Ep. 1422: Where we quit the pick-up tip
Ep. 1422: Where we quit the pick-up tip
37:58

Ep. 1422: Where we quit the pick-up tip

Culture
-Hey, what's up everyone? It's Friday, February 7th, 2014. Guess what you've done the right thing with your life, you've made good decisions. You've tuned in to the 404 Show. I'm Jeff Bakalar. -I'm Justin Yu. -I'm Ariel Nuñez. -We don't appreciate or compliment people enough. The fact that they like decided to listen to us. -Oh, I thought you were talking about ourselves. -No, no, no, screw us. I'm talking about them. They're the only ones that really matter in this big bad world of ours. They made the right decision. They were like, you know, I'm gonna watch this show. I see value-- -Not only that but they also participate in the show. -Yes. -I think it's super awesome. -Yes. -Not that we've ignored them recently 'cause we've been reading all of their e-mails. -Of course. -We just haven't had the right technical gear-- -Sure. -to play the voicemails. But we have a lot of-- we have a lot of responses to stuff we've talked about over the last week today. -We do. -So, the second have is gonna be all about reading your guy's e-mails. -That's correct. -And responding to them. -That is correct. -But the first half is a lot of financial news-- -Sure. -that we are gonna talk about. We got some news about credit cards sorta changing-- -Finally. -next year. -Yeah. -And then we're gonna talk about sort of weird-- -Mailing glitches. -a weird mailing glitch. Yeah, that Bank of America sent out to somebody. And then we're gonna talk about a Facebook app that lets you borrow and lend money out to your friends and family, which sounds like a terrible idea but we'll get in to that. -Either way you slice it, we're gonna be poor by the end of this episode. -Yeah. -Somehow we have lost all of our moneys. I wanna bring up something super quick. Someone brought to my attention that I may or may have not called-- it may have like sounded like I made a gigantic blanket statement about people who get divorced. I don't think-- -You're making blanket statements? -Never happened. I don't think I said this. I didn't go back and listen. I forgot to but I should. -Okay. -Someone told me that I might have called every single person who gets divorced are dummy. There's no-- I don't think I would have said that. I don't believe that. If I did, I didn't mean it. I think, I think, I know I said the word dummy, it's like my new favorite word over the last four months or so. -Uh-huh. -if I said it, I meant people who get married for the wrong reasons are dummies. -Right. -Which is what I think I said. I should have gone back and listen. -Even those people I wouldn't necessarily just lump them all into the dummy category. -No, if get like-- -It's a mistake. People make mistakes sometime. -Right. A dummy is not the worst thing you can be. -It's not a dumb-ass. -Right. You're not a dumb-ass. You're just the dummy. You're just, you're dummy. What are you gonna do? You know, he got, you know, that's all. That's fine. -Okay. I like that. -Either way, if I somehow upset anybody with that. I don't think I did man, all right--you know, I know plenty of people who were divorced. So I wouldn't have said that. -And even if those people weren't offended, I'm sure you said something else that offended other people. -I'm just gonna apologize for like six years of shows, right now. Is that-- I'm gonna make that kind of blanket statement. -Yeah, just 1422 episodes. -I'm just gonna wipe my hands clean of it. New dealer and we're all set. -Yeah. -All right. -It's got a new deck in there. -Lead us in sir. What do we got? -Speaking of cards, our first story is about some news that's happening to the credit card industry next year in October 2015. You're no longer gonna have to sing a receipt after you swipe your card. So, I even realized this until I read this article. It's something that I don't really think about too much. But, you know, when you go especially in New York-- -Yeah. -you use your credit card in a lot of places. -Of course. -And sometimes you have to sign other times you don't have to sign. -Well that I know why. You know what? -And that's because they use a different machine. -No, no, no. It's the amount of money. -Oh, I didn't know that. -You don't have to sign if it's-- I think it's like less than 25 bucks, you don't have to sign. Yeah. -I think a lot like-- well, in terms of this story we're talking about two different kinds of cards. -Sure. -There's one type of card that has the magnetic strip-- -Uh-hmm. -which is mostly everybody. -Yeah. -But if you have something like the Chase Sapphire Rewards card, that credit card has a little micro processor chip that you can see. It's got a little window and then you could see a tiny data chips-- -Sure. -that's embedded into the side of it. And that's a different type of card that's called the EMV card, which I'm not sure what that stands for. -I don't know. -Something Visa, something MasterCard Visa, Euro MasterCard Visa. -Electronic? -I think it's Euro MastCard Visa. -Okay. -So anyway, we're going to see the end of these swiping credit cards. -It's the magnetic tape-- -Yeah. -that is very hackable. -Right. -And primitive. And compared to other civilized places in the world, we're kinda the only ones that still