Interesting reads
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@tim said in Interesting reads:
This serves well as a companion piece to Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies.
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I’ve long suspected there was flim-flammery going on. I’d read the useless reviews and often conclude they were completely pointless, and wonder why reviewers even made the effort. Now I have a better idea.
Inside The Ecosystem That Fuels Amazon’s Fake Review Problem
A vast web of Amazon review fraud lives online, and it's designed to evade the company’s efforts to thwart it.
————————————————————————————————————————————————One morning in late January, Jake picked up the box on his desk, tore through the packing tape, unearthed the iPhone case inside, snapped a picture, and uploaded it to an Amazon review he’d been writing. The review included a sentence about the case’s sleek design and cool, clear volume buttons. He finished off the blurb with a glowing title (“The perfect case!!”) and rated the product a perfect five stars. Click. Submitted.
Jake never tried the case. He doesn’t even have an iPhone.
Jake then copied the link to his review and pasted it into an invite-only Slack channel for paid Amazon reviewers. A day later, he received a notification from PayPal, alerting him to a new credit in his account: a $10 refund for the phone case he’ll never use, along with $3 for his trouble — potentially more, if he can resell the iPhone case.
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@salacious-crumb Advertising is bullshit. Shock, horror...
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@chris-b said in Interesting reads:
@salacious-crumb Advertising is bullshit. Shock, horror...
Are you getting paid to shill on TSF? Is that what I’m supposed gto expect — that any comment I see in a forum or a review board is likely a paid advert? I could be an outlier, but I don’t think that’s what most other people think, either.
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"Dear Sirs,
I recently had the exquisite joy of experiencing a Curved Air concert and was most impressed by the exceptional talent of their new drummer...."
Stewart Copeland admits to writing that and a raft of other letters to music magazines in 1975 in the book I just mentioned on the "What are you listening to" thread.
Find that Japanese guy who markets his incredible abs regime (for a while it popped up on half the sites I clicked on) and every comment is an obvious fake - "Wow sounds great, I'm going to give it a try", "Me too....".
I can't readily locate him - he's possibly in jail....
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Long fascinating read about a young female grifter in the Big Apple. Very deceitful con artiste, but you kinda admire her chutzpah. Good chance this gets made into a movie.
——————————————————————————————————————-Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It
Somebody had to foot the bill for Anna Delvey’s fabulous new life. The city was full of marks.
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Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not?
She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.
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@salacious-crumb Good on her. A fool and their money are easily parted.
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The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code
Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code
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Interesting opinion piece about how the media system is playing both sides for suckers, and how we just buy in to it.
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@mariner4life Yeah. Was discussing with a friend a few weeks ago whether an experiment to unplug the internet and the television for a couple of months might yield significant benefits.
It's typical that these great inventions would be fucked up by c#nts!
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@mariner4life that was a great read, thanks for posting.
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Read this and you’ll probably want to retire to a seat in front of the fire with a large scotch and a loaded revolver
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall
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@taniwharugby hadn’t thought of that angle , airlines are ruthless in that regard.
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@jegga Yeah. Slots are far more valuable than you might think and once you lose it you are stuffed, probably never get it back at a busy airport. Home carrier airlines often use smaller planes, not just to increase frequency, but to use up slots to stop the opposition getting them. If you take up all of the slots with a 737 it stops someone coming in with an A380 and providing cheaper seats.