my buddy tom actually fell for this with that big mecha anime, i forget the name. he got the like $150 "ultimate edition" and it came in this giant box that was all scratched up. the whole thing was just a cardboard stand that folded out and the discs were in paper sleeves that scratched them too. he had to fight the company for a refund for like 3 months.

Hate to be that guy, but I gotta call out something real quick. That $600 digger isn't "hydraulic," it's just a powered post hole digger with a gas motor. Hydraulic ones run off a skid steer or excavator and cost like 2 grand plus. Anyway, your main point totally stands though. I borrowed a buddy's gas powered auger once and it was a nightmare in rocky soil too, sheared a shear pin on the first rock. Those things have no give, they just keep spinning until something snaps. The manual clamshell is slow but it lets you actually feel what's down there. You can work around roots and rocks instead of fighting them. Folks see power tools and think they're always better, but for our kind of ground, brute force usually just breaks stuff.

Read somewhere that floral foam can take years to break down in landfills, that gave me pause.

That totally misses the point when some people just want to figure it out alone without being bothered.

I read an article in Consumer Reports a few months back that basically said the same thing @rubybarnes. They tested a bunch of smart thermostats and found that the Nest especially just doesn't handle people who adjust the temp a lot. It just assumes you want it at whatever you set it to most recently, even if that was because you were trying to get comfortable after a workout or something. So it just locks onto that temp and never learns the pattern of when you leave for work or go to bed. It's basically a dumb thermostat with a fancy face that costs too much. I stuck with my old Honeywell programmable one, it's way simpler and I don't have to fight it.