We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Mille grazie to Roger de Hauteville, the Norman King of Sicily (recent photo on the right) for his change-of-pace morning links while I was away. Much more clever and fun to read than mine are.
President Trump sees Honduras as “a distressed property” that will become “the jewel of Latin America after it gets the Trump treatment,” according to a new brochure release by the White House to attract investment partners to the new property, tentatively dubbed Trump-Rico International. “The Trump Organization will create a luxury experience delivering a sense of style with unrivaled customer service — a real boutique nation for the discriminating resident or traveler.”
“Last night, I was sitting on the sofa watching TV, when I heard my wife in the kitchen ask: ‘What would you like for dinner, sweetheart: chicken, beef or lamb?’”
“I think I’d like chicken, dear,” I replied.
“You’re having soup, numbnuts. I was talking to the dog.”
Prof. Gelernter: "For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful..."
That means Situation Abnormal All F-ed Up. Things generally go OK for us. When I got home, learned my office phone had been out for 12 days. Not good. And more.
If any readers care, when I get reorganized here I will post some photos from my reconstituted HQ and after a semi-catastrophic (4 days in Italian government hospital for Mrs. BD, but then 6 days buzzing all around the environs of southern Tuscany with our great VW were pretty fun using an elegant villa in the countryside outside Montepulciano as our base). Good food, still lost 5 lbs which I did not need to lose.
It's a long story, but, in brief, due to the accidental stay in the hospital in Ostia, we made a wonderful new friend of a lovely young Slovenian gal who speaks 8 languages fluently, I got to spend 5 hours wandering around Ostia Antiqua, spent a day on the Lido in Ostia, and hopped the train to spend a day urban-hiking Rome which reminded me of how much I dislike that city. I can say that 5 days in an ordinary Italian suburb, no tourists, was a cultural education than few if any Americans could get. I was an alien.
Also learned that I need to update my Civil War-era iphone.
A lengthy interview with many good moments. Listen while cleaning a closet or something. It will save you the trouble of reading their book. Peterson does the interview but he properly keeps himself out of it and lets them talk.
3:1 Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
3:2 For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle.
3:3 If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies.
3:4 Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs.
3:5 So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!
:6 And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell.
3:7 For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species,
3:8 but no one can tame the tongue--a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
3:9 With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.
3:10 From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.
3:11 Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water?
3:12 Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.
Usually, when we speak of financial news, we're referring to central bank machinations and Wall Street piracy and great big old honking government budget contortions and hedge fund rapacity and interest rate shenanigans and so forth. That's great, because talking about the monetary policy of your next door neighbors on the evening news could get boring. "Well, Stefanie, we see a period of instability in cross-border money transfers for the foreseeable future. Ms. Howard maxed out the Discover card on those super-cute Louboutins I was telling you about during the break, and Mr. Howard, oh dear, has been to the strip club again, so I don't see them going to Sandals this winter. Now the weather..."
Actually, that might be more interesting than watching the evening news to determine whether you're flush or flushed in the spondulicks department. The same news is reported as all bad or all good depending on who's in the White House. "We're seeing negative unemployment rates this month, as more Americans are retiring after successful IPOs on their javascript empires before they're old enough to get their first job, and the Fed is continuing to hold interest rates at zero because nobody needs any money. However, our Aye-Team investigative reporters have discovered that one of those buckets at the gas pump at the Sheetz in Fishkill, you know, the ones with the filthy water and the squeegee? Well, it was almost empty, and the clerk behind the counter was unsure when he'd be able to refill it. As of this moment, it's unclear how long the monster in the White House can survive after news like this gets out."
Well, I don't have time to scrape all your data from your Facebook pages to see how your personal finances are going, so going personal in the financial news isn't practical for me. And I would never peek in your windows to see how you're doing, but hey Ted, you should really tell your wife to stop undressing in front of the home security camera with the default password still on it. No reason. But let's at least take a Saturday look around the internet to see how we're doing in general, shall we?
Most economists and analysts tend to support the narrative that real income growth hasn’t increased enough for median Americans. Since the top 1% and 10% have seen their income and wealth increase, if real median incomes are flat lining, it’s a problem. As we mentioned in a previous article, if you look at real median income per person instead of per household, it looks better because households have shrunk.
My household has shrunk, too. My wife keeps wallpapering and the walls are getting closer.
The company produces frozen ready meals and since it was set up in 2014 has had just one profit-making year in 2016-17 when it made €400,000. Projected losses for year end 2019 are €2.6m and the parent company is no longer prepared to support it, the company's petition to the court states.
