Monthly Archives: September 2007

Andrew Meyer's Shocking Performance

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It's funny that James wrote about this today, because I wrote about it last night on a discussion forum.  I'm pleased that James and I saw the same videos and came to the same conclusions.  If you haven't heard, a young man (Andrew Meyer) caused a disruption at a John Kerry Q&A forum and finally was removed by the police.  During his removal he became more combative and resisted the officers which ended up getting him arrested and finally tasered as it was the only way to get him to stop shouting and remove him from the hall.  Predictably (I suppose) people have seen an editted version of the video that makes Mr. Meyer look like more of a victim than he actually was and the most outspoken conclusions I see on YouTube basically boil down to “he asked a question 'they' didn't like so he was tasered and arrested, wake up America, we are living in a dictatorship”.  *yawn*

Anyway, here's what I wrote on a discussion forum where someone had posted the editted version of the video under the heading “A Most Terrifying Video”:

The video was editted to make the kid look more like a victim than he was. There is a more complete video with commentary that makes the kid's behavior easier to see through and makes the cops behavior more understandable:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1na1hcGQCHg

I'm a liberal and I believe in civil liberties. The kid was totally in control of that situation, he WANTED a big scene and he got it. He was totally playing to the cameras.

The cops were standing behind him because he had a reputation for causing trouble at public events. The moment he took the mic and began speaking one of the college officials went to the police and said “he's a troublemaker, watch out”. This made the police suspicious of him. At one point a police officer told him to finish his question and let Kerry answer, he responded rudely (through the mic so everyone could hear) and continued. As Kerry tried to answer the boy's first question, he ignored Kerry and launched into his second question. It was clear at that point he was there to talk not to Kerry, but to the crowd.

Well it's cool if you want to talk to a crowd. You can put a video on YouTube, or you can schedule your own rally and see who shows up, but you can't just grab the mic, take the floor, and talk whatever crap you want as if it is your show. It's not your show and the organizers are going to eject you if you won't play nicely, which they attempted to do at the end of his THIRD question which is the part you got to see. No surprises there.

All this boy had to do is say “sorry officer, I'll cooperate” and in all likelihood they would explain to him why they were ejecting him the moment they got him out of the room. Which by the way, they did, except you don't get to see that because the video that was posted at the top of the thread doesn't include it. Heck, if he had cooperated they probably would have let him go at the door.

This video does show his detainment once they get him outside the room:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7NWukZhsiBw

Watch that video where he reveals by his own behavior just how much of a neurotic nut he is:

“They're going to give me to the government! They're going to kill me!”

Those of you who think its actually okay to scream HELP HELP and WHY WHY when a police officer has decided to detain you should take heed: when the police arrest you, they are allowed to hold you and don't have to charge you with ANYTHING for 48 hours. That is the law of this country. If you don't agree with it, please contact your representatives and work to get the law changed. If a police officer tries to escort you out of a building, you DO NOT have a right to know why. If a police officer chooses to arrest you, you do not have a right to be told immediately why you have been arrested. If a cop tells you “stop shouting, and stop resisting me or I am going to arrest you (or taser you)” and you choose to continue shouting and resisting, well duh, do the math.

The rights you do have upon arrest are read to you in long form, or in the abbreviated form:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to be speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”

Did you see “you have the right to know why you are being arrested” or “you have the right to scream loudly and resist arrest”? Me neither. That's because we don't have those rights.

It's a shame this boy provoked the police into tasering him by repeatedly refusing to cooperate. I'm sorry he got tasered, but freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to disrupt a political rally. Watch the full video and pay attention to the commentary, and watch the second video that shows what happens outside, how he keeps craning his neck so he can shout to the cameras… because he's all about the cameras.

1. http://youtube.com/watch?v=1na1hcGQCHg

2. http://youtube.com/watch?v=7NWukZhsiBw

I'm trying not jump to conclusions (paranoia is unhealthy). As far as I can see, this boy orchestrated what happened to him through his own behavior and could have put a stop to it at any time.

There are a lot of affronts to free speech in this country, serious ones that we should be concerned about (“free speech zones” for example: http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/04/hilden.freespeech/index.html), but this nut and his bad performance art does not qualify. He should have been ejected, and he was.

