You may have heard of the "sales funnel," well, let me introduce you to the "sales loop..."

Why would that be a crime? Advertising your weird-ass failed scifi author founded cult isn't illegal.

There are plenty of other crimes scientologists have committed that they're not being protected for (like, where is the head of the church's wife? Hasn't been seen in like 15 years). This isn't one of them.

...you know...

They’re not going to pay extra multiple times to multiple companies because they made a single sale.

The premise is that the package is ads that resulted in a conversion are paid higher. It's not an individual ad that creates a conversion is singularly billed higher. It's an ad package where a conversion happened, therefore a higher price for that entire package.

The Tankies They Don't Want You To Know About

My partner found the wedding bands they wanted to buy. They're metal bands in the design of para cord as I was in the military at the time and their father is a retired Lieutenant-colonel. The two of them together was like $150 and we got them off Etsy.

For nearly a month after I bought them for us, my phone was giving me ads for wedding rings. Like... Bro, we got them already. We don't need more.

But you can't know a conversion happened due to a specific ad package unless the customer interacts with an ad from that package.

And platforms can definitely give you detailed enough metrics to know how many conversions happened due to customers interacted with your ads. It's part of what tracking cookies are for.

Similarly:

We've been tracking you for decades now. We know your location at all times. We know about the humidifier you bought. We know you do everything in English, but we also know you're trying to learn Spanish. We know who your family members are based on your interactions with them, and we have vast databases on them too. We know about the plane ticket to Turkey. We know about the new bathing suit you bought. We know about the English language guidebook you bought for Turkey.

We know you're now in Turkey on your vacation.

Here's an ad in Turkish for a humidifier sold in a Turkish store.

You go to a different country, and despite the massive privacy invasions, and the terabytes of data they have about every aspect of your lives, they think you speak the local language and show you ads you can't even understand for products you'd never buy while there on a vacation.

And platforms can definitely give you detailed enough metrics to know how many conversions happened due to customers interacted with your ads

Yes that you got a sale and they proved it is why you had to pay more. Every ad doesn't cause a conversion. But the more ads show can cause more conversions.

It's not just Amazon.

Use Hanlon's razor.

Voting with your wallet does indeed go a lot further.

There is also something like a 14 day return policy so sellers have to buy the ads to prevent other sellers from making a better offer during that time.

At least 22 people were reminded of scientology. Money well spent.

That's free markets. Capitalism is something else. Look it up.

Heh. *The printers with refillable ink tanks.

Came here to post this, love this video!

I hate to be so American, but what is that in 3 month-old elephant seal pups?

I did actually google it and was on the fence on whether or not it was real after seeing some real products

Selling ads to people wanting to make money is like selling picks and shovels to people heading to the gold rush. Those selling shovels don't even really care if their buyer finds gold (despite any apparent enthusiasm), they don't even care if they'll even need or want the shovel after figuring out most gold in this rush is found panhandling rather than by digging or that the amount of digging you'd have to do to find a decent amount of gold is more than what a shovel can handle (actually they might use that to sell you a shovel subscription).

They only care that your desire for money has brought you to them, where you can make them money whether you do or not.

With some products, that's entirely intentional. The goal is to convince you to keep thinking it was a good idea so you say you like your car in consumer satisfaction surveys that work as better sales drivers since people tend to do a degree of research on them, and to keep people from trying to return the product or make complaints.

But that's typically things like "cars", and they target you very precisely because they know exactly who you are, having just sold you a car.
The humidifier is that they see you bought a "home air treatment device - consumer grade - basic", which puts points in you being in the category of people who want to improve their home air quality. And you know what the most common purchase by that category of people is? Humidifiers!
As big and horrifying as the models are, they can't track everything and rely on putting people into consumer groups, and labeling products by relevance to groups and then tracking them that way.
So even though you're probably in the group because you just bought the thing that most people buy to put them in the group, it's still statistically the thing someone in the group is most likely to buy.

All that to say, it's a fucking sham and you get 95% of the results by matching ads to products instead of people, and it costs a fraction to do it that way.

Round here we tend to buy dehumidifiers. Why would someone intentionally increase the humidity in their home? That way lies mo[u]ld

Too dry and your skin gets all dry and cracky, and every lightswitch or piece of metal furniture shocks you when you touch it

I live in Colorado, quite dry, and occasionally wake up with nose bleeds if I don't use my humidifier at night

I think all the ones that don't just use heat to evapourate water follow this general strategy: do something that gets water droplets suspended in air, then blow that air out of the unit to let it evapourate in the drier air.

It's why the mist from a humidifier feels cool: it is still in the liquid state, those droplets stick to your hand, but also evaporate, taking heat from your hand or whatever body part you like shoving into the mist. No judgement.

