Things that are things.

Discussion, in general

Re: Things that are things.

Postby iMURDAu » Sat Jun 06, 2020 11:50 pm

cmsellers wrote:I mean, on one hand, that's kind of a shitty position to put a customer service peon in.

On the other hand, that funny.


I'd have done it. Computer says balance is $3k, customer wishes to pay balance, vat iz problum? :D
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby jbobsully11 » Tue Jun 09, 2020 7:23 am

My sister’s pet cat died yesterday. He was only ~6 years old.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby jbobsully11 » Fri Jun 12, 2020 8:50 pm

Good news: I got another job.

Bad news: Apparently the place where they sent me for a drug test only does them until 3 PM, and I got there later than that. Also, you have to call before you go, even though there’s theoretically no appointment necessary. (Thanks, COVID-19!) So I guess I’ll call tomorrow morning and find out if I can go then.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby cmsellers » Sat Jun 13, 2020 7:20 am

I have discovered that Medium.com now has metered articles and a paywall.

Paywalling a site with no quality control, to which people contribute for free on the expectation of getting read, seems like it will join Tumblr banning half its content in the "Stupid Business Decisions Hall of Fame."
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby jbobsully11 » Sun Jun 14, 2020 4:04 pm

That happened a while ago, though; at least since last January when I joined. Also, I thought the writers did get paid.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby cmsellers » Mon Jun 15, 2020 4:16 pm

AFAIK, it's a blogging platform, though they may have some sort of revenue-sharing model.

Any rate I've been sniping eBay auctions for a few months now. I started doing it because I noticed that people will up their bid if you outbid them. Now, this is essentially an irrational behavior. The correct strategy is to bid your absolute maximum, because you're willing to pay it. You won't ever actually pay it unless your maximum bid happens to be so close to the runner-up's that the difference is within the eBay bid increment, meaning most of the time you either lose or get a deal.

I suspect there are two things going on here: firstly that most people still hedge even where it's counterproductive, and secondly, once you are winning an item, the endowment effect kicks in: you feel like you already have it and will pay more to keep it. But either way, in light of this irrational behavior on the part of other bidders, bidding your maximum bid last-minute is the best way to win a contested auction.

I've won half a dozen auctions this way, putting in my maximum bid once the timer drops below a minute. I also nearly missed out on bidding on one because eBay malfunctioned, and I only got my bid in in the last few seconds.

Today, I was outbid by someone else this same way, though I can't really complain, because I'd tried to snipe three related auctions in the last minute and they sniped two of them in the last few seconds, so close to auction end that I didn't even get a "you've been outbid" notification. I can confirm that the endowment effect is real: immediately after losing them, I decided I'd have been willing to pay a third more to win them. Which is another good reason for sniping: I didn't have a chance to let the endowment effect influence my max bid that way.

I do wonder if the person who outbid me is using a sniping software to time it so perfectly, though. I know those exist, and now I'm thinking I should look into it myself, now.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby JamishT » Tue Jun 16, 2020 3:38 am

cmsellers wrote: I started doing it because I noticed that people will up their bid if you outbid them. Now, this is essentially an irrational behavior. The correct strategy is to bid your absolute maximum, because you're willing to pay it. You won't ever actually pay it unless your maximum bid happens to be so close to the runner-up's that the difference is within the eBay bid increment, meaning most of the time you either lose or get a deal.

I suspect there are two things going on here: firstly that most people still hedge even where it's counterproductive, and secondly, once you are winning an item, the endowment effect kicks in: you feel like you already have it and will pay more to keep it. But either way, in light of this irrational behavior on the part of other bidders, bidding your maximum bid last-minute is the best way to win a contested auction.


I haven't participated in an eBay auction, but if I were to participate in any auction, my goal would be to pay as little as possible for the item up for bid. Sure, I'll have a max bid in mind, but I'm hoping that everyone else's max is somewhere below it. I guess eBay has hard time limits that snipers can take advantage of, unlike the IRL auctions I've been to.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby cmsellers » Tue Jun 16, 2020 3:51 am

JamishT wrote:I haven't participated in an eBay auction, but if I were to participate in any auction, my goal would be to pay as little as possible for the item up for bid. Sure, I'll have a max bid in mind, but I'm hoping that everyone else's max is somewhere below it. I guess eBay has hard time limits that snipers can take advantage of, unlike the IRL auctions I've been to.

