The mothership has an article on Frank Lloyd Wright. May I confess I put him in the same category as The Beatles; "considered great because they are so well known"? Most people don't care about individual architects, so the only name they know is Frank Lloyd Wright. A good number of his works are ugly.
The irony is that his better known works are among his more expensive, even though he claimed he wanted to build for the common folk. Whoever invented ranch houses built for the common folk....
Like a good many top geniuses, his life was chaotic to say the least
I know a wee bit about architecture from the Tute. Established the 1st architecture college. I.M Pei is a grad. The campus also has buildings from Pei, Saarinen and Gehry.
I'm tempted to agree with Frank Lloyd Wright, and most modern architects like I. M. Pei, for whom aesthetic appearance was not a priority or objective.
But I disagree about The Beatles. They influenced the development of rock music for everyone who followed (even for my favorite band, The Who). Their greatness is beyond dispute IMHO.
His Usonian Houses, designed and built for the common man, sucked. Small cramped mean little spaces with nonfunctional kitchens and bathrooms, cold, failed heating systems, etc., etc. His earliest work was wonderful. The later stuff, not so much.
Falling Water is very beautiful. But it is in a large part the woods and creek and the way the house is beautifully constructed into it. The conditions are unique.
Beautiful, yes...groundbreaking design, incredible dimensioning and proportioning...and it leaked like a sieve, the cantilevers sagged like a failed boob job and required complete and total reengineering and reconstruction, and it is on its third or fourth major renovation to the tune of a hundred million or so over several decades. All the problems related to water, inadequate structural engineering, non-comprehension of all the ways water moves in structure (yes, it can flow up), and a long list of individual detail defects that are still being figured out, make it a big question mark in assessing its legacy.
I love it and I hate it. Sometimes it's better to do what the client asked for and build it over on the other side of the river and let the waterfall be a waterfall.
Yeah, it sure seems that way - built to satisfy the artist dreams knowing full well from an engineering sense it was a bad idea. Now I can't get failed boob jobs out of my association with the structure!
For me, avoiding scammers starts with simply not answering the phone. This is especially a problem for older, potentially lonely folks. I can't get my 87 yr old dad to just not answer. I like the idea of a secret family code. Luckily we all collectively share one already.
I've gotten that. I still don't answer it. I go to the bank website where secure messaging lets me see if it's real. The IRS...doesn't contact people that way.
If you can just get it through people's heads to know how actual sources contact you, most of this could get beaten back.
I agree. It’s the best policy. But people shouldn’t kid themselves. Savvy, smart, educated people get sucked into these scams. They work in teams. I almost fell for one and just got really lucky.
A good part of the podcast story had to do with China: Chinese triads, Chinese kingpins, Chinese government policy to block capital flight, Chinese anti-corruption crackdowns, Chinese scammers forced into it by gangsters and held hostage to run scams from bases in the Philippines and other SE Asian countries.
The Chinese government has taken it very seriously, and it still grows and flourishes. The series left me convinced that we in the west are flying blind and in denial that it’s a problem beyond all conceivable proportion. And I don’t think I’m typically alarmist about tech.
Essentially, beware any message, request, contact, or anything, that "needs" personal information. Anything related to request for funds, forget it. Any unexpected account closure, forget it. Toll roads...states have online checks for that. I have an ETC card for tolls, I get a couple messages a year telling me my toll wasn't paid...delete...
I suppose I could get fooled, but my radar is on high alert all the time about this stuff. I do wonder what I'd do if someone physically kidnapped me and made me open up my accounts....which I expect to be the next frontier.
You really can’t be paranoid enough. That’s just about the best policy. Or as the one FBI agent or prosecutor says: Assume every inbound attempt to contact you by phone, text, or email is a scam operation until you’ve proved otherwise.
The reporter on the story is Australian-Chinese living in Singapore, and she explained that some significant share of the online gambling industry globally is from Chinese nationals trying to make money abroad and hide it, since gambling is illegal for Chinese nationals to do *even when they do it while vacationing or visiting outside China.* That blew my mind.
