Hang on a minute. Rewind. Look at the basic premise here, and realize how there is a poisonous precept in place.
If technology can eat all our jobs, than this means that we should be free. It should be like Star Trek, where we don't have to worry about people cleaning our toilets or doing our laundry, and subsequently don't need to worry about how to the rent or the car.
If technology can eliminate most workers, then we need to ensure that everyone gets to share that prosperity, and not that those who are making it happen get to rule over the rest of us.
This is just capitalism in action, right? When you ask the repair shop in the desert "how much to fix my car" and they respond "how much you got?" , it's the same premise. If the company can get you trained and into a job, they will try to extract as much of your future earnings as they can, because in their eyes, without them, you wouldn't have that job.
This is not much different from the philosophy of private colleges. Just a slightly different payment method.
Yes, absolutely, but I think I used the wrong term. I think the term is "Hawthorne Effect". Hawthorne Effect is when the people who know they are being watched no longer act naturally.
Google had good insight that links amounted to "votes" - webmasters themselves linked to other sites they liked, the more links a site had, the more "votes" it got by people who were more than just novices.
But once sites figured out that Google was doing this, they created artificial links wherever they could. Sometimes it was via shady link exchanges, and then it morphed into forum spam, which essentially made running a forum 100x harder. The forum spam wasn't about getting visitors, it was all about getting pagerank.
Google really destroyed the internet from what it once was. They created what amounted to Observation Bias - once people knew that links were no longer just to naturally reference another website, links became weaponized.
But it didn't stop there, and I don't think Google caused this innocently. Google started actively punishing websites based on their links. Anyone remember "web rings"? They predated Google, and were a way for like-minded sites to link to each other **so that visitors to one site could find something else related to that site**. They were like mini-islands of sites that, if I remember right, shared a code that allowed you to see all the related sites. But that kind-of circumvents Google, doesn't it? So Google punished sites that used them.
Even if you think a webring was a sketchy way to game Google, remember how websites used to have a page of "links"? Those were just other sites that the owner either liked or felt were relevant. The link was the way of saying "hey, I like this, maybe you will too". But Google came down on them too, particularly if they found a reciprocating link back. Turns out that Google invented a non-standard tag called "nofollow" which they required webmasters to use (or else they would punish them) when linking to other "non-trusted" sites. This was mainly due to forum spam where users dropped in links - a massive problem, but one Google could have solved by simply recognizing user-generated forum content and discounting links within it.
So now, when someone makes a website, they just don't create links. Why bother? Links got people punished by Google, so why risk it just to show a little love? And since no one links to each other, we depend on Google - which is probably just what they wanted anyway.
If you plug $10,000 into the US CPI Calculator from 2000 to 2015, you will find that it is worth $13,905. That means an increase from $10,000 to $12,000 over that period of time is an effective cut.
I don't think Canada messes around with a "worker in purgatory" program like H1-B (where, if you don't follow the employer's wishes, you get let go, and have to return to your home country since it is hard to get another employer to sponsor you on short notice). Canada just allows more skilled workers to become legal immigrants right away.
That is what the US should be doing. When the immigrants get a green card, they then lack restrictions which allow them to be exploited. Allowing them to participate in the job market - where they can do what everyone else does, switch jobs to get a raise - blunts any major impact they have on everyone else's salary. At that point their impact on the job market is only the fact that they are just another worker - no different from a newly-minted college graduate, or anyone else who learns to code and throws his or her hat in the job market ring.
The benefit of immigrants is that they add demand to the US economy. Demand is demand, no matter where it is from. If you're living in Podunk, USA, and your company says "we need to ramp up. We can either hire 1,000 immigrants from China and India and get them settled in Podunk, or we can move the work to Canada and put those 1,000 immigrants there", if you're living in Podunk, and Podunk has a lot of empty storefronts, you're going to want those immigrants.
Companies like TATA and Cognizent are the main problems; they bring in the H1-B workers but pay them really badly by US standards, because they can't easily switch jobs. Seems like they have replaced the Anderson Consulting model of hiring college grads, who at least got decent pay which was governed by their ability to switch jobs.
Bingo. I "bought" a movie on Amazon a while ago. Percy Jackson or something. Watched it a couple of times with the kids. No one has any interest in it anymore.
So what can I do with it? Can I resell it? Nope. Can I give it to a relative who now has young kids? Nope. Can I leave it to my children? Uh uh. The "sale" of that item to me was fictional. It was a perpetual license that I have to keep track of. If Amazon "loses" that somehow, I have to remember that I had it, I have to provide some form of proof that I "own" this.
I would also be willing to bet that somehow Amazon will find a way to "revoke" this perpetual license from me before I die.
For that reason, I prefer to buy physical copies of everything. Maybe I won't be able to use them in 30 years because the mechanism to play them will have evolved, but I can at least move them along to someone else and let them enjoy the experience.
> The standard method for bidding in forums is that the auction ends 24 hours after the last bid.
As a seller, that would be very frustrating. I really like knowing when the auction ends. Such a plan could extend an auction for days, even longer. Does this kind of method work with the style of bidding eBay uses, where your bid remains low if no one else is bidding? In live auctions, they can open the price at $10, you can go in and say "I bid $1,000", and you're going to win - for $1,000.
