Woot returns now accepted

FYI, the header image is @fablefire’s Return of the Noms

I’m all for Woot having both good deals and liberal return policies at the expense of Amazon shareholders.

the FAQ they send you to says:

How do I return a damaged or defective product?
If the item you purchased is damaged or defective and was purchased within the past 30 days, please go to our Support page to report the issue. Please include the order number, a description of the item you would like to return, and a detailed explanation of the problem. If it’s damaged or defective, we will provide you with a return authorization. If we still have the same item in stock, we will provide you with an exchange of the same item. If a replacement has been issued and you do not return the original item within the 30 days as stated in the return authorization, you will be charged for the replacement item.You may be required to return your defective item to Woot before an exchange or refund is issued. In the event the item being returned to Woot is NOT found to be damaged or defective, you may be assessed a 15% restocking fee and the original shipping charge will not be refunded.

I have to admit I haven’t really been thinking about return policies much - what’s new on theirs?

edit: hmm it appears they are just being sloppy and this element needs to be deleted?

In any case, as I said, however great they can become, I support it.

Meh

This doesn’t even compare to sending Sharpies.

What if the batteries have been refrigerated?

What if the batteries have not been refrigerated?
.
What then?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return

Section on
Friedrich Nietzsche

The concept of “eternal recurrence”, the idea that with infinite time and a finite number of events, events will recur again and again infinitely, is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.[5] As Heidegger points out in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s first mention of eternal recurrence, in aphorism 341 of The Gay Science (cited below), presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than postulating it as a fact. According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the question of eternal recurrence—whether or not such a thing could possibly be true—that is so significant in modern thought: "The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the ‘greatest burden’ [of eternal recurrence] makes it clear that this ‘thought of thoughts’ is at the same time ‘the most burdensome thought.’ "[6]

The thought of eternal recurrence appears in a few of his works, in particular §285 and §341 of The Gay Science and then in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The most complete treatment of the subject appears in the work entitled Notes on the Eternal Recurrence, a work which was published in 2007 alongside Søren Kierkegaard’s own version of eternal return, which he calls ‘repetition’. Nietzsche sums up his thought most succinctly when he addresses the reader with: “Everything has returned. Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all things will return”. However, he also expresses his thought at greater length when he says to his reader:

“Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time, avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature of light. - Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon”.[7]

This thought is indeed also noted in a posthumous fragment.[8] The origin of this thought is dated by Nietzsche himself, via posthumous fragments, to August 1881, at Sils-Maria. In Ecce Homo (1888), he wrote that he thought of the eternal return as the “fundamental conception” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[9]

Scene of Nietzsche’s inspiration: „by a massive, pyramidally piled up block not far from Surlei“.
Several authors have pointed out other occurrences of this hypothesis in contemporary thought. Rudolf Steiner, who revised the first catalogue of Nietzsche’s personal library in January 1896, pointed out that Nietzsche would have read something similar in Eugen Dühring’s Courses on philosophy (1875), which Nietzsche readily criticized. Lou Andreas-Salomé pointed out that Nietzsche referred to ancient cyclical conceptions of time, in particular by the Pythagoreans, in the Untimely Meditations. Henri Lichtenberger and Charles Andler have pinpointed three works contemporary to Nietzsche which carried on the same hypothesis: J.G. Vogt, Die Kraft. Eine real-monistische Weltanschauung (1878), Auguste Blanqui, L’éternité par les astres (1872) and Gustave Le Bon, L’homme et les sociétés (1881). Walter Benjamin juxtaposes Blanqui and Nietzsche’s discussion of eternal recurrence in his unfinished, monumental work The Arcades Project.[10] However, Gustave Le Bon is not quoted anywhere in Nietzsche’s manuscripts; and Auguste Blanqui was named only in 1883. Vogt’s work, on the other hand, was read by Nietzsche during this summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria.[11] Blanqui is mentioned by Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), a book closely read by Nietzsche.[12] The eternal recurrence is also mentioned in passing by the Devil in Part Four, Book XI, Chapter 9 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which is another possible source that Nietzsche may have been drawing upon.

Walter Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche may have encountered this idea in the works of Heinrich Heine, who once wrote:

[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again…[13]

Nietzsche calls the idea “horrifying and paralyzing”,[citation needed] referring to it as a burden of the “heaviest weight” (“das schwerste Gewicht”)[14] imaginable. He professes that the wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ [The Gay Science, §341]

To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, “love of fate”:[15]

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.[15]

In Carl Jung’s seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Jung claims that the dwarf states the idea of the eternal return before Zarathustra finishes his argument of the eternal return when the dwarf says, “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’” However, Zarathustra rebuffs the dwarf in the following paragraph, warning him against over-simplifications.[16]

A late 1880s comment by Nietzsche, “In an infinite period of time, every possible combination would at some time be attained,” has been cited to argue that Nietzsche dropped his plans to try to scientifically prove the theory because he realized that if he would have to eventually repeat life as it is, his presumption of infinite time means “he” would also have to “repeat” life differently, since every configuration of atoms and events will occur.[17] Instead, according to this interpretation of Nietzsche, he continued to propound the doctrine for its psychological and philosophical import. Though section 1063 of his posthumous notebooks “The Will To Power” states, “The law of conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence.”

Section on
cosmology

While the big bang theory in the framework of relativistic cosmology seems to be at odds with eternal return, there are now many different speculative big bang scenarios in quantum cosmology which actually imply eternal return - although based on other assumptions than Nietzsche’s.[18] So there are competing models and hypotheses with a temporal, spatial or spatio-temporal eternal return of everything in all variations as Nietzsche has envisaged.

The oscillating universe theory—that the universe will end in a collapse or ‘big crunch’ followed by another big bang, and so on—dates from 1930. Cosmologists such as professor Alexander Vilenkin from Tufts University[19] and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Max Tegmark suggest that if space is sufficiently large and uniform, or infinite as some theories suggest, and if quantum theory is true such that there is only a finite number of configurations within a finite volume possible, due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, then identical instances of the history of Earth’s entire Hubble volume occur every so often, simply by chance. Tegmark calculates that our nearest so-called doppelgänger is 1010115 meters away from us (a double exponential function larger than a googolplex).[20][21][22] While it would be impossible to scientifically verify an identical Hubble volume, it does follow as a fairly straightforward consequence from otherwise unrelated scientific observations and theories. Tegmark suggests that statistical analyses exploiting the anthropic principle provide an opportunity to test multiverse theories in some cases. Generally, science would consider a multiverse theory that posits neither a common point of causation, nor the possibility of interaction between universes, to be an ideal speculation. However, it is a fundamental assumption of cosmology that the universe continues to exist beyond the scope of the observable universe, and that the distribution of matter is everywhere the same at such a large scale (see cosmological principle).

woot.