Down here at the pawn shop

[sexobon]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Asked for the second time:

Why do we not use physical punishment (beating, infliction of pain) against prison inmates as part of their sentence? ... Also, I'm not asking if we should, or not...I'm asking why we don't.

This method of behavior modification, like many others, is mostly effective during the formative years. If it was as effective with adults, we might be using it instead of putting people in prison. Especially if it was more economical. The first time you asked, it seemed to be a rhetorical question.

[Griff]

Spanking Creates Aggressive Children, Study Shows

Naturally we can't look at the methodology or data without buying the journal. From my years in early childhood education, the idea smells right. The broken ghetto culture has no other option for asserting authority. They hit because they were hit. They lash out at the people around them because that was how they were taught to deal with problems. The folks that designed Head Start knew that and fight that fight but hitters breed faster than the learners. Now that Early Education is about academic achievement rather than socialization that tiny finger is gonna come out of the dike. Maybe someone has a better idea about instilling values. Jesus and Mohammed failed the inner city. The Irish had similar issues and mostly escaped through better economics but there was a general respect for learning in the culture... Good luck America!

[Undertoad]

to get back to this

did becoming successful make them stop hitting? Or was stopping hitting part of what made them successful?

They were successful for thousands of years

Becoming successful made them stop hitting.

To put it in terms of how the ghetto sees it, the ghetto needs to hit; because without being successful, the community faces a harsher and more desperate status overall. This leads to crime if the young are not raised with authority. The ghetto is aware of its challenge and hits with love because it has few other parenting skills.

But it doesn't work; in fact it has an opposite effect. The actual, productive parenting skills are never culturally shared and the ghetto remains the ghetto.

[Undertoad]

In my experience* and in my generation, whenever the topic of spanking comes up, the room is likely to go 50-50 when asked whether they themselves were spanked.

And what I notice is that you can't really tell whether they were spanked by their behavior, so much as their culture; and that is urban vs suburban vs rural, central Pennsylvania versus big city, fashionable or regular, that sort of thing; not whether they were smart or focused or even personally disciplined.

What all this information says is that spanking alone is not a critical component in determining success, and anyone can be spanked or not spanked and be successful or not successful. The belief that it works or doesn't work is entirely 100% personal, because it's written to your hard drive at an extremely young age. And we are not aware of what actually works, because it's not even in our parents' beans. They did what their parents did, because it, too, was written to their hard drive.

By the time we have the capacity for rational thought, we have already been successfully parented, in so many ways that it's hard to imagine. This leads to behavior that is so deep-seated it feels like instinct.








*this is what someone says when they want it to be clear that the following is unscientific blather and should not really be highly regarded

[Gravdigr]

The next time I punch somebody Ima tell 'em it's cuz I love them.

And, if it's me getting punched, I hope like hell I have the wherewithall to ask them if this means they love me.

[sexobon]

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I would start with some cheaper stuff on the Bay to see how it goes. It is truly all about the hassle.

And I'm taking your advice. I'm getting my feet wet with my first Auction on eBay.

Feel free to bid away, everyone. I'm hoping to get over $10 but will be content with $5 and happy with $7.

[Undertoad]

Looks good. It should fetch $11.50 - $12.

[Gravdigr]

It was stored in a box for those 4 months in a climate controlled, non-smoking, pet free environment.

You usually have to pay extra for that.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Looks good. It should fetch $11.50 - $12.

Not sure how I got so lucky, but it got $16.01 plus $2.32 shipping. There was a bidding war between two people who got carried away.

I wanted to see a visual representation of the auction, but all Ebay provides is a list of bids (and automatic bids) and times. So I took that information and dumped it into excel. Since I'm a novice there, I poked around until I figured out how to format the dates the way they wanted, then I set up a collum next to the dates that subtracted each bid time stamp from when the auction was listed. That gave me a bunch of day numbers with long decimals, and I didn't know how to graph that, so I found an online graph and pasted them into that.

It's kind of ugly, but here's a chart of the auction. The y axis is $ and the x axis is the number of days since the auction start. It was a 7 day auction.

[infinite monkey]

I can't believe glatt sold his dongle to the highest bidder.

What's a dongle?

[glatt]

And I only got $16 bucks for it. I'm low rent to boot.

A dongle syncs your fitbit device to your computer so you can see fancy charts and stuff. But you don't need one if you use your smart phone to look at those same charts.

[Undertoad]

Well done sir!

I think this can happen when your item is the only one ending soon and the item is a brisk but not huge seller. Although that's very hard to predict. If there were three of them ending at nearly the same time, there would be competition for the bidders.

For things like iPhones that sell in thousands per day, we set up three-day auctions, because all that action happens at the end of the auction anyway. A lower seller item, you want up for a week so people notice and Watch it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Nice job of graphing that, but way too much work for you. If you had to do it often it would be worth investing in the time to find one.

[glatt]

I don't mean to hijack the pawn shop thread, but I wanted to come back and post about how selling this blu-ray player went.

I listed it yesterday at $79, and got discouraged when I saw just how many decent blu-ray players were being offered for sale on eBay with free shipping for a fraction of my starting bid. How would anybody notice mine?

I checked back a few hours later and saw that about 20 people had looked at the item and 4 had even put it on their watch lists. But no bids.

Then a few hours after that I got a message from somebody asking if I would offer it as a Buy It Now. I still don't understand eBay completely, but I'm beginning to understand that they nickle and dime you to death. Offering something as Buy It Now costs extra, but I had a fish nibbling on my hook, so I decided to go back in to the listing and make that change. But the question was at what price? That one in the UK went for $320, and I wanted to get as much as I could, but I didn't want to be greedy and unrealistic. So I decided to go for $249 plus shipping.

The guy who had contacted me bought it at $249 plus shipping. I could second guess myself, but I'll never know if I could have gotten more. And since this cost $1000 brand new 5 years ago, one quarter of that seems pretty good, especially since it doesn't do 3D or streaming, or any of that new stuff these things do now. It's a nice player though.

The guy who bought it is of Indian decent and is aware of the brand. Lives in California, so he's paying $32 to get it shipped to him.