Last night I was surfing the web and came across a news story titled Ten Things Americans Waste the Most Money On from a web site called 24/7 Wall Street. I’ll save you the trouble of reading the story: we Americans waste our money (in monetary order from most to least) on restaurants, gifts, audio/video equipment, pets, hotels, entertainment admission fees, alcohol, sporting goods, tobacco, and apparel. Or in other words eating, having family and friends, enjoying music, having a dog or cat, experiencing the world, knocking back a dirty martini, exercising, and replacing our worn-out clothing is a frigging waste of money.
Just shoot me.
If we didn’t spend all that money what would happen? The way the folks at 24/7 Wall Street evidently see it, we’d be better-off because we wouldn’t be wasting so much money. Of course being such careful spenders would not only make us dull and uninteresting as Hell, it would also destroy our economy.
Great advice coming from a financial site.
So I ask you, what was the point of this story? The only point I can see is that 24/7 Wall Street writes it and, according to their web site, the story is then syndicated to TheStreet.com, AOL Finance, BloggingStocks, The Wall Street Journal Online, MarketWatch, StockHouse, MSN Money, AOL Finance, Daily Finance, Time.com (TIME.COM!!!), and Newsweek.com.
They publish it, we read it and someone makes money.
A pox on all these publications. They should be ashamed to print such garbage.
This story is less than air, it is vacuum — words stuck together and published solely to fool dopes like me into being exposed to ads. And while one might argue that it has always been so, well I don’t think it was ever quite this bad.
I don’t want to pick on 24/7 Wall Street too much, but they did write the story so here goes.
The story is crap and those who wrote it are hypocrites. For one thing they somehow excluded from their list of wasted money anything having to do with their own line of business. No publishing is mentioned other than cable TV. The Internet, newspapers, magazines (all sites in the 24/7 Wall Street syndicate), and books are never mentioned.
I certainly spend far more each year on computer equipment and Internet service than I do on audio-visual equipment, which is right up there on the 24/7 waste list. For that matter I spend more on newspapers, magazines, books, and telephone service, too, which aren’t mentioned at all.
Whether these oversights are intentional or inadvertent doesn’t really matter: the story has no substance and no value, none. No wonder it was aggregated (but not paid for) by the Huffington Post.
We used to talk about having 100 channels but nothing to watch on TV, and now the same thing seems to be happening to Internet news. News is being search-engine-optimized to heck and back with the result that it is harder and harder to find anything worth reading on the Net that doesn’t come through a major portal.
Yet here’s a funny thing, this rag you are reading now — I, Cringely — can’t even be found in many search engines because Google won’t index me as either news or a blog. Weird, eh? Hundreds of thousands of people manage to find these words but they have to do it despite the Internet, not because of it.
You may wonder why I don’t just submit my content to Google and ask them to index me. I have, dozens of times. A few times I’ve even been indexed for a week or more, but then I always fall off. This happens today at cringely.com but it happened, too, back at PBS where I used to have the network’s legal department contact Google on a regular basis to no avail.
Clearly I have enemies, terrible luck, or what I write is simply without value.
As it is, the only way I can get in Google News is by having some other indexed site quote me.
Yet there is 24/7 Wall Street, indexed all over the web and telling us we’ll be fine as long as we don’t eat don’t have fun, and above all don’t buy anything.
You can’t miss it.
A2389C85HNAX
I can find you on StartPage.com
“it would also destroy our economy”
Um, no. By all means, everyone should be free to spend their money on whatever they choose to, but substituting saving for consumption would NOT destroy our economy. On the contrary, it would GROW the economy. This is because saving, loosely defined, means investing in productive assets, which will hopefully generate returns that can be used for greater consumption (or more investment) in the future.
Here’s a pretty simple analogy. If you have an ear of corn and you eat it, the corn is gone forever. That’s consumption. If, however, you plant the ear of corn (or whatever the hell it is that farmers do to grow corn) then you have the possibility of having more ears of corn in the future, some of which you may consume and some of which you may plant (invest) to grow even more corn in the future.
