Some of it, at least, is the result of places which are too small to sell to the usual overstock buyers--those tend to want truckloads and you may only ever have a box or two at a time--who just want to recover a decent % of the cost while having it stop haunting their shelves.
I have a family member that sells on amazon. His stuff is surplus, lost freight, damaged freight, and other stuff of unknown origin. There is no way for him to verify its authenticity. If it appears new, he sells it as new. I've purchased stuff on amazon sold as new that is misprints, etc... that I'm pretty sure are in a similar situation. They might be new but are obviously 2nd runs and although they might share the same UPC code, they are not the same quality item. In some cases, I suspect they might even be "destroyed stock" that didn't get properly destroyed or grey market stuff that shouldn't even be legally sold. In one specific case, my family member ended up with a brand new harley motorcycle that was supposed to have been destroyed and got a call from the harley dealership asking for it to be returned when he tried to get a lost title for it.
I don't think getting thousands of users would be that difficult but once you have several thousand visitors then there is probably more profitable ways of using those eyeballs than trying 10k combinations to get a $50 gift card. That would be less than a penny per captcha so if it is a 1/10k payout for $50 then a captcha is probably pretty effective. On the other hand, if the numbers are sequential and/or some of the dollar amounts are larger then that changes. I regularly get $500 home depot gift cards. This would change the calculation significantly especially if you can figure out the pattern and not have to search the whole domain.
The easiest solution (short of recalling all the cards) is to create a "slow-countermeasure" so that it takes exactly 30.5 seconds per try, so that 0.5 x 10000 tries = 5000 minutes or 3.47 days. The second thing would be to put a time-activation lock on numbers tried by ip address, so the first 5 numbers take 30 seconds and every subsequent number adds a 30 second "please wait to try a new card"
Neither of those work. It's really easy to get hundreds of IPs and/or virtual computers legally for pennies and an illegal botnet can easily have 10k+ bots so your 3.47 days becomes seconds. The only real solution is a good quality captcha which is what most sites use but even that's pretty trivial to defeat with things like amazon turk or access to a third party website with real users willing to solve them for you (i.e. porn sites, wares sites, etc..)
Wow. This was a really stupid idea. It looks like it is optional but it makes no sense. It appears they might even be co-mingling third party items with their own items. I will have to start reconsidering my purchases on amazon. This makes amazon products less trustworthy than ebay. It also doesn't really make sense. Why would you buy a new product and send it to amazon when amazon should in theory always be able to buy in bulk cheaper than you.
Amazon mixing stock from multiple vendors may have introduced a liability. Consider, customer a well known brand made by a well certified legitimate vendor from Amazon. Actually gets a counterfeit pair from a different vendor because Amazon co-mingled the stock. Relying on legit vendor's assurances they use the glasses....
Moral of the story: If you offer brand A from vendor A and someone orders it, you damned well better not ship knock-off A from vendor B.
Do you have any proof they do this? I'm pretty certain they don't do it this way. I'm fairly certain that stock for each seller stays separate and they are just storing it for them.
The way we avoid Luddites is to make sure everyone gets a share of the productivity dividend, of which the most practical proposal so far is a UBI.
If there is less work that needs to be done by humans, instead of paying half the people to sit around and do nothing while the other half continue to work 40+ hours per week, why not just make it so it's illegal to do more than 20 hours per week of work. It's going to take a long time to automate away all the jobs, even the manual labor type, so by slowly reducing the work week, we can start transitioning to a UBI without creating a society of haves and have nots. Someone with a job is always going to be in a better position than someone without a job. Better to make more jobs by mandating that everyone works less hours. 40 hours is a very arbitrary number anyways. Why not make it 35 then 30 then 25?
You sound like a moron, trying to distinguish all those sugars from "sugar".
Actually it is you that sounds like a moron lumping all the sugars together into a single "sugar". There are plenty of reasons to know the difference between the different types of sugar. Fructose is a type of sugar. Lactose is another type of sugar. Some people are lactose intolerant and can't process lactose. Some people also can't process fructose. Table sugar is usually cane sugar which is sucrose which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Alcohol is also a type of sugar. There are other sugars as well. They are not all the same. Glucose is what your cells use. You can't be intolerant to glucose. The LD50 of glucose is 30g/kg while the LD50 of fructose is only 1g/kg. Putting glucose in an IV is a common medical procedure while putting fructose, sucrose, or any other sugar in an IV would likely kill you.
I think these days very few of us give our kids multiple glasses of HFCS today. Back in the day we'd drink big jugs of coke like it was going out of style, but the word is out there that this stuff is bad for you in quantity. Like alcohol, moderation is required when complete abstinence isn't desirable.
