Unverified vanity URLs and interest tracking catalyze fraud online
eligrey.com
eligrey.com
I believe the job-listing identifier was always unique because I eventually got an email from this recruiter which instead contained a bit.ly link, presumably because it rendered me unable to remove the tracking information. I did not click on that link. That was also the last email I received from that person, cementing the idea in my mind that he was "on to me" affecting their recruitment analytics.
Sometimes I think back on that time and smile, knowing that I caused some difficulty -- however small -- for someone working in business intelligence with my dumb anti-tracking antics. Admittedly, they did successfully track some of my behavior but they had to do it manually with a human thinking critically so I'll call it a win.
Anyway, the point of the story is that I didn't click the URL-shortened link because they're shady AF and often used for the specific purpose of hiding details about the URL. Tracking is a rather benign "abuse" of this but there are other practical concerns with malicious domains.
Well, although a rather harsh dictatorship, Libya was at the time one (bit.ly was registered in 2008) of the more stable and prosperous countries of the region, and had been normalizing its international relations for some time. That was just after he had been received in France, erecting his tent on the lawn of the state guesthouse next to the French presidential palace.
I don't think many people expected the dramatical events that occurred soon after.
But it's true, I personally think one should never use the TLD of a dictatorship or unstable country for obvious ethical reasons and for future-proofing a business.
Cool visualizations on your site, by the way.
That, or add “.info” at the end, e.g. goo.gl/FOOBAR.info
Many other URL shorteners copied Google and Bitly’s approach so adding “+” or “.info” at the end of short URLs usually reveals the hidden redirection without hitting the final website.
=> advertising is negatively affecting society.
Meaning, at cheaper prices to poorer people? Seems good.
The discrimination cuts both ways.
This seems like a contrived example. Wikipedia has a long list of examples of price discrimination, which mostly benefit poor people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Examples
Even if the item is "kept at the same price" and poor people get a "discount", the market will still determine which price produces maximum profit. In the long run, it will be more profitable to raise the rich man's price than it would have been if they had to raise a price that was paid by everyone. So in the long run they'll converge on a value which means that the rich pay more, not just that the poor pay less.
(And yes, this applies to coupons, sales, and other forms of price discrimination as well. If coupons were made illegal, and having the coupon actually helped the retailer in the first place, the non-coupon price would be too high for maximum profit and retailers would be forced by the market to lower prices.)
The value created by a sale, i.e., the difference between what something costs to produce and what someone is willing to pay for it, can be divided into producer surplus and consumer surplus, i.e., the benefit that accrues to the producer and the consumer, respectively, at a given price point.
Price discrimination is an attempt to convert consumer surplus into producer surplus by charging individuals a price closer to what they are willing to pay. The blue region gets bigger (producer profit increases) and the red region gets smaller.
Price discrimination requires market power in order to set prices higher than the equilibrium price (that is, it cannot happen if there is perfect competition). With market power but without price discrimination, producers maximize profit by charging a "monopoly price" higher than the competitive equilibrium price. So there will already be a wedge on the right hand side of the economic surplus region missing, as shown in this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss#/media/File:Ta... (the labels are for taxes, but the math is the same for monopoly pricing) [2]. Price discrimination may recapture some of that "deadweight loss" (selling to some consumers at cheaper prices than they would with a uniform monopoly price), but again producers will take more of it than they would in a competitive market, and they do not create any value that would not have existed in said competitive market (selling to any consumer at a price lower than the competitive equilibrium point is unprofitable by definition, so producers will do their best to avoid it).
Looked at in this way, it is easy to see that consumers end up worse off overall than they would in a competitive market with a uniform market price.
[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus#Consumer_surp...