Some economists have unfortunately bought into the Keynesian notion that a lack of economic growth indicates that there isn’t enough demand in the economy. This is patent nonsense. Human wants have no end and there is and always will be a demand to consume. The only question is whether to consume now or invest so that we can consume an even greater amount in the future.
Amazing, and here I thought we were in a recession (irregardless of the catalyst) because consumers aren’t buying much, lowering demand, lowering production, lowering hiring and increasing unemployment. But hey I can always be wrong.
I’m sure ‘destroying’ was hyperbole, but investing money in company (because leaving it in a standard bank at .02 interest is a waste of time) that isn’t selling much, will just cause them to buy other companies, to increase their bottomline, and lay off the redundant staff. Which I’m now guessing is good for the economy too, huh.
It’s easy to find you on Google by searching for “nude Christmas card.”
I noticed the same thing during the 2008 elections. Someone would come up with something. It would be taken out of context. Often it was so obvious the originator HAD TO KNOW they were misrepresenting the story. It would be published in a recognized publication, obviously with no fact checking. Then another publication would pick up the story, then another, then another. Within a day the story would be on the national news and openly debated. No one along the way would check or correct the story.
How can society, how can a democracy function when any story no matter how bogus, or wrong can be released and treated as fact by the news industry?
As I scanned the list, many of the items are of little interest to Wall Street. They do not involve big companies or interesting stocks. Maybe the writer(s) were looking at spending that puts money into the financial or investment community. But as you suggested, people needs jobs and what’s wrong with spending money on services that provide income to your neighbors? What is the alternative?
I’m waiting for the followup article about how we waste our time, which is free, but can be so much more valuable if properly wasted.
Top of the list is probably looking for useful news on the web.
But, there is a serious relationship between wasted money (which in my book is something purchased that you end up not using or enjoying) and the amount of time that you have to available to ‘waste’. I have long found it useful to translate the cost of buying something into the equivalent cost for another thing that I know I’ll find rewarding. For example, the price of a new pair of skiis that are marginally better than my old ones is about equal to 2 days of skiing on those old skiis, including two unpaid days off from work. I don’t buy skiis very often.
What would be interesting to hear is how you came to “surf” to that story: where you found it, what prompted you to click on it, why it’s valuable to post about it. I mean, even the headline screams Mad Magazine-type pointless drivel with no value, yet here you are giving them a link (on which I will not click.)
Come on, Bob. You’re an independent thinker. You’re well known in the computer tech world. Who needs those financial losers? Oh, maybe the same bunch that stole all that money from people for worthless financial packages.
Getting back to more important matters how is the second phase of the Cringely Startup Tour coming along? Any news you can share with us?
A2389C85HNAX?????
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xhX2FywS7GgJ:www.cringely.com/2011/02/pay-no-attention-to-this-post/+A2389C85HNAX&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&source=www.google.com.au
You are indexed just fine – this little test with A2389C85HNAX works perfectly.
I right-clicked and did “search with Google”, and naturally this page comes up on top.
So what makes you say it’s not indexed in Google?
Oh, and I wonder if you’ll read that string in your Podcast version? 🙂
cringely.com is indexed as a *site*, but that is not the same thing (in Google) to being indexed as a blog or as a news source, each of which have additional aggregation rules that highlight the content a little more for specific searches.
I have found the quality of the links returned by Google has decreased quite a bit in the last couple of years. Searching “news” at least guarantees(for now) that the links won’t be to some bogus site.
The weird string comes up in a google blog search for me: https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=A2389C85HNAX#q=A2389C85HNAX&hl=en&prmdo=1&tbs=blg:1&prmd=ivns&source=lnms&ei=NbBvTeyrDsKXcdjNzfgC&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=8&ved=0CBwQ_AUoBw&bav=on.2,or.&fp=dc9eafc8777aa6f5
While Google has become a monopoly, many have discovered the same fate of non existence. I have no idea what the solution is, but Google wields far too much power.
