Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Bricking Microsoft Office 2019
No Bounty for Mysk
fsck_hfs Cache Exhaustion Bug
Three Ways to Get Paid
Jason Zweig, back in 2018:
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.
There are three ways to make a living:
Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
Pairs well with Om Malik’s remarkable line about the success of “the grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things” in his “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World” essay that I linked to yesterday.
The First-Time-Buyer-Discount Dickover Scheme
Neil Panchal, on Twitter/X (XCancel link):
Of all the dickovers, the dickover that blueballs you with some first-time buyer incentive. “Sign up and get 10% discount, new accounts only”, the dickover boasts.
Never understood why you’d ever penalize returning customers with a dickover, blue-balling them with 10% off teaser that they’re ineligible for. wtf?
And for first time buyers, they’d always feel left out if they don’t shove their email address in the dickover. The choice is an illusion with a penalty of 10%. But wait… there’s more! You only get a discount code if you, after clicking the confirmation email link, also sign up for their SMS marketing. You just got double dicked.
I fell for this racket once, albeit with my eyes open. Last year I bought a cap from New Era’s website. They offered me some sort of discount for giving them my email address. I knew they were going to get my email anyway because I was going to buy the hat, so I figured why not. Only then — exactly as Panchal describes — did they say I also needed to give them my phone number and grant permission to text me marketing messages. Now I was pissed. I did it anyway, just to see what happened (and get the discount). As soon as I bought the hat, discount applied, I rescinded their permission to send me text messages and marketing emails. (They had already texted me like two marketing messages, in addition to the ones confirming my phone number.) Overall I’d have rather paid a few more dollars than go through the hassle, which is why my standard operating procedure is to decline all such entreaties. A real discount is just offering a lower price. Anything else is a scam of some sort.
But the real problem is that it completely soured my impression of New Era. I am far less likely to purchase from them again. I will eventually buy a New Era cap again — their actual products are excellent, and they are the exclusive maker of official MLB on-field caps — but if I can buy it elsewhere, I will. I’ll go out of my way to avoid buying direct from New Era for the rest of my life.
The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes — and insist on adding dickovers and dickbars to websites — do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.