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You may think you have many and varied reasons why some of the things I say boil your blood. You're wrong though, there's only really the one reason. Guilt.

In this world you either take the position that it is okay to do what you know is evil for $reasons or you do not. You do, I do not. You rationalize it away with as many layers of camouflage as necessary to obscure this from your conscious mind but your unconscious mind is not fooled. It knows you've chosen evil and it is not placated by your excuses. This is where the rage comes from inside you when I unashamedly speak the truth.

Only when you reject all rationalizations and excuses will you ever have the chance to be at peace with yourselves. A good fishing spot wouldn't hurt either, mind you.

You may now commence the guilt-fueled rejections of the truth I have just spoken.

The potential for scamming is reasonably high with any online market. I've liked Ebay for years now, because it usually enables me to beat competitors prices with a nice margin.

Recently, my OBD2 scanner has gone AWOL. The thing is pretty old, and pretty basic, it just gets the codes, and leaves you to figure out what they mean. So, it's AWOL. I asked my brainy son about a good replacement. Among his recommendations was the Autel MaxiLink ML629. It's not a super brainy device, but it does a little more than just read the codes. ABS brake alarms, airbag alarms, and transmission codes, as well as some kind of database to let you know what the codes mean.

I priced the thing as high as $160, Amazon had it for $129, and Ebay gave me about five hits for $109, with several other priced higher.

I didn't buy immediately. I just sat on the information for a few days. Went back to Ebay yesterday, and found that the particular sale that I "watched" had ended. So, do a search for the same item, and I'm faced with a wall of $114 sales.

Now, that price is obviously not "bad", but it seems suspicious that less than a week ago, there were five hits for $109, but now, the lowest "buy it now" price is $114.

Is Ebay running some kind of algorithm (like Amazon is purported to do) that establishes what I might be willing to pay, then gives me that price? It just seems odd, and oddities tend to catch my attention.

Possibly, they are trying to pressure me to buy now, rather than wait a few more days? "Oh, geez, it's gone up 5 dollar in four days, what will it be in five or ten more days?"

All of that, plus, I have an email in my inbox. "Your Ebay rock star report". WTF? Common dumbass television advertising tactics? Maybe that email is punishment for blocking advertising and trackers.

Is anyone else having weird and/or creepy experiences with Ebay? Are they beginning to go downhill?

An additional bit of weirdness:

In a different browser, using a different proxy, I did another search for the same item. There is a similar wall of offers for $114, but I'm also seeing others priced as high as $210, $199, $151, and $147. I'm definitely NOT seeing precisely the same results when using different browsers, or, more accurately, when I'm more anonymous.

I feel like I'm being gamed. Maybe not as badly as Amazon does, but the feeling is still there.

Begin the test by looking at this picture. When you're finished looking, read the spoiler below.

Today on this 214th anniversary of the historic duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton I have but one thing to say.

Ham shot first.

Sorry I haven’t written, but I’ve been spending all my time working on my cookbook. I’ve even gotten way behind on my reading; there are four copies of F&SF I haven’t even cracked open yet.
        It isn’t the TTL Cookbook, someone else wrote that one a few decades ago. I highly recommend it, if you can find a copy. It describes how all the circuits in a computer work, down to the individual components within the chips; transistors, capacitors, resisters, etc.
        This cookbook is a culinary cookbook. Five hundred old family recipes covering breakfast, lunch, brunch, deserts, drinks, and snacks, an herb and spice guide over twenty pages long, hundreds of illustrations, and detailed information about people, places, things, and histories connected to many of the recipes.
        The recipes themselves come from a cookbook my grandmother’s family compiled a few decades ago. Many come from popular southern restaurants that were owned and run by family members.
        It’s almost ready for publication. I need to take a few more photos at Humphrey’s Market tomorrow and add them to the book, but other than that it’s finished and ready to have bound copies printed.
        Now I can get back to science fiction.

Guy,

Detaining and separating families at the border isn’t just horrific – for some tech companies, it’s profitable.

Microsoft is one of those companies. They sell Azure, a cloud computing service that does everything from file storage to facial recognition, to ICE and make millions – $19.4 million to be exact – off of ICE’s deportation machine.

Tell Microsoft to divest from ICE immediately and to quit profiting off of deportation-industrial complex.

When the news hit that families were being separated at the border, and children were being held alone in cages at secret ICE facilities, Microsoft was quick to walk back their role in equipping ICE with technology. But make no mistake, they touted that their Azure service was “mission critical” to ICE’s operations.1

Now Microsoft wants to distance themselves from ICE’s cruel detention policies, but that’s hard to do when they’re making millions off of Trump's inhumane immigration crisis.