Google is how i found you. I was researching the history of videogames for a school assignment, and came accross a really old column of yours about nintendo.
I definatly wish i knew of more bloggers that actually tried to make sense of events as you do. There is a real need for people to step back and think about things, rather than just repeat heresay.
well said.
I can find you straight away on Bing – thus proving that Bing does not source it’s results from Google!
I found your site thanks to a dispute between you and MG Siegler, so controversy still seems a solid plan B behind organic SEO.
Bob you come up as #1 in duckduckgo (http://duckduckgo.com/?q=cringely).
You actually touched on one of the greatest of subjects of our times, and yet again managed to make it all about you 🙂 What Wall Street would really like to see, is for the middle to upper but not filthy rich class folks live miserable miserly lives and put 50% of all our earning into their “financial vehicles” to “secure” our retirement, so that THEY the top 1% of the country can enjoy the stuff that we “waste most of our money on”.
We are sermonized daily how we must spend money to grow the economy – so it make sense for companies to pay us more, right? – yet we must also keep our pay low to compete and attract investment, and at the same time save save save to be fiscally responsible. This so-called economic dream seems more like religious fiction than a real sustainable system.
The alarming thing is that the “stuff we waste money on” not only is the only thing that moves this economy (rich overseas bank accounts sure don’t), but also if you look at the list it consists of spending that only create mostly low-end service type jobs here in this country (celebrity chefs excluded).
Therefore, by controlling our spending and saving, the Illuminati enslave us and we in turn enslave the poor to them, for them. I like it. Well, I don’t like it, but I love a good conspiracy theory.
In my advanced age (almost 40…gross!) I find elaborate conspiracy ever more believable. Maybe it is adult onset schizophrenia, or just maybe I really am getting smarter every day.
It might also be a way of spreading the idea that because the middle-class waste the money they earn (sorry, I meant “the money they are given”), they really shouldn’t be given so much (because they just waste it).
Re the photo of the cannon, Cringley. Are you suggesting that military spending might be a waste of money. Or are you suggesting that this is an example of the war being waged against the working class. Either way I agree.
I suspect he is suggesting neither. “Just shoot me” is an American expression of frustration. Ira (below) posted a cute take on the title.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyPFQKpRnd0
Editorial bias has always been a temptation in publishing. It’s a reminder that we all need to help our kids to learn how to question what they read.
As for search results for Cringely.com, regardless of where it ends up on the serach results, good content has a way of attracting an audience. And people like to let their friends know about the good stuff the find.
Google brings up a few links including this one, one at /technorati and one that is titled ‘ignore this post’ – both of the latter two give 404 Page Not Founds when clicked
A search for site:cringely.com returns 1100 results. Clearly you are indexed; I can’t speak to the page rank of your content however 🙂
-JohnF
He’s talking about his content being indexed (hence the alpha numerical string at the end of the piece) not the site being discoverable by entering his name. People can find Cringely if they know what to look for but can they find it if they search for Apotheker (subject of his last post, etc)? Clearly, search is broken in terms of assignment of value to content but that is subjective and tough to rank without also being open to sophisticated gaming (hence the huge SEO business).
I think this is something we basically have to live with. There is a lot of crap on TV. There are a lot of crappy advertisements that steal our time, etc. It’s the cost of doing business in an open manner. The alternative (which is not for all) is some sort of curated world. This is the approach seemingly taken by Apple. It has its disadvantages too! It all depends on what you are prepared to give up.
Bob,
Thank you for writing about something I’ve suspected for a long time in regards to the internet becoming increasingly useless. Between the ads for secret foods to reduce belly fat and the stupid mortgage/school ads, I can barely stand to use it anymore. The success of the stories that HuffPo creates that are simply meaningless has bred increased use of this tactic across the net to the point that I simply don’t use sites (Slate and Salon, I’m talking to you) that I greatly enjoyed in the past. Even bellwethers like the Chicago Tribune are useless anymore and Google allows some sites (allows is the wrong word) to respond to searches with “buy t-shirts on *search term* from *business of the day*” I can’t stand it anymore.