I've bid in such auctions before eBay (usually done via phone), but when eBay came around, the fresh and exciting thing was that the price got set based on the 2nd highest bidder's bid. That is really nice for collectibles, it sure makes me bid more because of the thrill of getting something for less than I'm willing to pay for it.
As someone who sells occasionally, that is a benefit, but as someone who buys quite a bit, the loss of "skin in the game" when listing an item has resulted in people listing items at stupid prices, basically fishing for that one particular buyer who might be dumb enough to want the item that much. It costs them nothing to take an item that is generally worth $10 and put it up for $50, and it sits there, day after day, month after month.
They are making a change in the near future so that "buy it now" listings are perpetual, no end date. That's going to clog things up even more, and is an even further departure from their auction format.
What I wish they would do is to allow me to block certain items as "seen enough of this listing already", because I'm sick of doing searches and coming across the same overpriced crap, some of which has been there for literally years.
How do you pay for those items? To be honest, although I hate paying the 3.4% or whatever of the payment, PayPal is a lot easier than waiting for someone to send me a check. I would never go back to accepting checks for payment, waiting for them to clear, etc.
I don't mind sniping, it's pretty easy to counter as a buyer - just use the platform the way you should. Enter your best offer right up front (maybe even 5% more). If someone snipes you, they paid more than you were willing to pay, and that's that. The only way eBay could really counter sniping is by limiting bidding in the final hour or so to people who already have bids in place. Sniping really just lets experienced buyers outwit inexperienced buyers and it discouraging bidding wars by said inexperienced buyers. I'll do it on occasion when I detect that I'm up against a newbie.
The one change that I think really altered the platform for me was when they made all the buyers private. Before that, it was kind-of exciting - I had some "nemesises" who were always competing for the same items as me. It was more like a game.
The press release spells out their major issue - they really did change their core mission from an Auction marketplace to an eCommerce marketplace. They don't want to just be the place where people come to find rare and unusual collectibles, they want to be the place that competes with Amazon. But while that could make them more money, their hands-off approach to sellers severely limits them. In fact, they do as much as they can to make the sellers anonymous to prevent people from circumventing their marketplace.
I wish they would just decide to go back to their original mission, even though that means reducing their volume.
Oh, here's one other totally asinine thing they do. When they display your list of items you won, they have a button next to them which guides you to the next step in the workflow, like "Pay Now". Once you have paid though, the button usually says "Leave Feedback". Except that is true only about 80% of the time, the other 20% it says "Return item" even though the step of the workflow is identical to other items. Who is their UI designer and how little do they care about things?
eBay is so frustrating. On one hand, a platform like eBay works best when it is a monopoly - when all the buyers and sellers are in the same place. On the other hand, the fact that they are a monopoly has made them into an awful, awful company.
I have used eBay for over 20 years. The overall experience today is worse than it was 20 years ago. I would go as far as to say that their last good improvement was probably made 15 years ago.
What is even more frustrating is that they continue to do absolutely stupid things, and they constantly introduce either bugs or degraded user experiences, which take months to then fix. And there's no way to even report those issues with the goal of getting a resolution.
Here's an example: I have a lot of "Saved Searches" set up - this is how I buy a lot of items (I look for collectibles). About 2 years ago, eBay for some reason decided that they would only show about 30 characters of the 80 character auction title in the email. What this means is that I get notifications of auctions which I then have to click through to their site to see what the auction actually is. I have stopped doing that long ago.
Then, they decided that when you perform the same search on their desktop site, they would limit the auction title to 50 characters instead of 80. So even there, I can't exactly tell what is being sold without clicking through to the auction.
My guess is that a VP is being paid bonuses on clickthrough metrics. Meanwhile I'm guessing that sales are down.
It sounds like things are about to get even worse now that the hedge fund wants its pound of flesh.
There is far less action on eBay than there was 20 years ago, probably due to the high fees (you're going to fork over about 13.4% of every sale, since final value fee is 10% and PayPal fee is 3.4%), and also due to the cost of shipping things greatly exceeding the value of the things being sold (try selling cross-border - you usually can't get away with anything less than $18 to send something to Canada, which sucks if you're selling items for less than $100). They were revolutionary when they first started, but now are just "meh".
I can understand the sentiment a little bit. The one thing missing from the article's analysis is that when people "size up" a neighborhood, they look for certain visual cues. One of them is the type of retail present. When you drive through a neighborhood and see a dollar store, you classify that neighborhood as "poor". You dismiss it. And while that is most likely a realistic indicator, it harms the neighborhood's chance of becoming less poor, because it's like a scarlet letter on its chest.
However, I would also point out that many of the people opposing dollar stores are the same people who reminisce about going to the "five and dime" when they were younger.
Don't we already have a similar situation in the USA - people who win a lottery? That would be an interesting group to study, to see what people do when they get a pot of money that isn't transformative (i.e. hundreds of millions), but sustaining (i.e. gives them what amounts to an annuity of something resembling a UBI, or is enough to basically replace their pre-winnings salary).
This should illustrate the need for a strong, independent media.
I know that it is currently en vogue to say "we don't need the media, we can just do their jobs ourselves using the internet", but it should be obvious that if you take that approach, you wind up trusting the "truth" being peddled by propaganda websites such as Zerohedge and Alex Jones.
It is literally the job of a strong independent media to figure out what is truth and what is fiction. They are trained to do this and therefore can figure things out much better than you or I can. Sure, they get things wrong from time to time - but they then state their errors, correct it, and move on.
