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BrandorKP posted:Yeah, but I think they do inner packages of a certain size to prevent this. Births are public records and companies are all over that poo poo. Prepare to be bombarded further as having kids is one of the few times people change shopping habits.
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# ? May 17, 2018 21:30 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:54 |
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Panfilo posted:Also, a lot of poorer families will share one Costco membership, because staff seldom look at the photo carefully. One weird trick to avoid the yearly cost of a Costco membership: Costco doesn't care. Have a member get you a giftcard or just go with them. Hand Row posted:Births are public records and companies are all over that poo poo. Prepare to be bombarded further as having kids is one of the few times people change shopping habits. Target knows if you are pregnant, based on your purchases.
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# ? May 17, 2018 21:40 |
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Tnega posted:] Well, sometimes. Advertising things like that gently caress up all the time.
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# ? May 17, 2018 21:47 |
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fishmech posted:Well, sometimes. Advertising things like that gently caress up all the time. I've posted this a bunch of times but if you have a facebook go settings->ads->your interests to see what the great machine god has determined your human hobbies are. Like, it'll get a few things pretty well but it seems to not even miss the base on what you personally might like but seems to be wildly uncalibrated towards what a human is or does. Like here is my supposed list of hobbies, it starts out pretty solid, I guess, but pretty much falls into beyond nonsense pretty quick. my hobby is "leaf"?
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# ? May 17, 2018 22:44 |
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lol if you think those dumps they give you are as accurate or comprehensive as what exists in reality
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# ? May 17, 2018 22:55 |
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Uh, I mean I'm not a huge fan but what a weird thing to single-out as the two things in life I do not care for.
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# ? May 17, 2018 23:08 |
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TyroneGoldstein posted:And, ironically, it all goes into the data set that insurance companies can then use to pump every last medical entity for even more money. Yep. Insurance is all about loss ratio and they are completely allowed to increase rates based on costs.
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# ? May 17, 2018 23:35 |
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self unaware posted:lol if you think those dumps they give you are as accurate or comprehensive as what exists in reality I mean, you can become an advertiser on facebook pretty easy and check what categories they use. If there is a system outside the ad auction system it's not what 99% of the ads on facebook use and if it's anything it's a special backroom deal to jump in line and get unfair access to the largest ad categories in front of the auctions not a thing where facebook gives the real hobbies list they generate then didn't tell anyone.
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# ? May 17, 2018 23:55 |
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Neon Noodle posted:No they don't, they lock them because people steal baby formula to cut heroin. This is like the heroin in MDMA trope from way back. Why are you talking this nonsense? Other than straight stealing and selling it for it's intended use, the only reason any underworld types would steal formula would be for non-standard currency application...sort of like how tide was being used for the same a few years back (and sometimes still is). It's ubiquitous, has stable demand and is standardized which allows it to act as an ad-hoc commodity and have a store of value.
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# ? May 18, 2018 12:22 |
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Woah, my facebook ad hobbies are kind of scary to see how deep the targeting goes. I have a separate account I use for my job and have never linked it to my personal account, only use it on the work computer and intentionally never write any interesting personal information about myself on that account, nor have I ever logged into it on my phone. Some of the hobbies make sense, but a couple of them (Kickstarter and Lifefitness) were kind of odd, I do use both of them but have never mentioned them on my business account, I don't think I've ever talked about them on my personal account either. I hover over it and it says they chose them because I installed an app related to them, which I do use on my phone, which would be my personal account. The fact that they know what apps I have on my phone would be concerning enough on that, but the fact that they somehow linked it to an (in theory) completely unrelated account is really weird.
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# ? May 18, 2018 14:09 |
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Facebook has a complete profile of you even if you've never created an account, just based on your friend's activities. It's scary good at what it does.
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# ? May 18, 2018 14:16 |
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the big problem with those interest lists is that it doesn't tell you why it thinks it does and it doesn't tell you how sure it is beyond that, most of your personal data is "anonymized" which is a fancy way for saying "we don't technically track *you* when it comes to that but we could easily put the pieces together if we needed to"
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# ? May 18, 2018 14:18 |
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Baronjutter posted:
This is interesting for showing the sheer number of Google services you use: https://myaccount.google.com/dashboard
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# ? May 18, 2018 14:18 |
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FCKGW posted:Facebook has a complete profile of you even if you've never created an account, just based on your friend's activities. These systems are great at showing trends for a bunch of aggregated data across a large population but are snakeoil at an individual level.
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# ? May 18, 2018 15:05 |
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Neo Rasa posted:The other one you would hear a lot is that no one who steals baby formula actually does so to re-sell it for less or use it on their own baby because the government gives you unlimited baby formula for free any time you want no matter your situation. Neo Rasa posted:In NYC some places will still even severely limit how much baby formula you can buy period since even now a lot of people will still get it to re-sell / send in bulk to their families/folks in China (for understandable reasons).