What happens when it all collapses under its own weight?
“What happens when it all collapses under its own weight?”
It becomes another strip mall in suburban America with dollar stores and buffet restaurants.
Education is our salvation. Not public, mind you; that system has already been corrupted.
I guess in the end it comes down to finding trusted partners to vet things of value in the future. I do far less internet searching than I used to because the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten so bad. I find myself turning to just a few sites that I trust and only going to Google as a last resort; a system remarkably similar to the old media model of having a few vetted sources (the so-called “mainstream media”) generally considered to have value in their news reporting mechanism.
As it stands, the old-school mainstream media is being increasingly corrupted by pursuit of the last dollar (i.e. not reporting but depending on the AP or Reuters to do the actual reporting). And sites like HuffPo are no remedy. So in the end it comes down to something new or we end up as you noted.
Bob,
Let me suggest you use the Google Webmaster Tools. You put a meta tag into your code and create profile for your site. There is a Google Site map plugin for WordPress that will help you manage all this.
It won’t guarantee getting indexed, but it will help.
Thanks for your writing!
Those similarly vacuous “Trefis” articles have been driving me crazy of late. They are also popping up everywhere with some catchy headline that makes you think you are about to be enlightened with some keen insight only to see five paragraphs of nonsensical babble coupled with a fancy-graphics-tune-it-yourself financial model that is so wrong it is laughable.
Lately I’ve found it nearly impossible to use search to find actual in-depth information on any sort of news topic. What you get is pages and pages of the simplistic article you just read from different sites with different headlines all referencing each other or some AP/Reuters original story. Good luck trying to find genuinely useful expert analysis or back-story. Even if it exists, as soon as the blurb is out it will be buried.
This is a future opportunity, not a problem. There is growing discontent with the gaming of the Internet, the page-view gimmicks, the tricks to lure people by bait and switch and the lack of novel content and thought. Create original and readable content that is compelling in of its own right and, over time, you will fall on the right side of the fence. It will take time, but the ratio of garbage to good is so stacked in favour of the former that soon enough people will have found ways to filter out the internets junk (I’m being an being an optimist – bear with me!).
Join the ranks of Malcolm Gladwell and others. Keep building it, we will come! Quality is valued!
If no one else is going to reference the George Best quote, I will, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”
It’s outrageous that automobiles didn’t even make the list! Sure, we need cars, or basic transportation, but we don’t need status symbols and that new car smell. The most money is wasted buying new cars on credit when 2-4 year old cars are just fine. 20 years ago I made a personal vow not to buy another auto on credit, to always pay cash. It’s one of the best things I ever did. I love the freedom of being debt free. There’s a reason that 90% of “The Millionaires Next Door” (including Warren Buffet) buy 2nd hand cars.
Not to mention that “new car smell” is merely toxic VOCs that are extremely harmful when inhaled for long periods or in large enough concentrations.
The problem with most media is that they are for profit. This leads to thinking up ways to make a story more juicy than it really is to get readers which makes them money from ads as Bob pointed out. That puts their interests out of alignment with the reader. The reader wants the whole story and not something that sounds juicy out of context. PBS and NPR are the closest thing we have in the US to news sources that are for the most part in alignment with the audience.
And of course, this blog. 🙂
I think you misinterpreted “waste” – i don’t think the article suggests that don’t buy any clothes – buy enough of what you need & use them to their optimal life. What is essential to someone (like computers and hardware) as part of their job might be a waste to someone else…
Can’t . They won’t let me waste money on cannon balls. 🙂
An interesting discussion of SEO shenanigans on this week’s On the Media podcast: http://onthemedia.org/episodes/2011/02/25
This is why I follow you on twitter. This is how I now get all of my news, through direct linking to sources with content of value.
Actually, I agree with the article that we do waste a lot of money on those things. And no, cutting back in those areas would not destroy the economy.
