One of the reasons I hate spam and spammers is because it’s bad marketing.
When some marketing weasel decides to spend a couple hundred dollars on an “e-mail marketing campaign” they’re either uncaring or too lazy to think about it and realize that “opt-in” is a lie. Their marketing message gets out there, but all it does is piss people off.
Stderr appears to have been “discovered” and I’m getting a couple hundred spams a week. That means I can’t review them all carefully – so if you post a comment and it does not go through, save the text and email me; I’ll dig it out of the spam pile and approve it.
What’s really goofy about this spam is they’re posting links to places where their ads have already been taken down. “Montana fire pits” – gasfirepit.deviantart.com? Poof. As soon as members report them, they’re gone. It’s a huge waste of everyone’s time and it’s not as though I – living in Pennsylvania – am going to ever buy a fire pit from Montana. I am, however, tempted to research the company and call their CEO for a little one-on-one display of privilege. I’m sure they’d be surprised to learn that their marketing people are so stupid that they paid a spammer who’s annoying non-potential customers on the other side of the country.
The fire pit burner market is big – there are at least 30 pieces of spam regarding Montana Fire Pits. I wonder what would happen if I put the spam through, then tracked down the company and sent them an invoice for advertising space on this our blog?
PS – if you can’t make your own fire pit burner, you don’t deserve a fire pit. I know that sounds mean of me, but it’s just the truth. A $50 bag of refractory cement and some black iron pipe and a box of crayons and a silicone baking tray, and you can have a fire pit burner of your own design, any size you like.
They all come in batches like that. The most persistent I had was spamming coins. I just skim, then empty the spam. You might notice which post they are being attached to, then do a quick edit and uncheck comments and pings. That works best.
mmmmm
spam
Caine@#1:
You might notice which post they are being attached to, then do a quick edit and uncheck comments and pings. That works best.
Oh, good idea. When their comments don’t post, they point the robots elsewhere.
I just don’t get why everyone needs burners so badly.
chigau@#2:
mmmmm
spam
My grandfather worked at Hormel in Minnesota for a while; he used to look physically ill when he saw cans of spam.
@ 2 chigau
Next you will be recommending a Newfie steak!
Marcus #4
A friend worked at a Cadbury factory, she had the same reaction to chocolate bars.
I have been to the Spam Museum.
Google would say that this is why they need to collect data about people in order to give them relevant advertisements.
The e-mail spam I usually get is for fraudulent products—pills that promise to make your penis or breasts grow larger; pills that will make you lose 30 pounds in a single week; cosmetics that will make your face and skin look 30 years younger—that sort of stuff. Products that cannot possibly deliver what they promise. I have gotten used to the fact that legitimate businesses never send me e-mail unless I have subscribed to their newsletter. If somebody sends me spam for a fire pit burner, whiskey glasses, SEO services, web design services or attorney services, I automatically assume that their product must be defective, bad quality, fraudulent, etc., that something must be wrong with whatever they are selling. Thus, even if I lived in Montana and I needed a fire pit, I would never even consider buying it from those guys who sent me spam messages, because I’d automatically assume that there must be something wrong with their offer. Instead, I’d look for a fire pit burner somewhere else.
Until now, I wasn’t aware that this word was also used to refer to a brand of canned meat. It was worth looking it up though. The Monty Python Spam sketch was fun.
Latvian word for spam is mēstule. In Latvian, mēsls means “crap, shit” and vēstule means “letter.”
The first person I met at university tried to chat me up by telling me all about working in a cheese factory and what they did with the stuff that fell on the floor. Said it put him off processed cheese forever. I thought ‘didn’t the texture and taste do that?’. He ended up being a good friend.
@ 5 jrkrideau
Don’t knock it.
Marketing spam does seem to be counterproductive, and obviously so at that. At least with honest-to-goodness phishing ‘sensible’ logic involved, namely that someone will fall for it and you can rob them blind. I doubt
many people will ever spontaneously decide to purchase [product] after having been informed of its existence by unsolicited e-mail, usually sent in triplicate because [company] bought/stole more than one of your addresses.For instance I recently got new sunglasses. I don’t really like them, I just needed a pair. I do like like one thing about them, though: They’re not Ray Ban sunglasses. They will never be Ray Ban sunglasses because I will never do business with Ray Ban. In fact, I have never done business with them. Nonetheless they have some of my addresses and insist on wasting my e-mail provider’s time by making them filter out this crap.
