Tag: stupid

Deadly Youtube

Killer gets 180-day sentence for YouTube stunt gone wrong

They planned on taking the Internet by storm with footage of Perez firing a gun at Ruiz, who believed that he could stop a bullet with nothing more than a hardcover book. There were a couple of issues with this plan. First, trusting a book to protect you from death, unless you’re boning up on how to make an anti-venom, is insane. Second, the pistol that Perez fired at her beau was a .50 caliber Desert Eagle. For the uninitiated, this is an insanely powerful handgun. With the right load, a round fired from it can bop through a bulletproof vest or pierce light ceramic or steel armor. In short, there was a very high probability that a book wasn’t going to cut it.

Despite this, Perez stood 30 cm away from her man and fired a single round. It went through the book! It went into him! He was killed! She got it all on tape, with not one, but 2 cameras. When Ruiz went down, she called 911 and told the operator what had happened. In December, Perez plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to 180-days in jail for the crime.

Fake news reach

fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them. Fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126k contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust.

Clean eating scams

Instagram is for dummies

The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked – but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it

and similarly for waterwater:

“Real water” should expire after a few months. His does. “It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery. If it sits around too long, it’ll turn green. People don’t even realize that because all their water’s dead, so they never see it turn green.” Mr. Singh believes that public water has been poisoned. “Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them. Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.” (There is no scientific evidence that fluoride is a mind-control drug, but plenty to show that it aids dental health.)

Amber alerts for cops

cops now want to be treated like little children. the correct response is of course to disable these annoying & useless amber alerts.

Warning people about violent suspects in their area is somewhat useful — a severe weather alert but for crime. But there’s no reason for a system like this to prioritize crimes against police officers. Adding mere threats to the mix just adds a bunch of junk info of nearly no use to the citizens on the receiving end of these alerts. At best, people will clear them from their screen as quickly as they do interloping Amber Alerts. At worst, they’ll decide to play Batman and put themselves and officers at risk by attempting to Do Something.

Stupid way to lose a fortune

You know you live in a banana republic if sending large amounts of money with a “check” is a thing.

Lorette Taylor’s father had died and left his children a large chunk of cash, which Taylor, as executor, had to divide between herself and 2 siblings. When she tried to do so, her bank said it was best to send her brother and sister bank drafts. 1 of the drafts, in the order of $846650, was destined for her brother, who hired UPS to ship it to his local store. The package never arrived.

Incompetent entrapment

if you’re a clown like james o’keefe, and you’re trying to entrap the media, perhaps use a more competent person?

Alice Crites, a Post researcher who was looking into Phillips’s background, found the document that strongly reinforced the reporters’ suspicions: a GoFundMe.com under the name Jaime Phillips. “I’m moving to New York!. I’ve accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceit of the liberal MSM. I’ll be using my skills as a researcher and fact-checker to help our movement.

The fake FB industry

how the gullible are entrapped by fake fb accounts. what works for politics works for scams too, of course.

While investigating the world of fake Facebook profiles, my colleague Marie-Eve Tremblay and I have discovered a massive network of fraudulent accounts that catfish their male victims using stolen photos of young women and adolescent girls. This is the story of the months-long investigation that allowed us to piece together the inner workings of this network of online bandits.

Peak Avocado Toast

it was high time someone made fun of stupid avocado toast.

Several avocado-ripening cycles on, the subject has not dropped. Recently, the online lender SoFi (that’s for “social finance,” a phrase once used to denote virtuous endeavors such as impact investing) promised a month of complimentary toast to customers who bought a house. “Buy a home using a SoFi mortgage, and you’ll receive an email asking whether you want regular or gluten-free bread,” the company advised. “Avocados and bread will then arrive in a series of 3 shipments—though you’ll still need to toast the bread yourself to get the full experience.”