Oh dear. No ready meals in Ireland. This sounds vaguely familiar. The company was obviously poorly run, though. Look, they made a profit one year. Any Musk could tell you that's not how to run a company.
Unless you’re “independently wealthy,” you probably don’t have enough money to open a small press bookstore or artist-run space, which means you’ll probably have to be a non-profit, which is almost guaranteed to be a terrible idea for a number of reasons. Sure, people will get excited at first and want to give you their tax-deductible dollars. Or maybe you’ll win some big prize to help you get started. We did. We won a $10,000 community art grant.
I don't see the problem. They wanted a non-profit, and that's what they got.
Despite decades of research on materialism, there are few viable strategies for reducing materialism in younger consumers. In this paper, we present two studies conducted among over 900 adolescents that reveal a promising strategy for decreasing materialism: fostering gratitude. In Study 1, results from a nationally representative survey showed that children and adolescents with a grateful disposition were less materialistic.
Gratitude? For adolescents, Halloween now lasts for three months, while Thanksgiving consists of texting all day while your stepfather watches football and your mother orders takeout Chinese. Do the math.
A government computer system that interacts with HealthCare.gov was
hacked earlier this month, compromising the sensitive personal data of
some 75,000 people, officials said Friday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made the
announcement late in the afternoon ahead of a weekend, a time slot
agencies often use to release unfavorable developments.
Hmm. This article is unconcerned about HealthCare.gov data collection and an ensuing security breach, but doesn't like the timing of the announcement. Oh, and one of the squeegee buckets at the Sheetz is nearly empty.
Ride-hail giant Lyft just dropped $100,000 to fight Proposition C, the ballot measure that would tax rich corporations to house 4,000 homeless San Franciscans. Yes, you heard that right: Lyft, not Uber, is pushing back against “Our City, Our Home” in a big way, On Guard has confirmed. It’s perhaps strange for a company whose CEO bragged to TIME Magazine in 2017 that his company is “woke,” and especially odd since the often-vilified Uber, which has weathered myriad recent scandals, confirmed to On Guard they’re not planning on donating for or against Proposition C.
I hope the tax money goes to fund $10,000 community art grants to help the homeless open non-profit, small press/artist-run spaces of their own.
Four of every 10 people who will move to Nevada this year will be from California, and most of those arriving in Reno and its suburbs are from the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with that human stampede have come rising home prices and rents - as well as rising anxiety for those living on the margins."We're not worried with keeping up with the Joneses," said Dave Frazier, who lives in one of the old motor lodges. "We just want to keep a roof over our head."
If they get evicted, they can always take an Uber to San Francisco and vote for a homeless tax on Lyft.
Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon took to the decks at a top New York nightclub just three days after the suicide of his former assistant, who was accused of stealing more than $1m of fine wine from the CEO.
I once played an Aerosmith record on my mom's stereo the day after my goldfish died. I still feel pretty bad about it.
RevPAR is the product of the hotel’s average daily room rate multiplied by its occupancy rate. It’s the most important ratio in the hotel industry. The hotel workers hours worked total also appears to have hit a plateau. STR, which measures the hotel industry, pre-announced growth of 0% to -2% in September. If this cycle is consistent with the last one, the economy would already be in a recession. However, it could just be a weak month which doesn’t mean anything for the broader economy.
I had no idea things had gotten this bad. The United States is apparently running out of Patels. Gentlemen, our country can't afford a Patel gap.
Los Angeles County's typhus outbreak, which began in the summer, has expanded to as many as 92 cases, including 20 in Pasadena and a possible 18 in Long Beach, where five were still under investigation by the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services. The average number of typhus cases the county sees in a year is 60, which itself has doubled in recent years, according to the Los Angeles County Health Department. City officials recently declared downtown's skid row — roughly 54 square blocks where more than 4,000 homeless congregate — a "typhus zone."
"So if the stock continues to go down, based on these kids that play with computers and somebody else's money, we are going to buy back stock. We are going to screw these guys so badly that I don't believe that they will be able to only resign. They will have to commit suicide. So we are going to screw these guys so badly that it will be fun to watch. That will be my first priority other than the two top priorities of finishing HBI and paying down debt."
The CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs forgot to mention the lamentations of the Goldman women, but other than that, a fine, Muskish tirade. I bet that shortselling Goldman employee won't be deejaying anytime soon after that verbal beating. In other news, Cleveland-Cliffs Initiates Dividend, Expect More Upside
I hope you have a great Saturday everyone, with very few lamentations around your hopefully typhus-free home!