If Microsoft is truly morally outraged2 by ICE’s actions, they’ll walk the walk and cancel their contract with the agency and stop profiting on deportations. Tell Microsoft to divest from ICE immediately.

Thanks for taking action,

Reuben and the team at Watchdog.net

My reply to Reuben:

You guys are deluded. Microsoft and Evil Corp are synonymous. Bill Gates worships the Almighty Dollar, and so does the corporation he founded. Like IBM before them, Microsoft would have collated data for Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich.

Besides which, I approve of detaining unwanted invaders at the border. If you insist, I suppose we can throw the kids into the same prison in which we detain the adults. Your call.

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Today we celebrate a bunch of guys who privately owned not only guns but cannons and armed ships declaring they'd rather be dead than under the thumb of a tyrant. We've knocked a bit of the polish off the apple since then but it's still the only place in the world where actual liberty still has a fighting chance.

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/394036-How-Comey-intervened-to-kill-Wikileaks-immunity-deal

In early 2017 talks were carried out between Assange, via attorney Adam Waldman, and DOJ officials. Assange is said to have offered to redact certain sensitive info from upcoming leaks in exchange for an exit path from the Ecuadorian embassy.

http://washingtonsblog.com/2018/06/did-sen-warner-and-comey-collude-on-russia-gate.html

But Waldman had told member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner that Assange was able to share technical evidence regarding the source of DNC email leaks. And after discussion between Warner and James Comey, Waldman was directed to call off negotiations.

I told you all this shit a while back and you all brushed it off. Now even full on SJW academics admit that even blue-haired, SJW, feminazi bitches want real men (Azuma and her team excepted of course). It's built into their fucking genetic code to want someone who can protect and provide for the family. There would not be a human being left on the planet were this not an evolutionary trait we picked up along the way.

Poor lefties. Reality has a systemic bias towards the truth and not all the wishful lies in the world are going to change that.

Everyone makes mistakes. If a cashier makes a mistake, you usually bring it to their attention. If it's a mistake that shorts you, everyone brings it to the cashier's attention. If it's in your favor, many of us tell the cashier anyway, right?

But, what about the big corporation that does everything on a computer? The computer makes no mistakes, right?

I need (well, actually, the wife needs) a pet carrier. I've shopped around a little, and the things go by different names - pet carrier, pet crate, pet cage, etc. We will rarely need the thing, there's not much point in getting a high dollar cage. But, it's got to be big enough, so the little cheapo's are out of the question. That puts us squarely in the $75 to $100 range.

I had almost settled on a cage from Tractor Supply for $80, and planned to get it on the way home from work. But, I had to pick something up FOR work, before I could leave town to go home. Wandered by the pet supplies while I was in Wal-Mart, and there was a pet taxi for $64. Hmmmm - it meets all my requirements - guess I'll get it. Grabbed a couple other things while I was there, went to the counter, and ran into difficulties. The stupid card reader didn't like my card.

A bell had gone off in my head that the bill didn't look high enough for my purchases, but the card reader puking distracted me. By the time that was straightened out, I had forgotten the bell. Three minutes later, everything loaded into the Trailblazer, I remembered that the bill didn't seem quite right. Read it - and that pet taxi was listed at $19.

Weird. Neither the cashier nor I had any input - the bar code reader read the sticker, identified it properly, and charged me for it. Hmmmm - maybe I read the price wrong? Not hardly - I've been shopping for these things for the past three days. Screw it - I'm not going back inside to argue with the store manager that he shouldn't have given me about 60% off.

Got home, and looked this thing up on Walmart site. There, it is listed at $88, not the $64 that I read on the store shelf. That price shows that I got about a 75% discount, not the ~66% that the shelf price indicated.

So - ethics. This will kinda nag at me for a little while, at least. If this were a case where the cashier were at fault, and I knew that she would have to take the difference out of her pocket, I would definitely go back and make things right. But - on a computer? FFS, we've all talked about "on a computer" in regards to patents.

But, this IS the corporate world. Computers don't make mistakes, right? It would take ten or fifteen minutes to convince the store manager that there was a mistake. Then what? Do they even have accounting practices in place to make this kind of thing right? Chances are high that the manager would consider it too much of a headache to go through the motions, and tell me to get lost.

Then what? Write a letter to corporate offices?

And, is all of that time and effort worth it? It's a forty dollar mistake, and I'm going to spend a hundred dollars worth of my time and effort making it right?

Screw it. There ain't no minimum wage employee at risk of losing that forty bucks. The Waltons can eat the loss.

If anyone else happens to be searching for a 42" pet carrier/cage/whatever, visit Walmart, and check out the Pet Taxi, by Doskocil. Maybe you can get it for a twenty dollar bill!