From Bulk Comes Bilk and EBay Wants Your Money

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I've been so busy with work and trying to sell cards that I haven't had time to do much photography.  I did get some great pix in Hyannis a couple weeks ago and some more good stuff at a reception for a christening I went to last weekend, but I haven't had time to photoshop the photos, clean them up, organize them, and so forth. Vanessa and the Dream Cruiser It's just been either work or eBay the last couple weeks.  Here's one picture I took (at the office, of couse).  Somebody in my building went out and got one of those “Dream Cruisers”.  Isn't it gorgeous?  Wow.

On the eBay front I continue to sell and sell.  Part of my unlimited set is gone now, and I've gotten the right price for it, and I continue to identify rarities or obscurities in my collection and put them up for sale.  I am happy to report that I am at 90% of stage one and expect to make it there by the end of the week.  Cool beans!

But I have learned one important lesson about selling.  Selling in bulk may allow you to ship more product, but it definitely costs you money.  I sold a set of 8 revised dual lands back on the tenth of September for $122.50.  In preparation for the end of that auction I got another 7 dual lands together and was prepared to sell them as a batch.  But I decided not to.  As an experiment I decided to sell the 7 duals as individual auctions (here they are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).  They went for a total of $139.60.

Sold as a batch, they went for $15.31 apiece.  Sold individually? $19.94.  That's 30% difference!!!  Viewed from that perspective it makes sense to sell individually unless you have a very small market (say you are selling on a table on your front lawn… maybe a couple dozen people swing by and look at the items, chances of selling them all individually are remote.)  But on eBay the market is huge, millions of potential buyers, so go for it right?

Well there *are* the eBay fees to consider.  eBay will charge you for absolutely anything you can think of and plenty of things that wouldn't even occur to you.  Back in the early days of eBay there was a listing fee and a sale fee.  The listing fee used to be 30 cents.  That was it.  Then if the item sold there was a sale fee which was this sliding scale thing that was very complicated but generally worked out to about 4% to 5% of your sale.  Nowadays everything costs money.  No longer is the listing fee flat, but it is based on the minimum bid of your auction.  If your minimum bid is a dollar, the listing fee is 20 cents.  If your minimum bid is $49.99 your listing fee is $1.20, and if your minimum bid is $59.99 the fee is $2.40.  As you can see the fee is determined inside some sort of bracketed structure.  Want to add a reserve price?  You'll be charged 1% of your reserve price.  Want to add a buy-it-now price?  There's a fee for that.  Want to schedule your auction to start later in the day or later in the week?  There's a fee for that.  And so on and so on and so on.  Sale fees aside, eBay takes a hefty chunk out of you up front just for listing the item.  To the point where it makes no sense at all to sell anything for under say, 5 dollars.  Ebay will simply eat so much of it that it becomes pointless to sell it.

And of course once your item sells, eBay charges you for a percentage of the sale price, this you would pay no matter how many items you are selling, but the listing fees are paid for each item.  My listing fees for the first dual land auction was 30 cents (I had no minimum bid, no buy it now).  The 7 individual auctions cost 40 cents apiece to list (probably because I set a minimum bid of $9.99, otherwise it would have been 30 cents).  But that is $2.80 to list 7 individual items instead of 30 cents to list one.

Then come the PayPal fees, which generally work out to about 3.5% of the sale price but which have overhead costs causing them to be at least 30 cents as a minimum.  I read an amusing story about a guy who overcharged his customer about 90 cents for shipping, and offered the customer a refund via PayPal.  So the customer got sixty cents.  Ouch.  For items worth about $20 each, the overhead is not really all that relevant, but it would be for inexpensive items.  The PayPal fees would be easier to stomach if PayPal wasn't owned by eBay.  Yes, that's right, you pay eBay to list your item, you pay eBay to sell your item, and you pay eBay to collect the payment for the sale of your item.  Yeesh.  And, to make it even more annoying, PayPal fees are instantaneously applied to any cash transferred, but eBay fees are simply billed to you at the end of the month.  That way, PayPal can charge you a percentage off of the $100 you were paid, instead of the $100 you were paid minus the eBay listing and sale fees.  I hasten to point out again that PayPal *is* eBay.  Double dipping anyone?

