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notwithoutmyanus posted:God damnit. How do people fall for this as legitimate? website posted:PreSend protects your entire portfolio and every transaction you send for just $0.02 per transaction, plus a 00.10% aggregated fee of the entire transaction! (Send a $100 transaction, fully protected, for just $0.12!) I have never seen two leading zeros before. I wonder if they want people to mistake 0.1% for 0.01% or even 0.001%.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:20
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If you make an ad that only an idiot would click on, you've guaranteed that all your clicks come from idiots. Isn't that the thing with spam emails being deliberately badly written, so that only stupid people click on them and the scammer doesn't waste his time with anyone smart enough to eventually see through the con?
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Sep 13, 2022 22:53
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jjack229 posted:I have never seen two leading zeros before. I wonder if they want people to mistake 0.1% for 0.01% or even 0.001%.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:58
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thekeeshman posted:If you make an ad that only an idiot would click on, you've guaranteed that all your clicks come from idiots. Isn't that the thing with spam emails being deliberately badly written, so that only stupid people click on them and the scammer doesn't waste his time with anyone smart enough to eventually see through the con? That only matters if you need to devote individual effort to each scamee that has to pay off.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:59
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evilweasel posted:That only matters if you need to devote individual effort to each scamee that has to pay off. Only the smart scammers realize that.
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Sep 13, 2022 23:47
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thekeeshman posted:If you make an ad that only an idiot would click on, you've guaranteed that all your clicks come from idiots. Isn't that the thing with spam emails being deliberately badly written, so that only stupid people click on them and the scammer doesn't waste his time with anyone smart enough to eventually see through the con? There is a very interesting paper about this, published by Microsoft of all places https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ "By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."
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Sep 14, 2022 05:44
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thekeeshman posted:If you make an ad that only an idiot would click on, you've guaranteed that all your clicks come from idiots. Isn't that the thing with spam emails being deliberately badly written, so that only stupid people click on them and the scammer doesn't waste his time with anyone smart enough to eventually see through the con? It took me a while, but I was able to turn the dude around before he sent a penny to the scammers. But I told him outright, in clear terms, that he was targeted for this because he was by definition an easy target. And at a minimum should always maintain skepticism on literally anything people try to promote to him. Just by asking basic questions and showing him the presend dude's linkedin, which is hilarious by itself. https://www.linkedin.com/in/larry-holisky-a714739/ (is this okay to link? no?) The fun part is that the presend guy's links to websites that are gone despite claiming to be current jobs, and at best he was a cashier in the past. Clearly someone ready to do all the crypto heavy lifting and programming! I still think my buddy is hosed and going to fall for something else, but at least not this one. I'm sure this will turn into more stories in the future as he comes to me with more pitches of rags to riches ideas that are only $1500+ to invest!
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Sep 14, 2022 06:35
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Residency Evil posted:Lotta boomers ITT who don't understand that my emotional support pit comes with me everywhere. "Can I bring your dog something to eat and drink? Maybe a dish of water and a toddler"
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Sep 14, 2022 07:21
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There's a pub near me where for a long time they had a cat, which was frequently dozing on a windowsill or trying to beg food off customers. I have no idea if it was actually allowed by regulations or not.
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Sep 14, 2022 08:27
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Look at all the companies no one's heard of he has founded, that lasted two years. Maybe this time.bis ship has come in!
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Sep 14, 2022 10:42
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tater_salad posted:Look at all the companies no one's heard of he has founded, that lasted two years. Maybe this time.bis ship has come in! obviously I need to sign up for his newsletter so I don't miss these once in a lifetime offers from this deeply intelligent and technical individual. I mean if my POS system goes down he'll even know how to reboot it! 
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Sep 14, 2022 12:14
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I think the spirit of this thread is more in line with this blog post: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/charge-market-rent/ “A week ago I made a post about investing in mobile homes and everyone got angry. Here’s why I’m right.”
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Sep 14, 2022 12:41
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Residency Evil posted:I think the spirit of this thread is more in line with this blog post: I read just the headline and got mad, what an rear end in a top hat
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Sep 14, 2022 12:49
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I skimmed the article and am also of the opinion that that guy is an rear end in a top hat.
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Sep 14, 2022 12:55
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The CAPITALISED ALL-CAPS HEADINGS give it the appropriate tone, too: a Boomer lecturing a teenager while they push their dinner around with a fork and try to wish themselves dead.