do this. -Yeah, if you ever done any traveling and tried to present a magnetic strip credit card to someone abroad, then look at you like you're a barbarian because they then have to write and enter down your card into the machine manually. -Yeah. See, I don't know about this. I was in Europe less than two years ago. -Uh-huh. -And I did-- I was in England and I definitely sign stuff with credit cards, I did. -Yeah. -I was in Brussels, in Belgium and I--in within Belgium. And all these cities and countries I definitely signed. -Right. -So I don't know. Maybe I was just using a lot of cash and didn't realize it. -Maybe. That wasn't a debit card transaction. -No, I don't. No-- -That's credit card. -No I don't use debit cards. But, you know, I don't know. Either way, you slice it though-- like it's crazy and I do believe like some of this, the stuff like we are one of the only countries that still uses this. -Yeah. -It's a big reason why there's-- why identity theft is so prevalent in the country. -Right. -What this new system will be is credit cards that are attached to a pin number. And instead of signing your name, you just pop in your four-digit pin or whatever it is and you're on your way. -Yup. -Why don't we take it a step further and just have like a photo attached to the pin? -Right. -Like when you swipe your card now, it's starting October 2015, when this is all supposed to take place, which is still like a year and a half away, which is crazy. -That sounds like more than enough time for hackers to get into this. -Yeah, it's like, they figure it out. -Yeah. -Like, okay, so I pop in, you know, I'm buying like a $400 thing. -Right. -I pop my credit card. I enter my five-digit number and then the cashier sees a picture of me. And it's like, "Okay, this is his credit card." -There are credit cards now that have your photo in it already and they could just look at it to make sure that this card is you. -All right. But I feel like they-- you know, those are the bank's choice to put the photo on there. The cashier doesn't, you know, need to say like, "Oh, there's happened to be a photo on your credit card." I just wanna say. -Right. But that's not also a foolproof method either. -It's not. -I know a lot of people like use fake IDs. -It's another-- well, it's another layer of protection. -Yeah. They should do it. They should do it definitely. -You know-- -For now, the pin system should hopefully work. So this is basically what you're gonna see. This is nothing new for people that live outside of this country by the way. Everybody has it. And I think-- -What is this fantasy machine? -The main benefit is that you can also use contactless payment cards. So, whereas this one, you could see the hand sort of feeding the card into the machine. -Right. -You'll soon be able to just pay with, say like a fob on your keychain-- -Right, like Google Wallet. -Like do-- or Google Wallet like you would at a gas station. You know, those quick payment systems, which is gonna be really easy and then you don't have to type in your pin code at all, I think it's just the swipe-- -It's kinda the news I don't wanna hear. I kinda wanna hear like, "Oh, we're just switching to mobile payments." -Yeah. But there's-- I mean, at the end of the day, even mobile payment is not gonna-- that's not gonna stop people from frauding. -It's not but, you know, mobile payments are more secure than credit card transactions. -Yeah. -I mean, they had the pin number built in-- -Uh-hmm. -with n NFC sort of thing going on. -Not to mention just light and load of your wallets. You don't have to carry multiple cards. -Come on man. -Speaking of which, one company that's really pissed off at this news is Coin, I'm sure. Remember we talked about this sort of concept card, which I think you can actually sign up for now. So, Coin was-- -I think-- still get like 18 months to good use out of it. -Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's more than a year-- that's good. -Right. So a Coin did was basically, you know, sniff out the credit card information and then let you store multiple credit cards on something the size of credit card. -Right. -It's a digital card. -It's basically letting you use multiple credit cards, debit cards and gift cards onto one system. -Right. -So it looks like a card but you can actually stored and then there's a button that lets you cycle through which card you wanna use. -Yeah. People are asking for their Kickstarter money back already. -Yeah. -This would have been awesome ten years ago. -Yeah. This would have been cool but clearly, they have the magnetic strip built into it so you still have to use it like a traditional card even the FAQ says they don't support EMVs. -How did the Coin people not see this coming? -Yeah. That's the problem with Kickstarter. -Right? How does it like-- -There's no one that's like-- -They should had someone on the team vetting like all future possibilities of what's happening with freaking transactions. -Right. -All right. I'm not gonna lose sleep over that. -Here's my question though is, how is tipping gonna work when you have to enter in your pin. I mean, you can't just sign the extra amount. They're gonna have to bring you the entire machine. -Yeah. So I think that's how it went in Europe. So that is the one thing that did stand out. So