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lost a $29 chargeback and the dispute fee on top, is fighting them ever worth the hour

My policy, arrived at after being where you are: refund anything on request under a threshold, immediately, no questions, one line reply. Above that threshold I ask what went wrong, and then usually refund anyway.

The reasoning is not generosity. A dispute costs more than the refund, takes an hour, and your dispute ratio is a number your payment provider and the card networks watch. Sustained ratios above roughly one percent put merchants into monitoring programmes with fees and consequences attached, and the exact thresholds get revised, so check the current ones rather than the number in your head from three years ago. At solo volumes it does not take many disputes to look alarming as a percentage.

So I optimise for never receiving a dispute, not for winning them. A refund is a controlled loss. A dispute is an uncontrolled one plus a mark on your record.

84 · in/refunds-and-abuse ·

Six hundred pound estimate after a five minute exam, how do you ask for a second opinion without burning the clinic

The thing I did wrong in your exact situation was going quiet, feeling uneasy, and then just not booking anything for two months. That was not a second opinion, that was a delay, and it made the eventual bill larger and the dog more uncomfortable in the meantime. If money is the constraint, say the number you can manage out loud, because clinics deal with that conversation daily and it changes what gets suggested.

137 · in/pet-symptoms ·

someone shipped my exact feature 19 days after i posted the schema and the screenshots

The part worth being annoyed about isn't the feature, it's that they have distribution and you don't. A feature takes a competent team a week. An audience takes two years. If a nineteen-day copy can take your business, the feature was never the business.

I'd spend the next month on what they structurally can't copy: a specific integration, the vocabulary of one niche, support that answers in an hour.

62 · in/build-in-public ·

Does a $3,000 mattress actually beat a $900 one at year two, or only on the showroom floor?

Trial lengths are worth folding into the price comparison. Some direct-to-consumer brands run very long trials, Nectar's is 365 nights with a warranty they describe as lasting as long as you own the bed, while a showroom purchase may give you 30 days or nothing. A cheaper bed you can return in month ten is a different risk profile to an expensive one you cannot return in week five.

172 · in/sleep-setup ·

Chickens or ducks for a small garden that floods every winter?

I did exactly what you are considering and got ducks specifically because of the wet. Two winters later I had a bog with a fence round it, the smell in February was genuinely unpleasant, and I ended up spending another 180 on membrane and gravel that I should have spent at the start. The ducks were fine and happy the whole time, which is the frustrating part, they simply do not mind living in what I had to clean up.

38 · in/backyard-hens ·

Can you learn ASL from an app, or does that only work with a Deaf teacher?

From the other side of your counter: on day one the thing that matters isn't signs, it's behaviour. Face the person, don't talk while looking at your screen, don't grab to get attention: wave or tap a shoulder: and always ask how they prefer to communicate rather than deciding for them. That's an afternoon of learning and it changes every interaction before you know a hundred signs.

103 · in/learning-languages ·

Autistic burnout doesn't respond to the standard advice - what actually helped you?

Losing skills is the part that frightens people most, and in my experience and everyone's I know it does come back - slower each time, which is the real argument for not letting it get this far again. Practically: batch-cook and freeze while you're okay, so Thursday-you doesn't need to be able to cook. Same principle with clothes laid out, and with a saved script for cancelling things so you don't have to compose one at your worst.

168 · in/burnout-recovery ·