A state-run media is no better than a collection of blogger-run media. Bloggers will get things right, but they almost always have an angle (I would posit that the less someone is paid to blog, the more they have a stake in putting out a specific message).
> If the publisher can approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can veto creative incorporating flashing. If the publisher cannot approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can switch to a different ad network or exchange, switch to publisher-hosted ad delivery without any network or exchange, or not use video as a format.
Online advertising no longer works like that. It is all programmatic. No publisher personally approves programmatic creatives, there are too many of them and advertisers can change them too rapidly. The best you can do is choose categories which Ad Exchanges (primarily Google, with some other players) give you. And even then, advertisers will cheat - they will put through inappropriate creatives when they can. I couldn't find anything in Google's DFP (most popular ad serving tool) that says "don't show flashing animation".
No one sells ads directly on their sites to advertisers, that is not a viable model because advertisers want to get their message out to a variety of sites instead of "sponsoring" one or more pages on a single site. If you're not using programmatic advertising these days, you are leaving most advertising dollars on the table. In fact, most advertisers don't care about the sites they advertise on (there are, of course, exceptions) - they are ultimately trying to reach the users, so if they know a user is potentially interested in going to St. Kitt's (because they searched for that island), they want to show that person St. Kitt's ads whether they are on a travel site or on a cooking site.
Believe me when I tell you that I have things set to block autoplay audio ads, but I find them on my site from time-to-time. The ad serving is so complex that it becomes very hard to trace their origin. There will always be sleazy advertisers out there, looking to game the system. This is the same industry that spawns robo-calls.
Thanks for the tip on the "main" HTML element, I wasn't aware of that one. It's troublesome that this relatively obscure and non-functional HTML element is used to make decisions though. It reminds me of when Google introduced the "nofollow" tag, and then penalized sites which didn't use it.
> Any webmaster who successfully claims control of a site in Google Search Console can clean up ads on that site and submit a request to have that site reevaluated.
I can speak with direct experience of being on the wrong end of a Google algorithm bug. It's nowhere near as easy as you state. My site was penalized in Google for about 6 months. It was a clear "-10" penalty - my content was being put onto page 2 where it was behind irrelevant results. Then, all of a sudden, the penalty was lifted. I never got an explanation why.
Google does not have "customer service", there is no one who can say "here's the problem, you have to fix these things". At best you can post a question in one of their forums, and then weather the abuse you are sure to receive.
I did manage to attract the attention of a Google employee on the forums. Do you know what his advice was? "Make your site the best it can possibly be, don't worry about its rankings". I couldn't call my congressman, I couldn't appeal to the courts. I had to deal with it, because, as dozens of wannabe trolls pointed out, "Google doesn't have to include you in their results if they don't want to".
Google and other large tech companies have more power than governments, with almost zero ability for individuals to influence them. Increasingly, decisions are made by algorithms with no ability for exceptions.
Let me give you one more example. My employer uses filtering software, and blocks several obvious categories - porn, gambling, etc. The classification of websites is done by a vendor, and the vendor classification is used by a lot of companies. What happens when that vendor misclassifies your website? The only thing you can hope for is to get in contact with that vendor and beg them to change the classification. There a
Not everything it bans are "formats". I would call these "formats" (which means a publisher can avoid them by not placing their code on the site):
- pop-ups (other than exit intent pop-ups) - prestitials (with countdown on desktop or at all on mobile) - postitials with countdown - screen-height ads that appear as a float rather than inline, thereby pausing scrolling of the article behind it (a format that I haven't personally seen in the wild)
These two are ad characteristics that cannot be directly controlled by the publisher via the placement of code:
- autoplaying audio (other than preroll before relevant video) - animated ads that include flashing elements
As a publisher myself, I don't want to show such ads, but first, there is no option in a network that says "don't show animated ads with flashing elements", and second, although I can (and do) say no to autoplaying audio, such ads still slip into the ad stream by advertisers who, for lack of a better word, cheat.
These next two are a lot more nebulous. I don't know how "30%" is computed, or what it even means, though I did find something on their site that suggest these are for mobile browsers:
- sticky ad taller than 30 percent of the scrolling area. Their picture of this one makes sense, it's basically when the top or bottom of the mobile screen is taken over by a fixed ad.
This one is less clear:
- vertical ad density over 30 percent of article space. This says "Ads that take up more than 30% of the vertical height of a page. Ad density is determined by summing the heights of all ads within the main content portion of a mobile page, then dividing by the total height of the main content portion of the page.". That's a little scary, as a publisher, because not only is that confusing to understand, it seems easy to break that rule inadvertently, for example, with a page that has less content than normal. Plus "Main content portion" is subjective, and some algorithm could whack you on that.
What is scary here is that there is no appeal process, and the ban appears to be absolute. From the OP:
Chrome will stop showing *all ads* on sites in any country that *repeatedly* display "disruptive ads."
How is "repeatedly" determined?
To me, this is just another case of a tech company being "governmental", in an autocratic way. They don't use people to make the determinations, it's all algorithm-based. Don't like the laws? Your only option is exile.
Google, a behemoth company, is using their dominance by blocking ads on third-party sites using the browser that they control, a browser that has 65% market share. The demand for advertising won't go away - it will just shift to Google Text Ads, meaning that publishers will have even fewer scraps to feed on.
