It was cold this morning — by local standards — and there was a fresh coat of snow on our nearby mountains.
Because I have recently been looking and reading about replacements for our aging whole house heater, the Internet of course "remembers" that. And so, I get served up an extensive and varied selection of ads and links for all things relating to heating your house in winter.
Fine.
The thing that always amazes me is how much sketchy stuff is on the market.
Lately, I've been spotting more and more of these relatively elaborate video ads that tend to come up at this time of the year. They typically have somebody going on for three or four minutes about somebody "being a former aerospace engineer at NASA (or rocket scientist, or jet engine technician) and now they're changing the heating industry by inventing some system that reverse engineers how a jet engine works and it's being offered in the form of a revolutionary personal heater that is making the conventional HVAC industry shake in their shoes."
Being a curious sort of human, I typically scratch my head and try to suss out the "gimmick." And so, if you sit all the way through the video, you eventually get to the point where there's some website and a "special introductory offer," and you can buy their little room heater for $59.95 or $39.95 or whatever.
Not that space heaters are a new invention, or anything. But they do tend to be energy hogs, so I'm always hopeful of finding a model that works is and more economical.
So I do pretty much I would expect any reasonable person to do: I try to extract the actual brand name (because I don't want to waste my time with a "scam from China") and I go out and see what I can find in terms of reviews from people who actually have and use these things. Because, surely, somebody must have bought one and determined whether it's either genius or a complete piece of shit.
History favors the latter...
As I hinted at, it almost always turns out that these things are pieces of shit. And everybody — except a contrarian handful of shills — gives them one star reviews and the warning "don't buy this product!"
But What Are They THINKING?
But that's not really the thing I'm reflecting on today. Instead I'm thinking about who it is, exactly, that has a mindset to come up with a plan to "Let's just produce some completely bogus product and price it at $50 and sell it to people based on outlandish promises and knowing full well that it does nothing!"
I mean, what is the underlying mindset of somebody who essentially goes about trying to produce and purvey absolutely nothing on a large scale?
Yeah, I know, cheats and scammers are everywhere. But that's not my deeper point.
These people are going to a lot of trouble, and there's clearly manufacturing involved here, so if you're doing all that... why not just make something that actually works?
It's one thing to pick up dog turds in a neighborhood ditch and market them as "ancient fossils" because your cost/risk exposure is near zero... but this?
Are here's what's even more baffling: There's actually a $10 knock-off on TEMU, virtually identical to the $50 original that doesn't work, in the first place...
Things that make you go... "hmmmmm..."
Because I don't like to be snowed by bullshit, I dug a little deeper and discovered that the quagmire of nonsense can be tracked back to the Chinese company that makes these and sells them "unbranded" for about $6.00 each if you buy a certain number of them, and you can even get your own "brand" added if you buy 200...
What's really being sold here is the bullshit story carefully spread out as a smoke screen before a piece of "Cheap Junk From China." In the manufacturer's defense, this "small personal space heater" doesn't make any of the claims the bogus reseller ads make.
At the end of it all — and a couple of hours wasted on meaningless research — I just ended pondering the fact that sometimes it seems like more and more of humanity has just gotten stupid. The claims become more outrageous every year, and people become more gullible every year.
So much for critical thinking, eh?
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2023-11-19 16:15 PDT
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