1. Restaurants. Not only is this largely a waste for most people, but it also generally ends up being unhealthy. Cut the restaurant spending, and have some home cooked meals (not Hamburger Helper or Mac ‘n Cheese either). You can still enjoy a good time with your friends and be better for it. Better yet – the conversations won’t be interrupted by waiters, or by other noisy patrons, and the only wait is the cook time – during which you can chat away. Better all around and far cheaper. Oh, and you’re still spending money just on other things.
2. Gifts. Yes, we give way too much too often. How many ties do dad’s get? How many of those do they actually wear? I’ve actually told my wife to never give me ties or other certain kinds of apparel (and please make sure the children don’t too) since I am highly unlikely to actually use them. I’d rather have something more meaningful.
3. A/V Equipment. This is certainly a pit hole for money wasted. Add computers to it too, though we can certainly put a lot of blame on Microsoft there since many replace computers that are perfectly good with new ones just to make them faster – when all that is needed is a good cleaning and/or re-install of Windows – or just switch it to Linux. But the equipment vendors are also to blame here as well – making often shoddy products that don’t last long, fill up the landfill when they get replaced, and are often expensive to boot. Seriously – do you need to replace your perfectly good TV every year or so? Do you really need to upgrade that DVR to the latest model?
4. Pets. Okay – you got me here. That’s a hard one as most are just getting what they need (food, a few toys, vet bills, etc.); and the eccentrics are in the minority – yeah, Fluffy doesn’t need another vest.
5. Hotels. Well, we really need to learn to stay with friends and family more; but you can save a lot by staying at Motel 6 instead of the Radisson or Marriott.
6. Entertainment. Okay – I’m expanding this one a bit. Movie theater prices, theme park prices, etc are just way too expensive; then add to that all the vendor prices inside those places – $4-5 for a measly box of popcorn, funnel cake, etc. – stuff that costs pennies to make. Yeah, they need to make a profit, pay staff, etc. But the prices could really come down without affecting that. But this really gets to the issue that America, right now, is very Entertainment Centric – ignoring reality (debt, etc.) and having spur-of-the-moment fun. It’ll catch up at some point. Just hope I’m not around to see it happen (not likely).
7. Alcohol. Again, buy the liquor and take it home. It’s cheaper than bars, and you have better security too.
8. Sporting Goods. Do you really need an NFL jersey if you’re not an NFL fan? Do you really need to spend $100 for it? Do the kids really need to be playing 5 different sports? Save the money and invest in time with family and friends instead. Time is more precious than anything you can buy, and it’s cheaper too (financially).
9. Tobacco. There is no way you could argue that spending on tabacco products needs to go away, if not for health reasons alone – also for the environment (cigarette butt litter) as well.
10. Apparel. This one peeves me the most. I’m not hard on shirts or anything, but I’d like them to last a few years. I don’t want to be spending $25/shirt every year, or even every-other year. And no, the kids don’t need Gap, Banana Republic, etc. either. Nor do they need logos saturating their clothing. It’s hard to find good clothes that last – and the more expensive clothes are often worse at enduring the test of time. And all too often, this is women & teens spending money on clothes to be fashionable, replacing entire wardrobes every couple years – often having not worn half of it to start with. And no, I have no problem with looking good – just the prices and reasons.
All said, there are better ways to spend money and time with family and friends – healthier ones too. And right now reducing our spending can actually help strengthen the economy as we lower the debt we are all in – a contribution everyone can make by reducing their own personal debt.
Of course you’re absolutely right. But I agree with Bob that the story is “drivel”, not wrong, from the point of view that we all should have learned to economize from our parents and by comparing our after-tax income to our expenses.
You are using a standard WordPress installation and yet your Alexa ranking in the US alone is below 35k. Doesn’t sound shabby at all to me.
Which rank would or should reading and writing comments on web sites have on that list?
Obviously you wouldn’t write a story complaining that another story is worthless, without some inkling that others would find your own story equally worthless.
So I would guess this very story to be a calculated risk.
(And I wouldn’t make this statement about a story complaing about another story as being worthless, without an inkling that other commentators would find my very own comment to be itself worthless, etc — but I will trump you all by declaring that by and large, any comment I wind up making is, generally speaking, quite thoroughly worthless)
Sigh, reading your comment has been such a waste time.