Given how shoddy that "Coalition for Better Ads" site is (404s on what should be their main content pages), I wonder if they are just a front organization for Google itself?
I'm genuinely interested - when you say you want your children to grow up in the city, are you talking about them growing up in a 750 s.f. 3-bedroom apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise in Manhattan, or are you thinking more like a 2-story brownstone in Brooklyn?
The reason I ask is that the 2-story brownstone in Brooklyn is not compatible with an economy where all the jobs are located in the 10 or so Superstar US cities. The housing needs to become as dense as Hong Kong or Tokyo. That's the conundrum - people want to live in a low-density house in a high-density city, and that can only happen if you have a few million dollars to spend, and if you have a bunch of people who earn low wages and who are content to live in squalor, or to commute 3 hours per day to their low-wage job.
I can agree with you that some people like living that way, but I don't think it is across the board.
If you're young and single, I'm sure it's an absolute blast. If you're married without kids, it's probably very good too.
I think if you're trying to raise a family, it becomes a lot less desirable.
If you're post-family, you may desire this more, but I could see how it wouldn't make as much sense, especially since you're either probably settled in your career and current place, and are now seeing fewer expenses (due to kids leaving). Or you are not living in a city to begin with, aren't doing that well, but can't afford to move to one because the price of housing is through the roof.
I don't think you can point to the demand for housing in Superstar cities as an indicator that people want to live in high-rise apartments, taking public transportation everywhere. In my opinion, that is more a function of "that is where the jobs are now".
Also, if you look at cities like San Francisco, Boston, and pretty much any Superstar US city outside of NYC, you'll see that the people who are living in the less-dense housing are fighting the construction of more housing, primarily via zoning laws. I think someone here said that they live in the Bronx with their family - but while the Bronx is denser than the 'burbs, when I plopped my Google Street View person down on a random street, I saw two-story single-family buildings, some of which were detached, others which were attached to their neighbor. When I look at Zillow, I can see that 1329 Findlay Ave in the Bronx is worth $600k. Wouldn't it make sense for someone to knock down those rowhouses and build a more dense apartment block, with a lot more units at $300k each?
That is simply the unstoppable path of the new economy. We are now told that all the jobs have to be in one of the 10 "Superstar" cities in the USA, because good jobs can't exist in a metro area unless there are millions of people there, because they can only find good workers in those 10 cities. But that high pay only goes to the Rock Star employees. Empty the trash? Why should you deserve any more money than someone emptying trash in Kansas? The result is that housing is bought by the people making $150k and up, and no one really wants to live like they do in Tokyo or Hong Kong, in small apartments in high-rise buildings, so they block that from happening without realizing that this puts $12/hour workers on the streets, or makes them commute 3 hours a day.
It's a common reply to say "college teaches you how to learn", and that is true to some extent, but college goes way beyond that.
College teaches you basic ideas, both practical and theoretical, and those ideas help you in your life.
I went to a technical school; My major was mathematics, and I took other courses concentrating in business, computer science, and history. I have a Master's in Operations Research and Statistics.
I likely do not use any of what I learned directly in my job, however I still have a basic understanding of those things 25 years out, so that when people talk about "AI" and "machine learning", I can appreciate that it is basically statistical sampling and cluster analysis. I take that appreciation into the things I do.
"Surplus populations"? What an insane way to frame the problem - that thinking implies that if society does not need any more labor, a person is expendable. In reality, that person should be thought of as "free from servitude" and our goal should be to move everyone into that category.
If all of humankind's needs can be met via technology and no human labor, then we just need to figure out a different way to allocate resources, because if everything is free, then a hell of a lot of people will want a giant mansion on Hawaii. Plus, most humans do seem to like to compete for their spoils instead of to just have spoils handed to them.
We allocate resources based on a combination of "work" and "capital gains" (meaning the amount someone can coerce others to sell their labor to you for a loss). Maybe we should be thinking of another way to do it.
Tablets fill a really important niche. They are far better than a phone for casual web browsing. They offer a lot more space for various applications. They are obviously mobile. I have a great Netflix experience with them while sitting in a room without a TV.
I was on the iPad path, but got totally fed up once my iPad-2 became completely unusable about 2 years after I bought it, which was about 2 years after my iPad-1 became completely unusable. I bought a Surface 3 a little over two years ago, and it still works perfectly, my only complaint is that the battery life is getting short. I don't want a laptop - I already have a powerful desktop to run various apps, and I also don't want to squint and look at my phone all the time while I'm not sitting at my desk.
Plus, the keyboard-cover of the surface makes it really stand out from an iPad, and I was able to pick up a low-cost dock so that I can bring my surface to work for segregated usage.
> Luckily we do not live in the EUSSR. If I want to work 80 hours a week, that's my problem. If I don't, I can work somewhere else (H1-Bs can do that too).
Are you suggesting that an 80 hour week is optional because you are free to get another job?
How is that any different from those who suggest that sexual harassment at work shouldn't be illegal because the woman is free to get another job to escape it?
If it makes our goods cheaper, who cares what they do? Most people seem to agree that cheap goods should be the #1 concern. If slaves can make thing cheaper, the pain they feel isn't as bad as the savings everyone else gets. On average, we are all better off./s
Slashdot Mirror
Hang on a minute. Rewind. Look at the basic premise here, and realize how there is a poisonous precept in place.
