u/Bjorlyn

Nonfiction Book review.

"Barragán came to the world of Nigerian scammers when his own mother was seduced over Tinder by a man purporting to be a U.S. soldier. After staging an intervention, Barragán did what any curious reporter might: He traveled to Lagos in an effort to track down the man who had broken his mother’s heart."

"What he found there, in the neighborhood of Ikotun, was not the network of master criminals that he had expected, but rather a ramshackle group of meth- and weed-addicted young men scraping Amazon gift cards and bitcoins from their victims using well-worn routines. “Most of these men weren’t master manipulators,” he writes. “They were just fulfilling unmet emotional needs, relying on repetition and recycled scripts.”

I've been thinking about the difficulty I have in forming habits, and wondering whether SDAM is related to this.

My boyfriend has a strict routine when he wakes up to go to work, and he is visibly disturbed when his habit is disrupted. I watch this with interest, because I've never created such a durable routine, and when I have created positive habits, such as walking or riding my bike, it's extremely easy for me to let them go.

Now, I have lots of bad habits, but these tend to be habits that stop me in my tracks rather than moving me forward, and mostly are addictions.

I guess that I am wondering whether the reinforcement aspect of habit formation is different for us.

Thoughts?

Abstract: "Bridging analyses of progressivist environmentalism and anthropologies of enclosure, this article introduces the idea of containability to understand the relationship between waste and race. Containability marks a realm of human-waste relations predicated on the aspirational goal of boundedness and the everyday disruptions of it. I examine these relations from the perspectives of waste collectors, recycling executives, Romani neighborhood residents, and international environmental consultants. These insights invite us to rethink the racial and material politics of environmentalism that constitute contemporary urban life."

Looking forward to a clear out!

I've survived my entire adult life without central heat and air in California's Central Valley.

Our classrooms in the 60's and early 70's had no air conditioning. Neither did my first family home. Moved out to a variety of rentals, and eventually purchased homes without a central unit.

My home was built in 1906 and constructed with care to capitalize on the climate. The design to maximize the Delta Breeze is remarkable.

I do believe my body is more forgiving of extreme heat because I have always lived this way. At 70, I do have a window unit in my bedroom so that when the temperature passes 100F I can sleep comfortably.

I get by with cold drinks, wet clothing, and a tub of water for my feet. Cool showers when it finally feels overwhelming.

You?

So I've been thinking about this for awhile as I contemplate the crazy amount of camping gear in my home and as I miss the times I spent in the great outdoors.

Are there people who would work for a short span of time to help an elderly person go camping?

Maybe there is already a service for this, and I've missed it, but... my problem is the activity unloading and reloading, of setting up a tent and a cot, and making meals. I would look for a campsite with bathrooms and a social campfire in a state park or similar. Somewhere that I could take a short walk in the woods.

Thoughts?

I appreciated the concern for aging parents reflected in this step-by-step New York Times article. They focus on carefully and kindly working with parents to protect finances.

"Ms. Tobin, 53, and her 92-year-old father, Ed Tobin, started talking about his finances about eight years ago after a national retailer announced a major customer data breach. Ms. Tobin used the news as an opportunity to ask her father if he had a credit freeze and offered to show him how to get one."

“Helping your parents in small ways builds trust and normalizes your involvement,” she said.

"Their conversations deepened in 2021 after Mr. Tobin fell for an online financial scam. After that incident, he agreed to share his account passwords with her so they could both watch for unusual transactions."

"The ways you help will increase gradually, Ms. Smith said."

Click the Open Button above to read more.

Doing some personal research on scams because I believe that there must be resources out there that can help us here in Reddit to better assist those who are experiencing scams in real time, particularly with regard to the most vulnerable people among us.

I want to share this research paper I ran across early on in my research, because it covers a broad swath of studies concerned with romance scams.

https://academic.oup.com/iwc/article/35/6/773/7331428

Tainted Love: a Systematic Literature Review of Online Romance Scam Research
Alexander Bilz , Lynsay A Shepherd , Graham I Johnson

Interacting with Computers, Volume 35, Issue 6, November 2023, Pages 773–788

I am going to Manage under the MODERATION menu on the website. Under the heading Manage Moderated Communities I am selecting the three dots to the right of the name of the subreddit. I am choosing to Leave Mod Team in the drop down menu. In the pop-up, I am choosing LEAVE. And nothing happens. Help?