Honestly the looks you get if you give your kid a can of coke for lunch at school puts you somewhere between terrorist and pedophile, and given the general idiocy of our education system, the teacher is likely to blame any and all issues on that can of coke. You have to be a glutton for punishment to keep doing it.
I can count on one hand the number of birthday parties, pizza parties, or any other kind of party where name brand soda wasn't the primary non-alcoholic beverage. Yeah, it's frowned upon in school lunches but that's really about it. Every special occasion, potluck, or get together, soda is usually the only beverage served. Also every restaurant, soda is the main drink. Most restaurants would go out of business if people stopped ordering soda and/or alcohol as that is where their profit is. Look around a restaurant next time you go to one and see how many tables you can find that are drinking something other than soda. Almost zero.
Oh, quit with the "poison" nonsense. Sugar is our primary cellular fuel.
Sugar is not our primary fuel. Glucose is our primary fuel. Sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup can be as high as 80% fructose. Fructose is not the same as glucose. Fructose is processed by the liver the same way as alcohol and other poisons. The only difference between fructose and alcohol is that fructose doesn't cause you to get drunk. Very few people would dream of giving their 8 year old multiple glasses of alcohol a day but millions of people give their 8 year olds multiple glasses of HFCS every day.
Quite often, the only real argument to buying newer models would be support.
But even that isn't a major issue. For instance, on the iphone, the iphone 5S and the iphone 6 get all the security updates that all the newer models do. The only reason the older ones don't is because they are 32bit instead of 64bit. I paid $50 for a like new iphone 5S and it runs all the same apps as the $700+ iphones.
Does everyone else abuse their phones so badly that it requires annual replacement?
Even if they do, that's still a point in favor of buying. Most lease programs and tradeup programs I've seen require the phone to be defect free. If you have a phone with a small crack, you can still use it, hand it down, or sell it. If you are in a lease program, you're likely going to be forced to pay to have it repaired.
But some of the issues is a feature of subscription services in general, which need to price their services according to usage by some sort of "average" viewer utilization, with low users subsidizing heavy users. There is no getting around this.
There is no reason that you have to use the all-you-can-eat business model. I would be very content with a business model where I paid $1/hour for my entertainment if I could choose from any movie I wanted. Yes, it's not a subscription model but it would likely be a profitable model. I have no desire to pay $8/month for B movies from netflix but I regularly pay $1+ at redbox for movies I actually want to watch. I would gladly pay $15-$20/month if I could watch exactly what I wanted without hunting. Amazon/VUDU/google play is closer to what I want with just being able to rent specific titles. The only problem with that is their pricing is off. I'm not going to spend $4 to rent a movie when the dvd is only $5. If Amazon switched and made the rental of all streaming titles at 10% of the price of the physical disk, I would use them exclusively. That would make new releases approximately $2 (or slightly more than redbox) and bargain basement and B movies the appropriate 50cents they should be.
Yes, I try to submit reviews. Also, even when I submit a 5-star review, I try to mention something that can be improved in the hopes that the creator might see my review and improve their product. I also do occasionally buy stuff with no reviews but I'm more reluctant to do so.
If a competing product has no reviews, then you have no way of knowing what the shortcomings are.
Not only this, but I'm always suspicious of a product with very few reviews. If people are actually buying the product then there should be some reviews. If there are no reviews, I start to suspect it to be a fraudulent listing.
One place I worked it cost $18,000 for us to run fiber about 1/4 of a mile. We had to bore underground because the incumbent power company wanted to charge so much in attachment fees that it was cheaper to go underground, despite the fact that this was on private property and the poles serviced no other customers. Extrapolating out, it would be ballpark $288,000 to $360,000 for your 4 to 5 mile loop. But of course, every situation is different.
Yeah, that sounds about right for the labor. The other problem would be actually getting permission to run fiber thru the state park and all the other properties between here and there. Other than my neighborhood of 20 houses, most of the rest of the area is farms so that would be a pretty expensive proposition for 20 houses.
If a few thousand measly, inflated dollars are outside your price range, you're no longer middle class.
The other issue is having somewhere to terminate on the other end. That would require someone in town willing to let you put a tower on it. Basically, even being firmly in the middle class, it's sometimes hard to do that last mile yourself.
In general, the 'smart' feature should always have been a module that, while it comes with the television and could be proprietary, should be upgradable and replaceable.
I agree completely. A friend of mine has a "smart" TV. Comes to find out, it is really basically only a TV with a built-in chromecast. Although this is a step in the right direction, it would be much better if they just had a small compartment in the back and it came with an *actual* chromecast. That way, if it breaks or needs to be upgraded, it can be a quick swap.
