Where I am and where I'm going / originally posted to eBay

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:10:00 -0400

First posted to my eBay blog on Jul-02-08 22:42:05 PDT. Updated Jul-07-08 10:08:20 PDT

I’ve been thinking as good a cause a fraud prevention is, and as close to eBay’s heart as that cause probably is, on general principle I should come up with something more interesting to do with this place than just using it to say “no, I’m not the guy offering to sell you the half wave inverter, and you shouldn’t be buying those, anyway”. Which you shouldn’t, by the way. Sure, maybe you think it’ll be good for laughs as you shut down your obnoxious neighbor’s TV set, but the FCC is really not amused by that prank and neither are the courts and yes, it can be traced. True, you will get free room and board and your social life (and dance card) will be full after your new neighbors discover what you’re in for, but really, is it worth it?

Perhaps not, so let’s move on.

Right now, when I’m not very busy out enjoying the summer, I’m working on my blog at another eBay service, Stumbleupon, so eBay might not mind the delay on this site so much; I work here, I work there, either way, I’m enhancing the value of what’s on their servers, right? But what would be fitting for this place? I can think of a few possibilities. Which, if any of these, I end up doing, depends on what my finances and responsibilities are like at the time, but I will start by saying that I won’t be selling anything here. “Whoo! Dude, fight the power!” No, that’s not what this is about.

What is this about? Back when the Web was barely known and the Internet was the newest, shiniest toy that the American people had to play with, many people viewed anything they saw on a computer screen with an almost superstitious sense of awe; “the technology is cutting edge, so anything coming to us through that technology must be cutting edge as well”, they seemed to think. This was a gift to the kind of person who thinks it’s funny to point lighted detour signs toward cliff edges at night, many of whom went out an argued for some horrifically irresponsible causes. I still remember the news story about the mother of a child with AIDS who took her child off of the triple cocktail because she read a claim on Usenet that the drugs were what was causing her child’s AIDS, when in fact the drugs were the only thing giving the child any real hope of prolonged survival.

When nonsense is taken seriously, there are real life consequences which frequently fall on those who least deserve them. I was one of those boring people who, at a time when belief in objective reality and morality was becoming unfashionable and this strange cobbled together mess of far left and far right wing positions called “political correctness” was taking hold, argued with the crazies and had the bad taste to keep winning. I wasn’t alone in doing that, but sometimes it surely felt that way, lately, at times now more than then. In time, uncritical faith in what one read on Usenet faded, though as the currently widespread uncritical faith in Wikipedia shows, that sort of credulity never really died. All the same, certain very marginal people came to see that their community’s glorious moment in the sun had passed, in part because of people like me, and they never really forgave us for that, for having stood up to them and having been the voices of reason, albeit occasionally justifiably angry voices of reason.

Picture the world being remade by the sort of people who place obscene phone calls. I feel good about the fact that I can look back and honestly say that I stood up to those people. It was the right thing to do, but doing the right thing sometimes carries a price. I have mentioned elsewhere the way in which certain anonymous cowards took to calling my elderly parents at odd hours of the night with death threats, until the police departments of their home town (never you mind where that is) and Chicago, where the bad guys were calling from, got involved. People like this never let go. They have no real sense of right and wrong, so to them, every disappointment, however well deserved, feels like a violation to them, and they really have nothing better to do with their time than seek vengeance over their imaginary grievances.

Let’s say that I did as I initially thought of doing, and maybe assembled a little equipment and sold it here. Let’s say that somebody bought it. What is to keep somebody, having purchased something in perfect condition, from lying and saying that it arrived through the mail in poor condition? Really, nothing. Mail order is done on faith, and faith, where malevolence is an issue, can’t be rational. While I’m not saying that most people online wish me ill, or have even heard of me, I am saying “look at the likely ratio among those who will arrive”; honest customers take a long time to find a new business, and the lowlifes I encountered a few years back have already networked. Realistically speaking, who is going to get here first, in real numbers, and who is going to scare off the others? Especially when those writing critically of sellers are free to speak, but the sellers aren’t really free to speak up on their own behalves, meaning that those coming to one of my auctions to make trouble would find that the rhetorical playing field was heavily tilted in their favor?