I didn’t listen to the podcast, but I’ve read several articles about it. I get it. It gets coverage over here. Your 4th sentence, I’d take out “savvy”. It’s true smart educated people get sucked in, but savvy people at least question things. It doesn’t take much to educate oneself about how authorities, banks, IRS, whatever make contact and conduct their inquiries.
You said you “almost” got tricked…but you didn’t, which I assume being due to your being savvy enough to not bite.
If folks argue that lots of people are not savvy and dupes, I’m in total agreement. I’ve been phished and called, I’ve gotten the fake IRS notices, I’ve gotten the emails from my bank that are absolutely perfect right down to the color of the lettering, font, layout, everything perfect. I’ve gotten notices from Apple about my account being closed and the same from Yahoo and Gmail and similar attempts related to other accounts and services…but I knew that these entities don’t make demands, requests, or whatever in the manner that I was being targeted.
I do wonder how it’ll work with AI and seamless video scams.
No, I actually *did* fall for the gambit. It used a real established company in the marketing industry that only insiders would know about. It wasn’t a household name like Apple or Google or anything like that.
The psychology did the heavy lifting for them. I researched the company, verified its reality and history—and by doing so, psychologically opened myself up to a great tactic in the influence business: I sold myself on the reality of something that was a fraud business proposition. They even went to the trouble of sending me the instructions via 2-day express mail envelope—as they had said they would. That envelope included an advance payment, real-looking check from a major GA credit union—and I verified all of that that I could before electronically depositing it.
In the end, what saved me was they wanted me to buy gift cards from a retail chain that doesn’t sell the ones I understood them to want me to buy. I stopped responding to their texts, got advice from my credit union, and they told me it was a common-enough scam, I should walk away. *And my personal buy-in had me still thinking it might work out!*
The fact of the matter is that we’re all very prone to defending choices we’ve made once we’ve firmly made our minds up. And that’s precisely what would have put me in the hole for an easy grand. I’d have had no recourse to get any of it back.
A week later the check I’d deposited bounced, but I hadn’t done my part of the “deal” since they picked the wrong retail outlet. (The scam was a secret-shopper scam, and the company that was used as a false front has a 45 year track record or so doing that type of skilled marketing research…and I can’t remember their name off the bat… Anyway, they added a warning page behind their recruitment/employment page warning of possible scams using their name and logo.)
Elderly loneliness is an issue! I've recommended churches teach its shut-ins how to use facetime, and have parishioners facetime them regularly.
I know remote worship services sucked, and they still suck but....we have 15-20 people who can no longer worship in person, and they love being connected via the zoom worship (we have cameras in our meetingroom so they can see and hear the worship service, and they can "unmute themselves" to share during joys & concerns, or open worship. It's better than nothing.
Then you’ve got lonely shut-ins with signs of dementia. A few of them should have guardians with power of attorney—but who wants it to be possible to assign such things?
Hopefully a few decades off, but I'm keeping in mind the idea that I'll give power of attorney to my kids, and all financial responsibility (paying bills, taxes, insurance, etc) at some point before I start slipping. Even more critical if I go before my wife.
I had the same frustration with my late parents. The idea of not answering a ringing phone was completely foreign to them, a lifelong habit they couldn’t break.
David French is spot on -- and alarming. Donald Trump's actions threaten to turn the best military in the world to a copy of Putin's politicized army that failed on the road to Kyiv.
Ditto the NYT editorial. The Dems should have gotten Joe Biden out much earlier, replacing him with a vigorous primary process to put in place a respected centrist candidate. Instead, Biden stayed in much too long, leaving his California progressive VP as the only possible replacement. Besides being unable to pivot to the center, Kamala Harris, an obvious "DEI hire" from the start, was in way over her head.
I read both of those, both pretty good. I do wish the NYT had taken its head out of its nether regions and written what was widely known before the election. It's a little late to be lecturing the Dems at this point.
Sadly, I am getting more and more of these on my phone. One nice thing about living in a small town, I’m pretty confident I’m up-to-date on all of my tolls because we have no tool roads within 100 miles of where I live. It's been years.
My daughter got that message and showed it to me. She had visited Chicago last year. She asked if maybe this was related to that? I asked her how they would have her cell number since the vehicle she was driving was registered in my name, not hers. A lightbulb came on. She saw it was a scam.