"Being a rich white guy" "No reasonable amount of money"
You are not rich.
Just because I think the price is unreasonable doesn't mean that I couldn't afford it if I really wanted. There are very few people rich enough where price is no object and those people don't tend to stay rich for long. I currently use cellular hotspots for internet which is faster than what I can get on a hardline and it suits my needs just fine.
"No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs " So why don't you just move less than five miles away? Are you really this dumb that you don't take internet connections into account when choosing a house? Because if you are, you deserve what you get.
I like where I live. I live on 4 acres and there is a state park between me and the city 10 minutes away. I wish I could get faster internet but it's not a deal breaker. That buffer zone is why I can't get faster internet but is also why I moved here in the first place.
The complaint is that they *can't* buy better internet. Being a rich white guy in an area where 1.5M is the fastest available, I feel their pain. No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands for me to personally have a line ran. There *might* be some esoteric solutions. My brother was in a similar situation and put a 100 foot tower at his in-town office and beamed internet to a 100 foot tower at his house in the country several miles away but this cost him several thousand dollars and is out of the price range of even most middle class people.
NodeJS is JavaScript, so you can cut down on the number of languages you are using for a Multi-Tier Application. This can allowed shared libraries across both sides Say your complex data validation check that you put on the Browser Side (as the UI layer needs this to keep people from keying in stupid stuff) then use the same code on the Logic Side, to double validate the data in case someone disables javascript on their browser.
This might have made sense 5 years ago but this doesn't seem very useful today. You could use the same argument for java and android phones. As most places now have to develop for web(js) and android(java) and ios(obj c), I don't see what the advantage is for having the same language on the server as the web. I'm assuming that most companies developing for web,android, and ios use a single language on their server to serve endpoints to the 3 current main platforms.
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Some of it, at least, is the result of places which are too small to sell to the usual overstock buyers--those tend to want truckloads and you may only ever have a box or two at a time--who just want to recover a decent % of the cost while having it stop haunting their shelves.
I have a family member that sells on amazon. His stuff is surplus, lost freight, damaged freight, and other stuff of unknown origin. There is no way for him to verify its authenticity. If it appears new, he sells it as new. I've purchased stuff on amazon sold as new that is misprints, etc... that I'm pretty sure are in a similar situation. They might be new but are obviously 2nd runs and although they might share the same UPC code, they are not the same quality item. In some cases, I suspect they might even be "destroyed stock" that didn't get properly destroyed or grey market stuff that shouldn't even be legally sold. In one specific case, my family member ended up with a brand new harley motorcycle that was supposed to have been destroyed and got a call from the harley dealership asking for it to be returned when he tried to get a lost title for it.
I don't think getting thousands of users would be that difficult but once you have several thousand visitors then there is probably more profitable ways of using those eyeballs than trying 10k combinations to get a $50 gift card. That would be less than a penny per captcha so if it is a 1/10k payout for $50 then a captcha is probably pretty effective. On the other hand, if the numbers are sequential and/or some of the dollar amounts are larger then that changes. I regularly get $500 home depot gift cards. This would change the calculation significantly especially if you can figure out the pattern and not have to search the whole domain.
Seems like the best solution would be to track the number of balance checks each card number receives and base a wait time off of that.
Something as simple as make the wait time be X^1.5 where X is the number of attempts would quickly make repeatedly checking numbers infeasible
That doesn't work at all either. You only need to check a specific number once.
The easiest solution (short of recalling all the cards) is to create a "slow-countermeasure" so that it takes exactly 30.5 seconds per try, so that 0.5 x 10000 tries = 5000 minutes or 3.47 days. The second thing would be to put a time-activation lock on numbers tried by ip address, so the first 5 numbers take 30 seconds and every subsequent number adds a 30 second "please wait to try a new card"
Neither of those work. It's really easy to get hundreds of IPs and/or virtual computers legally for pennies and an illegal botnet can easily have 10k+ bots so your 3.47 days becomes seconds. The only real solution is a good quality captcha which is what most sites use but even that's pretty trivial to defeat with things like amazon turk or access to a third party website with real users willing to solve them for you (i.e. porn sites, wares sites, etc..)
About a zillion references.
Wow. This was a really stupid idea. It looks like it is optional but it makes no sense. It appears they might even be co-mingling third party items with their own items. I will have to start reconsidering my purchases on amazon. This makes amazon products less trustworthy than ebay. It also doesn't really make sense. Why would you buy a new product and send it to amazon when amazon should in theory always be able to buy in bulk cheaper than you.