After correcting for eBay listing fees, eBay sale fees, and eBay PayPal fees, the group lot went for $14.20 per card, and the individual lot for $17.80.  That's still a 25% improvement in price, even after being robbed charged for eBay's fine services.  Altogether the 8 auctions sold for $262.10, which isn't bad, even if eBay took $23.92 in total fees.  My state government charges 5% in sales tax.  eBay?  9.13%.  Yikes!!!

So from now on I'm going to sell individually and try not to think about the fact that I might as well just set every tenth item on fire since I'm not going to end up with any money for it.

Wherein I Discuss Abject Greed…

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September 9, 2007: Black Marble

It's been a busy time here. I'm either working or trying to sell stuff on eBay. My mouth is still bothering me, so this weekend I decided to just stay in and not put my dentures in all weekend. I think they might be irritating the area that is trying to heal. I have another checkup with the oral surgeon tomorrow and I'm nervous that more surgery is going to be necessary.

I've been taking pictures, but for the most part, only pictures of cards I'm trying to sell on eBay, so I hardly think it counts. This beautiful black marble here I shot the other night after I was done posting auctions. It's a 30 second exposure where I used a penlight to illuminate the scene and remove the shadows… that weird ring-shaped highlight was caused by me moving the penlight in a wide circle. I shot the image with my old Nikon-mount Tamron 90mm f2.5 Macro lens, using the Kawa adapter to mount it on my XTi. The adapter pretty much permanently lives on this lens and I really love the images it produces. Isn't that nice? I'm definitely going to procure another adapter for the Nikkor 28mm and give that lens a real workout too.

So most of my “free time” has been spent getting auctions up on eBay to finance my wedding kit as discussed awhile back.  Right now I'm about a third of the way to Stage One.  By rights I should be well into Stage Two by now, but I am finding myself thwarted by what I can only describe as “abject greed” on the part of people looking for deals.  In fact that has been a recurring theme I keep running into lately, one of the earliest examples back when I was trying to sell my Nikon gear to finance my EF 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS lens.  The kit would have fetched about $500 to $600 on eBay, and I was quoted somewhere in that neighborhood by a retailer who after having my gear shipped to their location, and holding on to it for weeks and weeks (and being quite rude to me on the phone) finally quoted me a price of $175 for the entire kit.  They gave a number of excuses, one of which was that my Tamron 90mm was extremely foggy and needed to be sent out for cleaning.  Just look at the fog in that picture above and you won't see what they're talking about either.  (The Tamron was stored in a sealed case with a dessicant for years–to say fog is “unlikely” would be an understatement.)  Greedy bastards.

Hey listen, I know people are looking for deals, or looking out for their interests, whether they're offering you 30% of what your gear is worth like they're doing you a favor, or needling you over a few pennies worth of rocks, or, as has been happening lately, making ridiculously low offers on your collectibles.  But still, there's deals, and then there's insults.  I wouldn't blame anyone for coming in with offers at about 10% under value, but 50%?  70%?? 90%?????  I've had people e-mail me, offer me a teensy fraction of what my stuff is worth, and then insist I end my auction early so I can sell it to them.  I typically ask if they're on crack.  It's been a real eye-opening experience.  Eye-opening, eye-rolling, head-shaking… and generally disgusting.

When I listed my most valuable set of trading cards for sale, I was offering them at over 20% off retail.  Partly because the cards weren't in mint condition, partly because I was selling on eBay, and partly because I didn't want to have to wheel and deal.  I figured people would see the price, recognize what a great offer it was, and jump at it.  Instead all they did was try to see how much lower they could make me go.  The obnoxious thing about this is the set in question contains nine special cards (called the power nine) which alone account for 75% of the value of the set.  It takes all of two minutes looking at completed auctions on eBay to see that I could sell those cards individually and make most of what I was asking for, and yet people had the gall to offer me FAR less for the entire set than I could assuredly make selling just those 9 cards.  Jesus!  I actually had to write up a price breakdown based on current eBay prices and post it on the auction just to get people to stop making ridiculous offers to me.  In the end the set didn't sell at all, nobody was willing to pony up the cash (it's eBay, and if they can't take advantage of me, somebody desperate enough to agree to such a deal will show up sooner or later.)

