Month: June 2007

fraudband:

n. low-quality broadband Internet service. This term is especially common in Australia, although it has been repeatedly recoined throughout the Anglophone world.

Having some lousy luck on eBay, though it seems the folks who sell junk know they’re doing it and are willing to make some amends. Today an iPod mini arrived, allegedly with a broken screen. Actually, the screen is fine, just the glass cover is cracked and I don’t care about that since I have another case.

But

• the clickwheel is from blue model (the case is silver)
• the Molex cable from the clickwheel is gone
• the disk is dead
• the main board seems troubled as well, as a couple of good disks won’t boot it.

The listing was that it was “for parts” as a lot of them are listed but there aren’t any salvageable parts except the screen, and I just listed that for sale.

Suffice to say I won’t be leaving feedback on that transaction. I like the idea of feedback but I think it can be gamed or skewed and it really doesn’t tell the whole story. I don’t feel like getting into a pissing contest, especially as I usually pay right when the auction ends, often within an hour. But sellers wait until the buyer leaves their feedback, essentially holding your trading history hostage: I know full well that leaving a black mark on someone else’s record will likely earn me one as well, no matter how promptly I pay.

There’s an expanded feedback area that the other party doesn’t see that I suppose goes into eBay’s monitoring of transactions. But overall, it can sometimes be a a hassle to deal with stuff that falls well short of expectations. I wish there was an escrow system that held payments until the buyer was satisfied: asking for a refund seems harder that just denying payment. But I realize the seller’s exposure as well.

I suppose I’ll have to get a few better transactions behind me before I feel better about “Earth’s largest rummage sale.”

When the ship is going down, you might as well sue the captain who ran us into the iceberg:

Have you noticed all those terrible storms that we’ve started to encounter as a result of warmer oceans? And all those rising sea levels that threaten the existence of major cities around the globe? And just how generally fucked we all may be as a result of global warming?
Well, law firms have, too. They’re expecting that as more lives are ruined the way they were ruined in New Orleans, and as more information comes out pointing to Big Energy’s full awareness of the dangers presented by their CO2 emissions, there’ll be some beaucoup-bucks lawsuitin’ ahead.

There’s gold in them rising sea-levels, apparently. Texas law firms — dare we call it double-dipping if they are also working for the energy industry that owns the mess? — are building out climate change practice groups.