Something a little amusing for your Sunday morning…
So we have this generous donation from one of our readers and we can’t spend it. I’m not sure if I should blame PayPal or the vendors. However, I do know that Auto Zone has really cocked things up over the past 24 hours. Advance Auto offers me a website that freezes up on the final checkout step of committing the order.
So we see that we are still not really in the Networking Age because if I can’t spend money. I’m guessing these large national companies are preventing thousands of others from doing the same thing. It’s a part of the background noise in economics that we call “transactional friction.” I don’t know where I learned that term, but it has to do with a measure of economic inefficiency that hurts the larger economy. The money can’t flow because the pathway has lots of blocks, bottlenecks, and so forth strictly on the matter of passing the money.
So we will probably have to wait for Monday just to get find out what the problem is, which means the car sits out in the driveway minus an alternator until I can persuade real humans to do a better job on their websites and actually taking the money. What a crazy world! You can’t even get people to take money.
I made a profile on that Icelandic site and then lost it. Whats the name of the site with your virtual church on it?
You told me you would be out of the loop for awhile, so I wasn’t able to let you know that I decided that Seen.is was a failed experiment. It was too much like Facebook in the sense of mindless chatter and wasted time on things people kept shoving into my face, as it were. I suppose I would say Seen is mostly the same users as Facebook but with different software. I seem to recall saying it was just an experiment, so I hope I didn’t give the impression we were committed to using that service. It didn’t serve our needs.