During his week guest hosting The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj discussed how social media enable even not-so-smart grifters to scam people.
This was in a new recurring segment on the show called Long Story Short where the host tackles one issue in depth. Seth Meyers has long been doing that on his show in a segment that is called A Closer Look. Both of them seem to be inspired by John Oliver’s success with Last Week Tonight where almost the entire show is devoted to a single topic.
It looks like many viewers are like me in wanting to see more in-depth examinations of important topics laced with humor.
I just want John Oliver to institute a virtual swear jar. F-bombs start at 1 penny and double every time. At the end of the episode, he announces which charity he is donating millions of dollars to.
It’s a shame that we have to turn to comedy shows to get our ethics. Although, I don’t necessarily think people are less ethical today than previous generations. When I started working in Silicon Valley around 1980, there was a “fad” (I guess that is what you would call it) of literal pyramid schemes. People were asked to pay real money to join a pyramid which would be funneled to the people above them according to some set formula. They were then required to get a certain number of other people to pay into the pyramid, which would create a new layer beneath them, with the hope that the pyramid would keep growing and give them a multiple return on their “investment”. I knew a guy who actually bought into this and I heard about many others. Of course, the pyramid must collapse fairly quickly, leaving many more people poorer than the few that get richer, but nobody cared about those people. Luckily, the authorities shut it down within a few months, and I never heard of anyone losing a house because of it, but the eagerness of so many people in my industry and my economic stratum to get one step ahead of the “suckers” just appalled me.
Presumably, this one:
@#2,
This seems like the old chain letter thing when I was young. It was not a scam in that it did not involve money but you were expected to forward the letter to five people whom you knew and also send a card to the person at the top of the list. The idea was that when you finally got to the top of the list, you would get a ton of cards.
In order to get compliance, the chain letter would warn that if you broke the chain, bad luck would befall you.
I would always ignore these letters.
It’s a shame that we have to turn to comedy shows to get our ethics.
There’s a reason why it’s got this way: the only way to get left-of-center commentary on TV these days is to disguise it as “comedy” and air it in the late-night-comedy time slots, to allow everyone who can’t deal with it to pretend it’s not “serious.”
Raging Bee, seems plausible.
“…Millennials have three times less money than boomers did at the same age…”
This ‘large multiple of an absent quantity’ phrasing never looks right to me. I always substitute it with the equivalent ‘small multiple of a positive quantity’ in my head, “one third as much money” in this case.
^Holms. I have never liked that phrasing either. It seems incredibly imprecise.
To my mind it means that for every $1 a boomer had a millennial is in debt to the amount of $2 because that would be “three times less money”.
@#4 “It was not a scam in that it did not involve money but you were expected to forward the letter to five people whom you knew and also send a card to the person at the top of the list.”
Sounds to me like a good way to build a mailing list of gullible people for future scams. Wary people like you are self-culled from the list because you didn’t respond.