Ah, but you see I don’t worry about such things! Choosing what I write solely to get more readers isn’t the way to go, at least not for me. I reckon if I provide true value readers will be attracted to my work. Quaint, eh?
Okay but now that begs the question: why to write, if not to be read?
And I fully anticipate you to throw the question back to wit: why to comment, if not to be heard?
I comment so as to be a Crank.
Obviously you need not respond to that one…
I was referring to the comment made by your reader, not the author’s comment, that being the original article (which may interpreted as a *comment* on the “Ten Things Americans Waste the Most Money On” article which by itself is a comment on society potentially leading to an infinite regress).
I would have left a quote from Knuth’s 4 Fascicle 0 edition where he provides his interpretation on why playing combinatorial games doesn’t necessarily have to be a waste of time but I don’t have my personal copy with me and I just wasted my time trying to find a copy in the computer science section of the library from where I’m typing this comment, only to discover that someone else (who just wasted my time) has checked out the only available copy.
Using a PC back in the 80s was considered to be a waste of time. Managing your check book, storing recipes, what a waste of time although the experience would seem to have become fruitful for some of us (I think I saw this on some or other “waste-of-time” documentary with this blond guy driving around in a convertible).
One’s waste is another’s food supply.
“I get the news I need from the weather report.” – Paul Simon
…and Jon Stewart.
Sounds like the Cringe is having a mid life crisis or maybe it’s time to expand the Cringley empire by adding some selected links/ syndicated content by a few independent thinkers just don’t go all Huffington on us Bob!
Ohmigosh are you guys aware that cringely.com is for sale?
And I dont think he’s foolin.
CRINGE what are you thinking, are you going to take a paying job now?
That’s what all my friends did (actually – they just copied my lead).
Hey it aint so bad.
Bob, have you considered putting Google Ads on your site to see if that will keep you in the index longer?
“it would also destroy our economy”
Um, no. By all means, everyone should be free to spend their money on whatever they choose to, but substituting saving for consumption would NOT destroy our economy. On the contrary, it would GROW the economy. This is because saving, loosely defined, means investing in productive assets, which will hopefully generate returns that can be used for greater consumption (or more investment) in the future.
Here’s a pretty simple analogy. If you have an ear of corn and you eat it, the corn is gone forever. That’s consumption. If, however, you plant the ear of corn (or whatever the hell it is that farmers do to grow corn) then you have the possibility of having more ears of corn in the future, some of which you may consume and some of which you may plant (invest) to grow even more corn in the future.
Some economists have unfortunately bought into the Keynesian notion that a lack of economic growth indicates that there isn’t enough demand in the economy. This is patent nonsense. Human wants have no end and there is and always will be a demand to consume. The only question is whether to consume now or invest so that we can consume an even greater amount in the future.
That reminds me of every article I’ve ever seen that links to Wallet Pop, over on AOL. Their site is a nasty mix of lazy journalism, bad statistics, and regurgitated truisms. If this is the future of media, count me out.
The title of this article nails it. A beans and rice economy is a miserable existence and the very idyll of poverty.
You have made the claim before that search engines and news aggregators are doing some fishy things. I think there is some merit to that and you cite facts which make it look nonrandom – but a more likely explanation is that 80% of people don’t know any better and are easily manipulated. If the majority of demand is driven by those people, it is no surprise a market caters to that. Most of the readers here are not in that group – they are the counterculture of that. But if you are correct and there is a coordinated effort behind this – that is cause for real worry. I for one am not comfortable with the idea of a handful of internet moguls driving public opinion with feel-goodness, fear, or whatever else comes handy to manipulate opinion. So I hope you are wrong – but I will keep my mind open and keep reading.
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So is 24/7 Wall Street, a Buddhist movement ? As in release all desire/wants?