I often find content that would be of interest to our new subreddit that I would like to post.

Yes, I can post the url link to the other post, but it doesn't bring up the photo or graphic content in my subreddit, which is the engaging part of the post.

I want to do two things:

1. Post the photo or graphic content.

2. Post the link to the original post and comments.

An example:

What is the etiquette around this? I don't like to "steal" someone else's photo or graphic, but I do want to highlight it and send people back to the original post.

Thoughts?

Should I post this on r/modsupport for more experienced feedback?

I recently asked myself how I somehow changed to buy less online.

When, due to disability, I stopped visiting bricks and mortar stores (including thrifts) fewer bags full of things made their way through my front door. I was finally able to remove a lot of my hoard. But online shopping took over, and even though I was able to keep my home a little less cluttered, the churning was real.

It's hard for some people to get off a shopping platform because:

• the scrolling behavior becomes so habitual,
• shopping platforms are designed to make the "buy" feel rewarding, and
• our brains process shopping with the same chemical rewards as sex, drugs, and gambling.

One solution is to replace shopping with a behavior that mimics the activity and the reward without the real-world consequences.

I wish that there were some better options for this, but here are a few suggestions.

Tell yourself and your loved ones that what you really desire are memories.

A few suggestions:

• A Pinterest board to share that curates places you would love to go and things you would love to do.
• A SIMS type game you play together where you create a virtual home and community.
• Digital scrapbooking.
• Email or text check-ins. Hoarders have years of memories with you. Write up and send one each day along with a link or photo or video.

At some point, my online shopping nearly stopped. I realize now that Reddit was part of the reason, that scrolling on Reddit to find ideas that interested me was similar to scrolling for something to buy, and the satisfaction of making a meaningful comment was far more rewarding than buying just one more thing.

Seems to me like app developers might do well to create platforms designed to reduce online shopping using these concepts, monetized with subscription fees rather than advertising.

I'm really interested to know what other ideas you might have as replacements for online shopping.

The article includes a list of links for data broker pages that were difficult to opt-out of before this action, and that also work for non-Californians.

For 575 other data brokers, use the California Privacy Protection Agency's

DROP = Delete Request and Opt-out Platform https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/

For Californians who have not yet done so, use the state government's DROP program to have the state itself handle opt-out requests for you with for the 575 data brokers currently registered with the program.

California residents can submit a single automated request to have their personal information deleted and removed from the databases of all these registered brokers.

What this means is that Californians don't have to pay for a service to remove most of their personal data from the web.

If you haven't done so, do a google search on your own name, and see what information shows up about you on the web. All those "people search" websites are a boon for scammers and unscrupulous companies that take advantage of seniors.

I am extremely unhappy that Kaiser has decided to hire people who cannot speak English to direct my health decisions. I am in full support of good immigration policy and welcoming immigrants from everywhere. I am NOT in support of hiring people who cannot effectively do the job that they were hired for.

Kaiser should be hiring fluent English speaking employees whenever possible.

Background: My mammogram appointment was cancelled because it was within a year of my last appointment. I made the appointment because I was having some unusual pain. I ended up doing what the non-English speaking person suggested, which was to go to a special breast clinic. This doesn't negate the fact that this employee was unable to explain why the shift was required, or even to express any tiny amount of empathy for my situation.

A while back I went through a series of months where I really struggled to use my phone, my tablet, my kindle, and just about everything with a touchscreen, including the check-out screens at the bank and the grocery store. Have you experienced this frustration?

After a while, my problem just disappeared.

Warmer weather brought my hands back to life. During the winter, I often need to use a stylus, because my hands are both cold and dry, and simply don't have the electrical conductivity to trigger touchscreens.

It's a problem that many seniors experience. Now when a gen-whatever rolls their eyes at me, I sometimes let them know, yeah, it really IS because I'm old that I'm so slow at some computer tasks, but not for the reason they think.

I also learned that keeping my hands moisturized really improves my touchscreen use in the winter. There's a good article about this at Medium: Touch screens don’t work for everyone!

Oh yeah, and seniors have more trouble triggering those bathroom sink sensors too. Maybe we really do become invisible!