In my backyard, I’ve been clearing some brush, some overgrowth. I had an old tree, not very tall that no longer lived. It was on my to do list fell it and cut it. after the storms last night it is now on my list to cut it up.
But God was watching over me. It fell on a diagonal, behind my daffodils, instead of crushing a line of them.
The toll scams my wife and I have both received, as texts. Neither of us has gone anywhere near a tool road, me in over a year (on roads that had old-fashioned toll booths, not license plate readers) and my wife, not in years.
A flip phone. It's just for my convenience in contacting friends and family or in case of emergency, if I'm out and about (or the VoIP landline ever goes down). No texting, voice only. No business or politician ever (legitimately, at least) gets my cell number. And no voicemail. No photos, I take those with a full-featured digital camera.
Good morning. We got a thunderstorm last night that included tornado warnings in some nearby areas (no actual tornados reported although there were high winds). Today the temps will be stuck in the 50s all day and cloudy.
The mothership is reporting on Trump’s tariffs, many of which will kick in Wednesday (on “Liberation Day”). The FP is headlining “Trump’s War on Big Law”). Not directly related, but I listened over the weekend to a fascinating Bari Weiss interview on her “Honestly” podcast with Leonard Leo, the conservative mind behind Trump’s Supreme Court and judicial picks in his first term.
Interesting commentary on AI scams. Not so sure I agree about cryptocurrency, however. Any form of money is morally neutral. Unlike firearms, beloved of many on the Right (both MAGAs and true conservatives), money itself has no power to harm anyone. Efforts to track money transfers (so called “anti-money laundering” efforts) have led to law enforcement distrust of large sums of cash, and in turn of seizures of cash as “forfeiture” in the absence of any evidence of a crime. (There, I feel better now).
Regarding crypto, the blockchain technology is promising, but there are also currencies designed specifically to evade such tracking and tracing. The episode talking about how the money is broken into myriad smaller tranches and moved along within minutes is powerful.
Since the technology exists, is there anything realistic that can be done about it? Probably not much beyond the heavy-handed approach of national bans with draconian penalties if you’re caught with the goods.
I'm familiar with Bitcoin and its blockchain. The ability to move bitcoin between different addresses to make tracking more difficult is inherent in the design, not AFAIK a specific design feature. But all transactions remain public in the blockchain, which means tracing is still possible, given an address known to be associated with a given individual.
The route governments are taking is to regulate the exchanges which make obtaining crypto and trading it easier, requiring them to do pretty much the same "Know Your Customer" checks including turning over your ID information that banks require. You can buy and sell crypto without going through an exchange, but it's harder.
it is undoubtedly true that crypto currencies enable illegal transactions. But drug cartels and terrorist groups are proficient at evading the anti-money laundering surveillance in place, even without using crypto. And there are very good reasons for third world citizens to evade the expensive banking systems in their own countries.
I recently read Andy Greenberg's book "Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency". It's a really interesting dive into the efforts of various law enforcement agencies to catch people who are doing really bad things. As you say, the interesting thing about the block chain is that all transactions are both visible and permanent. The difficult part is to identify the person associated with a particular digital wallet. However, if that can be done, then any and and all transactions that they've ever done can be traced.
And one of the greatest guitarists ever. If you have never seen it, go look at his guitar solo on while my guitar gently weeps during the concert for George available on YouTube.
I've seen that video too. It is impressive, and I love Prince. But for me, I've been on a Glen Campbell hero worship for a while. In this interview, he's asked if he's a better guitarist than Prince, Van Halen etc. He demurs, but then offers that he's more versatile than any of them. About the 4 minute mark. He's played for everyone from Sinatra to Righteous Bros to Beach Boys and of course his own work. Wichita Lineman - how can such a simple song give me goosebumps.
When Prince passed away, he left behind a whole vault of unpublished material, probably worth a great deal. The story goes that he forgot his access code, so hadn't been in that vault in years.
They mention that scam as a version of a scam going back centuries, where the mark has to pony up in advance for promise of a later payout…and I can’t recall the name of the category.