I myself I follow latest tech but always come in purposely late & cheap. Same for other consumables. SpendThrift or Tightwad Gazzette have never offered any ideas I’m not already doing. Still I don’t want the rest of the US/World to shirk on their buying for it keeps the economies going. Evnironmental waste is a concern as a byproduct of consumerism – just buy higher quality.
Thank you for your blog. As a newcomer to the world of Internet search rankings etc., I appreciate your insight as well as your opinion as I learn.
Bob,
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I’d like to agree with you that there are people in America deciding what is and is not acceptable subject matter for conversation. For example, you stated an implicit assumption that the health of the economy depends on spending. This is a Keynesian economic idea. Keynesian economics has been widely promoted by those who are in a position to decide what does and doesn’t get published as though it were the only brand of economic thought in existence. Keynes’ detractors’ voices simply don’t get heard.
You may be interested to learn that there is another school of economic thought, called Austrian economics. According to their mode of thinking, there exists an ideal level of savings and investment. This level depends on people’s “time preference”. It is discoverable through the free market process of adjustment to interest rates that would take place if we didn’t have a fiat currency. The economy functions most effectively when this level is maintained. Anything below this level will cause a temporary boom, followed by an inevitable bust.
In other words, if we weren’t spending money on those things, we would either be saving money or investing it. Savings enables future spending. Investment makes the economy more efficient by making capital available to entrepreneurs. Rather than collapsing the economy, that would enable us to spend more in the future.
Mark
I guess google is like democracy – it’s a flawed system but all other options are even worse. So yes, the query results are getting useless, and yes, the system is gamed and yes, more and more drivel ranks higher and higher, but what’s the alternative?
Hey, you could be totally reliant on Mahalo for funneling all us faithful to your website.
Relative to the top 10 list – besides holding some of that discretionary money back from Ruth’s Chris or waiting for the “real” Facebook IPO, we could put some of it aside for helping Charlie Sheen realize his personal fantasies.
Uhmmmm, did they mention bottled water?
Btw, I found out in law school, when I was always worried about running out of money, that it was better value to buy the cheapest (or cheapest-ish) lunch at the law school ‘restaurant’ than to buy food in advance, make my lunch up in advance and hall it to school. Frequently I wouldn’t eat it or didn’t feel like eating what I bought in advance when it came time to eat it, so lots of the food was wasted.
I found out, the Japanese were right: just-in-time purchasing of food, even if it cost a little more, is worth it because less gets wasted, you don’t have to burn all the time shopping and storing and packaging it and then having to haul it around with you while you are hauling 15 lbs of books that might smash it up as you go.
One has to be careful, always, on assessing value, quality, nutrition (taco bell is cheap, it even tastes good, but is it nutricious? I’m not sure it’s food? – I think it’s mostly, like candy, a form of entertainment). But spending extra money is not necessarily a poor value if it helps reduce waste: you only buy as much as you need when you need it, no more, no less, so less waste, and you have the added value of eating something you feel like eating at the time you eat it, instead of eating what you felt like eating last weekend when you went shopping at the grocery store.
In law school I usually opted for a small cup of soup (good) and a hotdog (bad) and made up for it when I got home and had salad for dinner (fruit for breakfast). The lunch would cost me just under $3 which is what my lousy home made lunch cost me – which was in poor shape by the time I got to it in the early afternoon. These days you can still get a salad at McDonalds for a dollar and they provide you with Newman’s Own dressing – if you are on the go and still want to save money. Eating at a restaurant is not always a bad strategy.
wow, you do know the point of the wasted money story is to get highly valued by google right ?
1) you include lots of things, and lots of links.
2) you have a list that gets linked to by loads of news aggregators that are attracted by this type of crap story like waving a feather in front of a cat.
Lots of people say nasty things about it, argue about the list, and send it around, etc.
Yeah, you’re quite right in getting really mad at it.
If you aren’t indexed on Google, I don’t think you really exist.
Who is Robert X. Cringely and why is he so mean?
And how did I end up here anyway?
All I wanted was porn.
This place sucks, but not in a good way.
Am I right or what?