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Sep 14, 2022 13:12
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My grandpa owned a mobile home park, ~30 homes all told, rented them all out. He got in big trouble with the IRS and had to sell a couple houses he bought down here and once he died my mom and her sister had to deal with the mobile home park. It sucked. They wanted nothing to do with it but his most recent wife was being a massive pain about the will (he did not leave her much, she had already inherited a lot from her previous dead husband) so the attorney for them said not to sell the park yet, because then it would look like they just wanted money. My mom and aunt had to constantly go to North Carolina from Florida and Texas, respectively, to deal with poo poo from that hellhole my grandpa was leeching people with. I have to give my mom credit she was at least trying to fix up stuff that was broken though (everything). One house was having some kind of trouble with the septic system, and my mom was like yeah of course we'll fix it. My aunt argued that the septic system for the whole park was getting overhauled in a month so he could wait, and my mom was like "he can't flush his loving toilet and you want him to wait a month???" so it got fixed. My aunt is generally a nice person too but I guess landlord brainworms are hard to avoid.
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Sep 14, 2022 13:32
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Antioch posted:There is a very interesting paper about this, published by Microsoft of all places On the other end of the scale https://twitter.com/deathtospinach/status/1569652410246733827?s=12&t=uxH4pKVSTw8_yBnqj3RgXA
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Sep 14, 2022 13:34
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TraderStav posted:On the other end of the scale Glad to see the spirit of 419eater live on into the 2020's
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Sep 14, 2022 17:32
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sticksy posted:Glad to see the spirit of 419eater live on into the 2020's I was waiting for a picture of a guy with a fish on his head.
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Sep 14, 2022 17:41
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Here's an interview with a guy who was hugely successful in the floppy disk industry disk industry in the 1980's, decided to stay in the floppy disk business after CDs/DVDs/USBs, lost money in the floppy disk business for decades afterwards, but kept in it and weirdly started turning a profit again around 2010.quote:We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business quote:So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. quote:When people ask me: “Why are you into floppy disks today?” the answer is: “Because I forgot to get out of the business.” Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. quote:20 years ago I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. quote:I would say my last buy from a manufacturer was about ten or twelve years ago. Back then I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million disks, and we’ve basically been living off of that inventory ever since. quote:About two years ago a guy called me up and said: “My grandfather has all this floppy junk in the garage and I want it out. Will you take it?” Of course I wanted to take it off his hands. So, we went back and forth and negotiated a fair price. Without going into specifics, he ended up with two things that he wanted: an empty garage and a sum of money. I ended up with around 50,000 floppy disks and that’s a good deal. Sometimes I also get a company that’s cleaning out a warehouse and they find pallets of floppy disks. They figure out through my site that I still buy them and contact me. There’s a constant flow. quote:Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars. I just don’t know what the market will do. It’s very hard to run a business when you don’t know what your product is worth. The dual BWM is that he has been selling them for 40 years and still has no idea what to charge for them and that people are actually paying $1 million for 500k floppy disks. quote:Who are your main customers at the moment? I want to know what a "hobbyist" with a collection of 10 floppy discs does with their collection. quote:You speak quite highly of the floppy disk. I wonder, have you formed a personal bond with the medium over the years? What do floppy disks mean to you? quote:Do you also use floppy disks in your personal life, outside of the office? quote:There seems to be a new wave of interest in retro media. I was wondering if you see evidence of this in your business, for instance, from people that approach you for new projects that utilize floppy disks?
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Sep 14, 2022 19:32
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Some governments use a surprising amount of them because of old systems, old hardware, etc. There was a politician in Japan who just made the news for declaring "war on floppy disks" in an attempt to root out all the remaining government systems using them. edit: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62749310
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Sep 14, 2022 19:36
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South Korea issues arrest warrant for Do Kwon, Luna drop nearly 50%quote:A court in South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, escalating its probe into the crypto ecosystem whose two tokens lost $40 billion in value in a span of days earlier this year. Do not pass go and go directly to jail
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Sep 14, 2022 20:59
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i was in school w that guy. struck me as kind of a douchebag so i avoided him after meeting him once bigger douchebag than i thought
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Sep 14, 2022 21:04
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:I want to know what a "hobbyist" with a collection of 10 floppy discs does with their collection. Presumably, they put them into their Apple IIe or similar system that only takes floppy disks.
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Sep 14, 2022 22:35
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To be honest if I had a floppy disk drive and a floppy disk I'd lose at least an hour absent mindedly putting it in and ejecting it again.
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Sep 14, 2022 22:48
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Residency Evil posted:I think the spirit of this thread is more in line with this blog post: a lot of his take from a moral stance appears to be "the poo poo you do is unethical already so why not add to it??" which: lol
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Sep 14, 2022 23:02
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:a lot of his take from a moral stance appears to be "the poo poo you do is unethical already so why not add to it??"
