Tag: scam

Wedding scams

the wedding-industrial complex thrives on a string of mistakes nearly everyone makes. it starts with paying a fortune for a material that isn’t actually rare (diamonds) and continues through overpaying for every little bit that is somehow wedding related.

Because this event is (ideally) once in a lifetime, that also means that vendors can appeal to consumers’ sentimentality, urging them not to cheap out on the “most important” day of their lives. Because of similar concerns about guilt-tripping salespeople, the Federal Trade Commission requires funeral homes to provide its bereaved customers with an itemized price list.

Idiot Ads

some ad strategies are little games in themselves.

You’ve seen them. Peeking out from sidebars, jiggling and wiggling for your attention, popping up where you most expect them: those “One Weird Trick” ads. These crudely drawn Web advertisements promise easy tricks to reduce your belly fat, learn a new language, and boost your credit score by 217 points. They seem like obvious scams, but part of me has always wanted to follow the link. What, I wonder, makes the tricks so weird? How come only one trick (or sometimes “tip”), never more? Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint? I’ve never pursued these questions, though, because a fear of computer viruses and identity theft has always stayed my hand. One curious click, I imagine, and I could wake up hogtied on an oil tanker headed to Nigeria.

If the flynn effect is true, the click through rate on these should decline over time as the dumbest get smarter.

If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past 6 years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)

Craigslist is still scammy

hyperlocal craigslist transactions without the ick factor of craigslist remain an unsolved problem.

i have a steam mop i’d like to get rid of and the easy channels like coworkers and foaf have failed, but like hell i’m going to deal with craigslist weirdos to move this item. what do do?

Fake Artisanal

is there a boardroom somewhere where a marketing and product design group is trying to figure out how to make your next Happy Meal toy, laptop, or Ikea table look like it was handmade by a MAKE reader, recycled from scrap, and sold on Etsy? Will we soon have Potemkin crafters whose fake, procedurally generated pictures, mottoes, and logos grace each item arriving from an anonymous overseas factory? Will the 21st-century equivalent of an offshore call-center worker who insists he is “Bob from Des Moines” be the Guangzhou assembly-line worker who carefully “hand-wraps” a phone sleeve and inserts a homespun anti-corporate manifesto (produced by Markov chains fed on angry blog posts from online maker forums) into the envelope? I wouldn’t be surprised. Our species’ capacity to commodify everything — even the anti-commodification movement — has yet to meet its match.

creating fake artisanal goods on the assembly line

Voynich before Gutenberg

Scientists have carbon-dated the Voynich manuscript, a puzzling and beautiful document covered in botanical and scientific drawings. Named for the Polish-American bookseller who acquired it in 1912, its undeciphered text and purported 15th-16th century origins have long been a matter of controversy. So just how old is it? According to the University of Arizona, the sample was dated to between 1404 and 1438, making it older than previously thought; it predates the Gutenberg bible, printed in 1453.

Kinda anticlimactic

New analysis of the Voynich manuscript reveals its secrets. It’s a mostly plagiarized guide to women’s health.

HFT

These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.

why is the nyt so hopelessly naive? it is quite embarrassing.

“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet. It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”

shades of the mundane singularity. the goal of these clowns is to create arbitrage opportunities by spamming the system with requests.

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4% of all quote traffic in the US stock market last week.

the reason HFT compete on latency is because they can’t compete on price: the minimal price increment is $0.01 and it is illegal to go lower. thus we waste a lot of people on reducing latencies. we should remove the minimal price increment instead.
2013-06-04: Why is there all this bs with “business days” when you do any bank transactions? Are the computers only working 9-5? Why is it 2013 and we still acquiesce to ridiculous notions like bank transactions that take days instead of seconds? The banksters know how to do it for their HFT buddies but not for the real economy?