BTW, Cyber Monday is Bogus

Unless it is a marketing (the art of manipulating people for your own purposes) success. When the Cyber Monday hype started, it was exactly that: hype. No basis in fact. Created in the early days of eCommerce, by marketing droids, as a means of extending (and cashing in on) Black Friday.

Total lie, at the start. So, to whatever extent it has become a Real Thing is a measure of the extent to which people have been manipulated.

Now it gets worse, as the US has managed to export Black Friday as well. What was once a day that many retailers went into black ink (profitable) on the busiest shopping day of the year (day after Thanksgiving, for non-US readers) has now been exported to other countries, which do not share that holiday. Canada. The UK, where there were problems with displays being ripped up in frenzied shopping.

This is the triumph of the marketing droids, and yet another thing that I dearly wish that the US had failed to export. It's right up there with Walmart and fast food. I would include universal surveillance, but the UK has arguably been in the lead on that since the founding of the royal mail, and they still loves them some surveillance cameras.

I mention this because I posted Just Buy Spam Nation earlier today, after first mentioning it back in July, and I do not routinely recommend things. No, this is not some sort of Cyber Monday marketing campaign. These days, cynics are possibly more justified than at any time since Ambrose Bierce penned The Devil's Dictionary in 1906. In this case -- no. But his definition is still worth reading.

CYNIC, n.

A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.