Commentary about those things I find interesting.
It seems like a common thing where employees wear shirts with a high school or college logo in the town of the team on the days prior to and on the day of a game. The more I talk to people, the more I run across people who are posing.
I tend to troll. Instead of wearing an opposing team, I wear something from another sport.
A legitimate message expressing concern about your impersonation account would:
Instead, the hot hoax right now says:
Hi….I actually got another friend request from you which I ignored so you may want to check your account. Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears…then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too….PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT A NEW friendship FROM ME AT THIS TIME.
Let’s break this down.
First, we have the preying on a fear we all have about our Facebook accounts getting hacked. Worse, this “hacker” is now going after friends.
But, the recommendation makes no sense at all. “Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears…then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too…”
Forwarding the message to others is how chainletters operate. You are being played by forwarding it. You are spreading fear. You are not helping.
Fermi wondered why we have not met aliens. He recreates an equation which we are still just figuring out some of the constants. Part of it wonders how many civilizations wipe out themselves. This Great Filter makes people concerned any time life on our planet is threatened.
During the Cold War, the concern was a nuclear war would wipe out human civilization or even all life. Olivia Butler’s Xenogenesis series is a little dated as it concerns this period. I heard about the Fermi Paradox back then. A distant second was an asteroid impact. Lately a popular concern is global warming being the Great Filter. Artificial Intelligence seems a close second.
Whatever is our current social concern for how we are going to kill off ourselves seems to be what we think killed off other intelligent species. We wonder how they could have survived it or why they died off in failing to.
At least these Great Filter concerns get us discussing how humanity can survive. Though, I wish we are further along in space travel as we need to spread out in the universe to survive.
I get it, if you have made a mobile app, then you need good ratings. However, most of the time that I get a notification to provide a review, I already have.
I probably left a good one as I was new to it. But, I have found more issues for subsequent times. So you are going to lose a star or two.
Liberals see “rights” as something of a public good (like national defense or a scenic view), whose consumption by one individual doesn’t diminish consumption by others. In fact, they believe that all Americans are thereby made better off.
In the conservative version of identity politics, however, everything’s a zero-sum game: Freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or other characteristics doesn’t unleash greater human potential to the benefit of all. Instead, it’s a step backward for everyone else, part of the never-ending war of all against all. Your gain is necessarily my loss.
In a world where one sees others gaining with a zero-sum game view, one should have fear for oneself, family, and friends. When the government encourages certain behaviors, they are picking winners and losers. Fear of being the loser becomes a real thing.
Whereas, with the non-zero-sum point of view, when the government encourages certain behaviors, it lifts up the lowest to improve the environment for everyone.
Got a phone call from my own cell phone to itself. That was pretty interesting the first time, but I declined the call because I was certainly not calling myself. A day later, I got another call.
This one I answered. It was an interesting call informing me my account with the cellphone carrier was locked. I would need to go through the automated process to unlock it. Press 1 to continue; enter my zip code…
At that point, I hung up, went to my carrier’s website and checked I could in fact login. I didn’t get far enough into the process to identify my account, so I think I am safe. But, yeah, it seems like a good number of people could fall for this scam.
It started with a tweet about how a new Congresswoman is dressed. There was a backlash on Twitter. I’ve seen several stories about that.
Less noticed, it seems to me, is the tweeter promotes his book on Twitter.
While I have your attention, buy my FANTASTIC book #FraudAndFiction here https://t.co/C5G5xupNQa
— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) November 15, 2018
People clicked over to Amazon to give the book 1-star reviews. You can see that when he posted it, the grab from Amazon showed 21 reviews with an average of around 4-stars. Now, it has an average of 2.7-stars with 36 reviews. He basically tanked his own book by his behavior on his own marketing tool.
Got an email subject of “How can I help you?” from my U.S. Senator. This is a first in the over 3 years of emails I have from his office. Most communicate his party’s stance on an issue. Some are advisory like “Preparing For Hurricane Irma”. The closest to this seemingly change in approach is the one email just days after the 2016 election disclosing mobile office locations about 2 hour drives from me.
So, I checked Ballotpedia and noticed he was elected in 2014. Add 6 and he will be up for re-election in 2020. Guess that means there is no reprieve from the 2018 election. The campaign for the next one has already started.
I’ve seen security kick plenty of people out of bars. They sometimes come back wanting to start something with security. In this case, one shot at security from outside who returned fire and apprehended one of them and held him at gunpoint for authorities. A police officer who showed up killed the security guard.
When I was an “emergency coordinator”, we once had a session about what to do during an active shooter situation. Guns were not allowed then. (Unclear now.) It was the Hide, Run, Fight philosophy which was hole up in a secure room if you can, get out if you can, fight back as only a last resort. The trainer’s point was when a police officer shows up, if you are armed, then you might get shot because they will not know who is a good vs bad. They see a weapon and might shoot before they know.
Got an email from Academia.edu saying,
Dear Ezra,
Alessandra Carneiro uploaded a PDF that mentions the name “Ezra Freelove”.
They have a premium service where you can buy access to mentions of your name. I know of only one mention in a VSU paper as a thank you for my work there in IT in helping them. So, I was curious about a second. I wasn’t going to spend $99 for it, so I looked up the name of the author. Only one person with that name has papers uploaded, so it was easy to just browse them.
Searching for “freelove” in all 8 led to no results. Then, I noticed “free love” one title. It was also the most recent. My actual last name is nowhere in the article. This website’s search must be ignoring the spaces in the four mentions.
Not the first nor the last time people conflate my surname with the term.