Algemarin

I zoomed into a handful of random spots, and quite a few (maybe 30%) do not appear to show basketball courts at all. Many seem to be just rooftops or construction sites.

Silly clickbait headline.

> If you live in Miami or Phoenix, you need air-conditioning to survive the summer. But if you live in the middle of the country, try leaving the air-conditioning off when it’s hot but not too hot.

The more accurate description of this opinion piece is therefore "if you live in areas where it's not too hot [Kansas, where the author is situated, seems like it has average upper temps of mid 80s right now], you don't really need AC much". ....Well, no kidding?

I just feel like the bank has infinitely more resources than I could ever have in terms of hiring more attorney-power.

Reading anecdotes like this is just so terrifying, and there appears to be absolutely no recourse.

These stories can, and do, happen to anyone at any bank. And what can we do about it? It seems like the answer is a glib 'nothing'.

> It might sound a little bit creepy from a privacy perspective, but Gamgee insists that all motion data is processed and stored on the routers themselves, and never in the cloud.

This seems deceptive. Sure, the data may be processed and stored locally, but if the routers themselves may be accessed remotely (e.g., by Gamgee, if the routers are compliant with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069), then the fact that the data isn't stored in the cloud is a moot point.

> It's hard enough to report issues to OpenAI.

Not at all. OpenAI follows basic accepted standards. This is like complaining that you can't find if a specific website doesn't want specific directories crawled because you don't know about the existence of a robots.txt.

OpenAI has a security.txt [0], which is:

> an accepted standard for website security information that allows security researchers to report security vulnerabilities easily [1]

Whenever attempting to find where to report a security issue, the easiest thing to do is always check if the website has a security.txt file.

[0] https://openai.com/security.txt

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security.txt

A user can just as easily identify a scam such as the one in this post by also taking 30 seconds to do a web search for some phrasing from the email.

And "if they don't do that, that's on them"? This is victim blaming in both cases.

> What more do you want?

For it to be clear how unrealistic the odds are. They're not exactly broadcasting "you're 40 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the jackpot", instead their site screams "Millions Could Be Yours!". That is the dishonesty and obfuscation. Millions _could_ be yours, but they are very unlikely to be yours, in fact realistically approaching zero. While advance fee scams say "millions will definitely be yours", with the odds being absolutely zero. But neither are meaningful odds.

Though regardless, my original point wasn't about odds but about the lure and the appeal of both of these things: the potential for getting a lot of money for doing virtually nothing (other than spending a bit of money up front).

The dishonesty lies in obfuscating the actual odds of winning, making the honesty about the payout a moot point as it's not particularly applicable for most entrants.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, taken to an extreme. A lot of theorizing about ROC curves and optimal operating point formulae, and absolutely no empirical, qualitative evidence (such as any interviews with actual scammers).

For example, there is no actual sample data provided to substantiate even the premise, let alone the conclusion of this claim:

> In choosing a wording to dissuade all but the likeliest prospects the scammer reveals a great sensitivity to false positives.

> Keep your links safe and accessible only to authorized users

Is the operator of this service also able to access the links?

If yes, then right away this claim is not true and merits caution: the random unknown owner of this service can now harvest links which were deemed sensitive enough to merit a password to access.

> I think it is an interesting idea that scammers intentionally make typos and absurdities, just to weed out discerning people in favor of easier victims

This is an apocryphal anecdote or theory that gets passed around, but I'm not sure how true it actually is, and certainly not universally true. In that, I think scammers are way more likely to just make typos than to setup an elaborate low-level target filter. Regardless, I've also never actually seen scammers admit to this.

This scam is successful because it is predicated on the same appeal that ventures like lotteries, sweepstakes, slot machines, or giveaways have (albeit accentuated with a seemingly guaranteed win, that these other ventures don't have): the belief that you can just luck into a giant treasure chest of money by expanding minimal effort.

