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mrmcd

Previous reporting on this (when the JPM civil suit was filed) mentioned that JPM didn't care about the fafsa forms business at all. They bought them entirely to get a big pile of marketing leads to sign up young people for banking services early in their adult life before they're signed up with other banks, through a brand they're already familiar with. Considering how many "$200 to open a new checking account!!" junk mail fliers Chase sends me, $41/lead must've seemed like a bargain.

She probably thought they would just be subsumed into a massive corporation, that JPM had shitty metrics and monitoring on their marketing campaign, and nobody would notice most of their emails were going nowhere.

Right. GE is $100/5 years. So, might as well pay the extra $3/yr for faster passport lines too.
Just pay the government a $100 bribe^W 'application processing fee' for Precheck or Global Entry, and no more taking off your shoes. Or taking out your laptops or liquids, or having a government employee look you over in the nudie scanner. Also, shorter, faster lines.

But all this is actually necessary and not security theater. We promise.

Re:YouTube removed 3.9M dislikes for White House on Thursday June 24, 2021 @02:47PM (#27622147)
This guy also has a bunch of posts on the same site denying climate change and rehashing conspiracy theories about fraudulent votes for Biden. I wouldn't take anything he says very seriously.
Re:Seasteading Creates RPG on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @07:25PM (#27442379)
Yes, but more likely the major naval powers would just ignore you unless you were doing something that specifically angered them (fugitives, human trafficking, piracy, etc).

Otherwise I think they'd be happy to let you sit there on your leaky little scurvy raft in international waters as long as you want. Piracy is a much bigger problem if you have anything valuable and aren't just sea hobos, but it's more likely the weather is gonna mess you up first.

It cost me $10k to mod the battery on my phone, but now I won't have to charge it again for over 5,000 years.
The degree to which HN is obsessed with AMP is hilarious at times. You'd think every single one of the 100k engineers that work there do nothing but dream up ways to trick people into using AMP for some secret illuminati end goal.

If you don't like AMP, that's fine. If you don't like this UX change that's fine too (and I suspect will be easily fixed with an extension). But maybe consider for a moment that not every single UX change to a product with a billion users is part of the vast AMPiracy.

> I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country.

In the EU, there is a lot of prejudice against Turkish people because of the decades of immigration. Think of how most Americans stereotype Mexico and Mexican people, and that's roughly how many people in the EU regard Turkey.

In the US people don't really know anything about Turkey, aside from a vague idea that it's "middle eastern". Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of Americans think Turkey is all deserts and they speak Arabic.

Re:Hacking GitHub's Auth with Unicode's Turkish Dotless 'I' on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:31PM (#21816866)
My girlfriend is from Turkey, and I shared this story with her a while back (I discovered it while also researching some Unicode collision issues.) She said that while it's an entertaining story, there's almost certainly a bit of sensationalism and exaggeration from the Turkish press combined with credulity by English language journalists when re-reporting it. Basically, the supposed texts wouldn't have made sense in terms of grammar and syntax with a straightforward dotless/dotted I swap, and would've been obvious to someone fluent in Turkish what happened. This is would've been especially true if you had had this cell phone for any amount of time and communicating in Turkish and it had been routinely swapping Is.

More likely is a bunch of young and/or not too bright people were looking for a reason to get into a violent confrontation. Then the muckraking Turkish press had a sensationalist murder-suicide lovers quarrel story, and as a bonus a nationalistic "see how cell phone companies don't respect our culture" angle as the cherry on top.

However, you should still ALWAYS be careful when converting between character sets and be locality aware when manipulating strings. Practice string safety. ;)

In other words every actual payment company didn't want to get a colonoscopy from every regulator on Earth for Zuck's Spruce Goose hobby.
Re:Amazon reveals private Alexa voice data files on Saturday December 22, 2018 @11:25AM (#18741180)
Google Home stores everything after the hotword trigger until the light goes off (you stop speaking).

Each action has a card that explains what triggered it, what device, and what result was given, and you can listen to it. You can also turn recording storage off entirely, or delete by device or date ranges.

Honestly the only bad part is it's buried several layers down in the options and account activity, where most people don't go looking. If you do care though the privacy options and controls are pretty good.

Re:Google Plans Large New York City Expansion on Wednesday November 07, 2018 @08:07PM (#18403657)
There's 8.6 million people in the NYC legal limits, over 20 million in it's greater metro, and a way more diverse economy. You'd need waaaaay more tech to get anywhere close to SV, which just isn't that big population wise.
> But they’re way behind, need to spend tens of billions to have a competitive global cloud infrastructure, and have a much more severe customer problem than IBM: their customers hate them

Had a good, long laugh at that one. Jesus, is there anyone on this planet that doesn't regard Oracle as the corporate equivalent of a slimy, violent mob boss?

Or more accurately, a JP Morgan customer bought a Bitcoin ETN.
Unrealized capital gains aren't income because I can't pay my rent and buy groceries with Amazon stock. Even if I could once I did it would be realized same as if I sold it for cash, and I'd owe tax.

