"And they wonder why retail is dying"

Reminded of that quote I heard on TV lately, I'll share this little experience I had; one of disappointments that sadly happen way too often.

I needed a beer mug that holds half a liter. I drove to a local furniture mart with a properly sized glassware department. (= time and fuel costs)
I found three 'tipover-optimized' half-liter Weizenbier glasses and a beer mug that only holds a third of a liter, brand "Leonardo". I asked a shop assistant about it and she said they don't have such and that Leonardo doesn't even offer them in half-liter size.
So I drove home, pissed at the glaring omission from a specialist dealer, and due to experience I checked Leonardo's website and there learned that in fact they DO offer those mugs I've seen in half-liter size.

Thus, more business for Amazon.

On Amazon I also checked alternative products and wondered something that one review indeed confirmed: If you design a beer mug, you of course have to keep a good amount of spare on the top for the beer's head. And one product didn't do that. Another example of "You had one job!". What IQ does it require to design proper beer glasses?!
Dilettantes. They're everywhere.
Now I have to wait for the Leonardos to arrive and hope they didn't screw up like that, too. Because they're not giving proper measurement information on their website but instead just the measurements of the carton the glasses are in, with width being the width of roughly two glasses next to each other and the depth referring to one glass including the handle. So I don't even know the exact diameter of them.
DILETTANTES! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!


On a side note, also no business today for Panasonic, because they are unwilling to offer consumer camcorders on the EU market that can optionally record in 60fps like the same models for the US market do natively.
I mean, it's not like we live in 2017 or anything.

Go(ogle) fuck yourself, not us

https://dowlphinblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/google-fuck-yourself-not-us/

Spread the link to this article if you are interested in this crap not happening anymore. It will never stop unless there is force applied.

UPDATE: Kind of resolved for the specific case.

Why Amazon Prime advertising is so intense

I am a bit annoyed at how aggressively Amazon is trying to sell their Prime membership with express shipping and the TV and movie access flatrate (The latter I only realized recently, which is kinda funny, isn't it?). As if they were about to go bankrupt, which is absurd.

Now I think I understand why. It's about that TV and movie thing. They are not the first in that market sector, so they are trying to catch up and cover a bigger market segment before a competitor does, because especially in our (appallingly but to me entirely expected) monopolist times once one business has covered it, that's it. Almost no chance to compete after it has solidified.
So this is basically a race and they're trying to recruit the customer for the pit crew.

A conspiracy theory that shouldn't exist, but needs to

Recent praise as well as crises about certain persons connected to the MLP fandom got me thinking again, and I write this as a mental experiment, as something that could totally be true in parts, or fully, or not be to the point at all, but the mere fact that it COULD be true based on the evidence at hand is worrisome enough and should make people start cultivating an awareness against being deluded, fooled or outright scammed.
What I write is stuff that is not in doubt of existing. To some it is business as usual. Only its applicability in the specific case mentioned is arguable.


To understand the context, you'd have to belong to the appalingly few people who care about or even know about what happened with the Galacon 2014 and BUCK 2014 charity auction song collab offers; the first one which I was personally involved in in one of the most spirit-crushing experiences of my life that took me quite the effort to get some emotional distance to, and from which position I am writing this, having done some unpleasant but necessary changes to how I approach things. Not always nicer, but stronger.

For reference:
Living Tombstone and ShadyVox dishonor charity


So let's be playful; Imagine the following scenario:


The Living Tombstone is doing what various other musicians eventually did: The activity in the fandom was a very useful career boost, and now business calls for greater opportunities. Some musicians are less skillful/ruthless than others at selling such a decision to expand or change their target audience.

So what can you do when your interest in making inspired music fades? Some final publicity stunts to boost your rep (or should I say "brand"?). You harvest great praise by showing off your willingness to fulfill the fans a musical wish, and all in the spirit of charity. Massive popularity boost.
You select someone with a good budget and who is not opposed to playing business (e.g. a commercial vendor whose greatest strength is definitely not healthy social interaction) and tell them to ensure they are the one with the highest bid. Then you pay them off afterwards. No loss for them, but you just bought a big publicity package, and you can afford it, not the least due to the lucrative marketing cooperations you did with computer game publishers and such.

Just that something didn't go as planned. Your shill was outbid, reached the agreed/expected limit. So now you were in the extremely uncomfortable situation of having to make a song where you never planned to make one, didn't have the time or motivation for it, so spirit is non-existent, since you didn't get what you wanted. It would have been so much easier to just pay the money and not having to actually do something you don't want to.
The shill then does what people do when they're under stress and in fear and offers the winner to buy them out ... for LESS than their winning bid, as if that made any sense! (Neither would have for more.)

