If you have any doubt that the very rich have decided to do away with the relevance of the middle class, you need look no farther than the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 and the current S510 bill in Congress.
The former effectively made it illegal for any individual or small-scale manufacturer to produce anything for sale for use by children, through demanding such absurd testing that no small producer can possibly afford to meet the requirements - and ANY breach allows the producer to be hauled into civil court and slapped with a million dollar fine. It applies to anything sold for use by children, including books, and it makes no exception for used, hand-made, or unique items. It has been used already to shut down thrift stores - places that sell NOTHING new! - in my own state. I have ceased to offer to produce anything in my own shop that is not in adult sizes, and many others in my position have done likewise. Do you really think that having only suppliers of the size of Wal-Mart will make your children safer?
It gets worse...
S510, which has not yet passed but shows signs of getting to the President's desk too soon, effectively makes it illegal (through grossly impractical or factually impossible paperwork requirements) for local small farmers to sell anything direct to the consumer, or sell it at all in most cases; it will also severely degrade the quality of produce available to restaurants, many of which rely on nearby small farms to obtain supplies of the quality of vegetables that you just can't get any other way. It takes the current privilege-of-monetary-power of hyper-abusive giants like Monsanto, to run roughshod over the production end, and enshrines those unconscionable practices as rights under the law; in some cases, it enlists the government itself in visiting those abuses upon the farmers. And it denies access to the market to any who dare try to simply continue the old, traditional ways of food production that have served humanity well for millennia.
Many links are out there about this; here's just one: http://hartkeisonline.com/food-politics/s510-may-mean-10-years-in-prison-for-farmers/
If this passes, it can be fairly said that we no longer have a government of, by or for the people; it will have passed to a tyrannic rule of the corporations and moneyed few, and will remain so unless WE get off our collective asses and vote in some people who have the integrity and unpurchasability to restore the government's true role as the protector of the RIGHTS of the people. This is NOT the goal of the Tea Party, whose dupes of the rich are simply seeking to dismantle the only remaining mechanism that might have a chance of being reformed to serve us again - the government itself. This is NOT the goal of the Republican Party, which is funded by those same corporations and moneyed few. This is also, sadly, NOT the goal of the current Democratic administration, which has utterly failed to meet any of the reasonable expectations that came from its win in 2008. But I see no party other than the Democrats which might be possible to direct toward this end; the Tea Party makes a joke of itself at every turn, and the Republicans...are Republicans, dedicated to precisely the opposite goal from what is needed.
Postscript: The Tester Amendment to S510 exempts only the smallest farms - those with a gross revenue of under $500,000 per year, who are no threat to Big Farma - from the documentation requirements of the bill and from some of the USDA-backed meddling in their operational practices which results from it. This does not really change the impact of the bill very much; although the kind of semi-pro small-scale farmer who sells direct to the public at a small-scale farmer's market in the town square would probably be exempt, the kind of farmer that's running an operation large enough to reliably supply a dozen restaurants with fresh vegetables, eggs and other products would almost certainly fall under the regs - and probably succumb. It's fair to say that the *average* family farmer is still directly under threat from this bill, and it is certain that the bill does more to erode the overall long-term safety of the food stream than to bolster it; the idea that forcing agriculture to be done only via the methods used by the largest industrial farms (where quality control is nothing more than a very bad joke, and the only thing that matters is the appearance and quantity of product that goes out the gate) is what needs to be struck down, and that basically means that this bill needs to be soundly defeated. Just look at who's really supporting S510; the same Big Farma outfits that essentially created it. This is a case of the fox demanding that only foxes be allowed to guard a henhouse, folks. It's NOT good for any of us. If you think letting the huge agribusinesses run the show is a good idea, think back to the last time you bought one of those huge, perfect-looking peaches in late summer...and it turned out to be lovely on the outside, and tasteless (and often half-rotten) on the inside. That's the kind of food that comes from following USDA "Best Practices", and NO farmer should be forced to follow them!
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
That's not an auction.
Lots of people will not have run across this particular scam, so I think it's worthwhile blowing a whistle here. A large number of sites have popped up with what they claim is an "auction" service; biddi.com, quibids.com, swoopo.com... the list is much too long already, and keeps getting longer. They all share one essential characteristic, however: they are NOT auctions.
In a real auction, the bidder selects the amount that they wish to pay, and bids it explicitly; when the highest bid has been posted (as indicated by the fact that no higher bid comes in), then the auction ends and the item is sold for that amount, which represents the bidder's entire outlay (possibly plus an auctioneer's fee that is fixed and knowable before the bidding begins). But the so-called "auctions" on these sites just increment the "price" by a fixed amount for each "bid", so the bidder never has the option of simply placing his bid for the amount he'd be willing to pay, and being done with it... and the advertised final "auction price" of any given item does not include the amount that the winning bidder had to spend on "bids" in order to be that eventual last bidder, so the "price" is fictitious in fact.
In these competitions, the "bidders" drop out only due to exhaustion of patience or money to buy more "bids" (possibly after they've spent a ludicrous amount fruitlessly), not due to the auction's "price" having exceeded their limits... though dropping out may very well cost them every bit as much as they'd have bid or more, without producing a win as a result! That's because of the second striking difference between these sites and actual auctions; even if an actual auction requires a cash deposit prior to participation (which is very, very rare), there is never a fee for placing a bid. On these "penny auction" sites, every bid requires payment of a fee. So "bids" aren't free, and "bids" are not actual BIDS, they are just tokens; places in line. And that brings me to the next point: These are more like a lottery, in that you have to buy bid packs (like jar-drawing tickets), but they differ from a jar drawing in that the last ticket dropped in the jar is ALWAYS the winner.