If technology can eat all our jobs, than this means that we should be free. It should be like Star Trek, where we don't have to worry about people cleaning our toilets or doing our laundry, and subsequently don't need to worry about how to the rent or the car.
If technology can eliminate most workers, then we need to ensure that everyone gets to share that prosperity, and not that those who are making it happen get to rule over the rest of us.
This is just capitalism in action, right? When you ask the repair shop in the desert "how much to fix my car" and they respond "how much you got?" , it's the same premise. If the company can get you trained and into a job, they will try to extract as much of your future earnings as they can, because in their eyes, without them, you wouldn't have that job.
This is not much different from the philosophy of private colleges. Just a slightly different payment method.
Yes, absolutely, but I think I used the wrong term. I think the term is "Hawthorne Effect". Hawthorne Effect is when the people who know they are being watched no longer act naturally.
Google had good insight that links amounted to "votes" - webmasters themselves linked to other sites they liked, the more links a site had, the more "votes" it got by people who were more than just novices.
But once sites figured out that Google was doing this, they created artificial links wherever they could. Sometimes it was via shady link exchanges, and then it morphed into forum spam, which essentially made running a forum 100x harder. The forum spam wasn't about getting visitors, it was all about getting pagerank.
Google really destroyed the internet from what it once was. They created what amounted to Observation Bias - once people knew that links were no longer just to naturally reference another website, links became weaponized.
But it didn't stop there, and I don't think Google caused this innocently. Google started actively punishing websites based on their links. Anyone remember "web rings"? They predated Google, and were a way for like-minded sites to link to each other **so that visitors to one site could find something else related to that site**. They were like mini-islands of sites that, if I remember right, shared a code that allowed you to see all the related sites. But that kind-of circumvents Google, doesn't it? So Google punished sites that used them.
Even if you think a webring was a sketchy way to game Google, remember how websites used to have a page of "links"? Those were just other sites that the owner either liked or felt were relevant. The link was the way of saying "hey, I like this, maybe you will too". But Google came down on them too, particularly if they found a reciprocating link back. Turns out that Google invented a non-standard tag called "nofollow" which they required webmasters to use (or else they would punish them) when linking to other "non-trusted" sites. This was mainly due to forum spam where users dropped in links - a massive problem, but one Google could have solved by simply recognizing user-generated forum content and discounting links within it.
So now, when someone makes a website, they just don't create links. Why bother? Links got people punished by Google, so why risk it just to show a little love? And since no one links to each other, we depend on Google - which is probably just what they wanted anyway.
If you plug $10,000 into the US CPI Calculator from 2000 to 2015, you will find that it is worth $13,905. That means an increase from $10,000 to $12,000 over that period of time is an effective cut.
Cuts to higher education are more prominent:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-lost-decade-in-higher-education-funding
I don't think Canada messes around with a "worker in purgatory" program like H1-B (where, if you don't follow the employer's wishes, you get let go, and have to return to your home country since it is hard to get another employer to sponsor you on short notice). Canada just allows more skilled workers to become legal immigrants right away.
That is what the US should be doing. When the immigrants get a green card, they then lack restrictions which allow them to be exploited. Allowing them to participate in the job market - where they can do what everyone else does, switch jobs to get a raise - blunts any major impact they have on everyone else's salary. At that point their impact on the job market is only the fact that they are just another worker - no different from a newly-minted college graduate, or anyone else who learns to code and throws his or her hat in the job market ring.
The benefit of immigrants is that they add demand to the US economy. Demand is demand, no matter where it is from. If you're living in Podunk, USA, and your company says "we need to ramp up. We can either hire 1,000 immigrants from China and India and get them settled in Podunk, or we can move the work to Canada and put those 1,000 immigrants there", if you're living in Podunk, and Podunk has a lot of empty storefronts, you're going to want those immigrants.
Companies like TATA and Cognizent are the main problems; they bring in the H1-B workers but pay them really badly by US standards, because they can't easily switch jobs. Seems like they have replaced the Anderson Consulting model of hiring college grads, who at least got decent pay which was governed by their ability to switch jobs.
Bingo. I "bought" a movie on Amazon a while ago. Percy Jackson or something. Watched it a couple of times with the kids. No one has any interest in it anymore.
So what can I do with it? Can I resell it? Nope. Can I give it to a relative who now has young kids? Nope. Can I leave it to my children? Uh uh. The "sale" of that item to me was fictional. It was a perpetual license that I have to keep track of. If Amazon "loses" that somehow, I have to remember that I had it, I have to provide some form of proof that I "own" this.
I would also be willing to bet that somehow Amazon will find a way to "revoke" this perpetual license from me before I die.
For that reason, I prefer to buy physical copies of everything. Maybe I won't be able to use them in 30 years because the mechanism to play them will have evolved, but I can at least move them along to someone else and let them enjoy the experience.
> The standard method for bidding in forums is that the auction ends 24 hours after the last bid.
As a seller, that would be very frustrating. I really like knowing when the auction ends. Such a plan could extend an auction for days, even longer. Does this kind of method work with the style of bidding eBay uses, where your bid remains low if no one else is bidding? In live auctions, they can open the price at $10, you can go in and say "I bid $1,000", and you're going to win - for $1,000.