Well, you’ve got to compare it with something for creative illustration. “It’s very big” says even less, although it has a greater precision to it.
Something that’s illegal is going to be a WAG to estimate in its own right. And as far as the size of national economies goes, the GDPs of Cambodia and Laos are about as conceivable as the color of a fairy-dust-powdered unicorn.
The only thing I could think of when I read this was the word "Cacao" from "Portlandia." If you know, you know.
Manul!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmLhit5PO0o
Catchy theme song! 🤩
The mothership has an article on Frank Lloyd Wright. May I confess I put him in the same category as The Beatles; "considered great because they are so well known"? Most people don't care about individual architects, so the only name they know is Frank Lloyd Wright. A good number of his works are ugly.
The irony is that his better known works are among his more expensive, even though he claimed he wanted to build for the common folk. Whoever invented ranch houses built for the common folk....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright
Like a good many top geniuses, his life was chaotic to say the least
I know a wee bit about architecture from the Tute. Established the 1st architecture college. I.M Pei is a grad. The campus also has buildings from Pei, Saarinen and Gehry.
I took a couple courses... it's a cool field
A famous tourist destination here in WI. https://www.taliesinpreservation.org/. Of course you can't forget the "House on the Rock" which is nearby but not designed by Wright, rather inspired by him according to legend. https://www.thehouseontherock.com/
I liked the SC Johnson HQ in Racine, WI. That’s one I’ve seen in person.
I toured House on the Rock years ago. It was impressive.
I find it creepy…well not the house itself but all the additions.
I'm tempted to agree with Frank Lloyd Wright, and most modern architects like I. M. Pei, for whom aesthetic appearance was not a priority or objective.
But I disagree about The Beatles. They influenced the development of rock music for everyone who followed (even for my favorite band, The Who). Their greatness is beyond dispute IMHO.
His flat roofs leaked.
One might think my next door neighbor's house was a FLW inspired home with it's flat, leaky roof.
I understand they have new roofing technologies now that can be leakproof, but it has to be installed right.
His Usonian Houses, designed and built for the common man, sucked. Small cramped mean little spaces with nonfunctional kitchens and bathrooms, cold, failed heating systems, etc., etc. His earliest work was wonderful. The later stuff, not so much.
Falling Water is very beautiful. But it is in a large part the woods and creek and the way the house is beautifully constructed into it. The conditions are unique.
I'm with you on the Beatles too.
Beautiful, yes...groundbreaking design, incredible dimensioning and proportioning...and it leaked like a sieve, the cantilevers sagged like a failed boob job and required complete and total reengineering and reconstruction, and it is on its third or fourth major renovation to the tune of a hundred million or so over several decades. All the problems related to water, inadequate structural engineering, non-comprehension of all the ways water moves in structure (yes, it can flow up), and a long list of individual detail defects that are still being figured out, make it a big question mark in assessing its legacy.
I love it and I hate it. Sometimes it's better to do what the client asked for and build it over on the other side of the river and let the waterfall be a waterfall.
Yeah, it sure seems that way - built to satisfy the artist dreams knowing full well from an engineering sense it was a bad idea. Now I can't get failed boob jobs out of my association with the structure!
For me, avoiding scammers starts with simply not answering the phone. This is especially a problem for older, potentially lonely folks. I can't get my 87 yr old dad to just not answer. I like the idea of a secret family code. Luckily we all collectively share one already.
Exactly. I understand how old lionely people can be taken in, but simply not answering the phone is foolproof.
And then their caller ID shows the name of their bank or IRS or something familiar.
I've gotten that. I still don't answer it. I go to the bank website where secure messaging lets me see if it's real. The IRS...doesn't contact people that way.
If you can just get it through people's heads to know how actual sources contact you, most of this could get beaten back.
I agree. It’s the best policy. But people shouldn’t kid themselves. Savvy, smart, educated people get sucked into these scams. They work in teams. I almost fell for one and just got really lucky.
A good part of the podcast story had to do with China: Chinese triads, Chinese kingpins, Chinese government policy to block capital flight, Chinese anti-corruption crackdowns, Chinese scammers forced into it by gangsters and held hostage to run scams from bases in the Philippines and other SE Asian countries.