Do you see the problem yet? Perhaps it will become clear with the addition of one more detail. During the final countdown period of these "auctions", if a "bid" comes in, the countdown timer resets to a fixed value (typically 20 seconds) and restarts. This means that you CANNOT just wait until the timer is at 1 second, and try to flip your bid in last; others will ALWAYS have the option of being last "bidder", because your "last" bid will give them more time to flip another one in.
I looked at the bids on several of these sites, and it became obvious that the site owners are making a huge profit, with what amounts to a lie. They may say that (for instance) an $800 Canon digital camera went for $43 (in a process where each "bid" increased the price by just one cent), but what they aren't saying is that the actual amount that the "winning bidder" paid in order to "win" is higher - probably MUCH higher. To place the bids at all, the bidder had to buy "bids" - probably lots of them - and may have spent hundreds of dollars more on "bids" than on the final "price" of the item. In order to wear out the competition and take that final-bid spot, a lot of other folks had to drop out along the way; they, too, may have already spent quite a lot on "bids". In the Canon camera example, if bids cost 50 cents each (not unusual; some sites require more, some less) and there were 4300 "bids", the site received $2,193 for that $800 camera: 50 cents for each "bid", plus the $43 that the "winner" still had to pay to complete the transaction. Oh, and unless the other bidders were given the option of converting their bids to cash against the purchase of the same item as a "buy it now" deal, they got NOTHING, despite having put over a thousand extra dollars into the site's coffers.
Also, consider the time factor. If that Canon camera required 4300 "bids" to be "sold", and all but 150 of them were placed during that seemingly-endless "final 20 seconds" at the rate of one every 10 seconds (which isn't far off, based on my observations), then that "final 20 seconds" lasted a whopping ELEVEN AND A HALF HOURS.
So, what amounts to a rigged raffle is being passed off as an auction. Unless the Buy It Now price is really attractive to you (and you had best read the fine print about shipping charges and other fees first... if you can find them!), these "auctions" offer you only a way to lose substantial sums of money and time.
I call them a scam, pure and simple. And I suspect that they probably violate both the auction and lottery statutes of multiple jurisdictions, but I haven't seen anything being done about them by the legal system so far.
In a real auction, the bidder selects the amount that they wish to pay, and bids it explicitly; when the highest bid has been posted (as indicated by the fact that no higher bid comes in), then the auction ends and the item is sold for that amount, which represents the bidder's entire outlay (possibly plus an auctioneer's fee that is fixed and knowable before the bidding begins). But the so-called "auctions" on these sites just increment the "price" by a fixed amount for each "bid", so the bidder never has the option of simply placing his bid for the amount he'd be willing to pay, and being done with it... and the advertised final "auction price" of any given item does not include the amount that the winning bidder had to spend on "bids" in order to be that eventual last bidder, so the "price" is fictitious in fact.
In these competitions, the "bidders" drop out only due to exhaustion of patience or money to buy more "bids" (possibly after they've spent a ludicrous amount fruitlessly), not due to the auction's "price" having exceeded their limits... though dropping out may very well cost them every bit as much as they'd have bid or more, without producing a win as a result! That's because of the second striking difference between these sites and actual auctions; even if an actual auction requires a cash deposit prior to participation (which is very, very rare), there is never a fee for placing a bid. On these "penny auction" sites, every bid requires payment of a fee. So "bids" aren't free, and "bids" are not actual BIDS, they are just tokens; places in line. And that brings me to the next point: These are more like a lottery, in that you have to buy bid packs (like jar-drawing tickets), but they differ from a jar drawing in that the last ticket dropped in the jar is ALWAYS the winner.
Do you see the problem yet? Perhaps it will become clear with the addition of one more detail. During the final countdown period of these "auctions", if a "bid" comes in, the countdown timer resets to a fixed value (typically 20 seconds) and restarts. This means that you CANNOT just wait until the timer is at 1 second, and try to flip your bid in last; others will ALWAYS have the option of being last "bidder", because your "last" bid will give them more time to flip another one in.
I looked at the bids on several of these sites, and it became obvious that the site owners are making a huge profit, with what amounts to a lie. They may say that (for instance) an $800 Canon digital camera went for $43 (in a process where each "bid" increased the price by just one cent), but what they aren't saying is that the actual amount that the "winning bidder" paid in order to "win" is higher - probably MUCH higher. To place the bids at all, the bidder had to buy "bids" - probably lots of them - and may have spent hundreds of dollars more on "bids" than on the final "price" of the item. In order to wear out the competition and take that final-bid spot, a lot of other folks had to drop out along the way; they, too, may have already spent quite a lot on "bids". In the Canon camera example, if bids cost 50 cents each (not unusual; some sites require more, some less) and there were 4300 "bids", the site received $2,193 for that $800 camera: 50 cents for each "bid", plus the $43 that the "winner" still had to pay to complete the transaction. Oh, and unless the other bidders were given the option of converting their bids to cash against the purchase of the same item as a "buy it now" deal, they got NOTHING, despite having put over a thousand extra dollars into the site's coffers.
Also, consider the time factor. If that Canon camera required 4300 "bids" to be "sold", and all but 150 of them were placed during that seemingly-endless "final 20 seconds" at the rate of one every 10 seconds (which isn't far off, based on my observations), then that "final 20 seconds" lasted a whopping ELEVEN AND A HALF HOURS.
So, what amounts to a rigged raffle is being passed off as an auction. Unless the Buy It Now price is really attractive to you (and you had best read the fine print about shipping charges and other fees first... if you can find them!), these "auctions" offer you only a way to lose substantial sums of money and time.
I call them a scam, pure and simple. And I suspect that they probably violate both the auction and lottery statutes of multiple jurisdictions, but I haven't seen anything being done about them by the legal system so far.