Dr. Newman with his crooked pince-nez Had studied in Vienna and Chicago. Chess was his only relaxation. And Dr. Newman remained unperturbed By every nastier manifestation Of pluto-democratic civilization: All that was cranky, corny, ill-behaved, Unnecessary, askew or orgiastic Would creep unbidden to his side door (hidden Behind a poster in the Tube station Nearly half-way up the moving stairs), Push its way in, the squat there undisturbed Among the box files and tubular steel chairs. H was once seen at the Philharmonic Hall Seeing the reactions of two patients, With pronounced paranaoic tendencies, To old Dutch music. He appeared to recall A tin of lozenges in his breast pocket, Put his hand confidently in - And drew out a black imp, or sooterkin, Six inches long, with one ear upside-down, Licking at an ice-cream corner - Then put it back again with a slight frown.
That's the title of this post, but I do not mean to restrict this little discussion to the workplace. The issue is that, wherever men and women congregate regularly, "chemical" attractions occur commonly.
These of course range from very mild to intense. It is difficult for people to focus on what they intend to do when there is a powerful attraction to a nice person of the opposite sex who is in regular proximity and contact. I have had people say to me "Is there anything you can do to help me get rid of this crush on so and so? It's messing up my workout/job/tennis game, etc."
A colleague and I were talking about this recently, and he (jokingly) suggested that people in that situation should just jump into bed together and eliminate the romantic/sexual tension and eliminate the mystery. "Get it over with. It's just biology." And of course their are rules about these things in the workplace.
In my view, such things are not necessarily a sign that a person is in a lousy relationship. Could be, but humans are designed to experience these things.
If a close friend confesses to you that some guy or gal at work or somewhere else is driving them nuts with desire, what would you say to them? Would you say"Grow up!"?
About a year ago our niece had a child. Shortly afterward, my in-laws felt it was time to go meet their great-grandchild. It became a family event. 5 of us flew from various locations to Arizona. We rented a van and took the 8 week old on her first grand family adventure, spending a weekend traveling through Sedona, up to Williams, and riding the Grand Canyon Railroad up to see the big hole in the ground.
A friend of mine recently posted a picture on Facebook of an old church in Europe, commenting "I wish we had old things like this here in the U.S." My tongue-in-cheek reply was "We do! The Grand Canyon is much, much older." In many ways, the Grand Canyon is much more beautiful than a church or any architecture man could devise.
I had never been to the Grand Canyon before. I can't say anything which hasn't already been said about its grandeur. I'll toss in a few pictures of Sedona and the Grand Canyon, but the reality is pictures simply can't capture the immensity and beauty.
We were on the South Rim, about mid-point of the canyon. It's 18 miles across at this location, and the North Rim is higher than the South Rim, so you look 'up' at the far side. Nowadays, there is no private property in the area, except for whatever was grandfathered in when the park was created. At this location, the El Tovar Hotel is right on the rim. We didn't stay, but it is a beautiful hotel if you enjoy the look of rustic West (I do).
The Grand Canyon Railroad is a fun way to get to there, especially if you're a family with kids. You don't get much time at the canyon itself, about 3 1/2 hours. However, you don't have to drive, you get to take in the scenery, the kids interact with cowboys and there is a train robbery on the ride home. It leaves at 9:15 am from Williams, Arizona (the last town bypassed by Interstate 40, and a town chock full of Route 66 memorabilia) and arrives at the canyon around 11:30. A tour guide gives a running commentary as cowboys stroll up and down the train strumming guitars and singing tunes for tips. There are a variety of vistas which are passed. High plains, forest, ranch, and mountains are all part of the two and a half hour trip. We saw elk, antelope, and jackrabbit galore.
I really enjoyed this trip, and there's so much to see I am inspired to return. I doubt I'd do the railroad again, and I'd like to see the canyon from several different places. I'd also like to go down into it, which I didn't have time to do. Always leave something for the next time. That's pretty much my motto when I travel.
The left has a pantheon of go-to authorities for this and that that I find amusing. In any setting where real work is performed, these dangerous intellectuals would be getting everyone else coffee, and getting the coffee order wrong, too. They'd be unable to give you correct change for their encore. The media takes the easy out, every time, by selecting someone from this Mount Rushmore of lamebrain notoriety to opine on the issues of the day, be it Krugman, or Bill Nye, or the knucklehead with the vendetta against Pluto, I forget his name. You know all their names if you watch TV. They once asked Krugman, the king of this empire of ill-formed opinion, what he thought of the internet. That's an accurate quote from the guy.
