There’s this damned TV commercial I’ve been seeing in the mornings for this stupid round thing I won’t name. Aside from the product itself being pure Sucker Bait (as in Never Give A Sucker An Even Break), they go further in their contempt by stating the instructional DVD needed to use the product is FREE — if you pay for shipping & handling.
So you wind up paying shipping and handling for the crap Sucker Bait and then really show them what a moron who doesn’t deserve money you really are by paying even more for a damned DVD that should be included in the original price!
And now this:
At a book reading in 2005, media “guru” Cory Doctorow said: “I don’t mind being a whore, I just don’t want to be a cheap whore.” And cheap he isn’t – it’ll cost you $25,000 (£15,800) to get him to speak at your conference (according to his booker, the fee is only $10,000 to $20,000 if it’s a “college-oriented talk”).
Fair enough, you may say – after all, Sarah Palin charges $100,000 for appearances. But what does Doctorow speak about? Well, ironically, he’s a proponent of giving away content for free as a business model – and for years he’s been telling the music industry to adapt to it. Am I the only one to see the irony in this?
As Barnum famously said:
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