The Chinese government has taken it very seriously, and it still grows and flourishes. The series left me convinced that we in the west are flying blind and in denial that it’s a problem beyond all conceivable proportion. And I don’t think I’m typically alarmist about tech.
Essentially, beware any message, request, contact, or anything, that "needs" personal information. Anything related to request for funds, forget it. Any unexpected account closure, forget it. Toll roads...states have online checks for that. I have an ETC card for tolls, I get a couple messages a year telling me my toll wasn't paid...delete...
I suppose I could get fooled, but my radar is on high alert all the time about this stuff. I do wonder what I'd do if someone physically kidnapped me and made me open up my accounts....which I expect to be the next frontier.
You really can’t be paranoid enough. That’s just about the best policy. Or as the one FBI agent or prosecutor says: Assume every inbound attempt to contact you by phone, text, or email is a scam operation until you’ve proved otherwise.
The reporter on the story is Australian-Chinese living in Singapore, and she explained that some significant share of the online gambling industry globally is from Chinese nationals trying to make money abroad and hide it, since gambling is illegal for Chinese nationals to do *even when they do it while vacationing or visiting outside China.* That blew my mind.
Also...multi factor authentication...all accounts. A little hassle, but worth it.
I didn’t listen to the podcast, but I’ve read several articles about it. I get it. It gets coverage over here. Your 4th sentence, I’d take out “savvy”. It’s true smart educated people get sucked in, but savvy people at least question things. It doesn’t take much to educate oneself about how authorities, banks, IRS, whatever make contact and conduct their inquiries.
You said you “almost” got tricked…but you didn’t, which I assume being due to your being savvy enough to not bite.
If folks argue that lots of people are not savvy and dupes, I’m in total agreement. I’ve been phished and called, I’ve gotten the fake IRS notices, I’ve gotten the emails from my bank that are absolutely perfect right down to the color of the lettering, font, layout, everything perfect. I’ve gotten notices from Apple about my account being closed and the same from Yahoo and Gmail and similar attempts related to other accounts and services…but I knew that these entities don’t make demands, requests, or whatever in the manner that I was being targeted.
I do wonder how it’ll work with AI and seamless video scams.
No, I actually *did* fall for the gambit. It used a real established company in the marketing industry that only insiders would know about. It wasn’t a household name like Apple or Google or anything like that.
The psychology did the heavy lifting for them. I researched the company, verified its reality and history—and by doing so, psychologically opened myself up to a great tactic in the influence business: I sold myself on the reality of something that was a fraud business proposition. They even went to the trouble of sending me the instructions via 2-day express mail envelope—as they had said they would. That envelope included an advance payment, real-looking check from a major GA credit union—and I verified all of that that I could before electronically depositing it.
In the end, what saved me was they wanted me to buy gift cards from a retail chain that doesn’t sell the ones I understood them to want me to buy. I stopped responding to their texts, got advice from my credit union, and they told me it was a common-enough scam, I should walk away. *And my personal buy-in had me still thinking it might work out!*
The fact of the matter is that we’re all very prone to defending choices we’ve made once we’ve firmly made our minds up. And that’s precisely what would have put me in the hole for an easy grand. I’d have had no recourse to get any of it back.
A week later the check I’d deposited bounced, but I hadn’t done my part of the “deal” since they picked the wrong retail outlet. (The scam was a secret-shopper scam, and the company that was used as a false front has a 45 year track record or so doing that type of skilled marketing research…and I can’t remember their name off the bat… Anyway, they added a warning page behind their recruitment/employment page warning of possible scams using their name and logo.)
Elderly loneliness is an issue! I've recommended churches teach its shut-ins how to use facetime, and have parishioners facetime them regularly.
I know remote worship services sucked, and they still suck but....we have 15-20 people who can no longer worship in person, and they love being connected via the zoom worship (we have cameras in our meetingroom so they can see and hear the worship service, and they can "unmute themselves" to share during joys & concerns, or open worship. It's better than nothing.
Then you’ve got lonely shut-ins with signs of dementia. A few of them should have guardians with power of attorney—but who wants it to be possible to assign such things?