they do have this like little mobile payment boxes and they-- instead of like the little envelope, the leather envelope with the receipt and the card, they hands you that. And then you just punch in numbers on the thing and swipe the card yourself. -That sounds pretty awkward. -No. I think it's great. -'Cause if they're standing right there and-- -No, no, no. They leave it with you. -Tip them too much. Oh, okay. -They leave it with you. Yeah, the same with-- yeah, it just replaces the check envelope. -Oh, okay. That's cool. Yeah, that's good 'cause you don't have to wait for them to come back and bring it to you. Just swipe it and you're done. -Right, and you're done. You get out of there. -Yeah. -You know-- -That's fine. I'm glad they also didn't make you sign in electronically either 'cause those never turned out well. -Yeah. -Like anyone can turn that to crap. -How do you feel about tipping? What's your like-- -What do you mean-- I do it? -No, of course you do it. I mean, a bit like-- there's times where I've had awful service and I still give them 20 percent. -Yes. So 20 percent is an interesting number because Ariel and, correct me if I'm wrong, I want your opinion on this too. -Uh-hmm. -But as a fellow Californian, people in California do not tip 20 percent. -No. That's a lot less. -Really? -It's way less. I would say it's like 10 percent. -Ten percent? -And if it's great service, maybe 12 percent or maybe like just have cheap friends. -Thinking about cheap friends man, I feel like 15 is the bare minimum. -Yeah? -Yeah. -Well, I've always double the tax. So whatever the tax is, I just double that. -Right. -That change is where you go. -Yeah. -Yeah. So here, what's the tax is? -Tax is like 8.75. -Right. -So you're basically doing, you know, 17 percent. -Yeah. -Right. That's the average. That sounds good. -Yeah. -Yeah, that's not bad. I think anywhere between 15 and 20 is expected. -Yeah. -But 10 percent? -Yeah. -What the hell is going on in California man? -Is there any where that you're traditionally supposed to tip that you refuse to? -Good-- I'm glad you brought this up. Honestly in Lake Tahoe, we ordered in for pick up. -Oh, yeah. You don't-- -You don't tip when you pick up. -Yeah, you don't tip-- -You don't tip when you pick up. -There's no pick up tip. -This guy was a pick up tipper. Dude, I was hanging out with this like, so we split the check, right? -Right. -'Cause we got like almost $200 worth of food. -Right. -So we get there. We drive through the restaurant. We say, "Oh, pick up for Jeff." -Uh-huh. -The guy said, "All right, it's gonna be a minute." And I'm like, "All right, well we can pay for it now." -Yeah. -So he hands me a bill. I go, "Oh, here's two credit cards, just split it." Comes back with the average, you know, always says tip on it. My buddy and I was like, "I'm gonna give him 5 bucks." I said why? -He didn't do anything. -He didn't do anything. He didn't wait on us. -Yeah. -You can't be a pick-up tipper. You a pick-up tipper dude? -No, not at all. -Right? -I don't. -Who the hell does that? -Just throw that money away. -I was so mad. He made me feel like I was like this weird Jew or something. -No comment on that. But-- -You can comment on that. I feel like, I feel like-- don't Asians have like that stereotype also? -I just think people like-- the tip is supposed to be for services garnered. -Rendered. -Rendered. -What did you say? You say garnered? -Garnish? -It's just like a piece of parsley. -Yeah like just-- -There you go. There's your reward. -It's just for garnish. -But no, like if nothing happens. -Yeah. -If there is no render-- -If nothing was rendered. -Yeah. There's gotta be some kind of like mnemonic device you could use here like if nothing was rendered, what's the rhyme for that? -No tip will be surrendered. -Yeah, yeah, something like that. So yeah, if they didn't do anything for you, they should not have the tip. -I agree man. -Like for example, you know, if I ever find myself at a-- let say burlesque club. I never tip the bathroom attendant that always hands you for the paper towel. -Oh, dude that's not-- those dudes are not Justin's strip clubs. -I didn't say strip club. No one said strip clubs. I didn't say strip club. -Come back me up Ariel. You-- when we go to Vegas, there are everywhere in Vegas. -I said a cabaret. -When we go to Vegas, oh, I forgot. You don't leave your-- but when we go to Vegas, there are in every bathroom everywhere. -Yeah. -Aside from like the CES show floor. -Right. -Right? You don't-- -I don't tip those guys. -I don't really tip them either. I don't. -Because I'm not gonna pay $3 for one tic-tac and a paper towel. -I think they're tipped enough is having to stay in the bathroom all day. -Yeah, I feel sad for those guys. -That's a tip enough. -Yeah. But that's a guilt-trip and I'm not gonna fall for that guilt-trip like them having to hang out in the bathroom all day. -Dude, at our CBS party there was a guy there. -I think I would tip if I went into the stall and did something nasty. -Well then you place the tip on the top of the toilet. -Then-- yeah. Then you would tip. -Ariel, what do you think about bathroom attendants? -I used to fall for it 'cause I felt bad but I don't do it anymore. -Yeah. -I don't give them any money. -I got-- you know what I do. I'm like, "All right, I