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# ? May 18, 2018 15:21 |
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FCKGW posted:Facebook has a complete profile of you even if you've never created an account, just based on your friend's activities. facebook doesn't have poo poo on me because for a few years i liked everything i saw. try sorting that out motherfuckers prisoner of waffles posted:haha, who would believe that nonsense? if the government gives you unlimited baby formula, why would anyone buy it from a store? the govt definitely does not give anyone unlimited formula prisoner of waffles posted:what would be the motivation behind preventing large sales? "protecting infants from resale after product has been kept in inadequate storage conditions" is like the only thing that comes to mind for me preventing localized shortages from people reselling to china. the link you quoted goes into more detail quote:The 2008 Chinese milk scandal was a widespread food safety incident in China. The scandal involved milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components being adulterated with melamine. Of an estimated 300,000 victims in China,[1] six babies died from kidney stones and other kidney damage and an estimated 54,000 babies were hospitalized.[2][3] The chemical gives the appearance of higher protein content when added to milk, leading to protein deficiency in the formula. In a separate incident four years prior, watered-down milk had resulted in 12 infant deaths from malnutrition.
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# ? May 18, 2018 15:50 |
ozmunkeh posted:These systems are great at showing trends for a bunch of aggregated data across a large population but are snakeoil at an individual level. Yeah they can have a ghost profile sure, but good luck getting anything on someone like teenage me since I never hung out with friends or anything
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# ? May 18, 2018 17:00 |
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Facebook data is trash, but having a pile that contains the most trash on the internet means they have the most still edible half rotten fruit.
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# ? May 18, 2018 18:47 |
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Barudak posted:Facebook data is trash, but having a pile that contains the most trash on the internet means they have the most still edible half rotten fruit. I think it's more that a data point saying "this is a middle class white guy living in dayton who is 26 and married" is an immensely powerful profile on it's own. All the other hyperfine stuff is fluff that doesn't matter as much to anyone and is mostly for tiny marketers instead of huge ones.
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# ? May 18, 2018 20:28 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think it's more that a data point saying "this is a middle class white guy living in dayton who is 26 and married" is an immensely powerful profile on it's own. All the other hyperfine stuff is fluff that doesn't matter as much to anyone and is mostly for tiny marketers instead of huge ones. Yep and even archaic retail companies I worked for know all that and more. Theoretically I could look you guys up to see your profile but none of this is particularly interesting at an individual level. It's all aggregated and only needs to be roughly accurate. No one is special. Just gets more bang for your buck in advertising. Your affinity for dogs just lumps you with millions of others that I stick a dog food ad on. Ad platforms like Google and Conversant are scarier to me, but even still it's just browsing data.
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# ? May 19, 2018 00:44 |
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https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/997610067644985344 Best Buy just killed their "Gamer's Club" membership which gave a flat 20% off any new game. Some people in the Deals thread were about to start discussing this topic so I thought I'd throw it in here. Dehry fucked around with this message at 00:51 on May 19, 2018 |
# ? May 19, 2018 00:45 |
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Dehry posted:https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/997610067644985344 Possibly because Amazon does something similar with physical copies? It requires Prime, but there's a lot more that comes with Prime than just game discounts. I'm not being smart; I honestly don't know and am just theorising. As I understand it, profit margins on new video games, especially physical copies, are very thin. Given the constantly rising costs of game production, perhaps that made it unviable.
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# ? May 19, 2018 04:22 |
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JustJeff88 posted:Possibly because Amazon does something similar with physical copies? It requires Prime, but there's a lot more that comes with Prime than just game discounts. It's simpler than that. Every few years, a fad for subscription programs runs through C-suites. You get guaranteed, predictable revenue, and most people hardly use their benefits then forget to cancel! How could it possibly go wrong? Netflix, Amazon, and Costco all make piles of money and if you just copy them it's a guaranteed path to success. It turns out that running a successful subscription program is actually pretty hard, especially if you want to offer a substantial discount on low-margin items. I'd bet that when they started the program, Best Buy had some really optimistic numbers about people buying other, high-margin crap like cables and phone cases every time they came in for a discounted game, and undershot the proportion of people who would buy one game and an auto-renewing GCU subscription versus the people who use it to buy 20 games on release day over a year. The margins for game studios and producers, though, don't really matter too much here. It's just a question of how much it costs Best Buy to get the game (quite a bit), how much they can sell it for (not much more over what it cost), and what their attach rate is on the accessory crap that actually makes money.
