I'm concerned that names and addresses alone seem to be enough for these guys to do meaningful ID theft with. The phone book is full of names and addresses anyone can get their hands on easily. Even these guys in India - there's whitepages.com. Not sure why they're going to all the trouble of trying to game Amazon's customer support.
On that note, I order alot from Amazon and throw out their boxes in the trash outside all the time. Sometimes I notice that neighbors (presumably) take those boxes for their own use before trash pickup comes along. All of them have my name and mailing address on them...
We suspected this was going on when we looked at the analytics for our ecommerce sites recently and noticed a big shift away from tablets towards mobile (Google breaks them out separately). Large phones would of course fall under the latter category.
Things tend to go faster with cash buyers. In particular, no risk the bank will decline them for a mortgage. I suppose there's less difference if they're preapproved.
Even preapprovals can fall through as the bank can decline to fund when they see the home in question or the valuation comes in lower than the sale price.
In a hot market cash is king as it removes 2 of 3 most common contingencies people have. For the seller this is two less weeks where things can fall through.
Those of us who were investors in bank stocks back in 2008 saw alot of large insider buys, including multi-million ones, from CEOs and top execs looking to reassure investors.
In most cases it simply didn't work. Fundamentals rule sooner or later, not optics. I was in the no-longer extant Wachovia for instance, where the CEO bought around $1m of stock. It was bought out for a song a few months later after it crashed.
One of my favorite texts back in my college days was The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. USA folks may not be familiar with this. It was actually more of a polished transcript of his TV series, which had aired in the UK and some other countries (including Malta, where it was required reading for getting into college in fact). Leo Szilard is a familiar name from that text - he certainly gets plenty of airtime in there.
The Ascent of Man series was shown in the US on public television and I was a huge fan. I had forgotten that Szilard was featured in it. I'd really like to go back and re-watch that series.
On that note, Europe has more than one waiting room these days. Malta and parts of Italy seem to be fulfilling a similar role for illegal migrants coming north from Africa, for example.
Again this is not black and white. There are plenty of non-VC funded companies that scaled quickly and had enough of an impact that you could say they "changed the world" to some extent. There are plenty of VC-funded companies that went nowhere and changed nothing except the returns of their VC funds (for the worse).
It was always kind of a ha-ha-only-serious joke. I'm amazed to read some people here take the "wars" seriously enough to make it an argument to not use either. Like some weird cultural misunderstanding. Hipster kids these days...
>>Authorities in Rome now hope to reconstruct the imposing, 17-metre-wide, 15-metre-long marble arch, in a project that would cost at least €1 million (£718,000).
Given the size of this thing, this sounds wildly optimistic.
On that note, I order alot from Amazon and throw out their boxes in the trash outside all the time. Sometimes I notice that neighbors (presumably) take those boxes for their own use before trash pickup comes along. All of them have my name and mailing address on them...