will trade you a mint or a stick of gum and I do a trade." -Like that's coming from his own personal stash of mints. -You know-- but I just take a bottle of cologne and leave the quarter. -Right. -That's what I do. -This is where the Jewish thing comes back in the-- -Well, you said it. -I didn't say that. -That's messed up. But yeah, all right. I wanna know about tipping. Would you tip for delivery? -Oh, I always do-- I'm a big seamless web user. -Right. -And it's depending on the weather. So that tip goes up and down based on how the weather is. -Right. -If it's a nice day to ride your bike, then I'm not tipping much. If it's arctic vortex-- -So it's not in relation to the price? -Distance? -Or the price. -Oh, well usually-- super lonely but-- -Thirty? -Usually, it's just a single order. -It's just $7. -So he doesn't have to really carry too much. I'm not ordering for four. -It's a forever-alone probably. -Yeah, yeah. This is sad but-- -Not it's not. -I don't tip by weight. I tip by either, you know, I didn't even tip by distance. Because if I'm in the-- -You tip by obstacles. -Yeah. -You tip by inclement weather. -Right. -I respect that I guess. -Yeah. You should have more-- -Or like in New York, no one is ever traveling more than, you know, 15 blocks to get you your food. -Right. -I kinda do it based on how much I ordered. But I don't do 20 percent. Twenty percent is a lot. -'Cause they already included a fee on top of that. -Delivery charges. -Yeah, yeah. -What about you Ariel? What's your like going-rate for tipping on delivery? I need to know. -I still-- I think I still double tax. That's just like my-- -Yeah. -go-to way of tipping. I don't wanna think this double tax. -Well like 20 percent you don't really have to think either. -You know what, I also heard that there's a conspiracy with delivery guys and the businesses-- the restaurants that they worked for and that you should always tipping cash. You know, on seamless web there's a window there that you can enter into digitally. But apparently, a lot of restaurants keep a portion of that-- -What? -when you enter it on the website. So if you want to get good service from your delivery guy and you use that restaurant a lot, tip them in cash 'cause they appreciate that money. -Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, everyone always wants to be tipped in cash regardless. -Yeah. -You bring up a very good point. I'm gonna start doing that. -Yeah. -Deliveries fees pissed me off though. All right, you know what else pisses people off? -Yeah. -Being called something crazy from their mail. -Yeah. -Tell me about this story 'cause I saw something-- I saw something so screwed up in relation to this. -I think I know what you're talking about. -Right. -This is the daughter? -Yeah. -That's not cool. But this is like before we get to that, this is super heavy. This is sort of similar-- so a writer in San Francisco recently, a woman by the name if Lisa McIntire. -Uh-hmm. -She used to junk mail showing up at her home. -Of course. -But last week, she was really surprised when she received a credit card offer from Bank of America and it was addressed to her sent to her mom's house. -Uh-hmm. -But addressed on both the envelope and the letter itself, it read, "Lisa Is A Slut McIntire." They just added three words to her middle name-- -I believe I went to high school with her. -which she has none. So it says, here I'll bring up, this is the screen shot if you're watching the video. -That is so awesome. -Her address, "Lisa Is A Slut McIntire." -Shouldn't capitalized the 'a' though. The 'a' in Is a Slut is capitalized. That is just poor grammar in that. -It even says, here too, when they automatically programmed your name into the letter it says, "Lisa Is A Slut McIntire, you've earned this special offer. I invited you to join the Bank of America." -This is so funny how nothing is humanized. It's all computers. So how did this happen? -It's not all computers. That's the thing. You would immediately wanna blame BofA for this-- -Well clearly-- -and be like somebody messed up there. -well, clearly at some point, some human entered the "Is a Slut" into like her field. -Right. -Right? -It's not like the computer becoming self aware and just being like gonna start pissing people off right now. -Right. -So how did it happen? -Well, according to her, she was at one point a member of an honor society called Golden Key. There was a Golden Key organization in my high school too, and they sort of giving out scholarships to kids going to college and doing community service around the city. -Right. -So she's a member of Golden Key and apparently from sometime between 2004 and 2008, someone-- she doesn't know who, clearly messed with her name. -Right. -And so, on her Golden Key letters also is addressed to Lisa Is a Slut McIntire. So she was able to traced that Is a Slut name back to Golden Key. So it's their fault no BofAs. -Interesting. -But BofA apparently gets some of their information. -Right. They all sell and share information, right. -From the Golden Key organization. -Right. -So thanks both of you guys. -So another interesting thing here where there was-- this-- I don't know how-- I mean, obviously this is data that was entered at some point. But there were a similar incident where a guy is named but then