I've bid in such auctions before eBay (usually done via phone), but when eBay came around, the fresh and exciting thing was that the price got set based on the 2nd highest bidder's bid. That is really nice for collectibles, it sure makes me bid more because of the thrill of getting something for less than I'm willing to pay for it.
As someone who sells occasionally, that is a benefit, but as someone who buys quite a bit, the loss of "skin in the game" when listing an item has resulted in people listing items at stupid prices, basically fishing for that one particular buyer who might be dumb enough to want the item that much. It costs them nothing to take an item that is generally worth $10 and put it up for $50, and it sits there, day after day, month after month.
They are making a change in the near future so that "buy it now" listings are perpetual, no end date. That's going to clog things up even more, and is an even further departure from their auction format.
What I wish they would do is to allow me to block certain items as "seen enough of this listing already", because I'm sick of doing searches and coming across the same overpriced crap, some of which has been there for literally years.
How do you pay for those items? To be honest, although I hate paying the 3.4% or whatever of the payment, PayPal is a lot easier than waiting for someone to send me a check. I would never go back to accepting checks for payment, waiting for them to clear, etc.
I don't mind sniping, it's pretty easy to counter as a buyer - just use the platform the way you should. Enter your best offer right up front (maybe even 5% more). If someone snipes you, they paid more than you were willing to pay, and that's that. The only way eBay could really counter sniping is by limiting bidding in the final hour or so to people who already have bids in place. Sniping really just lets experienced buyers outwit inexperienced buyers and it discouraging bidding wars by said inexperienced buyers. I'll do it on occasion when I detect that I'm up against a newbie.
The one change that I think really altered the platform for me was when they made all the buyers private. Before that, it was kind-of exciting - I had some "nemesises" who were always competing for the same items as me. It was more like a game.
The press release spells out their major issue - they really did change their core mission from an Auction marketplace to an eCommerce marketplace. They don't want to just be the place where people come to find rare and unusual collectibles, they want to be the place that competes with Amazon. But while that could make them more money, their hands-off approach to sellers severely limits them. In fact, they do as much as they can to make the sellers anonymous to prevent people from circumventing their marketplace.
I wish they would just decide to go back to their original mission, even though that means reducing their volume.
Oh, here's one other totally asinine thing they do. When they display your list of items you won, they have a button next to them which guides you to the next step in the workflow, like "Pay Now". Once you have paid though, the button usually says "Leave Feedback". Except that is true only about 80% of the time, the other 20% it says "Return item" even though the step of the workflow is identical to other items. Who is their UI designer and how little do they care about things?
eBay is so frustrating. On one hand, a platform like eBay works best when it is a monopoly - when all the buyers and sellers are in the same place. On the other hand, the fact that they are a monopoly has made them into an awful, awful company.
I have used eBay for over 20 years. The overall experience today is worse than it was 20 years ago. I would go as far as to say that their last good improvement was probably made 15 years ago.
What is even more frustrating is that they continue to do absolutely stupid things, and they constantly introduce either bugs or degraded user experiences, which take months to then fix. And there's no way to even report those issues with the goal of getting a resolution.
Here's an example: I have a lot of "Saved Searches" set up - this is how I buy a lot of items (I look for collectibles). About 2 years ago, eBay for some reason decided that they would only show about 30 characters of the 80 character auction title in the email. What this means is that I get notifications of auctions which I then have to click through to their site to see what the auction actually is. I have stopped doing that long ago.
Then, they decided that when you perform the same search on their desktop site, they would limit the auction title to 50 characters instead of 80. So even there, I can't exactly tell what is being sold without clicking through to the auction.
My guess is that a VP is being paid bonuses on clickthrough metrics. Meanwhile I'm guessing that sales are down.
It sounds like things are about to get even worse now that the hedge fund wants its pound of flesh.
There is far less action on eBay than there was 20 years ago, probably due to the high fees (you're going to fork over about 13.4% of every sale, since final value fee is 10% and PayPal fee is 3.4%), and also due to the cost of shipping things greatly exceeding the value of the things being sold (try selling cross-border - you usually can't get away with anything less than $18 to send something to Canada, which sucks if you're selling items for less than $100). They were revolutionary when they first started, but now are just "meh".
I can understand the sentiment a little bit. The one thing missing from the article's analysis is that when people "size up" a neighborhood, they look for certain visual cues. One of them is the type of retail present. When you drive through a neighborhood and see a dollar store, you classify that neighborhood as "poor". You dismiss it. And while that is most likely a realistic indicator, it harms the neighborhood's chance of becoming less poor, because it's like a scarlet letter on its chest.
However, I would also point out that many of the people opposing dollar stores are the same people who reminisce about going to the "five and dime" when they were younger.
Don't we already have a similar situation in the USA - people who win a lottery? That would be an interesting group to study, to see what people do when they get a pot of money that isn't transformative (i.e. hundreds of millions), but sustaining (i.e. gives them what amounts to an annuity of something resembling a UBI, or is enough to basically replace their pre-winnings salary).
This should illustrate the need for a strong, independent media.
I know that it is currently en vogue to say "we don't need the media, we can just do their jobs ourselves using the internet", but it should be obvious that if you take that approach, you wind up trusting the "truth" being peddled by propaganda websites such as Zerohedge and Alex Jones.
It is literally the job of a strong independent media to figure out what is truth and what is fiction. They are trained to do this and therefore can figure things out much better than you or I can. Sure, they get things wrong from time to time - but they then state their errors, correct it, and move on.
