American Grimoire

Quibids.com is a scam site that is misleading at best and fraud at worst.

The first misleading tactic is by declaring themselves an “auction.” They are not. This is clearly a lottery where tickets (i.e., “bids”) are purchased. Also, in a real auction, only 1 individual ends up spending money. On quibids, there is 1 winner and many, many losers.

The second misleading tactic is the belief that you (the one bidding) actually stand a good chance of winning a bid. You do not. The winner is someone who is willing to spend an exhaustive amount of time and money monitoring an item. By contrast, consider a real auction. You say you’ll pay X amount for an item. Someone else says they’ll pay Y amount. And so on. Very rapidly you come to a market price for the item. In the case of quibids, you must pay for every single bid and you are limited to only increasing the price by 1 or 2 cents. To put it another way, the winner is required to invest considerable amounts of time and money just to “win.” Example: let us consider an item I recently attempted to “win” on quibids. It was an iPad. The bidding war went on for at LEAST 27 hours (which is when I began watching it…who knows how long it was going on prior to that). If you were a prospective bidder when it started that meant you would have had to keep bidding on it non-stop for over a day and night before you stood a chance of winning. There is no reasonable rationale for allowing a bidding war to continue for that length of time.

The third misleading tactic is their “Buy It Now” option. Soothes your wounds, right? Wrong! This just proves they’re a gambling outfit. People get sucked in with the concept that quibids is an “auction.” This implies they can bid and win on something that they couldn’t afford otherwise.

More to come as I think of it…

Many sites ask you these three seemingly innocent questions:

• Date of Birth?
• Gender?
• Zip Code? (or perhaps Postal Code)

The reason is simple. According to a Carnegie-Mellon study, with the above information your identity can be discerned with an 87% accuracy. To put it another way, once a site has the information above, they know exactly who you are…and even if they don’t, they can always sell the information to a 3rd party who will.

So it occurred to me…do Americans have an accent? After all, the British spawned the language of English, so isn’t their way of speaking the “correct” way? To them, do we have the accent? And I discovered…yes! To non-American English-speakers, Americans do have an accent!

Evidently the “proper” way of speaking any language is entirely cultural and chosen by government and taught via schools. In the case of America, the US at large has been pushing a Midwestern dialect dubbed the GAE dialect (General American English) for some decades now. Also, outside America, virtually all—if not all—ESL classes teach using the GAE. Despite this, dozens of cultural and regional dialects still thrive in the US and over a hundred thrive worldwide. I took the tongue-in-cheek test below and was amazed that it predicted a regional accent that encompassed my birthplace (Philadelphia Dialect) despite the fact that I grew up in the South. Also, I didn’t answer the way I normally speak, I answered “correctly,” I.E., how I spoke when I was in a professional situation. I didn’t even think I had an accent. Fun!

What American Accent Do You Have?

Regarding the GAE: why is the US (and the world) at large, using a Midwestern dialect as the English standard? Answer: TV.

The reason it’s pushed on students nowadays is courtesy of Hollywood! The Californian movie factory produced movies where most actors spoke with a Midwestern accent (because that’s what most native Californians spoke at the time). When new thespians streamed into LA with stars in their eyes, they discovered they had to talk like the preexisting stars/directors/etc to “fit in.” This Midwestern dialect spread to TV and News Broadcasting with Walter Cronkite sealing the deal. Public school teachers pointed to news anchors as the “right way” to speak English…even though they themselves may not speak with that accent, and of course I’m not sure any President has ever spoken with a GAE accent.

And so a Midwestern frontier dialect has taken over our perception of how English should be spoken. Fascinating.

So I’ve recently had the chance to play around with a coworker’s iPad. I can sum it up with a phrase you’ve probably heard before: it’s a really big iTouch/iPhone. That’s neither a diss, nor a perk, just the truth. Everything you can do with your iTouch you can do with the iPad and vice versa. Likewise, everything you cannot do with your iTouch you cannot do with the iPad. For me, that means I would primarily use it to watch Youtube and/or randomly surf the web late at night when I can’t sleep. Your mileage may vary.

Reading: I can definitely see using this to read magazines. I think it’d be fantastic in that role! For long-term reading (i.e., novels)? No go. It makes my eyes all watery.

Playing: pretty much everything you already know about (i.e., apps, games, music, videos, etc). You use iTunes to load up your iPad the same way you do with an iPod.

Size: it’s smaller than you think. Or at least it was for me. When I held it the first thing I said was “did you get the small version?” The actual screen size appears to be a little bigger than half-a-sheet of paper, maybe at most 2/3′s a sheet of paper.

Replacing a Laptop/Netbook: No one will use this as a laptop replacement.

Overall: I don’t want to seem negative on the iPad itself, because I’m not. It’s a terrific device. However I am negative on it’s price. For the 900 bucks (about 734 Euro) you’d spend for the best model, it’s just not worth it. As a splurge item, I would pay $200 for an iPad (possibly $300) but I’d still think I was paying too much. I definitely look forward to the later versions. I expect them to be much cheaper and far more robust. Hit me up if you have any specific questions!

UPDATE:
So yeah…after all that earlier talk, I just bought an iPad2 for 650.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/parasite-makes-men-dumb-women-sexy/2006/12/26/1166895290973.html

Unbelievable, but true. One wonders just how many problems in our world today (war, irrational behavior, etc…) are aggravated (or even caused) by this parasite. 40 percent of the globe infected!

Check out the link. There will be 30 million more men than women in China by 2020. Hmmm. Seems to me that, historically speaking, surplus boys go to war…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6254763.stm