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Sunday, May 03, 2020

Cold River: Some Amazon Sellers Are Paying $10,000 A Month To Trick Their Way To The Top

 I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.
— A. E. Housman, who died in 1936

Nordic noir, the parents …

 Remembering Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck Novels : The Booklist Reader

They actually were never husband and wife.


 Maj Sjöwall: ‘Nordic noir’ pioneer, author of the Martin Beck series, dies aged 84.


This Moment
Eavan Boland
A neighbourhood.
At dusk.
Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.
Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.
But not yet.
One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.
A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.


Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark


Turns out men give up on books they don’t like way more easily than women do - Literary Hub: “According to a recent study of ebook usage in the UK, conducted by the Audience Agency, men are likely to give up reading a book before page 50, while women more often make it to page 100 (at least). That said, almost nobody gets to the end of their books at all—according to the data, “only 5 percent of ebooks are finished by more than 75 percent of readers.” They found that the majority of books were finished by 25-50 percent of readers…” [Note – apparently I am an outlier specific to getting to the end of all the books I read – but I do not read ebooks, only print books – wonder if that makes a difference?]


BuzzFeedNews – An emerging black market offers Amazon sellers pricey ways to cheat the marketplace and mislead customers, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. “The most prominent black hat companies for US Amazon sellers offer ways to manipulate Amazon’s ranking system to promote products, protect accounts from disciplinary actions, and crush competitors. Sometimes, these black hat companies bribe corporate Amazon employees to leak information from the company’s wiki pages and business reports, which they then resell to marketplace sellers for steep prices. One black hat company charges as much as $10,000 a month to help Amazon sellers appear at the top of product search results. Other tactics to promote sellers’ products include removing negative reviews from product pages and exploiting technical loopholes on Amazon’s site to lift products’ overall sales rankings. These services make it harder for Amazon sellers who abide by the company’s terms of service to succeed in the marketplace, and sellers who rely on these tactics mislead customers and undermine trust in Amazon’s products…”



There will be an end, I once wrote to myself, on a postcard one afternoon with the sun on my nape, my feet up on a chair. But not just yet, I eventually added. I was in another country and the city has been incredibly kind to me, and I was teaching myself about my limits and my fears.
 
In parts of Czechoslovakia, the border strip became hundreds of meters wide, and an area of increasing restrictions was defined as the border was approached. Only people with the appropriate government permissions were allowed to get close to the border.[73]
Cold War Era Via Cold River

American crocodile underwater

Greg Lecoeur Discusses His Incredible Underwater Photography Career.


Swedish city to use chicken manure to deter crowds BBC 


Game of Thrones actor deadlifts 501kg to set world record

The former winner of the World's Strongest Man competition said "there's nothing better than proving people wrong" after achieving the feat.