Problem with Ebay

I sold my G1 phone on eBay because I need the cash right now. At start I saw the prices they offered for the listing. I selected to start the auction at $90 with $9 shipping. Only one person bid on the phone. So the phone went at $90 and $9 shipping. The money went to my paypal account. Instantly PayPal (owned by eBay) charged me $5 for the transaction. Two days go by and eBay charged me $8 on top of the $1 they originally stated. So now I am down $13 of the $99 received for the sell and the shipping. Now i have to pay $9 for the shipping.
Of the $99 I’m now down $22.
This makes my take on the sell of my cell phone $77. Along with the wait in line at the post office on my lunch break. Because well. I didn’t want to make the buyer wait 1 or 2 extra days while the post office gets around to picking up the package from my house and i didn’t want to shell out more money for the shipping labels provided by eBay. Because really. I just sold one item.
$22 dollars to make less than $100 and the advertisement ran for three days. Heck it took 5 days for the money to transfer from PayPal to my bank account, but just seconds to to transfer from my bank account to eBay to pay off the fees for the listing.

Considering the last time I ran an ad on eBay I got hassled by a scammer who kept sending me payment confirmation emails but no payment was ever transferred.. Really for eBay to be so unsafe, they sure do charge quite a bit of money for you to sell one item and use a max of about 200kb of storage and maybe the same in bandwidth.

 

So now I plug my own website. My alternative to eBay.

On My Front Lawn is my Garage sale site where I now sell everything i want to sell.

onmyfrontlawn.com

Internet Price changes, Fair? or Fare?

We all know that Comcast is going to increase their prices. They made that announcement the moment they found out they could not start charging website owners for the “traffic they bring them”.  and we all see the new filters Comcast has put into their  servers, the ones that direct us to their designated page, so we do not ” get the inconvenience of a 404 page”. To the common that say they are doing us a wonderful favor of removing  unattractive pages that display nothing for us. The wise know that the filter is there and could potentially be used for extortion. Meaning specific websites could be  shut off by a specific internet provider. Let’s say a large enough internet provider, one that has a  40% foot hold of all united states internet users. 40% of all users being filtered by one company, is bad bad bad bad. If 40% of the readers who view this site just suddenly stopped reading, I would really feel like I am being shut down and feel like I could potentially be done wrong.

I don’t know about you, but I pay my web provider to allow me to go to websites using their services. So they are already making money from me and many others, for just that. The internet providers making money off of the website owners for the traffic that hits said websites using said owners, purely is greed. That’s almost like building a toll road, keeping fees for usage of the toll-road active, meanwhile using tax money to maintain said toll roads. Oh, they do that in Houston. hmmm..

Well the truth is, internet usage and file  downloads have all been increased.  How? well not by using Comcast. but closer to you than that. Smart phones or App phones, all have constant running  apps that use internet at all hours of the day. Pretty much all phones that use android have a default of keeping you signed into Gmail 24/7. You have to pay the internet fee for this services if you do not have internet services already. Here’s the funny part (before you say .. oh ok. that’s a lot),  you pay  $35 a month for that internet service. You can’t really do anything with that service other than stay connected. It’s a tiny 3 inch screen. the actual file transfer is so tiny it’s just a tiny portion of what what it would be on your home pc. yet the cost is 80% of the pc internet fee. Sure Comcast wants in on that action and that kind of fee. So now they limit our monthly usage and want to charge us for overages. Well because the number of users have increased. sure they did, Comcast bought out other services. The world did not suddenly gain 60% more people who use internet. Just Comcast’s user count increased. The amount of servers and hubs have increased at the same time . Picture a janitorial company buying out all the other janitor services, and then increasing fees because demand is up… like they lost all of the mops and janitors they just hired or something. Same thing.

Meanwhile Comcast cranks up their bandwdith to outrageous speeds. Unthinkable speeds compared to five years ago. 5 years ago 2.5 mbps was hard to come by. Now internet speeds are commonly 25mbps. there is no way you will drop that kind of service, you will just try an not go over  your amount of consumable internet downloads. Well that’s just the way we all think. That’s kind of is dense. In reality you want faster so you can download more much easily, but are willing to download less to keep fees down for overages. They know how to market us.

I advise you do not fall for this stuff. If we all just drop capitalistic companies, these companies can not continue with what  they do. Net Neutrality, H.R.6123,  what ever you want to call it