Friend of mine swore by a free multimeter he got from a parts supplier at a trade show. Took him two days to figure out why a brand new thermostat wasn't getting power. Turns out the meter was reading about 4 volts low on the low end, so everything looked dead when it was fine. He swapped in a Fluke he borrowed from a neighbor and found the problem in ten minutes. That free meter is now a paperweight in his garage.

5 trees in 2 hours isn't that impressive for a pole saw.

Yeah I used to just assume it was some random product tweak they rolled out without much thought, but honestly your point about it being a Monday morning meeting between two managers makes so much sense. I remember the exact fall of 2018 when my feed went from chronological to chaos, and it felt way too deliberate to be a simple bug fix. Now I'm picturing some conference room where they mapped out the whole algorithm switch over coffee and stale bagels. It actually explains a lot about why they didn't warn anyone or test it properly first.

Yeah, "wrote off" is right - I always said it was just a gimmick.

My neighbor Jim told me to just use plain mortar mix and I watched my patch crumble after three rains. I read some Reddit post about using a bonding adhesive and a wire brush prep and that patch is still holding strong TWO YEARS later. Not everything online is overthinking, sometimes it's just learning from people who already messed it up.