A state-run media is no better than a collection of blogger-run media. Bloggers will get things right, but they almost always have an angle (I would posit that the less someone is paid to blog, the more they have a stake in putting out a specific message).
> If the publisher can approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can veto creative incorporating flashing. If the publisher cannot approve or veto creative before it appears on the site, the publisher can switch to a different ad network or exchange, switch to publisher-hosted ad delivery without any network or exchange, or not use video as a format.
Online advertising no longer works like that. It is all programmatic. No publisher personally approves programmatic creatives, there are too many of them and advertisers can change them too rapidly. The best you can do is choose categories which Ad Exchanges (primarily Google, with some other players) give you. And even then, advertisers will cheat - they will put through inappropriate creatives when they can. I couldn't find anything in Google's DFP (most popular ad serving tool) that says "don't show flashing animation".
No one sells ads directly on their sites to advertisers, that is not a viable model because advertisers want to get their message out to a variety of sites instead of "sponsoring" one or more pages on a single site. If you're not using programmatic advertising these days, you are leaving most advertising dollars on the table. In fact, most advertisers don't care about the sites they advertise on (there are, of course, exceptions) - they are ultimately trying to reach the users, so if they know a user is potentially interested in going to St. Kitt's (because they searched for that island), they want to show that person St. Kitt's ads whether they are on a travel site or on a cooking site.
Believe me when I tell you that I have things set to block autoplay audio ads, but I find them on my site from time-to-time. The ad serving is so complex that it becomes very hard to trace their origin. There will always be sleazy advertisers out there, looking to game the system. This is the same industry that spawns robo-calls.
Thanks for the tip on the "main" HTML element, I wasn't aware of that one. It's troublesome that this relatively obscure and non-functional HTML element is used to make decisions though. It reminds me of when Google introduced the "nofollow" tag, and then penalized sites which didn't use it.
> Any webmaster who successfully claims control of a site in Google Search Console can clean up ads on that site and submit a request to have that site reevaluated.
I can speak with direct experience of being on the wrong end of a Google algorithm bug. It's nowhere near as easy as you state. My site was penalized in Google for about 6 months. It was a clear "-10" penalty - my content was being put onto page 2 where it was behind irrelevant results. Then, all of a sudden, the penalty was lifted. I never got an explanation why.
Google does not have "customer service", there is no one who can say "here's the problem, you have to fix these things". At best you can post a question in one of their forums, and then weather the abuse you are sure to receive.
I did manage to attract the attention of a Google employee on the forums. Do you know what his advice was? "Make your site the best it can possibly be, don't worry about its rankings". I couldn't call my congressman, I couldn't appeal to the courts. I had to deal with it, because, as dozens of wannabe trolls pointed out, "Google doesn't have to include you in their results if they don't want to".
Google and other large tech companies have more power than governments, with almost zero ability for individuals to influence them. Increasingly, decisions are made by algorithms with no ability for exceptions.
Let me give you one more example. My employer uses filtering software, and blocks several obvious categories - porn, gambling, etc. The classification of websites is done by a vendor, and the vendor classification is used by a lot of companies. What happens when that vendor misclassifies your website? The only thing you can hope for is to get in contact with that vendor and beg them to change the classification. There a
Not everything it bans are "formats". I would call these "formats" (which means a publisher can avoid them by not placing their code on the site):
- pop-ups (other than exit intent pop-ups)
- prestitials (with countdown on desktop or at all on mobile)
- postitials with countdown
- screen-height ads that appear as a float rather than inline, thereby pausing scrolling of the article behind it (a format that I haven't personally seen in the wild)
These two are ad characteristics that cannot be directly controlled by the publisher via the placement of code:
- autoplaying audio (other than preroll before relevant video)
- animated ads that include flashing elements
As a publisher myself, I don't want to show such ads, but first, there is no option in a network that says "don't show animated ads with flashing elements", and second, although I can (and do) say no to autoplaying audio, such ads still slip into the ad stream by advertisers who, for lack of a better word, cheat.
These next two are a lot more nebulous. I don't know how "30%" is computed, or what it even means, though I did find something on their site that suggest these are for mobile browsers:
- sticky ad taller than 30 percent of the scrolling area. Their picture of this one makes sense, it's basically when the top or bottom of the mobile screen is taken over by a fixed ad.
This one is less clear:
- vertical ad density over 30 percent of article space. This says "Ads that take up more than 30% of the vertical height of a page. Ad density is determined by summing the heights of all ads within the main content portion of a mobile page, then dividing by the total height of the main content portion of the page.". That's a little scary, as a publisher, because not only is that confusing to understand, it seems easy to break that rule inadvertently, for example, with a page that has less content than normal. Plus "Main content portion" is subjective, and some algorithm could whack you on that.
What is scary here is that there is no appeal process, and the ban appears to be absolute. From the OP:
Chrome will stop showing *all ads* on sites in any country that *repeatedly* display "disruptive ads."
How is "repeatedly" determined?
To me, this is just another case of a tech company being "governmental", in an autocratic way. They don't use people to make the determinations, it's all algorithm-based. Don't like the laws? Your only option is exile.
How is this not an anti-trust violation?
