I’ve been played by imposter scams a few times. I was only duped for a few minutes—once for a half hour—and I caught on before sending money, so all I lost was time. Maybe next time I won’t be as smart or lucky.
Scammers are using AI to perpetrate “imposter scams.” The voice sounds like a family member or other loved one, and claims to need money to get out of trouble.
If a loved one tells you they need money, put that call on hold and try calling your family member separately… If a suspicious call comes from a family member’s number, understand that too can be spoofed. Never pay people in gift cards, because those are hard to trace…. and be wary of any requests for cash.
Scammers are now using AI to sound like family members. It’s working. By Pranshu Derma at The Washington Post
Fox News is
a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. What has always been the tell about Fox News is the tagline and motto: fair and balanced. The operation’s very branding is an aggressive bit of trolling. An unabashedly partisan and ideological operation selling itself under the heading of “fair and balanced.” It’s less a lie than a knowing taunt.
… One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against, the history that in Bill Buckley’s famous phrase he was standing athwart and yelling “Stop!” None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.
The worst children’s cartoons ever. Includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, Clue Club, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Partridge Family in 2200 A.D., and much, much more.
Florida’s politicians are making the state a “laboratory for fascism.”
Indoctrination is nothing new in Florida’s schools | Boing Boing
The Mandolorians are a race of people repeatedly almost decimated by genocide who now live scattered across the galaxy. These rootless cosmopolitans sometimes blend into their new societies. More often, however, they’re forced to support themselves by turning to professions their societies despise.
— Is The Mandalorian a Space Jew?, by Nathan Abrams on JewThink. Abrams is quoting Charlotte Gartenberg in The Tablet.
Harrison Ford is Jewish? If I knew that, I forgot.
Gentleman on Twitter posts his “sleep stack”—12 products and three practices he uses to sleep. Ryan Broderick is befuddled:
The “sleep stack” tweet has really thrown me. The fact the user tagged all the products he’s using. The fact he called it a “stack,” as in a “tech stack”. The fact other people in the replies are sharing their own “sleep stacks” as if this is totally normal. I think there’s a growing subset of people — especially in America — that want to both optimize and also commodify every part of their lives. I think some of these people feel a genuine discomfort when they do something that doesn’t involve spending money or buying products. Anyways, the best “sleep stack” I ever heard was from Steve Harvey back when he used to host a morning radio show and it was “a Benadryl and some silk underwear.”
The tweet..
jwz: Welcome to year four of 14 days to flatten the curve..
The pandemic is still killing 11,000 people per month in the US alone, but supposedly it’s over. I guess that’s what “over” means now.
If you choose to stand around inside a crowded room without wearing a mask — I think you’re a fucking idiot.
Turns out, nearly every person I know is a fucking idiot.
I do not claim to be smarter than anybody else about this. I’m no more careful than anybody else. I stay home more than most people, but that’s my nature.
At last we have a definitive answer to the question of whether masks work.
That answer is “maybe.”
Ars: Do masks work? It’s a question of physics, biology, and behavior