It's a ridiculous opinion, which is his stock in trade, I gather. It gets floated endlessly across the internet, and I saw it all over the place this week while looking for Maggie's Farm links. This opinion held him up to ridicule so badly that he got internet fellow travelers like the Snopes dissemblers to explain that he was just joking, or stirring the pot, or performing a thought experiment that the uncool couldn't grok. In short, he admitted he was wrong, without admitting he was wrong, of course.
Look, I'm not arguing that Paul Krugman isn't a rantipole, addlepated, intellectually stunted jerkwad hack, or that his mother doesn't dress him funny. I'll leave that to others. What I'm saying is that it's funny that he disowned this comment, because it's the only time he was on the right track with his opinions. The quote gets posted on the internet as prima facie evidence that Krugman is a fool, as if no further exposition is necessary. That's because the average internaut has no idea how profoundly the fax machine, and technology like it, changed the economy.
Posting this little quote is a form of begging the question. No, we don't all know reflexively that fax machines never mattered much, and the internet is everything. I stood in front of a teletype machine taking orders in the past, and slit open envelopes with mail orders from Fortune 500 purchasing agents, so believe you me, I know that fax machines transformed business. Many businesses in many parts of the world still use fax machines today as a primary form of business communication.
Google stole the Yellow Pages, Facebook stole magazine ads, Craigslist took over newspaper classifieds, Amazon got the Sears catalog, and Shopify is just a bunch of Fingerhut catalogs. Most other internet businesses are just unintentional Ponzi schemes who haven't run out of seed money or IPO cash yet. The fax machine soldiers on in the corner. So I say Krugman was almost right, for once in his life, and then immediately disowned his own comment, keeping his batting average at a thousand.
I was crawling along the bottom of the lake on my arms and knees, looking for stones to skim, when my hand and knee felt something long and hard buried in the clay and sand. I pulled it out and saw that it was different from the sticks or rocks I usually find. One end had a point, and the other had a handle, so I pointed it up to the sky, put my other hand on my hip and called out, “Daddy, I’ve found a sword!”
A charming story, but no, it doesn't make you the Queen. The guy you handed the sword to, however...
Wear Space is, for lack of a better description, like equine blinkers for humans. The strip of flexible material wraps around the back of the head and covers the side of the eyes, blocking up to 60 percent of a wearer’s peripheral vision, Panasonic says. Think of it as a sign for potential bothersome coworkers that broadcasts, “I’m busy.”
Millennials will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that they're wrong about anything, including cubicles, which were a fine way to balance privacy and office camaraderie.
In Chengdu, there is reportedly an ambitious plan afoot for replacing the city’s streetlights: boosting the glow of the real moon with that of a more powerful fake one. The south-western Chinese city plans to launch an illumination satellite in 2020. According to an account in the People’s Daily, the artificial moon is “designed to complement the moon at night”, though it would be eight times as bright.
I'm not sure if I'll trust this to replace streetlights until Paul Krugman weighs in.
Small talk outside social situations between close friends is virtually non-existent. Interactions with baristas? Limited to the name of the coffee you want to order. Sitting, walking or standing in a way that requires acknowledging a stranger’s presence? Never. (A meme featuring people standing outside a bus shelter rather than under it is an often-posted joke in Finland to illustrate this point.) If you’re a foreigner, congratulations – you’re probably the loudest person on their often (voluntarily) silent public transport.
What is it with these phlegmatic Finns? What is it with these female writers and parentheses?
SolarWinds, notably, has strong operating profit and EBITDA results but loses money on a net basis due to some exotic-ish expenses (“Unrealized net transaction gains (losses) related to remeasurement of intercompany loans”), and the cost of its debt. SolarWinds is carrying billions in debt, which drags its healthy business into a bucket of red ink.
There are parentheses inside of other parentheses in this article. What is it with these male writers always trying to one-up the girls? Oh, and that balance sheet is a mess, so I bet Krugman would love it.
At least 600 "highly skilled" roles will be added in Manchester working on software, machine learning and AWS, its cloud computing business. The company will also create 250 and 180 jobs at its development centres in Edinburgh and Cambridge respectively. Doug Gurr, Amazon's UK country manager, described the new roles as "Silicon Valley jobs in Britain".
Paul Krugman's head will explode while trying to explain this news while still blaming both Donald Trump and Brexit for all the world's ills.
