Today In Terrible Things To Spend Your Money On

By Ester Bloom October 1, 2015

Melvin was supposed to be a Catahoula leopard dog, Louisiana’s state dog (sometimes called a Catahoula hound). Turned out, Melvin was a mutt, probably part Catahoula and part Doberman.

“I paid $50 for him,” says Phillip. “But I wasn’t going to return it. I thought for a while I was going to put him to sleep.” Then he changed his mind. “Turned out to be the best dog I ever owned.” …

So a couple of years ago, when Melvin was about 9 and starting to show his age, the Duponts turned to a lab in South Korea. Even though the process would cost them $100,000, the couple decided to do it. They’d already spent that much on a Humvee, Phillip notes. “So, what the heck?”

A lab in South Korea charged them a whopping six figures to make two genetic replicas of Melvin, dogs the Duponts call Ken and Henry. Um. Talking about cloning is even creepier when people give their pets human names. What’s the matter with Spot, I ask you. Or Socks.

Also, if you’re going to give your pet a human name, maybe don’t refer to him as “it.”

Why is this a bad idea, aside from the ick factor?

To clone a dog you need to use a lot of other dogs to serve as egg donors and surrogates, Hyun explains, and that means many dogs are undergoing surgical procedures. Most of the time the process doesn’t work; many attempts are required to produce a single clone.

“I think there are probably better ways to spend $100,000 if you really care about animals,” Hyun says.

He also wonders about the health of Sooam’s cloned puppies. Most cloned animals end up pretty sickly — all that for a dog that isn’t even an exact replica of the original.

Likewise, do not start, invest in, or sign up for a company like Peeple that promises to commodify interpersonal relationships by being “Yelp for humans.”

“People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions,” said Julia Cordray, one of the app’s founders. “Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life?”

This is, in a nutshell, Cordray’s pitch for the app — the one she has been making to development companies, private shareholders, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. (As of Monday, the company’s shares put its value at $7.6 million.)

A bubbly, no-holds-barred “trendy lady” with a marketing degree and two recruiting companies, Cordray sees no reason you wouldn’t want to “showcase your character” online.

Why is this a bad idea, aside from the ick factor?

as repeat studies of Rate My Professor have shown, ratings typically reflect the biases of the reviewer more than they do the actual skills of the teacher: On RMP, professors whom students consider attractive are way more likely to be given high ratings, and men and women are evaluated on totally different traits. …

But at least student ratings have some logical and economic basis: You paid thousands of dollars to take that class, so you’re justified and qualified to evaluate the transaction. Peeple suggests a model in which everyone is justified in publicly evaluating everyone they encounter, regardless of their exact relationship.

It’s inherently invasive, even when complimentary. And it’s objectifying and reductive in the manner of all online reviews. One does not have to stretch far to imagine the distress and anxiety that such a system would cause even a slightly self-conscious person; it’s not merely the anxiety of being harassed or maligned on the platform — but of being watched and judged, at all times, by an objectifying gaze to which you did not consent.

Or as Kristin Iversen puts it at Brooklyn Mag:

Gone are the days when we paid lip service to the idea that humanity is comprised of anything other than judgmental assholes who, for the most part anyway, not only have pretty terrible judgment (have you spent much time reading Yelp reviews?), but also are very bad at articulating why it is that they do or don’t like something (no, really: have you spent much time reading Yelp reviews?).

If you need more convincing, listen to this episode of Reply All wherein a woman’s professional life is ruined by one bogus, hyper-critical review on the site Ripoff Report, posted by a business competitor. Imagine what havoc we could wreak on one another’s personal lives with a tool like this at our disposal. Imagine, and then shudder, and then hold my hand and promise me you’ll never use it.

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