Amazon mixing stock from multiple vendors may have introduced a liability. Consider, customer a well known brand made by a well certified legitimate vendor from Amazon. Actually gets a counterfeit pair from a different vendor because Amazon co-mingled the stock. Relying on legit vendor's assurances they use the glasses....
Moral of the story: If you offer brand A from vendor A and someone orders it, you damned well better not ship knock-off A from vendor B.
Do you have any proof they do this? I'm pretty certain they don't do it this way. I'm fairly certain that stock for each seller stays separate and they are just storing it for them.
Well, they've been banned by the FCC for now, but here's what they used to be:
http://www.fiercecable.com/onl...
One version may have been banned but they have been replaced by things like "zero rating" which is just the same thing by a different name.
The way we avoid Luddites is to make sure everyone gets a share of the productivity dividend, of which the most practical proposal so far is a UBI.
If there is less work that needs to be done by humans, instead of paying half the people to sit around and do nothing while the other half continue to work 40+ hours per week, why not just make it so it's illegal to do more than 20 hours per week of work. It's going to take a long time to automate away all the jobs, even the manual labor type, so by slowly reducing the work week, we can start transitioning to a UBI without creating a society of haves and have nots. Someone with a job is always going to be in a better position than someone without a job. Better to make more jobs by mandating that everyone works less hours. 40 hours is a very arbitrary number anyways. Why not make it 35 then 30 then 25?
You sound like a moron, trying to distinguish all those sugars from "sugar".
Actually it is you that sounds like a moron lumping all the sugars together into a single "sugar". There are plenty of reasons to know the difference between the different types of sugar. Fructose is a type of sugar. Lactose is another type of sugar. Some people are lactose intolerant and can't process lactose. Some people also can't process fructose. Table sugar is usually cane sugar which is sucrose which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Alcohol is also a type of sugar. There are other sugars as well. They are not all the same. Glucose is what your cells use. You can't be intolerant to glucose. The LD50 of glucose is 30g/kg while the LD50 of fructose is only 1g/kg. Putting glucose in an IV is a common medical procedure while putting fructose, sucrose, or any other sugar in an IV would likely kill you.
I think these days very few of us give our kids multiple glasses of HFCS today. Back in the day we'd drink big jugs of coke like it was going out of style, but the word is out there that this stuff is bad for you in quantity. Like alcohol, moderation is required when complete abstinence isn't desirable.
Honestly the looks you get if you give your kid a can of coke for lunch at school puts you somewhere between terrorist and pedophile, and given the general idiocy of our education system, the teacher is likely to blame any and all issues on that can of coke. You have to be a glutton for punishment to keep doing it.
I can count on one hand the number of birthday parties, pizza parties, or any other kind of party where name brand soda wasn't the primary non-alcoholic beverage. Yeah, it's frowned upon in school lunches but that's really about it. Every special occasion, potluck, or get together, soda is usually the only beverage served. Also every restaurant, soda is the main drink. Most restaurants would go out of business if people stopped ordering soda and/or alcohol as that is where their profit is. Look around a restaurant next time you go to one and see how many tables you can find that are drinking something other than soda. Almost zero.
Sugar is not our primary fuel. Glucose is our primary fuel. Sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
You two are talking past each other. Sucrose, glucose, and fructose are all sugars.
When most laymen talk of sugar they are talking about table sugar (also commonly known as cane sugar) which is 50/50 bonded.
Oh, quit with the "poison" nonsense. Sugar is our primary cellular fuel.
Sugar is not our primary fuel. Glucose is our primary fuel. Sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup can be as high as 80% fructose. Fructose is not the same as glucose. Fructose is processed by the liver the same way as alcohol and other poisons. The only difference between fructose and alcohol is that fructose doesn't cause you to get drunk. Very few people would dream of giving their 8 year old multiple glasses of alcohol a day but millions of people give their 8 year olds multiple glasses of HFCS every day.
Quite often, the only real argument to buying newer models would be support.
But even that isn't a major issue. For instance, on the iphone, the iphone 5S and the iphone 6 get all the security updates that all the newer models do. The only reason the older ones don't is because they are 32bit instead of 64bit. I paid $50 for a like new iphone 5S and it runs all the same apps as the $700+ iphones.
Does everyone else abuse their phones so badly that it requires annual replacement?
Even if they do, that's still a point in favor of buying. Most lease programs and tradeup programs I've seen require the phone to be defect free. If you have a phone with a small crack, you can still use it, hand it down, or sell it. If you are in a lease program, you're likely going to be forced to pay to have it repaired.
But some of the issues is a feature of subscription services in general, which need to price their services according to usage by some sort of "average" viewer utilization, with low users subsidizing heavy users. There is no getting around this.
