Last year, I gave donations to a number of charities, and this year I’m donating again to all of the same nonprofit organizations except for two: the Alzheimer’s Association and the Alameda County Community Food Bank.
My decision NOT to donate to these organizations is based on the volume and apparent cost of their continuing mailings to me, asking for more donations. Quite simply, it appears that they’ve spent about as much money as I donated to them, on printing and postage (for US Postal Service mail) asking for more donations. Read more »
September 8, 2016: I was pleased to receive this announcement from Informa today: “Informa and Channel Partners value and celebrate diversity in all its forms within our workforce and among sponsors and attendees. With that in mind, Channel Partners finds North Carolina’s recently passed law, known as HB2, incompatible with its values and cannot therefore move forward with plans to hold the Channel Partners Evolution event in Charlotte in September 2017.” Read more »
There are Bad People out there, who sell USB flash drives designed to show fake capacity values.
Over the past year, I’ve purchased a few dozen USB flash drives, with capacities ranging from 8GB to 256GB. Some were genuine; most were fakes. Read more »
Excellent article about a “unicorn” startup: “Zenefits Was the Perfect Startup. Then It Self-Disrupted: What happened when an HR firm had some epic HR problems” (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-zenefits/) in Bloomberg, by Claire Suddath and Eric Newcomer.
Like some other “unicorns” in recent years, Zenefits decided that the rules didn’t apply to its company: in this case, state-by-state licensing requirements when selling insurance, and the training and compliance requirements for such sales. Read more »
This just seems creepy and wrong: Google (AdWords) allows advertisers to create Search ads which pre-fill forms with Google Account data. In this example, my email was pre-filled next to a “subscribe” button which doesn’t say what I’d be subscribing to — alongside a completely meaningless “Privacy” link which doesn’t disclose how the email address would be used. Read more »
Back in December 1999, I wrote about my frustrations with Priceline.com and another travel web site, both of which which proved completely useless. Today, I confirmed that PriceLine has upgraded from a useless service to a “bait-and-switch” operation.
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Check your credit card statements for any improper charges by Amazon!
I just found a series of unexpected small transactions from Amazon on my credit card.
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A quick observation about Amazon’s book pricing: While the Kindle price for a book is generally less than the “new book” price from Amazon itself when a book is first released, the price never seems to go down. Thus, for most books, the Kindle price never seems very attractive:
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I’ve never participated in a focus group, but recently I’ve seen a surge in ads (on Craigslist and other employment sites) promising $50, $100, or more to participate in a focus group. Unfortunately, most of these ads are scams.
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