Oh, and don’t ask google about the environmental impact of spam. It would render this already pointless exercise in “marketing” even more infuriating. Being paperless doesn’t make it green…
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Maybe you could do one of those legal twists, “by visiting this website, you agree to our terms of service”, and stipulate a) charges for ads posted or b) prohibit ads/bots outright* and proceed to sue companies. All tihs is subject to how much you enjoy paying lawyers.
*c:” Turnabout is fair play.” We hope you’ll enjoy digging your website and company e-mail servers out from under waves of home-made soap ads and reviews for handcrafted pokey stabby things. Tactical pokey stabby things.
It’s not just cheese. There’s no reason to believe that it’s any different with other food products. Or with restaurants. For example, in Down and Out in Paris and London George Orwell gave a nice overview of all the awful things that happen in restaurant kitchens. Or with anything else in general. Working in some industry makes you learn all its secrets and see its dirty laundry. I remember watching one Russian documentary, where a reporter got a job in a supermarket and filmed with a hidden camera what was going on there. They routinely sold food that was long past its use by date. You have got a piece of cheese with some mold on it? Workers simply scraped the mold off cheese, repackaged it, and sold it. You have got some meat that stinks badly? Just use some chemicals to get rid of the stench and sell it.
You can even discover nasty stuff in an industry where you never expected shit to happen. For example, after retiring from her real job my mother got into dog breeding. The insider info I learned made me reconsider everything I used to believe about purebred dogs. When buying a puppy, there’s a probability that the papers you got from the kennel club are plain worthless. Occasionally dog breeders fudge puppy pedigrees. They do it for all sorts of various reasons. And all that crap that’s going on in dog shows. . . The parents of your puppy have gotten countless prizes in dog shows? They must be really great, right? Wrong. People in charge of running dog shows will sell diplomas to any dog owner who is willing to pay for these papers. All that’s papers, though. As long as they get a healthy puppy, papers aren’t that important for most people. Unfortunately, occasionally the nastiness goes much further than some fudged papers. I have heard about cases where owners knowingly bred dogs with illnesses that can be genetically inherited in puppies.
For some reason I thought “tactical soap”! Marcus should make some!
So I googled “tactical soap”…
chigau @#12
I just googled for that as well. Holy crap! Items labelled and marketed as “tactical soap” actually exist. Probably I should have started getting used to this by now. But seriously? Tactical soap? Come on, this is ridiculous.
I recently tried posting a comment in this thread, and something weird happened. My comment didn’t appear here, so I assumed that something must have went wrong with my Internet browser and I tried reposting the same comment. Then I got “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” It seems like I can post other comments, but not that one.
Do you have here some interesting spam filtering system that blocks some comments made by the same person based on some criteria (keywords maybe, I cannot imagine what could have been unusual about that comment which didn’t show up here and probably got caught in the spam filter)?
There are also “combat soap”. The former leads to something called “Defense Soap”, which is supposed to keep away all sorts of “grappling-related” infections (quoting a review) one apparently frequently chances when wrestling or engaging in martial arts. In that regard it’s a similar product to “fight soap”. But most intriguingly, according to the warning label, it “may antidote homeopathic medication”. So it can (possibly) counteract remedies that famously have no proven medical effects. Just amazing!
And there exists a wikipedia article on soap made from human corpses. Clearly it was a mistake to google for “tactical [thing]” and related terms, and I won’t repeat it any time soon.
I wonder how much internet spam links to malware, trying to get weird bored people to infect their computers. I never click on any spam if I can help it, curiosity being what purportedly killed the kitty.
@ 10 abbeycadabra
Don’t knock it.
I’ve tried it though in ON not on the Rock.
Beats spam in my opinion but there are people who love Spam. A cousin of mine used to serve fried Spam regularly.
@ 16 Komarov
”may antidote homeopathic medication”
That must mean it is water repellent.
body wipes
Spam Musubi is very close to being a national dish of Hawai’i.
komarov @#16
I knew this already. The things history teachers say to little kids at school. . . That was supposed to somehow prove that Nazis were utterly evil. Yet the way I see it, killing people is a much worse thing than making soap out of their body fat.
I don’t like modern burial and cremation industries, because they cause plenty of environmental pollution. I’d prefer it if people figured out some environmentally friendly way how to dispose of dead human bodies. Yet making soap out of human fat seems like a bad idea. The meat industry is already producing more lard and tallow than we know what to do with.