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:28 |
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Space Gopher posted:It's simpler than that. When I worked BBY corporate they were perpetually obsessed with subscription services. They just print money when done right. The problem is BestBuy is full of idiots and they can't ever not gently caress something up.
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:50 |
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The wholesale price of a new game is $50-55 most of the time, so they're losing a few bucks on every sale.Space Gopher posted:and what their attach rate is on the accessory crap that actually makes money.
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# ? May 19, 2018 06:17 |
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prisoner of waffles posted:what would be the motivation behind preventing large sales? "protecting infants from resale after product has been kept in inadequate storage conditions" is like the only thing that comes to mind for me boner confessor posted:preventing localized shortages from people reselling to china. the link you quoted goes into more detail It's neither of those, the real reason is protecting their profits in China. The way it goes is that baby formula that is perceived to be mostly foreign that is sold in China has a huge markup over the same formula sold in their home country (ie. Australia). This is prolly due to distrust of the Chinese supply chain, protectionism by the Chinese government, foreign products being percieved as being higher quality, etc. Regardless, it's in the formula companies interest to limit supply in their home countries so it doesn't leak into China via grey imports. So they only sell limited supply to supermarkets in their home countries. So that is why you get ppl cleaning the shelves of baby formula.
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# ? May 19, 2018 22:04 |
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Tehdas posted:It's neither of those, the real reason is protecting their profits in China. that's interesting (and kinda terrible), thanks for explaining
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# ? May 20, 2018 02:44 |
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Apparently the NYT ran an article on baby formula recently: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/02/magazine/money-issue-baby-formula-crime-ring.html Says that the price got drastically inflated because FDA regulations created a 3-company oligopoly, WIC created a huge government subsidy for it, and the oligopoly only got a slap on the wrist for price fixing as usual. And, the point of the article, it's also a hot target for organized shoplifting.
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# ? May 21, 2018 05:01 |
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OneEightHundred posted:Apparently the NYT ran an article on baby formula recently: gently caress, i expected some Nestle water poo poo about corrupt CEOs and got a Mafia story. Wow.
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# ? May 21, 2018 05:53 |
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FilthyImp posted:gently caress, i expected some Nestle water poo poo about corrupt CEOs and got a Mafia story. Wow. ...there's a difference?
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# ? May 21, 2018 19:07 |
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OneEightHundred posted:Apparently the NYT ran an article on baby formula recently: Lol at the head of the ring for attempting to split the difference between running a scrappy little company and running a criminal enterprise. quote:Tondreau-Leve repeatedly sought assurances: “Please confirm that these cans are acquired legally!” she texted when she first made contact. But when Powell equivocated, as invariably he did, she didn’t seem deterred. “I’d love to know where he’s getting it from,” she says during their second meeting, meaning the brother. When Powell tells her, “Everything’s good, Alicia,” for a moment on the recording, she appears flustered: “No, not ‘everything’s good,’ because, you know, I don’t steal — I don’t buy stolen.” Then she resumes loading her purchase.
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# ? May 21, 2018 19:31 |
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OneEightHundred posted:The wholesale price of a new game is $50-55 most of the time, so they're losing a few bucks on every sale. All big box retailers and major chains have direct distribution deals; they are not going through a wholesaler/middleman. This includes Amazon, Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.
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# ? May 23, 2018 23:27 |
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https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1002165355442253829 https://twitter.com/DandC/status/1002178833548652544
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# ? May 31, 2018 14:37 |
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# ? May 31, 2018 15:03 |
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# ? May 31, 2018 15:32 |
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Company managed pension funds: A bad idea? Nah, there's no need to change anything.
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# ? May 31, 2018 22:54 |
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For some reason the Sears at the fairly upscale Oakbrook Mall (near Chicago) is actually undergoing a massive renovation and I wonder if they're actually going to make a go of being a viable retailer or pull some kind of shenanigans with the real estate.
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# ? May 31, 2018 23:04 |
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I like how the stock spiked up around 70% for the last month or two on "Fast" Eddie stripped the last assets out of the company shortly, then crashed when the truth of the inevitable bankruptcy became clear.
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# ? May 31, 2018 23:18 |
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The SituAsian posted:For some reason the Sears at the fairly upscale Oakbrook Mall (near Chicago) is actually undergoing a massive renovation and I wonder if they're actually going to make a go of being a viable retailer or pull some kind of shenanigans with the real estate. Most likely, but Sears also has a lot of franchising things for their specific "departments" so maybe someone's planning to try to keep the name after the rest go under or something and make it an upscale home service place or something?
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# ? May 31, 2018 23:46 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:54 |
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The completely empty Sears Grand store by my house escapes death this round
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# ? Jun 1, 2018 00:01 |