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Language: en

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I am in New Orleans, Louisiana,

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in the French Quarter, in the Crescent City, the home of jazz

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and a really good place to talk about ZIP codes.

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No, seriously, because New Orleans is on the Mississippi,

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which is the dividing line between the west and the east of America.

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And ZIP codes work like this;

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up in the northeast, you have the zeros.

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Up in the southwest, you have the nines.

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And New Orleans, here in the middle, you have the sevens, not the fives.

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That's because the population density in the northeast is much higher.

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And so, you know, it's spread out by that rather than just geographical location, which does make sense.

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And there is one ZIP code, of course, that is more famous than all others:

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Beverly Hills' 90210.

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And the reason is a commitee decision at some point in the US postal service

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when they were setting up ZIP codes. At some point they decided that Beverly Hills

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would get this arbitrary number, and of course, a TV show made it famous.

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Something interesting though, that you might not know,

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back in 2000, there was a company called AllAdvantage.

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And their shtick was this:

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Download a program that would just put adverts permanently in the bottom of your screen,

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like watching a YouTube video only with everything.

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And that advert would stay there, permanently,

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blocking up a little bit of your screen,

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and in exchange, they would pay you quite a bit of money,

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'cause this was 2000, this was the dot-com boom,

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this was when you could get away with paying a lot of money for banner ads.

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And then, they added a multi-level marketing scheme, like all the dodgy pyramid schemes

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that you still see today.

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If you referred other people, you would get a small cut of what they got,

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and all the people they referred would send some money to you as well.

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Obviously, the company died when the dot-com bubble crashed.

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That really didn't need to be mentioned, but,

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back in 2000, oh, this was a wonderful scheme.

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AllAdvantage.com released a press release, a very happy press release

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announcing that the most popular ZIP code for their users,

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Beverly Hills, 90210

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And this was astonishing,

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because, why would the rich people at Beverly Hills want a few dollars an hour for putting

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a banner ad on their screen?

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If you have a referral scheme like that, where they're just giving out free money

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for something you do on a computer, well, people are going to cheat it.

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They're gonna install it many times on many computers,

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trying to get as much money out of it as possible.

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To do that, they need fake accounts.

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These folks aren't in the US, so what they do is they sign up with the only ZIP code they know:

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90210.

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So that press release in the heady days of the dot-com boom,

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is a result of several decisions,

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One, the US postal service picking that ZIP code for that area,

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Two, a TV show picking that ZIP code for its title,

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and three, one very silly web service, burning through a lot of money, very quickly,

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and being scammed for all they could take.

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And that is something you might not have known.

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