Google, a behemoth company, is using their dominance by blocking ads on third-party sites using the browser that they control, a browser that has 65% market share. The demand for advertising won't go away - it will just shift to Google Text Ads, meaning that publishers will have even fewer scraps to feed on.
Given how shoddy that "Coalition for Better Ads" site is (404s on what should be their main content pages), I wonder if they are just a front organization for Google itself?
I'm genuinely interested - when you say you want your children to grow up in the city, are you talking about them growing up in a 750 s.f. 3-bedroom apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise in Manhattan, or are you thinking more like a 2-story brownstone in Brooklyn?
The reason I ask is that the 2-story brownstone in Brooklyn is not compatible with an economy where all the jobs are located in the 10 or so Superstar US cities. The housing needs to become as dense as Hong Kong or Tokyo. That's the conundrum - people want to live in a low-density house in a high-density city, and that can only happen if you have a few million dollars to spend, and if you have a bunch of people who earn low wages and who are content to live in squalor, or to commute 3 hours per day to their low-wage job.
I can agree with you that some people like living that way, but I don't think it is across the board.
If you're young and single, I'm sure it's an absolute blast. If you're married without kids, it's probably very good too.
I think if you're trying to raise a family, it becomes a lot less desirable.
If you're post-family, you may desire this more, but I could see how it wouldn't make as much sense, especially since you're either probably settled in your career and current place, and are now seeing fewer expenses (due to kids leaving). Or you are not living in a city to begin with, aren't doing that well, but can't afford to move to one because the price of housing is through the roof.
I don't think you can point to the demand for housing in Superstar cities as an indicator that people want to live in high-rise apartments, taking public transportation everywhere. In my opinion, that is more a function of "that is where the jobs are now".
Also, if you look at cities like San Francisco, Boston, and pretty much any Superstar US city outside of NYC, you'll see that the people who are living in the less-dense housing are fighting the construction of more housing, primarily via zoning laws. I think someone here said that they live in the Bronx with their family - but while the Bronx is denser than the 'burbs, when I plopped my Google Street View person down on a random street, I saw two-story single-family buildings, some of which were detached, others which were attached to their neighbor. When I look at Zillow, I can see that 1329 Findlay Ave in the Bronx is worth $600k. Wouldn't it make sense for someone to knock down those rowhouses and build a more dense apartment block, with a lot more units at $300k each?
That is simply the unstoppable path of the new economy. We are now told that all the jobs have to be in one of the 10 "Superstar" cities in the USA, because good jobs can't exist in a metro area unless there are millions of people there, because they can only find good workers in those 10 cities. But that high pay only goes to the Rock Star employees. Empty the trash? Why should you deserve any more money than someone emptying trash in Kansas? The result is that housing is bought by the people making $150k and up, and no one really wants to live like they do in Tokyo or Hong Kong, in small apartments in high-rise buildings, so they block that from happening without realizing that this puts $12/hour workers on the streets, or makes them commute 3 hours a day.
It's a common reply to say "college teaches you how to learn", and that is true to some extent, but college goes way beyond that.
College teaches you basic ideas, both practical and theoretical, and those ideas help you in your life.
I went to a technical school; My major was mathematics, and I took other courses concentrating in business, computer science, and history. I have a Master's in Operations Research and Statistics.
I likely do not use any of what I learned directly in my job, however I still have a basic understanding of those things 25 years out, so that when people talk about "AI" and "machine learning", I can appreciate that it is basically statistical sampling and cluster analysis. I take that appreciation into the things I do.
"Surplus populations"? What an insane way to frame the problem - that thinking implies that if society does not need any more labor, a person is expendable. In reality, that person should be thought of as "free from servitude" and our goal should be to move everyone into that category.
If all of humankind's needs can be met via technology and no human labor, then we just need to figure out a different way to allocate resources, because if everything is free, then a hell of a lot of people will want a giant mansion on Hawaii. Plus, most humans do seem to like to compete for their spoils instead of to just have spoils handed to them.
We allocate resources based on a combination of "work" and "capital gains" (meaning the amount someone can coerce others to sell their labor to you for a loss). Maybe we should be thinking of another way to do it.
Tablets fill a really important niche. They are far better than a phone for casual web browsing. They offer a lot more space for various applications. They are obviously mobile. I have a great Netflix experience with them while sitting in a room without a TV.
I was on the iPad path, but got totally fed up once my iPad-2 became completely unusable about 2 years after I bought it, which was about 2 years after my iPad-1 became completely unusable. I bought a Surface 3 a little over two years ago, and it still works perfectly, my only complaint is that the battery life is getting short. I don't want a laptop - I already have a powerful desktop to run various apps, and I also don't want to squint and look at my phone all the time while I'm not sitting at my desk.
Plus, the keyboard-cover of the surface makes it really stand out from an iPad, and I was able to pick up a low-cost dock so that I can bring my surface to work for segregated usage.
> Luckily we do not live in the EUSSR. If I want to work 80 hours a week, that's my problem. If I don't, I can work somewhere else (H1-Bs can do that too).
Are you suggesting that an 80 hour week is optional because you are free to get another job?
How is that any different from those who suggest that sexual harassment at work shouldn't be illegal because the woman is free to get another job to escape it?
If it makes our goods cheaper, who cares what they do? Most people seem to agree that cheap goods should be the #1 concern. If slaves can make thing cheaper, the pain they feel isn't as bad as the savings everyone else gets. On average, we are all better off. /s