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Well, your post pretty much embodies everything that is wrong with the world these days. "Cost of doing business"? ROTFL, I'm just a dude selling a handful of

Well, your post pretty much embodies everything that is wrong with the world these days. "Cost of doing business"? ROTFL, I'm just a dude selling a handful of trinkets and baubles on eBay, once in a blue moon. Your argument is like one of those math "proofs" that make sense internally, but are stemming from axioms utterly divorced from reality. You could "demonstrate" anything that way. You could even "demonstrate" how PayPal is "right" to keep my money for no good reason, or how Sony is "right" to have me waive my rights to sue them if I use their product. When they do it, it's called "EULA" and "cost of doing business" or some other kind of standard boilerplate bullshit like that. But let me try the same tactics on their skin. Then it's called "theft" or "piracy" and I go to jail. And what's the difference? They own immense quantities of cash, out of which they can afford to pay armies of lawyers and lobbyists, effectively superseding the law. I don't have that much cash, so I must dance to whatever tune they like to play. All they have to do is couch this behavior in intricate pseudo-rational arguments like yours, or lofty but flawed rhetoric like you see all the time on TV, and "all is well" with the world. This is bullshit. It needs to stop.

muraiki 15y ago
Start your own competing service then. Seriously. Then you'll understand why things are the way anigbrowl explains. The one "divorced from reality" is you. There is significant cost associated with PayPal's operation. Their management of all this risk is what earns them their profits. PayPal provides a service and you are getting benefits from it at a relatively low cost. They are taking risk on from you selling stuff that is making them very little money (trinkets and baubles, as you described). I'm not saying PayPal are a bunch of saints, or that they don't have some policies which aren't right. As a musician, I find the situation described in the article to be abhorrent, and it's behavior like this that prevents me from using PayPal except as a last resort. But what you are saying basically boils down a temper tantrum about how things should be different. Well, if you have an idea as to how to do this in a way that doesn't bankrupt you, there's your entrepreneurial opportunity. Go change the world.
anigbrowl 15y ago
You make money from the sales, right? And the amount of money depends on your claims that the trinkets and baubles have some residual value (as opposed to being merely pretty junk sold for flea-market prices)? Then you are doing some business, even if it is only part-time business. They're not superseding the law at all. You have no automatic legal right to enter a private marketplace; if you want eBay/Paypal's low fees, you accept their conditions. If you want the full-service luxury treatment of an established auctioneer like Sotheby's, then you pay their huge fees. If you want the no-questions-asked simplicity of a flea market, then you rent a table and stand in the cold for hours.

muraiki 15y ago

Start your own competing service then. Seriously. Then you'll understand why things are the way anigbrowl explains. The one "divorced from reality" is you. There is significant cost associated with PayPal's operation. Their management of all this risk is what earns them their profits. PayPal provides a service and you are getting benefits from it at a relatively low cost. They are taking risk on from you selling stuff that is making them very little money (trinkets and baubles, as you described). I'm not saying PayPal are a bunch of saints, or that they don't have some policies which aren't right. As a musician, I find the situation described in the article to be abhorrent, and it's behavior like this that prevents me from using PayPal except as a last resort. But what you are saying basically boils down a temper tantrum about how things should be different. Well, if you have an idea as to how to do this in a way that doesn't bankrupt you, there's your entrepreneurial opportunity. Go change the world.

anigbrowl 15y ago

You make money from the sales, right? And the amount of money depends on your claims that the trinkets and baubles have some residual value (as opposed to being merely pretty junk sold for flea-market prices)? Then you are doing some business, even if it is only part-time business. They're not superseding the law at all. You have no automatic legal right to enter a private marketplace; if you want eBay/Paypal's low fees, you accept their conditions. If you want the full-service luxury treatment of an established auctioneer like Sotheby's, then you pay their huge fees. If you want the no-questions-asked simplicity of a flea market, then you rent a table and stand in the cold for hours.