There is no reason that you have to use the all-you-can-eat business model. I would be very content with a business model where I paid $1/hour for my entertainment if I could choose from any movie I wanted. Yes, it's not a subscription model but it would likely be a profitable model. I have no desire to pay $8/month for B movies from netflix but I regularly pay $1+ at redbox for movies I actually want to watch. I would gladly pay $15-$20/month if I could watch exactly what I wanted without hunting. Amazon/VUDU/google play is closer to what I want with just being able to rent specific titles. The only problem with that is their pricing is off. I'm not going to spend $4 to rent a movie when the dvd is only $5. If Amazon switched and made the rental of all streaming titles at 10% of the price of the physical disk, I would use them exclusively. That would make new releases approximately $2 (or slightly more than redbox) and bargain basement and B movies the appropriate 50cents they should be.
Just out of curiosity, do you submit reviews?
Yes, I try to submit reviews. Also, even when I submit a 5-star review, I try to mention something that can be improved in the hopes that the creator might see my review and improve their product. I also do occasionally buy stuff with no reviews but I'm more reluctant to do so.
If a competing product has no reviews, then you have no way of knowing what the shortcomings are.
Not only this, but I'm always suspicious of a product with very few reviews. If people are actually buying the product then there should be some reviews. If there are no reviews, I start to suspect it to be a fraudulent listing.
One place I worked it cost $18,000 for us to run fiber about 1/4 of a mile. We had to bore underground because the incumbent power company wanted to charge so much in attachment fees that it was cheaper to go underground, despite the fact that this was on private property and the poles serviced no other customers. Extrapolating out, it would be ballpark $288,000 to $360,000 for your 4 to 5 mile loop. But of course, every situation is different.
Yeah, that sounds about right for the labor. The other problem would be actually getting permission to run fiber thru the state park and all the other properties between here and there. Other than my neighborhood of 20 houses, most of the rest of the area is farms so that would be a pretty expensive proposition for 20 houses.
If a few thousand measly, inflated dollars are outside your price range, you're no longer middle class.
The other issue is having somewhere to terminate on the other end. That would require someone in town willing to let you put a tower on it. Basically, even being firmly in the middle class, it's sometimes hard to do that last mile yourself.
In general, the 'smart' feature should always have been a module that, while it comes with the television and could be proprietary, should be upgradable and replaceable.
I agree completely. A friend of mine has a "smart" TV. Comes to find out, it is really basically only a TV with a built-in chromecast. Although this is a step in the right direction, it would be much better if they just had a small compartment in the back and it came with an *actual* chromecast. That way, if it breaks or needs to be upgraded, it can be a quick swap.
"Being a rich white guy"
"No reasonable amount of money"
You are not rich.
Just because I think the price is unreasonable doesn't mean that I couldn't afford it if I really wanted. There are very few people rich enough where price is no object and those people don't tend to stay rich for long. I currently use cellular hotspots for internet which is faster than what I can get on a hardline and it suits my needs just fine.
"No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs " So why don't you just move less than five miles away? Are you really this dumb that you don't take internet connections into account when choosing a house? Because if you are, you deserve what you get.
I like where I live. I live on 4 acres and there is a state park between me and the city 10 minutes away. I wish I could get faster internet but it's not a deal breaker. That buffer zone is why I can't get faster internet but is also why I moved here in the first place.
Form a community like us
http://www.wafreenet.org/Home
My neighbors and I have been discussing exactly this. Getting a shared tower installed.
Go get a job and buy better internet!
The complaint is that they *can't* buy better internet. Being a rich white guy in an area where 1.5M is the fastest available, I feel their pain. No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands for me to personally have a line ran. There *might* be some esoteric solutions. My brother was in a similar situation and put a 100 foot tower at his in-town office and beamed internet to a 100 foot tower at his house in the country several miles away but this cost him several thousand dollars and is out of the price range of even most middle class people.
NodeJS is JavaScript, so you can cut down on the number of languages you are using for a Multi-Tier Application. This can allowed shared libraries across both sides Say your complex data validation check that you put on the Browser Side (as the UI layer needs this to keep people from keying in stupid stuff) then use the same code on the Logic Side, to double validate the data in case someone disables javascript on their browser.
This might have made sense 5 years ago but this doesn't seem very useful today. You could use the same argument for java and android phones. As most places now have to develop for web(js) and android(java) and ios(obj c), I don't see what the advantage is for having the same language on the server as the web. I'm assuming that most companies developing for web,android, and ios use a single language on their server to serve endpoints to the 3 current main platforms.