Hopefully a few decades off, but I'm keeping in mind the idea that I'll give power of attorney to my kids, and all financial responsibility (paying bills, taxes, insurance, etc) at some point before I start slipping. Even more critical if I go before my wife.
Yes, it is.
I had the same frustration with my late parents. The idea of not answering a ringing phone was completely foreign to them, a lifelong habit they couldn’t break.
'What Rusting Russian Tanks Can Teach Us About the Pete Hegseth Group Chat--David French
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/opinion/hegseth-signal-trump-putin.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8E4.v7fD.uYD_itWg-oot&smid=url-share
'The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024'--NYT Editorial Board
http://archive.today/HE1fw
David French is spot on -- and alarming. Donald Trump's actions threaten to turn the best military in the world to a copy of Putin's politicized army that failed on the road to Kyiv.
Ditto the NYT editorial. The Dems should have gotten Joe Biden out much earlier, replacing him with a vigorous primary process to put in place a respected centrist candidate. Instead, Biden stayed in much too long, leaving his California progressive VP as the only possible replacement. Besides being unable to pivot to the center, Kamala Harris, an obvious "DEI hire" from the start, was in way over her head.
Thanks for those!
I read both of those, both pretty good. I do wish the NYT had taken its head out of its nether regions and written what was widely known before the election. It's a little late to be lecturing the Dems at this point.
Thanks John!
Good job NYT. Even the mood of the top 10 readers comments was relatively sober.
Sadly, I am getting more and more of these on my phone. One nice thing about living in a small town, I’m pretty confident I’m up-to-date on all of my tolls because we have no tool roads within 100 miles of where I live. It's been years.
My daughter got that message and showed it to me. She had visited Chicago last year. She asked if maybe this was related to that? I asked her how they would have her cell number since the vehicle she was driving was registered in my name, not hers. A lightbulb came on. She saw it was a scam.
In my backyard, I’ve been clearing some brush, some overgrowth. I had an old tree, not very tall that no longer lived. It was on my to do list fell it and cut it. after the storms last night it is now on my list to cut it up.
But God was watching over me. It fell on a diagonal, behind my daffodils, instead of crushing a line of them.
The toll scams my wife and I have both received, as texts. Neither of us has gone anywhere near a tool road, me in over a year (on roads that had old-fashioned toll booths, not license plate readers) and my wife, not in years.
I don't have texting! I don't have a car anymore!
You don't have a cell phone of any kind?
A flip phone. It's just for my convenience in contacting friends and family or in case of emergency, if I'm out and about (or the VoIP landline ever goes down). No texting, voice only. No business or politician ever (legitimately, at least) gets my cell number. And no voicemail. No photos, I take those with a full-featured digital camera.
Good morning. We got a thunderstorm last night that included tornado warnings in some nearby areas (no actual tornados reported although there were high winds). Today the temps will be stuck in the 50s all day and cloudy.
The mothership is reporting on Trump’s tariffs, many of which will kick in Wednesday (on “Liberation Day”). The FP is headlining “Trump’s War on Big Law”). Not directly related, but I listened over the weekend to a fascinating Bari Weiss interview on her “Honestly” podcast with Leonard Leo, the conservative mind behind Trump’s Supreme Court and judicial picks in his first term.
Interesting commentary on AI scams. Not so sure I agree about cryptocurrency, however. Any form of money is morally neutral. Unlike firearms, beloved of many on the Right (both MAGAs and true conservatives), money itself has no power to harm anyone. Efforts to track money transfers (so called “anti-money laundering” efforts) have led to law enforcement distrust of large sums of cash, and in turn of seizures of cash as “forfeiture” in the absence of any evidence of a crime. (There, I feel better now).
Regarding crypto, the blockchain technology is promising, but there are also currencies designed specifically to evade such tracking and tracing. The episode talking about how the money is broken into myriad smaller tranches and moved along within minutes is powerful.
Since the technology exists, is there anything realistic that can be done about it? Probably not much beyond the heavy-handed approach of national bans with draconian penalties if you’re caught with the goods.