Jane VC, a new venture fund based out of Cleveland and London wants entrepreneurs to cold email them. Send them your pitch, no wealthy or successful intermediary necessary. The fund, which has so far raised $2 million to invest between $25,000 and $150,000 in early-stage female-founded companies across industries, is scrapping the opaque, inaccessible model of VC that’s been less than favorable toward women.
Maybe abject discrimination against males of the species can produce another Ginni Rometty!
The growth of internet access around the world has slowed dramatically, according to new data, suggesting the digital revolution will remain a distant dream for billions of the poorest and most isolated people on the planet. The striking trend, described in an unpublished report shared with the Guardian, shows the rate at which the world is getting online has fallen sharply since 2015, with women and the rural poor substantially excluded from education, business and other opportunities the internet can provide.
As usual, women, minorities, and Paul Krugman hardest hit.
Palantir, the hyper-secretive data-mining company founded by Trump homie Peter Thiel and C.E.O. Alex Karp, is almost as mysterious as the clients it works for. Started in 2003 and with seed money from the C.I.A., Palantir has developed a suite of surveillance technologies that have reportedly been used by the military to hunt down Osama bin Laden, to avoid roadside bombs, and by police departments to predict crimes before they happen.
Well, everyone at the FBI and the CIA is too busy ghostwriting articles at the New York Times to get any work done, so they had to sub it out.
“If aliens are so likely, why have we never seen any?” That is the Fermi Paradox—named after Enrico Fermi, a physicist who posed it in 1950. Fermi’s argument ran as follows. The laws of nature supported the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Those laws are the same throughout the universe. The universe contains zillions of stars and planets. So, even if life is unlikely to arise on any particular astronomical body, the sheer abundance of creation suggests the night sky should be full of alien civilisations. Fermi wondered why aliens had never visited Earth.
Please notice that Fermi followers never circle back to question their begged question: If aliens are so likely... Says who?
A lesser-known aspect of Sears’ 125-year history, however, is how the company revolutionized rural black southerners’ shopping patterns in the late 19th century, subverting racial hierarchies by allowing them to make purchases by mail or over the phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.
That's funny. The internet shopping experience that replaced mail order catalogs lets advertisers discriminate by age, sex, and race when they decide who will see their ads. In order to promote racial equality, I demand that we immediately replace internet shopping with mail order catalogs and fax machine ordering. Who's with me? Besides Krugman, I mean.
Now fax in your comments, and have a great Friday!
For some reason, New York is upset that it pays 30% more, per capita, in taxes than the average state. Well, I'm from New Jersey and we pay slightly more than New York. New York is upset that it gets back much less than it pays out. Again, I'm from New Jersey and we get even less back.
New York is a big state, and a relatively wealthy one. New Jersey is wealthier. I figure we have more to be upset about.
Theirs is not an effort to raise boys into men who can integrate into a kinder, gentler future economy of helping professions and easily expressed feelings. It is an effort to overcome maleness itself. And it is an admission of failure, because when boys fail to grow into civilized men, everyone suffers, just as they do when women are denied equal opportunity. The answer isn’t reeducation in radical feminist notions of men’s innately violent natures. It’s raising boys and girls to treat one another with respect and to uphold gender-free values such as the presumption of innocence and due process and equal opportunity. Civil society relies on due process not only because it’s an objective good (though it is). Everyone should embrace both due process and the presumption of innocence because everyone might need these themselves one day, regardless of his or her gender.
If a problem is very important, then setting back the cause is very bad. If a problem is so neglected that you’re among the first focused on it, then you’ll have a disproportionate influence on the field’s reputation, how likely others are to enter it, and many early decisions that could have path-dependent effects on the field’s long-term success.
A long read but somewhat interesting. It makes one major error early: "Few people persist [in]doing actions that are obviously harmful ..." This assumes facts not in evidence, your honor. And your grammar is subtly atrocious.
The beauty of Android is that it’s easily customizable. On Apple’s iOS, one can’t even change the default browser. On Android, it’s a matter of a few clicks. Most alternative browsers work just as well as Chrome and aren’t as demanding of a device’s resources. Some are designed to keep data collection about the user to a bare minimum.
Ah, the internet. You can be Amish, or you can be famous. Take your pick.
While I have no interest in leaving my iPhone, when it comes to the computers in the house I am very interested in moving away from Apple. I am currently upgrading the home computer setup and while the MacBook will last a number of years yet, when the upgrade is eventually due I won’t be going with Apple next time around.