under it said like, "daughter died in a car crash" or something like that. -It said-- yeah, "daughter killed in car accident". -So it was like some sort of field that was entered as maybe like a-- -Like a dossier. -Yeah-- which is really strange and it just sort of magically showed up in someone's mailing address, which is-- -It was the office man. -The opposite. The opposite of cool. -Right? -Yeah, for sure. -That is-- yeah, so here's a screen shot of what we're talking about. -It's nuts. -Right here, it was sort of addressed to him in a letter-- -Right. -the ads playing now but basically, they lost their teenage daughter in a car crash. -Right. And that information somehow found its way on to like the front of the letter. -What is office max need to know that? -It's weird man like following the bread crumb trail of like how this, you know, gets entered and winds up there. That's-- -Right. -a job for someone with a lot of time in their hands. -Yeah, that's really weird. You can only imagine this most to happen more and more now that you sort of volunteer this information on social networks. -Yeah, for sure. -You know, I used to work for public relations company. -Yeah. -And we would do cold-calling to journalists to sort of get our product into newspapers and magazines. -Oh, I love you guys. I love you guys. -I know. It was the worst, right? Basically just at a call center. -Sure. -I was working in a call center. -Which worst, a call-- a cold-call or cold-email? Which do you hate more? -The cold-email. -Yeah. -Because I just don't know see-- -You have no choice but to get-- -Right. So anyway, I used to work at that PR company and we would be-- we were a business-to-business technology firm. And so one of our company was like the short-tell telephone that you have in your meeting rooms and stuff. -Sure. -And we would call companies like CNET and talk to journalists. But, there are-- we actually had a software program that we use to keep information on all the editors that we would call along with fields that read, you know, their main interests, what's been happening to them, you know, details about their personal life that maybe you've talked to with them during the phone conversations in the past. Stuff you found on social networks, etc. And it was not just shared amongst our company but it was a service you could buy into. -Right. -That other people would enter information into as well. -Right. -So we would get, you know, collaboration-- collaborative information from other PR agencies like this. -Right, yeah. -And it was really personally stuff, stuff like this. And, you know, maybe not as morbid but like, has two cats, has like-- really into hockey, etc, stuff like that. -Dude, I hate that. -I know. It's weird. -I hate that. -So, do you ever get that from PR people when they call you up and like, "Hey, Jeff. Like how's the hockey season going?" -Oh, my God. They're just like "how's the hockey?" -How did you know that? -That is the most revolting cringe-worthy thing that happens to me. -Right. -Because it's so specific. -And it almost puts you off too as if, you know-- -It does. -maybe before they said that you would have been opened to hear a general pitch now it's just creepy. -Well, the thing is it's like-- so obviously I deal with a lot of game PR people. And the ones I've developed good relationships with-- -They know you. -obviously, they know me and they know I don't shut up about hockey. But when I get-- when I meet someone who I've never really talked to and they kind of like lead in a little with that, it's a huge turn off. -Yeah. -And it happens over the phone. If you have the balls to do that in person, like "I've never even seen your face and you're asking me about the devils?" -Yeah. -Not cool. -Some people are really bad at it too like there's this one time someone called me and it was like, "Oh, man-- like we were just talking after this pitch already happened and she was like, "Oh, you know what restaurant I went to? I think you might actually like this place. Claim jumper, and I was like, "What-- like how did you know that I like Claim Jumper?" It was kind of like a Nardwuar incident. -Yeah, yeah, yeah. -I was like, how did you know that about me? -Not cool. -And then I realized that I had liked the Claim Jumper fan page on Facebook. -Yeah. -Like a decade ago, and I forgot that I had even clicked that button. And then I look back and I was like, "Oh, this is probably where this girl is trying to find familiarity with me that we both love Claim Jumper. So yes, I will write about your company. So weird. -Look, it is weird and the more I kind think about it, you know, look like it's our fault. We put that out there like you click Like, I am very vocal about hockey. So like even though my file in PR land is frontloaded with, you know, hockey in all caps, you don't have to be like, you know a private dick to know that. I kinda like hockey. You know what I mean, like-- so I get it. I'll stop punching these people. I will just shake their hands and smile now. -I do love Claim Jumper. -I know, right? -They gave you those root beer barrels at the end of dinner, so good. -I get it. I get it. -Meltdown lava chocolate cake, delicious. -I get it man, don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed to that. All right, let's talk about