the deal they got.
This is hilarious. If I had some spare cash (and a lot of spare time), I’d absolutely love to do something like this. I’d love to do some modern blockbuster movies.
The thought of burning some BD5s filled with a bunch of new series and/or movies fills me with a joy that's hard to describe. Getting stuff for myself is one thing. Making it easily accessible for others is just a different level entirely. I'd love to know that I've given someone down on their luck countless hours of entertainment for a $3 investment.
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