Beware of empowr

A couple of days ago, I started getting all these messages from something calling itself “empowr”, a social networking site. First alarm: they announced that I had made a post to their site. No, I didn’t, I had never heard of it. Second alarm: they kept sending me messages announcing that I had earned $X from my post and my photo (remember, I had made no post or photo). It was up to $25 today, which sounds rather sweet for two days earnings from something that involved no work at all on my part.

Wait…money for nothing? Don’t trust it. So I looked into it.

Empowr is a scam. It’s not illegal, but it is a cheat in which they give you imaginary credits to monetize connections with imaginary dollar values, but to cash in on those monetized links, you have to repay empowr for all those credits they loaned to you. And, surprise, those loaned credits cost you more than your earnings from links.

Get out while you can. Don’t give them a credit card or paypal information, because you’re authorizing them to buy out all those ‘credits’ they give you.

I checked out the site myself, and here’s another warning: they don’t give you any way to quit empowr once you’re in. Fortunately, I didn’t give them access to facebook or any credit info, so they don’t have any hooks on me, and I just blocked all their messages in email. I expect there will be urgent notifications of ever-growing sums of money piling up in my fictitious account, all getting automatically thrown in the trash.

First frost can’t get here soon enough

I try to get out to walk a few miles twice a day, which is normally fine and pleasant, but conditions have changed. Right now…

  • It is warm

  • We’ve had almost daily rainstorms for the past several weeks

  • This is Minnesota.

Do you know what this means, boys and girls?

The air is equal parts humidity and mosquitos. I walk down the sidewalk doing a slappy dance, fighting off clouds of carnivorous chitin, screaming out stuff like “Aaargh, not in the eye, you filthy bugger!” and “Yikes, how did you get in there?” and assorted incoherent epithets, occasionally having to spit out bugs, which is the downside of opening your mouth to cuss ’em out. Avoid bushes. Do not step in the grass. Anything with vegetation is a hive of evil that will stir itself at any dissturbance.

I’ve finally arrived at the safety of my office, raked the mangled corpses out of my beard (I have that bit of protection going for me), and can relax a little bit. I imagine it’s a bit like living in the Carboniferous.

Now you know why Minnesotans don’t mind winter so much. It murders the vicious little bitey bastards.

I’m sorry, but Pokemon Go is my game

At least this writer admits to having an unpopular opinion about Pokemon Go.

To my fellow millennials, and adults of all ages: Just let kids play. Considering it’s their game, let them have it for a little while, OK?

Wrong. I’m almost 60. I’m at risk for heart disease. My father died of heart disease when he was a little older than I am now. I have been told by my doctor to get an hour or two of light exercise every day, and for the past couple of years I’ve been walking a few miles every day, around my rather unexciting little town.

That opinion is exactly backwards. It’s like Pokemon Go was designed for us old people. You young’uns get out of my game and go play racketball or rugby or run marathons, or any of those other games that would kill me if I tried them.

Nah, not really. There’s room for everyone and no need to be exclusive in any way. This weekend we were in St Cloud to take my oldest son out for a birthday lunch (happy birthday, Alaric!) and we went for a stroll around Lake George. There were swarms of people out walking with their phones. I saw a couple of Hispanic families talking excitedly about the game (I assume!) in Spanish; I saw a woman in a hijab stabbing at her phone happily; I saw lots of kids and college students and even crotchety old people like me enjoying the weather and checking their phones as they were out for a promenade.

So yeah, please stop trying to claim for yourself what everyone has good reason to enjoy.

Twitter rule: always punch down

Scalzi has some comments on the banning of Milo, and I particularly like this point.

It’s good that Twitter punted Yiannopoulos, but let’s not pretend that it doesn’t look like Twitter did some celebrity calculus there. Yiannopoulos and pals had a nice long run pointing themselves at all other manner of people they didn’t like, for whatever reason, and essentially Twitter didn’t say “boo” about it. But then they harass a movie star with movie star friends, many of whom are Twitter users with large numbers of followers, and whose complaints about Twitter and the harassment of their friend get play in major news outlets, and Twitter finally boots the ringleader of that shitty little circus.

So the math there at least appears pretty obvious from the outside. You can punch down on Twitter and get away with it, but don’t punch up, and punch up enough to make Twitter look bad, or you’ll get in trouble (after more than a day). Is this actually the way it works? I’m not at Twitter so I can’t say. I can say I do know enough women of all sorts who have gotten all manner of shit by creeps on Twitter, but who weren’t in a movie and had movie star friends or got press play for their harassment. And they basically had to suck it up. So, yeah, from the outside it looks like Twitter made their decision on this based on optics rather than the general well-being of their users.

This is exactly the rule set that fosters bullies, and is going to make the problem worse.

But who will replace him?

It sounds like Roger Ailes is going to be fired from Fox News. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but now I’m wondering who is on Rupert Murdoch’s short list of replacements?

  • Satan? Only problem is that he’s mythological, and is also in high demand to lead Christian megachurches.

  • Pat Robertson? He hasn’t had a sex scandal yet. (Has he? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to think about it.)

  • Alex Jones? He’d probably turn it down as he struggles to fit it into a false flag narrative.

  • The most likely, best choice, who would fit in perfectly with the ethos of the organization: Dick Cheney.

How long do you think we’ll need to wait?

A Playboy playmate, Dani Mathers, took a picture of an older woman in the shower at a gym, and then a photo of herself sniggering at her. She even took the time to caption it, If I can’t unsee this, then you can’t either, before sending it out to the public. I guess the other woman didn’t look like a Playboy Playmate of the Year, which is more than enough grounds for derision, right?

mathers

She has sort of badly apologized: she didn’t mean to make her ugly thoughts public, she intended just to share her contempt for women who are insufficiently pneumatic with a good friend. She’s now getting hammered on social media, has lost her job at a radio station, is banned forever from that particular gym, and the police have been notified. But there’s a worse punishment awaiting her.

How old is she? In her twenties? In a few years, she’s inevitably going to be in her thirties, then forties, maybe even, heaven forfend, her fifties. It’s how nature works. She’s going to get older. And as she becomes increasingly aged, that loathing of other’s bodies is going to turn inward and torture herself. The only question is how long it’s going to take before she starts exaggerating her own emerging flaws in her mind. 10 years? 5 years? Now?

It seems like cruel and unusual punishment to me, but if it’s self-inflicted, it’s her own damn fault.