If it was already in a gaseous state, it would condense on your hand and feel hot like the steam that tries to punish you for pouring your pasta into a strainer while holding it. Well, maybe not that hot, but it would be giving your body part heat as it condensed from the saturated air, which probably immediately evapourates again, taking that heat with it, but it would either be a net warming or neutral result instead of cooling.

I've had good luck with Thriftbooks the last few years. I accidentally bought a dust jacket on ebay once and I'm too embarrassed to return.

The technology connections video I linked shows how ultrasonic, steam and evaporative humidifiers work, I was just wondering what "the fancy German one with the wheels" is, because I'm not even sure what it's supposed to look like.

Not sure, but I can tell you it is exactly 226 SMUs. This is - as you're already well aware - standard mcunits. 1 SMU is one standard mcdonalds cheeseburger, 300 Cal or 348 Wh.

Almost as good as when I went to Home Depot and the next day I got an email asking me to rate my experience during my recent visit. That creeped me out so much I removed the app from my phone and forced logout on all devices. I have not been back since. And no, I did not pay using a Home Depot card and I am not part of any rewards program with them. Just eeew. If you advertise to me, I will ignore your product and buy something else. If there is not an alternative, then I will either plug my nose and buy it assuming that it is a need, otherwise I go without.

Yeah, I'm curious, too.

I was able to find information on a wheel-based dehumidifier that uses things like silica gel to absorb water from the air and then heats it to dry it (with the wheel rotating between an open section it pulls water out of and a closed section it stores the water in). This can also act as a humidity buffer if it has a mechanism to switch between which side is open.

For pure humidifier, best guess is that it uses a wheel mechanism to increase the surface area of water so more evapourates naturally. Basically you have a drum rotating just fast enough that it dries completely by the time it goes under water again. This would function as a simple AC, too, at least until the air is saturated. Though I do find that it's in winter that I want more humidity and summer where I want less, so that wouldn't help me lol.

But I wasn't able to find clear information about if this is what OP was referring to, so that's just speculation.

Exactly the one that came to mind, love this one

The number of penetrable orifices, extremities with clasping capability reduces the number of useful partners to 3 to 5. Some people are more adventurous. This number appears to work for both men and women and LGBTQ-ist equally unless you count the possibility of taking turns or having various groups and clans in the same household. I mean, one could probably afford a house like that. We would be happier. Kids would get more attention and the population would reduce to a sustainable level. All good things!

Stateside, though oddly enough been looking into some central/eastern European and Russian authors of late, like Krasznahorkai (Mostly because of the recent Nobel), Solzhenitsyn (Not because of his Nobel though it didn't hurt), and Čapek

A very annoying feature of that company. Always trying to sell you what you just bought, sometimes at a lower price its like theyre saying HA HA you got screwed

For a lot of people, humidifiers only get brought out when theyre sick, so the hot wet air soothes their lungs and they cough less...

Then there was my grandmother. She had both in her music room, to protect her piano and custom built harpsichord. They were set to keep the humidity in a fairly narrow range to keep her from needing to retune.

The dehumidifier was mounted on the wall, with a hose running into the tank for the humidifier below it, so it kept it topped up with the h2o pulled from the air on rainy days, with another hose running out of that tank at about the 1 gallon mark, that fed through a hole in the floor to the basement sink, to dispose of excess water. Both were wired up to an old school analogue hygrometer, with a control circuit powering each unit when it fell outside of its respective range.

That's some hardcore humidity control!

You can never be too humid.

They should push you to buy a dehumidifier. Then you can put them on opposite sides of the room for humidity wars.

My hypothesis is that they sell that you searched for a humidifier (more or less) and they don't update it with you having bought one. Probably because it's difficult for the folks buying the ads to deduce if it actually results in a sale. They're likely only seeing impressions and clicks. And the folks selling the ad space don't care, because why would they? An ad is an ad. They aren't really incenticized to.

Yeah but you're a fish, you should stay in your tank.

The targeted advertising bubble cannot pop soon enough.

that's a crime against humidity

You want one? Why not a bunch! Buy buy buy! /s

Who can say? I've certainly never experienced such a thing... 🤷

as an amphibian this has been extremely useful advice

half a year? good god is this what other peoples' lives are like?
I expect the appliances i buy to last like 2 years, and that's for stuff like a 10€ coffee brewer!

the problem is that you're assuming rationality and competence, which in many many many cases just isn't there.
Especially with smaller companies it's incredibly common for the decision-makers to simply be dumb and make terrible decisions on a daily basis, like how mom&pop stores will prioritize the 4 people who show up in a car over the 20 people who want to bike to the store.

what, you mean you've never used the "share on facebook" button on pornhub?

i mean, i derive some pride from having bought things, but that's because i literally spend a month researching before i buy anything above 20€ and i enjoy the fact that i didn't end up with a pile of garbage.

If i do end up with garbage i bang my head against the table a couple times and spend 3 months researching the next time..