You could argue that capital gains rates are too low, but that's a different argument than saying stock owners are getting "invisible income".

"The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only laws that apply in Australia is the law of Australia."

Numbers aren't real in the KANGA Kingdom! Lalalalala I CAN'T HEAR YOU!

Oh boy, a "travel voucher" that likely has so many restrictions it's worth 1/10th the actual number printed on it.

I'm not gonna hold my breath these people will actually offer cash.

Re:I'm a creep. I'm sorry on Saturday July 01, 2017 @11:02PM (#14680634)
I wish there was a way to give imaginary internet upvote points to all the people who didn't act like harassing shitheads, but I guess we're stuck with giving them to this asshole, who whines about "this isn't who I am!" and "I invested in so many of my LGBTQ friends!" months or years afterwords when finally called out on it.
Re:Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble on Sunday June 25, 2017 @11:25AM (#14630418)
The terms of the loan we're really, really unfavorable. They essentially pledged every piece of IP they have to get the loan. It's not the kind of loan you take if your company is healthy and has easy access to financing.
Re:A Facebook bot purge clobbered USA Today on Sunday April 23, 2017 @11:32AM (#14178538)
Instead of crazy conspiracy theories, how about this: USA Today isn't actually that popular, but some botnet programmer with an imperfect understanding of American culture thought it was a brand ordinary Americans all love and read regularly. So they were all instructed to follow their page in an attempt to make the bots look legit.
Re:SeedRamp on Friday March 04, 2016 @02:29PM (#11226262)
So you are literally selling them futures on your next preferred series, except if the valuation comes in below the cap, then they get extra stock, so there's no downside for them except total equity wipe-out.

Why do I feel like this is a leading indicator of imminent bubble collapse?

Re:A band you can book via GitHub pull request on Monday February 22, 2016 @12:29PM (#11152540)
Yes, but, what if I wanted to get the blockchain involved somehow?
Re:A band you can book via GitHub pull request on Monday February 22, 2016 @12:28PM (#11152519)
oh... it's a "PR" stunt is it?
Re:How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls on Friday February 19, 2016 @01:18PM (#11135313)
Did you read the article. It talks about how that trick no longer works on a lot of sites because they are now checking User-Agent strings too.
Re:Trying to interview Larry Page on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @04:31PM (#10983595)
I assume the NYT headline was a reference to a few years back when Page was talking about how great Glass was and by way of comparison described looking down at a phone screen as "emasculating".

I assume he (Page) was just meant that using a phone a lot felt awkward and took your attention away from the rest of the world around you, but made a poor word choice while improvising in front of an audience. The tech press had a little tisk tisk field day about though, especially since this was well past the point where Glass was looking like a silly boondogle.

In most newspapers though, someone besides the author writes the headline for an article, so I'm assuming whoever wrote this one for the NYT thought they were being clever here in referencing that faux pas.

edit: Just checked it was actually Brin who said the emasculating thing, so who the fuck knows what the headline writer was thinking. Maybe they remembered wrong too.

Re:Is serotonin the happy brain chemical? on Tuesday January 26, 2016 @10:39AM (#10973906)
I can't speak for MDMA, but I have experimented (ok, recreated) with psilocin (shrooms), 4-ACO-DMT, and DMT, which are all serotonin agonists.

The best I can describe it is that a high enough dose feels like putting your brain into debugging mode and then cycling through hundreds of circuits simultaneously. It's not so much "I am experiencing happy now" as "I am experiencing happy, sad, confused, interested, pulsating colors, fractals, childlike wonder, fear, and every other cognitive state simultaneously or in rapid succession."

Some people get very spiritual about it, but I think you kind of have to be a spiritually inclined person anyway to have that specific experience. I always saw it more of giving the hardware a good jolt and seeing what falls out. It's pretty common to go from laughing uncontrollably, to inconsolable sadness, and back again, fairly quickly. This is where a lot of the fear about "bad trips" comes from, but I've found you can manage that with practice and having experienced people tripping with you or babysitting.

I do think there are therapeutic benefits though. Even if there are difficult periods, I find I always felt happier, more ok with the world and open to new experiences and attitudes for up to weeks after words. The article briefly mentions how there's a hypothesis that depression is possibly an effect of individuals who "over learn" negative experiences and become fixated on negative outcomes, and this makes a lot of sense to me. Aside from a sort of "purging" feeling just from such intense bursts of emotions, I could see how it helped to kind of kick me out of the traps of negative and habitual thinking and emotions. Maybe it helped my neurons "relearn" there are other experiences, emotions, and modes of thinking that I can access too?

This is all anecdotal evidence though, gathered while under severe impairment, so take it with that caveat. I would bet that aside from the legal issues, the hardest part of investigating things like psychedelics in a scientific way is that every experience is inherently subjective and personal. Trying to describe and talk about them gets very squishy very quickly.

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