Broadly, this is a modern version of what's known as an advance-fee fraud, which has been around for hundreds of years - paying a small amount upfront (hence the 'advance fee') under pretense of receiving a much larger amount later.

ah yes, passed around countless txtfilez in the '90s...

http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CALLATT.... http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CCF.TXT

Here's the America's Most Wanted segment about the guy, James Clark, from 1988:

https://youtu.be/e56gA8NBXuQ?t=1204

> Imagine supporting the 2nd most popular language in the world. CRAZY right?

Why are you fixating on supporting the 2nd most popular language, shouldn't it support the 1st most popular language first? Or why not jump straight to the 3rd?

> The UX was not great... not to mention that it was mostly in Korean. I had a lot of trouble. They didn't strike me as the most professional operation..

What does the seemingly very common-sense fact that a South Korean app was "mostly"(?) in Korean have to do with the UX or with it not being "professional"?

What language were you expecting the South Korean app to be in, French?

> it's completely free open access

Why are the PDFs individually watermarked?

It seems antithetical to the spirit of releasing a book about Tor and "future of privacy", and to then not only watermark each PDF, but to not explicitly state that this is the case, let alone explain why.

> This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea applies to so much more – basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary.

I think it's one of the major failures of the education system. Why is there no class in school which covers taxes, savings, budgeting, etc? People are seemingly just expected to know this on their own.

If you believe this, you presumably also believe that companies should be able to enforce this, yes? Which means what, hiring private investigators (or having an in-house investigations team) to monitor employees after business hours? So you either support surveilling staff after-hours, or you think the policy merits existing but doesn't merit follow-through and enforcement?

> FWIW most airports I’ve visited have a staff canteen that’s actually open to everyone, albeit hidden.

Could you please list which airports you've been to have this, and where it is located in them?

It's not that I doubt airports have staff canteens, it's more that I have trouble believing anyone can just waltz into them. And a casual web search brings up only results about one airport actually having one open to the public.

> Why does a plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich cost $15

Because people keep paying for them.

The fault of price gouging lies firmly with consumers. If consumers are willing to tolerate ridiculous prices, then guess what, vendors are going to keep charging ever-higher ridiculous prices. Why in the world would they not?

If no one, or at least much fewer, people were willing to shell out $15 for a sandwich, then that sandwich would not cost $15.

If you're going to be hungry, bring food with you to the airport. If you don't want to deal with being hassled while going through security about it, then eat it before you go through security. It's very simple.

Sure there are always going to be exceptions--flight delays, you're running late, your kids' blood sugar is dipping, etc, but if you adhere to this very basic principle more often than not, sandwich prices will go down.

Except there's no evidence that they don't guard sensitive personal data other than an unsubstantiated post.

I feel conflicted whenever I see a comment like this.

On the one hand, let's assume it's true: a Paytm employee acted negligently.

But on the other hand, what if it's not true? What if you happen to have a friend or family member who works for a Paytm competitor, or you have some grudge against Paytm for whatever reason, and are instead spreading low-key FUD about the company to make it seem like they have lax data controls and staff disregard for sensitive data?

The issue is that there doesn't really seem to be a way to substantiate your anecdote.

> But nope, they pretty much say: "We know you're skilled because we have requirement of 90k/year, but we don't want skilled workers to be able to stay here, because go somewhere else". Well, ok, Iceland..

Correct. It's not a difficult concept to grasp, especially as they are being very overt about it. They don't want foreigners settling into their country. They want foreigners coming in for a short time, pumping money into it, then buggering off.

> $80k/year is rich?

Yes.

> That’s less than the median household income in a half-dozen states.

That's nice. Can you guess how many states there are in the world?

The fact that you're using the claim that a minority percentage in a single country makes a large amount of money as an argument for the claim that an 80.000 salary is not rich, is ironically a stereotypically American myopic outlook at the world.

Correct. It is very explicitly targeting tourists who want to stay for more than 90 days, up to 180 days. Basically this is a convoluted method of extending tourism to rich tourists for a longer (specifically, a double) period of time to have them pump more of their money into the country. That's all.