It's a testament to the mindset that this announcement is proffered like it's earthshaking news.
The manufacturing analysts who spent 6,600 hours inside a warehouse north of Detroit picking apart a Model 3 have good news and bad news for Tesla Inc. The company now boasts the best technology of any electric car, with potential profit margins that would be the envy of most automakers. But Tesla is squandering that edge with wasted expenses linked to poor design and bloated manufacturing.
I filed this one under: If only Comrade Stalin knew!
General Motors' self-driving vehicle unit, GM Cruise, is running neck-and-neck with Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, to be first to deploy fully autonomous cars for public use, likely as ride sharing. GM said it will do it next year. San Francisco is the proving grounds to refine the technology. But that race is facing resistance as some people fear losing the freedom of personal car ownership and want to have control of their own mobility. They distrust autonomous technology and they worry about the loss of privacy.
Who are we to argue with a generation of balding toddlers who want to ride in the back seat while playing with their speak and spell long after mom's kicked the can?
The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that the United States will be withdrawing from the U.N. agency that oversees postal rates around the world out of frustration with the discounts given to China and some other countries that allow them to ship products to America at cheaper rates than those paid by U.S. companies to ship domestically.
It's almost like the President is pro-American or something. It confuses a lot of people. Not used to it.
BEC is a sophisticated scamming technique that often makes use of the popular type of social engineering attack called phishing. In phishing attacks, a scammer disguises as a trusted entity in order to trick the victim into clicking on a malicious link usually included in an email or SMS and allow the attacker unauthorized access to sensitive data like financial and payment information.
These are always described as "sophisticated" scams. They're not. Telling a dullard clerk to click on stuff that looks vaguely like a bill is hardly Ocean's Eleven.
When Harvard University admitted several applicants tied to influential donors in 2013, including one who had promised to pay for a building, the Kennedy School dean fired off an e-mail calling the head of admissions “my hero.” “Once again you have done wonders. I am simply thrilled by all the folks you were able to admit,” David T. Ellwood, who then headed up the university’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote to William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions.
Thornton Mellon says been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Poland’s government has allied with Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, has courted confrontation with Brussels as part of what he calls a “national liberation struggle” against globalisation and the liberal ideas of the EU. PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has said Poland is following Orban’s example. Both states have railed against internationalist left-wingers and courted nationalist leaders such as Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Alternate title: Three millennial women wonder aloud why Poland doesn't just do whatever Germany wants it to. Yeah, it's a mystery, gals.
The U.S. beat off Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, the other top four markets, with a score of 85.6 out of 100, the report said, due to its “vibrant” entrepreneurial culture and “strong” labor market and financial system. The World Economic Forum, the same organization that runs the Davos meeting of global powerbrokers each January, bases its rankings of 140 economies on a dozen drivers of competitiveness, including a country’s institutions and the policies that help drive productivity.
Unfortunate choice of words there, Katanga. Anyway, can anyone recall some problem that appeared in 2008, that's not extant now? I'm drawing a blank, but something has changed. It's a mystery.
I am not the first to conflate drama and history. Yet Twelve O’Clock High fascinates me precisely because it looks back at a World War II past that was scarcely past when the film was made. The strategic world of the Eighth Air Force that the movie recreates—massive formations of heavy bombers fighting their way to targets—was obsolete by 1949, but the filmmakers arrived in time to achieve authenticity on a budget. The Air Force put a dozen battered but still-flying B-17s (with U.S. Air Force crews) at the disposal of 20th Century Fox. The service also supplied World War II surplus flight gear (including many sought-after A-2 leather flying jackets later reported “lost” by the actors), a technical advisor at no fee, and several hundred airmen as volunteer extras. The studio acquired a surplus B-17 for the crash scene, paying stunt pilot Paul Mantz $2,500—about $26,000 in today’s money—to execute a wheels-up emergency landing for the cameras.
They got all that stuff from the military because Hollywood wasn't unanimously anti-American yet.
Leaders within the Constantinople Patriarchate, historically the most influential center of the global Orthodox Church, recently took several administrative steps toward granting ecclesiastical independence — also known as autocephaly — to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is currently under the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. The move comes after years of increasing tension in Ukraine over the status of its church in the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
Why, this almost sounds like a church making a political, not an ecclesiastical decision. Does Putin want to behead a couple of wives or something?
Mille grazie to Roger de Hauteville, the Norman King of Sicily (recent photo on the right) for his change-of-pace morning links while I was away. Much more clever and fun to read than mine are.
Lots of 