So now you try to piss them off so much that they either give up on their side or accept what you had planned all along - to be paid the donation money back. If you can pull it off, if you can make the whole thing fail, it means you win by being an asshole. And your army of fanboys and general denial will ensure that no significant harm comes to you from this. Reality proves it's a feasible strategy, and as every trickster knows, fancy words are preferrable over uncomfortable reality for those already hooked into an emotional dependency. Contradictions are no problem. They will cherrypick your statements. People don't want to see their hero-idols unmasked, because it leaves them back in harsh reality that they tried to escape from.

Your general sincerity having been revealed to the few as nothing but smokes and mirrors in several ways, among them by emphasizing the uniqueness of the offer, you offer the same again a month later at another charity auction, to maximize the publicity effect. This time the collab is set up to be with another buddy (i.e. business colleague or likeminded career ally) who you can trust wouldn't raise a finger against you due to mutual interests. And this time, who wins the auction with the highest bid? Surprise! Another musician. Who then, as far as can be estimated from the typically/sadly little information that transpired, has no problem at all to not insist on the collab ... because reasons. Stuff happened, ah, can't really do the collab. Couldn't forsee this, didn't see this coming. - Yeah, buddy, I understand. Don't sweat it.
And he's either so much an ally in spirit that he thinks a scam for charity is still a good thing or you pay him off, too. It's still cheap advertising, a powerful strenghtening of customer loyalty that serves the dual-purpose of also creating action against those who would speak negatively of you.



Let me hear your ideas why this could not possibly have happened this way. And make it good reasoning, because much worse is happening in the world under the protection of denial, and over the years of curious study I am running out of reasons for assuming the best. ("The best" meaning "only moderately appalling".)



Ever wondered what happens when the best of Pinkie Pie collides with the worst of Rarity?

Deutsche Bahn disses customers big-time

I rarely travel by train. Long time of no train travel, then in 2014 again, for Galacon, and there was trouble, that luckily could be resolved without disadvantage.

Recently I traveled to Den Haag in the Netherlands by train. Journey there was problematic, with two trains sharing one track at Groningen station and mine having to wait, so I had to wait 40 additional minutes at the station and get the next train and deal with an extremely uncommunicative information employee. And then they said that train wouldn't go all the way to Den Haag and that I had to get out earlier. I did and when I asked which train to take now, they pointed me to the one I just got out of, and that it would still travel farther than they had told me, to Den Haag, just not main station.
A few days later, on my journey back, this kind of experience would be 10-upped by Deutsche Bahn.

On my journey from Leer to Ooldenburg, there was a tree hit by a freight train. So my train had to stop and wait for a while until that was cleared up. So there was some delay. Eventually the train arrived in Oldenburg and we were informed that there is still another train in front of us between Oldenburg and Hude, so we have to wait. I assumed (as anyone else would) that this was a clash due to the fact that my train had arrived with delay, not fitting the schedule anymore.

Then (to keep things short here) over the course of almost TWO HOURS we were given absolutely minimalist and sparse information from the train pilot. First that there is now yet another train in front of us, so we have to wait again. Then much later even less information, merely that we still need to wait longer and that they will tell us as soon as they have new information, and whether we will be able to continue the journey at all. Then, another half eternity later, basically a repetition of that same announcement.

People had been losing patience and leaving the train all the time, and now mine was exhausted, so I left the train. And there other passengers approached me and told me that they had been traveling back-and-forth, that this was their third train now in a stuck situation, and only then I learned that there had been very stormy weather and that the track between Oldenburg and Hude had been blocked by falling trees and such, too. I was so pissed that they didn't tell us ANYTHING. The display next to the train showed ~120 minutes delay for my train. I had waited almost that long now, but didn't trust that information anymore. The full magnitude of this shoddy communication towards their customers hit me when I went to the main hall and looked at the main display and FUCKING ALL TRAINS were either massively delayed or outright canceled! There had been a country-wide storm warning and stuff and pretty much the whole train system had come to a halt. And while sitting in the train, we were told NOTHING about that. All that the Deutsche Bahn sociopaths were interested in was to try and fulfill their contract so that they wouldn't have to provide alternatives and act in the interest of those who pay the money to keep the business alive. They probably realized they couldn't organize enough buses either, so they tried to keep a lid on the information flow, almost imprisoning their customers using deception through omission. Treating us like cattle.

I eventually had to pay a taxi - the only option left at that time, which could have been avoided had I been properly informed about the situation earlier.

They later publicly admitted that they had 'failed' on that day. Well, words are cheap and they know it. People will forget or are dependant on train travel anyway, so for DB it's no loss - an easy cop-out, a rare event that they don't prepare for because it's too expensive. A couple of years from now they might again admit some maor screwup, and then business just continues as usual.

The interests of the customer are irrelevant to them. You are just tools, variables, in their business scheme.

The lack of customer-orientation in all kinds of businesses has reached a very troubling degree, and it is what happens when you give assholes even more leeway instead of dealing with the core problems that cause such things. The world is gradually going insane.