My wife runs an estate sale company, helping families dispose of property. Sometimes the family wants her to give something away. She hates that. It’s way more work for her than selling it for even $1.
She says, “There’s no one more entitled than someone you’re giving something to for free.”
People responding to an ad for a free item will ask her to deliver it, load it, store it, repair it, and warranty it.
My theory is that folks who seek something out because it’s free tend to have more time than money. And that means they don’t value time very much.
I believe Daniel Kahneman did a cognitive science study that pointed out similar concepts related to a day care that used to stay with kids after hours for free, then charged parents a fee for staying late, then removed the fee.[1]
The core takeaway is that there is a stark difference in how people treat a social obligation versus a pay-transaction, and even attempting to switch back to the prior relationship doesn’t necessarily work.
My experience is that friends and family frequently give things / items / services to the ones they love and feel social obligations / responsibilities to. I think Open Source Abusive Freeloaders think they are in this category with Open Source Maintainers, but Open Source is a strange hybrid of social obligation to people we have no friend/family/community relationship with, so some people are completely missing the expected behavior standards.
Also interesting, I saw a high profile tech journalist Dave Winder) have a mini meltdown venting about a very similar abuse of his time by strangers on LinkedIn recently.
Sorry but the linked article shows the exact opposite phenomenon: when parents had to pay a late-arrival fee, the number of late parents noticeably increased.
In open source the free-loaders are the entitled ones, expecting maintainers to move mountains to accomodate them.
In fact, I am led to believe that they superficially look the same, but are very different phenomenons with very different results. I feel that the open source maintainer burnout is not driven by price, but by sheer scale of reaching so many "customers" worldwide of any type, which includes nasty people. If 1% of people are narcissists, and your modest library on GitHub is used by 100,000 people, you'll have to deal with 1,000 potential entitled idiots, which is very stressful for a non-paid volunteer job. I bet that if your library was sold for a nominal price, as your link shows, you'd get even more entitled users. The fact is that not many paid products reach as many users as any average open source project. Most of the world is much poorer than the Western countries, and their only choice often is open source.
This is also my observation. The cheaper I sell stuff on the local version of craigslist, the lower the quality of the buyers. No shows, non responsive to messages, whatever. I gave up on putting up stuff for free.
The reason I put it up for free is that I value not having the item more than having it, so much more that I don't care about the 10 or maybe 100 euro that I could theoretically get for it. The idea is putting it up for free will let me quickly get rid of it, and instead of throwing something useful away, maybe someone will be happy with it. In practice this rarely works, I now much better understand why some people with limited time just toss out whatever they don't need. Getting it into someone else's hands is just too much work. The environmental impact is horrible though
Another insight: whenever i donate my time fro free (volunteer work), my time is not valued at all. We start with a 30min coffee break with strangers I have no real interest in. Then a speech thanking so and so, and then someone starts preparing and finally after over an hour I can start contributing with whatever is the cause I want to help with. What a waste...
If I charged my normal rate everyone would be prepared and make sure they make the most effective use of my hours.
So this is such a paradox: people under value what is free, so giving something for free is not appreciated enough for me to do it.
Final observation: I run a repair-cafe, and a very significant portion of appliances people come by with are cheap, ireppairable junk (often nespresso and senseo coffee machines, but also toasters etc). Im am suspecting that the people that buy more expensive coffee machines (the ones that are serviceable) are less inclined to actually take the time to repair it and just discard and buy new
> I run a repair-cafe, and a very significant portion of appliances people come by with are cheap, ireppairable junk (often nespresso and senseo coffee machines, but also toasters etc). Im am suspecting that the people that buy more expensive coffee machines (the ones that are serviceable) are less inclined to actually take the time to repair it and just discard and buy new
Or the machines that are serviceable already have professionnal services that owner can reach and they will provide both repair and parts. The repair café is a last chance before junkyard.
That may aso be a factor, but in general machines under 500 euro cannot be repaired economically as it easily costs 100-200 before the manufacturer even has a look. And this usually results in replacing a subassembly like the entire PCB at a very inflated price of say 200. I wouldn't be surprised if the economical-to-repair threshold is well over 1000 for a lot of product categories. Third party professional repairers are all but extinct. Only for certain specific product categories (e.g. washing machines) you still have them. But as most washing machines cost around 500 euro, and are expected to last only 5 years, I would think the number of repairers are declining (why repair a 3 year old 400 euro machine for 250, for at most another 2 years of utility if a new one can be had for 400?).
I would love to know if there are professional shops where one can get e.g. a capacitor on a PCB replaced, but as far as I am aware all these kinds of repairs are done by amateurs in garages like myself.
