Standard Mischief

Seriously, it works so well here in the states – blaming the Giffords shooting on “violent rhetoric” instead of a random crazy person – why shouldn’t it work exactly the same in Egypt, where the majority aren’t even native English speakers?

This morning as I was listing to CBS news radio at the top of the hour, and the topic of the 30 second spot was the current uprising in Egypt. The sound-bite was presumed to be a native random protester, except that she was female, and well-fluent in English with hardly even an accent. The message? The Egyptian people wanted “Democracy, Peace, and Social Justice”.

Forgive me if I feel this quote was cherry-picked. Forgive my cynicism of the mainstream media, for they do nothing to dispel it. Forgive me if I don’t understand why CBS feels the need to condense a complex issue down into a inaccurate sound-bite.

Here’s a few more minutes of research: A bit more in-depth analysis of how the economy has been going lately over in that country, by Karl Denninger.

Imagine, a “severe” winter storm that was proceeded by enough freezing rain to damage a number of trees. Widespread power outages from falling limbs. Temperatures that have only occasionally flickered above the freezing point. Several inches of snow is abundantly covering all available real estate.

Three days into the storm, and my local “all news” outlet runs a helpful article about which food needs to be pitched due to lack of refrigeration.

Speechless.

It’s harder to tell since ebay stopped displaying the handles of the bidders that bid against you. But this one looks pretty suspicious:

(clickable to enlarge)

Above is the recent bid history of the partly-anonymized second highest bidder on an auction I recently bid on. This poor guy has made 463 bids in the last 30-days, yet he only has a feedback level of (7). It’s almost like he’s not trying to win any auctions at all!

The last 15+ bids he’s made were on the merchandise for sale from the same seller. All the bids were placed between 8 and 9 hours before the auction ended. (Can you say bot?)

I’ve reported the suspected shill, but I don’t expect anything to happen. The person offering the auction in this case is a high volume seller that makes a lot of money for Ebay.

So I’m out a small amount due to fraud. If his bid was retracted, I’d get about one dollar back from the seller. This is my first detected shill and I wasn’t burned too bad this time.

I make it a practice to submit one bid, my final bid, at my top price within about 15 seconds of the auction ending. (Thank you jbidwatcher. ) While Ebay “sniping” is 100% allowed by the rules, my top bid going in that late makes it very hard for confederates of the seller to react and nudge the auction price upwards. Not foolproof, but a damn sight better than the “15 minute rule” over at gunbroker.com

Update before publication: Ebay sent me a nice form letter. The meat of the matter: “To protect the privacy of the member that you’re reporting, we can’t tell you exactly what actions were taken. ”

I guess there’s no chance at all for getting my buck back.