That's my point. eBay will auto-increment bid for you up to your max bid; you will almost never pay that much. Most of the time, you'll either win at far less than your max bid, or will lose.

So, at least at small amounts, there's never a reason not to enter your max bid. (For large value auctions, eBay takes advantage of another well-known cognitive bias to up their increments to degrees where you'd probably want to structure your bids to hopefully never pay a full increment over the prior bid, but I don't bid on large value auctions.)

Additionally, there would be no reason not to enter your max bid early on and leave it be if everybody else did the same and stuck to it. But, because many people either figure they can up their max bid if they're outbid, or else they up it because of the endowment effect once they're "winning," the optimal strategy for contested auctions is to enter your own max bid, but only at the last minute.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby JamishT » Tue Jun 16, 2020 1:20 pm

Ohhh, I didn't know eBay does that auto-incrementing.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby cmsellers » Tue Jun 16, 2020 5:16 pm

As I've mentioned before, in the wake of Trump getting elected, I joined the mailing list of the Texas Nationalist Movement. About half of their emails are complaining about changes to the presentation of the Alamo—either the physical site or how history books present the battle—that they think dishonors the legacy of its defenders. Still, I guess for a group seeking Texas independence, "defending" the Alamo is on point.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby jbobsully11 » Tue Jun 16, 2020 10:18 pm

My new job doesn’t seem terrible. I’m being trained to spend my days applying glue to metal sheets that are used in making boxes... somehow. They recently got a machine that no one knows how to use, so I’ll start using that at some point, theoretically. The guy that was training me is going on vacation tomorrow, so that should be interesting.

Less fun is the fact that I’ve almost never done so much standing (with relatively little walking) as I did yesterday and today. And I didn’t get any sleep the night before last, because of course not.

oh, and an unrelated thing: On my way home from work today, nine police cars passed me with their lights and sirens on.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby iMURDAu » Thu Jun 18, 2020 9:23 pm

I used to love trawling eBay. Yes trawling, not trolling. Almost all of our Coca-Cola decor came from eBay and cost us probably $200 total. Which is way cheaper than it should've been. At the time there were brass keychains with a Coke bottle that hung from the loop and they were being sold individually from $5 for shite condition to $20 for like new. I found a lot that wasn't tagged as "coca cola" or "coke" but as "soda bottle" and got 10 of them for $10. All were in good enough condition to display.

The funniest times were bidding people up on things that were not the only item. Like say for instance there's a listing with a buy it now price of $20. Why would anybody bid more than $20 on another listing for the same item in the same condition? I don't know either but it was always great to wake up to the "you were outbid" emails because iirc only twice did I get sniped by someone targeting the same item.

The last time I used eBay I got a good deal on a Buffalo SNES controller. Probably wasn't the smartest purchase now that I think about it. In March I had a package sent to me from Washington state that contained a Chinese import. I can see Governor Hogan's wtf face now.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby jbobsully11 » Fri Jun 26, 2020 6:12 pm

In Minor annoyances, I wrote:(stuff about upgrading to Windows 10)


I found instructions on how to load Windows 10 from a flash drive, and I have a 1 TB flash drive already, so that seemed perfect. And yet, despite formatting the flash drive, copying the file, and doing all the other steps that I could find... my computer still wants to load 8.1. Go figure.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby Pedgerow » Fri Jun 26, 2020 7:35 pm

Have you updated the boot order in the BIOS? Presumably you have, but everything else you listed is to do with the drive and you need to change the boot order on the computer itself, so maybe you haven't. The drive will also have to be bootable, but again, that's probably another step that's right at the top of any instructions you will have found.
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Re: Things that are things.

Postby jbobsully11 » Sat Jun 27, 2020 3:29 pm

Pedgerow wrote:Have you updated the boot order in the BIOS? Presumably you have, but everything else you listed is to do with the drive and you need to change the boot order on the computer itself, so maybe you haven't. The drive will also have to be bootable, but again, that's probably another step that's right at the top of any instructions you will have found.

I thought so, but it didn’t help. Unless I keep picking the wrong thing from this list...
Spoiler: show
IMG_1551.JPG
None of the options seem to change anything...
IMG_1551.JPG (847.06 KiB) Viewed 4460 times
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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