Should I shop online or offline? A shoppers’ guide.Written by Steve Hawker
I went shopping with my wife other day, to a British city centre nearby. My ordeal lasted ten hours.During many idle moments, I compiled this rough guide for shoppers who are unsure whether to shop online or offline in future. I decided that shoppers SHOULD shop offline, at a nearby shopping centre, if they: * Enjoy getting up early, to drive through slow-moving traffic and secure cheap parking places. * Aren’t too worried if their parked cars are scratched or bumped anonymously whilst they’re out shopping. * Thrive in British climate, and are impervious to rain, hail, snow, wind, heat, frost, fog etc. * Welcome walking from shop to shop, to find what they or their partner needs, at best prices. * Don’t panic when their partner says that s/he wants to try an eighth store for a ‘special something’. * Like driving and/or walking back to stores, if goods are faulty, or they forget something. * View carrying of heavy plastic bags, which slice into their hands, as a form of exercise. * See avoiding pickpockets, thieves and robbers as a bit of ‘sport’ too. * Tolerate sinister young men with a taste for lager, lurking in boisterous groups on street corners. * Humour young parents with 4x4 buggies and/or unruly, unrestrained toddlers that scream loudly. * Think retired people should go shopping at weekends, at same time as people who work. * Believe wide friends have right to amble slowly side-by-side, in ways that block pavements and passageways.
| | Why Using an Ad Blocker Can be a Bad IdeaWritten by Joe Duchesne
Ad Blocking is getting to be a common sport on internet. Now there are some legitimate uses for an ad blocker. Some ad companies resort to downright harassment when serving their ads using annoying pop ups, flying ads, floating ads and like. Blocking these types of ads are not a problem. Using an ad blocker though to block all ads on a site including text ads, banner ads, etc is wrong and here's why.Free Information makes Internet Valuable. Do you like getting free news from major news sources? How about latest weather for free? Do you like being able to use a search engine to find information on a topic that interests you? How do you think companies that run these services can afford to give this information away for free? It's because they charge advertisers who display advertisements on pages where this free information is found. How useful would Internet be if it was Ad Free? Without ads, there would be much less commercial business transacted online. Would it eliminate it completely? No. But there would be much less of it. Now, some people think that would be a good thing but stop to think about it. If you take away all free news sources like CNN, NY Times, and all major news sources, then take away all Travel sites, then cut number of free information websites on almost any topic by 95% and what kind of internet are we left with?
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