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Sep 14, 2022 23:33
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Ham Equity posted:Dude is a loving doctor, what a piece of poo poo. Well, I'm not sure I'd call him a doctor anymore. He figured out that: 1) You can make money with a personal finance blog that caters to doctors 2) You can make a LOT of money by selling ads for disability insurance/investment advice/real estate advice/online courses, while pretending you have a personal finance blog.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:37
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Here's an interview with a guy who was hugely successful in the floppy disk industry disk industry in the 1980's, decided to stay in the floppy disk business after CDs/DVDs/USBs, lost money in the floppy disk business for decades afterwards, but kept in it and weirdly started turning a profit again around 2010. Cool piece! Here is the source: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/
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Sep 15, 2022 00:30
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Do floppy disks deteriorate over time? Seems like there's a big problem to this business model if no one's manufacturing them anymore. EDIT: VVVVVV oh yeah to be clear this guy seems cool and I'm not looking to be super-critical, I'm genuinely wondering how long floppy disks last in storage Tippecanoe fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Sep 15, 2022 |
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Sep 15, 2022 01:06
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I thought that interview was rather charming, not BWM. Dude is 72 and seems to have had a reasonably successful career and a sense of humor and curiosity about it.
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Sep 15, 2022 01:15
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Tippecanoe posted:Do floppy disks deteriorate over time? Seems like there's a big problem to this business model if no one's manufacturing them anymore. It depends on what you're using them for. "I wrote a bunch of data to this disk when it was new, how long will it still be readable for?" is one question, "I bought this years-old blank floppy disk, can I write data to it and use it to boot my vintage computer" is a different one. His disks are probably still good for the latter use case.
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Sep 15, 2022 02:44
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Floppy disks will store data for a surprising amount of time if you keep them safe and never expose them to strong electric/magnetic fields or high humidity. There's always a really lucrative market for making outdated parts for stuff that used to be standard. The trick is that everyone was making it at one point so you have to wait out the culling of existing stock and the end market really only supports 1 or 2 suppliers. See also Vacuum tubes and Cobol programmers.
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Sep 15, 2022 03:51
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The junk collector posted:Floppy disks will store data for a surprising amount of time if you keep them safe and never expose them to strong electric/magnetic fields or high humidity. My company hires entry level people at $70k with no programming background so they can teach them Cobol because apparently it’s like career poison if you don’t want to work for a bank or an insurance company and even then there is a big shift away from it.
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Sep 15, 2022 04:28
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Yeah the hilarious thing about COBOL is no programmer wants to do it because "it's dead", and yet we always seem to be desperate for COBOL programmers and the youngest person is our COBOL department is like...48?
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Sep 15, 2022 04:42
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The thing is that a lot of banks use it or used to use it. We are shifting away from using a cobol application for loan decisions but it will take years, and then we will need to keep it around as long as regulators want to audit loans that were originated in the old system. Sometimes that’s loans that are literally decades old that they want to look at for one reason or another. But aside from that we still have a mainframe application that is in use by tens of thousands of users across the company and of course they don’t want to pay for new licenses for something else, and migration to something else would be a total nightmare.
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Sep 15, 2022 05:04
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MrMojok posted:I can never get enough of these types of stories
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Sep 15, 2022 07:01
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Jabor posted:It depends on what you're using them for.
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Sep 15, 2022 07:47
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therobit posted:The thing is that a lot of banks use it or used to use it. We are shifting away from using a cobol application for loan decisions but it will take years, and then we will need to keep it around as long as regulators want to audit loans that were originated in the old system. Sometimes that’s loans that are literally decades old that they want to look at for one reason or another. But aside from that we still have a mainframe application that is in use by tens of thousands of users across the company and of course they don’t want to pay for new licenses for something else, and migration to something else would be a total nightmare. At a certain point, those loans will be from so long ago, and the odds of regulatory interest so low that paying a fine if anyone wants to look at the loans is cheaper than keeping all of that stuff. Unless you're in a jurisdiction where the fines are sky high because they're really meant to drive an offending institution into bankruptcy, of course. Then you just keep training new cobol programmers like it's some kind of monastic tradition and you're retaining the essential knowledge of all of civilization
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Sep 15, 2022 07:50
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therobit posted:My company hires entry level people at $70k with no programming background so they can teach them Cobol because apparently it’s like career poison if you don’t want to work for a bank or an insurance company and even then there is a big shift away from it. Sorry, $70k for entry level with no programming background? Are they hiring now?
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