Now I have a set up for auction that isn't worth nearly as much, but is ironically much rarer.  It is arguably a one-of-a-kind item, in that I have never seen a complete set for sale anywhere, and neither has anyone else to my knowledge.  But that doesn't stop the bottom feeders from slithering out of the dark to try and get it for a tenth of its value.  I had one guy try and argue with me that I was overvaluing the set because he had found a retailer than valued some of the cards in the set less than I do–conveniently ignoring that the same retailer valued most of the cards in the set more than I do.  So if you were to actually buy the set at the retailer's prices (which you can't because the retailer doesn't have the whole set since it is so damned rare) you would end up paying almost 50% more than my asking price!!!  Holy crap!  Yet another auction where I had to post a followup explanation for people who should be able to do the math themselves.

But I'm not losing hope.  I know eventually I will be able to move the sets and get a fair price for them, it's just been irritating–I suppose I shouldn't let it bother me, but it does.

eBayers Drive Me Crazy!!

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Looking down the notes/status on my selling/sold auctions, they read like something out of “How to be Obnoxious — A Practitioner's Guide”.  Let's run through them, shall we?

Item 1 is a very rare set which did not sell because some rather clueless sellers all decided to run auctions for the same item at the same time as mine, and undercut me.  As a result they all hurt each other and nobody made what the set was worth.  One guy had an extremely low minimum bid and got no bids.  After his auction ended, there was only one auction left to bid on, it shot way up over the first guy's minimum despite having poorer quality cards.  Thinking about that makes my brain shrivel.  Now I have to wait around for all of these shmoes to finish relisting and selling their sets so I can get a fair price for mine.  And they appear to be waiting for me.  Greaaaaaaat.

Item 2 is my most valuable set, wouldn't sell for 80% of the retail price.  I received the most ridiculous offers, promises from people who then disappeared, and got strung along by people who eventually just backed out as if surprised when I repeated stuff to them which was clearly stated in the auction description.  Meanwhile the auction has had hundreds of views and dozens of people watching it.  I've now relisted (cha-ching! extra ebay fees!) lowered the price to 70% and it still isn't selling.  Jesus.  I'm going to have to split it up and sell it in pieces (cha-ching! more fees!)… and I'll end up making way more than the current asking price.  Had one buyer offer the full price if I would ship to Spain (auction says shipping to USA only.)  He assured me up and down that it was perfectly safe and he does it all the time.  Then I told him that he would have to assume the shipping risk (i.e. item goes missing, he has to wait for the UPS refund, up to 6 months).  And suddenly it's no longer something he feels comfortable doing.  (Guess he doesn't have as much faith in the Spanish courier services after all.)  Currently I have one offer from a guy who “is trying to get the money together”.  We'll see… past history is not a good indicator.

Item 3, a set so rare that only a handful exist in the world.  I set a reserve and have people who expect me to sell it to them for one tenth of the reserve.  One bidder offered to buy it for the reserve price, but insists I cancel the auction and relist it with a buy it now option first!!  (For those wondering, it cost about $9 to list it the first time, and would cost another $9 to list it again.)  Guy refuses to just bid the goddamned reserve amount.  I refused to end the auction for him.

Item 4, fixed price/best offer auction.  I accepted an offer of $150, only to discover that the buyer was from Japan (you don't get buyer's location until you accept their offer.)  Auction description says shipping to USA only.  Genius.  I recalculating the shipping charges, and they tripled.  Sent buyer an invoice and pointed out that he should have contacted me first before he bid because that's exactly what the auction description says.  I hope he doesn't back out, but I suspect he will (and I lose $5 in listing fees… cha-ching!)

Item 5, sold Aug-31.  No contact from buyer.  Invoice sent 9/1.  Reminder sent 9/4.  Still no contact.  Standard eBay grace period is 3 days from end of auction.  Going to have to send buyer a warning tomorrow and if he doesn't pay within a day after that it will be negative feedback and relist the item (cha-ching! more listing fees…)

Item 6, shipping to USA only.  Bidder from Germany pleaded with me to ship to him, and eventually I agreed and let him bid.  Then after winning the item he argued with me about the shipping costs and insisted I ship USPS instead of UPS.

Item 7, buyer asked repeatedly about card condition despite pictures of the cards being in auction description, and then took his sweet time getting his payment together after he won (took 5 days to make an instant electronic payment.)  At least he apologized for taking so long.  He'd be the first.

What next???