“Yeah! Dilbert’s finally fighting the suits!” Again, no. Not what I’m getting at. I have my own thoughts about the rightness and wrongness of this policy or that, but I’m not going to talk about that here, and if you think that you’ve read between the lines and found hints of a position, you are almost certainly mistaken. In a free market, a business will make an offer and a customer will respond to that; there is nothing revolutionary or even radical in the customer’s actions, when the customer decides for himself whether the deal offered is a good one or a bad one for him. That’s what a customer is supposed to do and it’s what I’m doing now. That deal offered by eBay works for them, and it works for some of their customers, and I have no interest in commenting on that. I’m simply saying that it doesn’t work for me, so I will respectfully pass on that particular offer and hope that eBay will accept that choice with equal respect, in turn.

That leaves us with the unanswered question - if one is on eBay, and one isn’t auctioning anything off, what does one have left to do? One answer, perhaps, is to notice that one has a blogging platform available to one, which one might use to write about subjects of interest to some of eBay’s other users.

What that something might be, I’m not sure, yet, and if that sound like indecision, some of that indecision is deliberate. When I first started writing pages, I used to head out with a clear, focused picture of what I was trying to do. If you’re an engineer trying to pattern a chip or lay out a circuit, that’s the way to go, but it’s a lousy way to write, and a lot of my early writing ended up very stilted as a result of that approach. What I learned to do was, in a sense, going back to doing things more as a mathematician would - do little tasks here and there, play with one’s work a little, let it tell you what it’s going to be, and be patient enough to notice that in time, it will do just that. I have some notion of writing a few things about consumer advocacy, about my efforts - successful and (umm) otherwise to get by as a self-employed professional, thoughts about legal home electronics projects one can do, a lingering interest I have in actuarial science and how it might be tied in to quality control … and I’m not sure of how these and other things might tie together, so when the time comes, I’ll just toss things out and see what happens, letting this blog evolve a theme, a spirit, a character of its own. I find that approach has been working well for me at Stumbleupon, where I have much more to do, and I think that it will work well here, too.

I’m going to need something from you, though - a kind of honest, positive feedback. “How are we supposed to do that, with no way to leave comments on this blog?”, one might ask. The answer is, when you see a post on this blog (or any of my other blogs) that you find interesting in a good way, link to it on one of your own blogs or site, and talk about it intelligently. The kind of posts that get that kind of response are ones I’m likelier to see as having been worth my while to write, in retrospect, and that feeling is going to affect the choices I make when I post in the future. In that sense, I gladly offer interactivity in my writing, because I do want to be read, not necessarily by the most readers - anybody willing to scrape the bottom of the barrel can probably do that - but by a readership I will feel proud to have reached.

I don’t know if that will happen for me, and to be honest, life has left me a little pessimistic, but as I find myself anticipating the worst, I am always delighted to be wrong, and look forward to the possibility that I may, this time, find myself standing corrected. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Why am I even here? / originally posted on eBay

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:57:00 -0400

First posted to my old eBay blog, Nov-01-07 14:45:52 PDT. Updated Jul-02-08 23:22:02 PDT

At present, I have no significant amount of cash, and so can neither buy nor sell. However, what I can do is pay attention when I find out that some clever soul decides that he’d like to take my identity out for a spin at the expense of eBay, its customers and my reputation - as would seem to be the case a few times now, judging from some of the e-mail I’ve been getting - and put a halt to that. If you do hear from somebody claiming to be me, drop by my Chicago centered personal blog

http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/

and see if I’ve announced anything to that effect. If not, and somebody has just offered you a fantastic deal on contraband electronics or whatever these clever souls will try to move, know that it’s not from me and probably not from any other competent engineer, either. Caveat emptor, and are you really that eager to have Homeland Security visiting you in the trauma ward? Or something like that?

Gosh, the Internet is a fun place.

Burn Unit / Joseph Dunphy's Ledger

Where I am and where I'm going / originally posted to eBay

Why am I even here? / originally posted on eBay