I'm familiar with Bitcoin and its blockchain. The ability to move bitcoin between different addresses to make tracking more difficult is inherent in the design, not AFAIK a specific design feature. But all transactions remain public in the blockchain, which means tracing is still possible, given an address known to be associated with a given individual.
The route governments are taking is to regulate the exchanges which make obtaining crypto and trading it easier, requiring them to do pretty much the same "Know Your Customer" checks including turning over your ID information that banks require. You can buy and sell crypto without going through an exchange, but it's harder.
it is undoubtedly true that crypto currencies enable illegal transactions. But drug cartels and terrorist groups are proficient at evading the anti-money laundering surveillance in place, even without using crypto. And there are very good reasons for third world citizens to evade the expensive banking systems in their own countries.
I recently read Andy Greenberg's book "Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency". It's a really interesting dive into the efforts of various law enforcement agencies to catch people who are doing really bad things. As you say, the interesting thing about the block chain is that all transactions are both visible and permanent. The difficult part is to identify the person associated with a particular digital wallet. However, if that can be done, then any and and all transactions that they've ever done can be traced.
We've come a long way from the Nigerian Prince days. And not in a good way.
I still long for the days of the Minnesotan Prince when we could party like it was 1999; often raunchy lyrics, but a really good musician.
"Two thousand zero zero, party over, out of time. . ."
And one of the greatest guitarists ever. If you have never seen it, go look at his guitar solo on while my guitar gently weeps during the concert for George available on YouTube.
I've seen that video too. It is impressive, and I love Prince. But for me, I've been on a Glen Campbell hero worship for a while. In this interview, he's asked if he's a better guitarist than Prince, Van Halen etc. He demurs, but then offers that he's more versatile than any of them. About the 4 minute mark. He's played for everyone from Sinatra to Righteous Bros to Beach Boys and of course his own work. Wichita Lineman - how can such a simple song give me goosebumps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXfNTEi2CIc
Campbell was a superb guitarist. Lotsa session work.
https://youtu.be/uWc4wMyL1oI?si=p2iCMtVjKjqznjcz
That's the one. The story behind it---how Jeff Lynne's guitarist almost screwed it up---is the subject of a great NYT piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/arts/music/prince-guitar-rock-hall-of-fame.html
Good story. Hadn't heard that one.
When Prince passed away, he left behind a whole vault of unpublished material, probably worth a great deal. The story goes that he forgot his access code, so hadn't been in that vault in years.
And? Has anyone opened the vault?
The account I read, made it sound as though the vault had been opened so that his estate could evaluate its contents.
Oh, I was expected it was Geraldo....
I read something about his sisters or some relatives taking over and releasing some of the unpublished catalog.
They mention that scam as a version of a scam going back centuries, where the mark has to pony up in advance for promise of a later payout…and I can’t recall the name of the category.
Advance-fee fraud. It's sometimes called the Spanish prisoner fraud as well.
Spanish prisoner was the term they used. Thanks, Jay. I was thinking that can’t be right—it’s just the name of a Mamet play…
Thanks for those recommendations. Seems like nearly everyone knows someone who has been scammed these days.
Why don’t you post your “Worth Your Time II” articles here, JohnM?
I could do that, but don't you want this space to be politics-free to a degree? I'll see what others think.
Politics is ok, we've managed to not get too stupid so far.
It would certainly be a generous contribution.
It’s not that we try to avoid politics so much as we try to keep from getting too worked up over it.
I’ve reposted these regularly. And this is not entirely politics-free. We just try to be civil here.
Good morning.
"it may account for half the gross domestic product of countries such as Cambodia and Laos"
That would be a shocking assertion except for the "it MAY" at the beginning.
The word "may" is often asked to do a lot of lifting.
Cambodia is about $40 Billion and Laos about $15 Billion...so not so surprising.
Well, you’ve got to compare it with something for creative illustration. “It’s very big” says even less, although it has a greater precision to it.
Something that’s illegal is going to be a WAG to estimate in its own right. And as far as the size of national economies goes, the GDPs of Cambodia and Laos are about as conceivable as the color of a fairy-dust-powdered unicorn.
"It's very big" says less now than it did 8 years ago.