this story on Facebook how you can now become a loan shark to your closest friends. -Yeah. So this is a new app called Agree It, and it's free. You can get it on to your Facebook page today. This app essentially lets you agree with, you know, a friend or a family member to either loan money or borrow money. And there's no obligation to repay-- -What's the difference? -which is dangerous. -Okay. -But if you're low on money and you don't want necessarily get a credit check because you have bad credit or you don't want to sign up for a high PR then like, you can go online and maybe sucker your friends-- -Yeah, and destroy your relationship with the close person. -into sending you money. -It's terrible. -I don't understand why this has to be on Facebook either, I mean borrowing money from your friends or family isn't a new concept. -It's kind of like a private matter. -You could do it before so why would you have to publicize it to everybody? That's sort of shameful. -It's almost, it's like dehumanizing the relationship. -Yeah. -Like if I was trying to get $10,000 from a close friend, I'd take them out to dinner-- -Right. -and be like, "Hey, I have a great business opportunity and I wanna get you in on it." -Right. It would be 10,000 -And it would be quite, it would be-- we would be whispering. -Right. -'Cause it would be like a low-light setting, you know. It would be like, "Hey, you know, I think I'm gonna make a lot of money with this." I wouldn't need some sort of robot to do it for me. -Right-- to sort of broker it for you. -You know, you kinda at least maybe like thinking, you ever have like-- I'm sure growing up in high school, you know, you lend your buddy 40 bucks. -Uh-hmm. -And you never see him again, stuff like that. -Right. -Feel like the ages like dead beat friends is quickly coming to a close 'cause now it's just like, we all have Venmo now. We all have this-- -Oh, yeah. There's just-- -There should never be an excuse-- -quick payment right now. -for like never paying anyone back. -Speaking of Venmo, I'm glad you brought that up. This is completely a New York problem. -Sure. -Not even a problem observation. If you ever ride the subways in New York, have you noticed those new ads for Venmo with Lucas? -Yes. I noticed. -Lucas? -Yeah. -He likes magic? -Yeah, he likes magic. He brushes his teeth. He goes to the park. -Oh, I've seen that. Yeah, I've seen that. I don't know what the point. I don't know like, I don't understand the messaging. -Yeah. -This is-- it sort of this new type of advertising where they don't tell you what the product they're advertising does. So this is what you would see walking on a big subway-- -Yeah, I don't get it. -station. -What is Lucas has dreams have anything to do with mobile payment services? -Yeah. Like if I didn't know what Venmo was and I do it's because of the show and working in tech, I have no idea what this is about. This just looks like an Asian guy like looking pensive. -Yeah. -And then describing his life. But no one's gonna go-- there's not even a QR code here for you to scan it. It's just have to Google Venmo. -I'm sorry, are you asking for a QR code? -No, I'm not. But maybe something-- -There's a Venmo at the bottom so you Google Venmo and you got your answer. -I guess so, but no one's gonna reach out for that extra like one step to find out what company does to see if they wanna support it. -It is-- yeah. Perhaps. It is a bad marketing campaign. I will agree with you on that. -It's so random and it's all over subway stations too like Lucas takes the stairs. Lucas buys around like Lucas takes a dump. I don't know what he does. -Oh, wait, wait, wait. I get it. -What? -So Lucas buys around, that I get. -Yeah. But he doesn't buy his dreams like it's not all financial face. -Well, dreams are-- he doesn't buy his dreams but to reach those dreams he might have to buy the-- -I mean yeah, the point is obvious that you can use Venmo to pay for everything in your life. -Sure. -But there's no way if you'd know it was-- he would string it together like that. -Yeah, it's a bad campaign. All right, so that was it with Agree It. You can totally have your friends indebted you for the rest of your life if that's how you wanna go about doing it. -Yeah. -Check it out. -Let's get to some e-mails. Got a lot to talk about and we'll get to as many as we can right now. This basically covers a lot of the topics we've been discussing over the last two weeks. So let's jump right in to it. We are talking about Best Buy falling out of relevancy, which Steven writes in and says, "I thought I'd pass on to you about your favorite topic. Best Buy being totally irrelevant in the Amazon age. Well, there's one thing they're still good for and that's buying cellphones. When you go to the Verizon store, they charged $200 a phone plus a $35 activation fee. -Uh-hmm. -I don't think I've ever paid for one of those but that's a freaking rip-off. "It's activation fee for a line that you already have, which is a racket", as he says. Best Buy is currently running a special if you sign up by February 15th. You get $50 gift cards for each phone you buy. And they waive the activation fee so he's saying, "Don't write Best Buy off just yet. You can still buy our phone." -Yeah. -And those massive Costco-sized stores are now just good for buying