The other day someone even gave me a broken 750 euro Jura coffee machine. The owner was not interested in getting it back, they had happily switched to nespresso. Still haven't figured out why the pcb will not power on the heater though
Or maybe they last longer, on account of not being junk, to the point that when they finally break they are so outdated the people decide to upgrade instead of repairing.
IME, listing stuff for free gets a lot of people who are cognitively impaired, such as by drugs or some mental illness.
There may also be "choosing beggars", but they seem to be in the minority, and I'm not sure they're distinct from the more general group above.
It also gets flippers (people who grab/buy things to immediately resell them), who are not at all impaired, but some of them are trying to maximize their profit. So if some of them impose, flake, deceive, etc., I get the impression that's all intentional, to make someone else bear their cost of their optimization.
Ways I've found to avoid these people: (1) post to a free-stuff list of a nearby university, where it generally reaches penny-pinching students; (2) post on a public list, like CraigsList, but with an ostensibly nonzero price, then tell the person it's free; (3) put it on the curb with a FREE sign.
There is an old joke. How do you get rid of a bunch of old junk that nobody wants? Most people would suggest to put it in front of your house with a sign that says: "Free". You will notice that almost no one takes anything. The solution? Change the sign to say: "Any item is X dollars". Then, people will quickly steal everything!
You should never accept the caller id of a phone number that called you as identity verification. It is trivial for anyone with a VoIP line to set caller id to whatever they wish.
This makes sense why American Express automated prompt keeps telling me that "I can see the number you are calling from matches the number on your record" (or something like that). My first thought was how trivial it is to spoof the system. Apparently, they are more clever than I am.
In an unrelated incident, I was talking to T-Mobile when the phone got cut off. They called me back (which was amazing customer service) until the first thing he said was he needed to authenticate I was me. So I was supposed to give him the last four digits of my social. I tried to reason with him why it was a bad idea but ended up thanking him and telling him that I'd call in at a later time.
Company the size of AT&T working in highly regulated areas, everything's a subsidiary for various accounting and legal reasons.
AT&T Mobile and AT&T UVerse are two different companies. They probably have different operating entities for different states, even. But they roll everything up into a single brand for ease of sales and marketing.
True, though it's interesting that you can purchase UVerse at an AT&T Mobility store. (I have a friend who's an AT&T store manager) While it has the appearance of being one company, I guess it's the rough equivalent of an "affiliate" sale.
We think it would be neat to do this sort of thing with existing numbers, too. That's why we released Ameche a couple of months ago. http://voxeolabs.com/ameche/overview/
Built by the same folks as Tropo was, so the couple hundred thousand Tropo developers will find the Ameche API familiar.
As it gains carrier support, you'll be able to do all this with your existing mobile number.
AT&T does have some APIs for interacting with MMS. Those have actually been around for several months. The MMS API they offer at https://developer.att.com/developer/basicTemplate.jsp?passed... is restricted to working with AT&T mobile numbers only, though.
Applications developed on the Call Management APIs do not require approval by AT&T. The APIs offered by AT&T that require approval tend to be those that interact with subscriber devices. If you can take over a mobile handset with it or grab someone's private info, AT&T wants to approve your code.
Not exactly. Instead of white labeling our APIs in our cloud, AT&T is running their own APIs in their own network, just like our previous announcement with Deutsche Telekom in Germany. We (Voxeo Labs) provided the technology to them, and licensed the APIs.
The only protection a hotel operator gets here is protection of their business model. Governments should not generally be in the business of favoring one business model over another, or of passing laws that protect models from the march of time. See also: Uber, copyright extension act.
Tropo has Australian numbers. And 40 other countries. Has for years. http://tropo.com (disclosure, I'm the product manager).
But really, if all you're doing is dialing out, then you don't actually need a local number. Just use whatever service you want (us, Twilio, Plivo, someone else, etc) and set the caller ID to a local number or make the call as a blocked caller ID.
WebRTC is a w3c standard - it's part of HTML 5 - so getting browsers to support it isn't going to be as big of a problem as you suspect.
Browsers today (even with HTML5) are mainly consumers of media. There's great ways to get audio and video to a browser, but no capabilities for getting access to a user's microphone and camera and no way of sending media from a browser to elsewhere. WebRTC fixes that.
A phone call has two halves, there's the signaling (where does this call go to, is it still active, did the other party hang up, etc) and the audio (the "media" in telecom parlance). What Phono is doing in this demo is connecting the media and the signaling from an early WebRTC implementation to the public phone network. Using the audio capture from the browser and letting you make and receive real phone calls with it.
She says, “There’s no one more entitled than someone you’re giving something to for free.”
People responding to an ad for a free item will ask her to deliver it, load it, store it, repair it, and warranty it.
My theory is that folks who seek something out because it’s free tend to have more time than money. And that means they don’t value time very much.