By the way, there used to be a pigment made from ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies, which was widely used by artists for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
I will. For me it seems fun to find out more about some of the weird things people do.
I well and truly edited my previous post to death, sorry.
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Re: jrkrideau (#19):
Now there’s a thought. Maybe washing one’s regular coat with this stuff can turn it into a decent raincoat that isn’t an ecological disaster.
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Re: Ieva Skrebele (#22):
For me the soap was yet another detail of horror I didn’t know about the holocaust, so that was rather unpleasant, to say the least. It’s a fractally awful period in history; no matter where you look there’s something horrid waiting to etch away the remnants of one’s faith in humanity.
With regards to burial and cremation, I agree completely. I can even approve of the pragmatic approach to the cemetary closure mentioned in the wiki entry. While not keen on death or my eventual disposal I figure the most sensible way would be to 1) remove all the useful bits, 2) make the rest available for medical training or research and, finally, 3) feed the leftovers to the vultures. Maximise use whilst minimising impact.
I didn’t know about the mummy pigment, by the way, so thanks for that. The oddest uses for mummies I recall (from some kid’s book on ancient Egypt in years too long past) were as firewood and wrapping paper for food. (Wikipedia at least rates this story as “inconclusive”)
komarov@#23:
For me the soap was yet another detail of horror I didn’t know about the holocaust, so that was rather unpleasant, to say the least. It’s a fractally awful period in history; no matter where you look there’s something horrid waiting to etch away the remnants of one’s faith in humanity.
Yes. And, amazingly, there are people who want to bring it back. I think they simply have no idea what they are asking for.
I’ve talked to a few “neos” and asked them “what are you trying to accomplish?” and they mostly seem to not understand that one cannot simply ask a targeted group to … “go away.” And so the killing starts. And then the killing starts on both sides. I mentioned to one “neo” – “You realize that you’re putting your family in the firing-line, too? Because some of your victims will use the same tactics against you as the vietcong did, and it will be very bad for everyone.”
@ 24 Marcus
And, amazingly, there are people who want to bring it back. I think they simply have no idea what they are asking for.
My suspicion is that these people do not know any actualhistory at all.
When you come right down to it, the Nazis were some of the biggest f**ups in centuries. They went from successfully capturing the German Gov’t in the late 1930’s to either committing suicide or being hung by the end of the 1940’s. And they managed to set the stage for the creation of Israel.
That is quite a career path. They are my heros!
Perhaps, for the next Nazi march, someone should pass out mock pistols, poison pills and miniature nooses.
I think we are missing the main point, though: Spam is not stupid, per se. It is just very, very cheap.
Given the per unit cost, if five people buy Montana Fire Pit Burners, the ad has been a success????
Komarov:. Odds are the Ray Ban spam is not from Ray Ban, but from counterfeiters thereof. They’re one of the most commonly counterfeited brands (of anything) and there are even sites purporting to sell them that simply steal the payment. Lump those emails with the penis pills: more scammers selling a lie, and in this case counting problems for a legit company. There are reasons to dislike Ray Ban, not least of which they’re overpriced several thousand percent like everything the great Luxotica eyewear monopoly sells, but they’re probably not spammng you.
bmiller, for a proper cost/benefit analysis you’d stil have to weigh that against the loss of potential customers who – like me above – simply come to despise your brand. To be fair, I have no idea how you would do such a calcuation.* Perhaps the negative impact is negligible. Marketing likes to claim that brand awareness is very important and that’s probably correct. However, what will most people think of when they read “Montana pit burners”? Is it “fantastic quality, I should get one”, or “ugh, spammer scum”?
Besides, online spam is extremely poorly targeted, which is an issue when you’re selling products that require shipping. Even if it’s cheap and occasionally effective, your spam routine is still wasting cash advertising stuff to the furthest corners of the globe, where purchasing your products would simply not be feasible. Spam is the online-equivalent of dropping flyers from a plane: Most will end up in the gutter (or wilderness), ignored, and a lot of people will get upset with you for having to clean up your rubbish. And all this is done in the vain hope that a couple might actually read your flyers and be interested.
*Maybe you could ask people how they feel about this, but since polling is often subject to manipulation by marketeers it’s not likely to yield anything useful.
Never mind spam, advertising in general tends to piss me off, because it always treats me like I’m a goddamn moron. Insulting me doesn’t make me want to buy your product! Why is this hard to understand?
LykeX: Sarah Palin, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert are elected by a majority of the voters in their districts.
Not everyone is all that smart . :(