I have to concur. NextDoor is neighborhood social media site, and what makes it nice is the verified addresses/persons. That cuts down on the anonymous hate posting that show up on other local boards. It is good because most local news site don't cover minor stuff anymore, so it's nice to know when there is an uptick of break-ins, so that I can be more vigilant. But it goes beyond that, it allows for neighborhood announcements (tag sales, festivals) and also just sharing of information between neighbors. It also helps me know who my neighbors actually are.

That is precisely what I was trying to do. The goal of propaganda is to get people to believe it, and the way you do that is to put enough hooks into it that make it believable. A good technique is to show the information in way that lets them feel like they now see it in a way that no one else sees. A better technique would be to seed different things to different groups which would allow them to come together and "figure out" the "truth" you want them to believe on their own.

It isn't as black and white as you say it is. We already agree that some speech should not be permitted - slander/libel. We have laws that allow an *individual* to go to court and receive a judgement against another person/organization that is slandering them. Slander is based on lies - the truth is a defense against that charge.

What if we broadened the definition of slander to allow for class-action lawsuits - allowing a group to claim damage rather than an individual? A court of law would decide if the speech is both false and causes harm, and if it does, damages would be awarded commensurate to such damage. Precedent would also be set as to whether the speech is true or not. Facts would be separated from propaganda.

This would put some responsibility back into speech that can now carried out by minuscule players using gigantic microphones (such as social media) that reach millions.

This may be one of the defining issues of our era - how to balance the notion of free speech with the newfound ease for people to create and promote propaganda?

Most people do not have the ability, when bombarded on hundreds of different issues, to separate truth from fiction. That makes it worse - well-funded actors can create what amount to alternate realities, and people don't seem to be able to break out of them.

It will probably get worse, as the ability to falsify videos becomes better. It will be possible to irrefutably rewrite history. Imagine if someone "unearthed" a trove of recordings that purported to "prove" that the Holocaust was made-up by Roosevelt and Churchill to get the US involved in WW2, while simultaneously showing evidence that life in Germany was thriving under Hitler, and that the US conspired to take him down because his economic policies threatened a world order which had the US and England at the top? If someone did this properly, they could easily convince 25% of the population of its truth.

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".