phones. -Right. You still have to go into the Best Buy store to get it. That's the biggest problem. -Right. We brought up the conversation of teenage tech literacy. And I brought up-- I thought that a lot of people, you know, coming out now are tech illiterate. It's not their fault. They just had all these awesome things in their lives. -Tech-spoiled. -It's not necessarily illiterate because they know how to-- -Right. You're a tech-spoiled. -yeah. They know how to work-- work technology. -Tech-spoiled better way of putting a column from Weehawken, always my neighbor says, "Hey, guys. You said kids aren't tech savvy and that his generation, he's 28, so like he's part of our generation. He says, he's totally agrees. We had both analog and digital lives in ways no other generation had and I dare to say that our generation is the quickest to learn new tech because the NAS to PS4 was such a huge jump than 20 years of the same generation. But there won't be a huge tech jump for a kid to started out with an Xbox, or do you think so? Anyway, that's really it." Oh, that's where he ended. So, I think he's got a point. I also think there's still room for huge tech jump maybe not in the same genre. But-- -Yeah. -in this-- you know, I don't know like, I mean the first phone I had, if you look at that, I don't know. What do you think there's gonna be like significant jumps like the ones we experienced? -I don't even know if we had significant jumps, I mean-- -We do. -you and I-- we did. I mean for-- -We went from-- -the person that had no exposure to technology like growing up, you bring up phones. I saw it coming from the long way, way that eventually our phones will do all the things that we want multi-media was. -Well, but it's not-- -You know, we started off with like the Nokia and then there's the palm pilot separately. -Dude, no we didn't. -Palm pilot started getting better and then phones are getting better than the palm pilot and went into the phone. -Yeah. -It was a sort of like a step-by-step system. I wasn't surprised. -But when you-- but where we've-- but where we've started like we went from rotary phones, which is like the dial on the thing-- -Uh-hmm. -To having all the world's information in your pocket. -But there were stuffs in between there. It was like the car phone. -There were stuffs, absolutely, but there were stuffs from any as to PS4 also. -Yeah. -So I don't know, but I agree and I think I agree. I do agree definitively that our generation is just really good at picking stuff up. -But-- okay, I wonder what the previous generation to ours should say about us in the same way like, "Oh, you guys don't-- -They're confused. -appreciate not necessarily technology but, I would say maybe we take access to information for granted. -Oh, I'm not saying we don't. But I think those people, people in their 50's, I guess like the generation ahead of us. -Uh-hmm. -I know a lot of those people and they're freaking confused with a lot of this stuff. -With technology. -Yeah, it's not their fault. They just didn't grow up with it. -Right. -We were forced to do it. -Uh-hmm. -We were forced to grow up with it. Like I got, I had my first PC when I was like, you know, 12 and I was like, "Anyone gonna teach me how to use this thing? No. All right, here we go, I'm jumping right in." -Uh-hmm. Yeah, I remember that. -So, yeah-- hey, do you wanna talk about Lane on the same topic? -Let's move on to the next one. -Okay. -'Cause I kinda wanna get to the mark of this question. -He brings up really good points-- he brings up funny things. -Who, Lane? -Lane. So-- get this. Okay, this is someone who's a lot younger than us. -Uh-huh. -Okay, he's 17 and he considers himself pretty tech savvy. But he says, most of his peers are technologically illiterate. He says that he lives-- a lot of these people from his generation grew up in a world where they just expect everything to work. -Sure, yeah. That's really designed-- -Which they don't-- think they have to like build stuff. He says he knows people who-- this is weird. He says he knows people that when they use a desktop keyboard, they use Caps Lock to capitalized things instead of just doing shift. -That's funny. -That's interesting, right? -Yeah, it's weird. -There are people I don't-- there's people who don't know what home buttons do when you double tap them on your iPad or iPhones. And he says, everyone I know suffers from vertical video syndrome. Just interesting. -Yeah. -You know, and that someone who's 15 years younger than us. -That's also just kids not giving a crap about like the way things look. They just what-- -They're just taking that for granted man. This kid-- all right, what do you wanna bring up? -So here we go from Marcus. He wants some advice from us that maybe one of us can provide. He says, he's currently going to school studying digital media production. He's been doing video production or photography for several years. He wanted to ask us about writing though 'cause he's always wanted to be a writer professionally. He's been working on those skills in his time in college and he's recently started working for the school paper as a writer. They found about his multi-media experience and they asked him to become the editor. But, anyway, he basically just wants to become a writer and he wants people to read