Hey! Posting this comment means I just got published! Finally.
Thank you Robert X. Cringely. You are now my favorite friend.
Bye!
The article in 24/7 NewsCrap whatever… sounds like someone writing in an old Soviet style newspaper trying to convince people that trying to enjoy their life with “wasteful spending” is anti-society and terrible for you in the process. That is, “all you bourgeois pigs will die by choking on the vomit of your excess while all us spendthrifty types will be laughing in a new worker’s utopia”.
What is that, Wisconsin calling?
Web presence is a concept and practice you may want to investigate.
Local business sites, blogs, social network and websites that you create that contain links to your promotion persona and links to your public persona.
Automation is easy with such sites as posterous, Though not perfect.
Taking advantage of preferred group sites such as wordpress.com and blogspot.com and the near blindness of the search engines can generate the exposure that is difficult otherwise.
My test results were and are surprising.
Yes the mere fact sites exist purely to capture passers by with click advertising is bad enough without them peddling pointless drivel. I run a couple of small sites and have always resisted any advertising except Amazon links to any books involved. (I’ve made zero money in referral fees!) But I don’t mind that. The sites exist purely for information which is, I hope, in the true spirit of the Internet.
Finding information on the Internet is fraught with such poiontless dead-ends and I can understand people giving up and declaring the resource a waste of time (even though I’d loudly argue they’re wrong).
This seems to be a more coherent version of what you are trying to say.
https://www.cantondailyledger.com/opinions/columnists/x1512111901/Benjamin-Wachs-More-informed-but-still-surprised
Share your frustration with empty headed news. The local Clear Channel talk station I usually listen to all day repeats the same crap over and over every half hour, we hear the same interview for “National Doughnut Day”, or that breakfast tacos are fattening.
As for Google, somehow I stumbled on the right combination. Like you I am “Plane Crazy” and build my own. My own design is the BK1 and my company BK Fliers names were picked after web searches came up mostly empty. Now if you Google either BK1 or BK Fliers, you get bunches of hits for my site, YouTube videos, and other sites that have mentioned my project. All for a cost of a $9 a month AT&T Yahoo web site. Don’t know how it works, maybe you could figure that out for me and your readers.
Thanks, Bruce King
PS: Been following you since the early Infoworld days, keep it up you are the best.
Like most Americans, you have confused NEED with WANT.
There is no NEED to have a six-figure wardrobe, yet many Americans do.
WASTE comes not from need but from WANT.
Thank god you are having difficulty being indexed by search engines, shouldn’t that be enough clue that your opinion is useless?
You are indexed! Type A2389C85HNAX in Googles searchform.
You are indexed! Type A2389C85HNAX in Google’s searchform.
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And there’s still no giant statue of you, breathing a column of fire into the sky and shouting “REMEMBER ME… REMEMBER ME…”
You’re a well-known blogger, isn’t that enough? About once a year I feel the need for some unreliable technology predictions, or bitterness directed at Steve Jobs, so I google for “cringley”, google says “did you mean Cringely?” and I find you. That method has never failed me in a decade.
Also I think you misrepresent that article. It’s not a serious suggestion that we should all become subsistence farmers. As the article says, “The credit crisis might not have been so bad if all that money had been put into savings accounts between 1989 and 2009, but the period would not have been nearly as fun.” So I think they get it.
And there is a kind of truth to what they’re saying. The fact that food in a restaurant may be ten times the price of food you make at home, and that prices may vary between restaurants by another factor of 100, strongly suggests that some people are deliberately looking for the most expensive option, just to get rid of their oodles of spare cash before they die. A billionaire only has one stomach, one mouth, one set of taste buds, one pair of eyes, 24 hours in a day, some limited number of years to live, and they have to divide their dollars between that stuff. So their dollars have to shrink in value to make the equation work.
So telling people that their wasting money is just another way of saying, “Congratulations! You’re rich. Stop complaining so much and at least try to enjoy it.” Which is definitely advice the affluent west could benefit from.
Hey this is somewhat of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding know-how so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
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