his stuff and to be given assignments it's like a real journalist instead of just a multi-media journalist. -Yeah. -And he says, he doesn't really know where to start because these jobs are hard to get and he's worried that due to his lack of experience as a writer that he'll have to give up that dream and continue to pursue the areas he is more experienced in which is multi-media editing. So he sort of wants to transition from-- -Sure. -like graphic design and, you know, video production into writing. -Right. -Which is funny 'cause you and I have sort of done the opposite. And like we're started in writing and now we're doing broadcast journalism. -Sure. -Which is a different pivot. -We definitely still write. -But we still write. -Yeah. -He just wants to know how he can get that started. -Well here's where you're in a good spot Marcus. You're in school so you're young. And, you know, no one like makes you a writer. If you wanna be a writer, you're a writer. So write-- just because no one is assigning you stuff doesn't mean that you can't write and take things and assign yourself things. I think you should, you know, and also, you know, when you look forward, I don't think there's anything wrong with like falling back on the stuff that you're really good at. You might have to do that. But for the time being while you're young and while you're in school, I would write like get-- that's what-- I mean that's what I did in college. I started my own blog and I just started to write and I just write about, you know, about what I knew and what I experienced. -Uh-hmm. -It doesn't-- you really don't necessarily need to focus. You don't need a subject. Just write, just continue to write and be aggressive with the college paper, you know, like you said, and write. And I think if you-- you know, because of social, because everything is accessible now and you can really reach out to anyone. I know people who are your age that pitch stories they write to big publications and they get them published. -Yeah. -So there's no problem with you doing that or trying to do that. But you have to write. You can't just be like, I wanna write. How do I get to the point where I can do it? You just have to write right now. -You don't have to be assigned something to-- -Of course not. -I would recommend three sites if he wants to write. One is the Buzzfeed community. -Uh-hmm. -That's a really good way to set yourself up for a job into the future. So Buzzfeed community started off as buzzfeed.com/raw, which is basically where community members like you, any 17-year-old can do this, can submit their own stories that they think should appear on Buzzfeed that's in their preview. -There you go. -You write an article about it and if it's good, it's gets up voted and they'll publish you. And I know for a fact that a lot of Buzzfeed writers got their jobs and their fellowships by being part of that community programs. -Great advice. So do Buzzfeed community, do Thought Catalog. Thought Catalog-- we talked about this a couple of weeks ago just basically like a teenager mid-- like early mid-20's websites some musings about life and that's perfect for you. That's exactly what you're doing right now. So just write about school. -Just right. -Write about the drama that you're experiencing in life as a young person and I guarantee you, they're looking for content like that if it's insightful and well-written. And then Medium, is a little bit more mature if you have, I think if you have ideas, you know, about your career or about anything you could-- just go check out Medium. It's-- there's no specific subject for that site. -I like Medium. -But it's more of like a, a more mature blogging platform than say Tumblr. -I think Medium is good if you're, if-- you know, Buzzfeed, you can really get a way to doing anything. -Yeah. -Medium is more like a very focus Op-Ed sort of long form stuff. -Yeah, right. -But it's great though. I read Medium every day. -But it's very polished too. So I have never read your writing Marcus but if you're a good writer, you have a good chance of getting on Medium as well. So check those three out; Buzzfeed community, Thought Catalog and Medium. -This guy very good stuff, very good stuff. All right. We have a few more e-mails but we're kinda running out of time so we'll get to them next week. -Okay. -All right. Is that okay with you sir? -Uh-hmm. -All right. That's gonna do it for us. E-mail as at the404@cnet.com and we'll try to get to as many e-mails as we possibly can. You can also reach us on the Twitters, that's @The404. Go check out our sub Reddit, reddit.com/r/the404. We interact with all the stories they get up voted there. And yeah, follow us on Instagram, all that other good stuff and we're back here next week. Until then, I'm Jeff Bakalar. -I'm Justin Yu. -I'm Ariel Nuñez. -This is been the 404 Show, high tech, low brow. Again, we're asking people for their questions about addictions so if you or someone you know is afflicted with that kind of stuff. Send us an e-mail with "addiction" in the headline and we're rounding them all up and we're gonna have a great conversation with our buddy Josh King coming in to talk about all of your concerns. So we'll see you guys on Monday, have a fantastic weekend. Later.

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