Category: FYI

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Selling Fear

A brief, off-the-cuff mini-micro-rant and observation.

Looking askance at the economy, it seems that the single largest influence on the economy is fear. Peer pressure, uncertainty for the future, personal physical safety: all these and more are just tools for moving products. Heck, just the need for more and more (and better and better, for values of “better” that specifically include “flashier” and “new” as primary values) “stuff” and ways to preserve the “more stuff”lifestyle constitutes a delightful lode of fear for sellers of “stuff”to mine.

So, what brought this mini-rant on, apart from years of observing the selling power of fear (yeh, I used to sell insurance, so? *sigh*)? A TV ad for a home security service that portrayed a happy family get-together and proclaimed that such get-togethers are only possible when one feels safe, followed by a display of the home security service’s logo, implying that such events are only possible when one’s home is secured by such a service.

*throws the bullshit flag*

Look, burglaries, robberies and other home invasions are actually relatively rare,1 on average, and can be made rarer still in one’s personal exerience by means of several simple, relatively inexpensive measures.

  1. Good locks, doors, and windows, to start.
  2. Clear notice that you are armed and willing to defend yourself, your loved ones and your property with deadly force. (Check your local laws on that last, to be sure you can do so and remain safe from law enFARCEment persecution.)
  3. Location, location, location. Where you choose to live may have the greatest impact on your home safety.

Of course there is more that one can do, but those three measures will eliminate most home invasion crimes. And the last one really is probably the single most important thing you can do to prevent home invasion crimes. The data supports my personal experience. In my whole lifetime, I have personally experienced a home invasion crime one time. The week after my wedding to my Wonder Woman, while we were away on our honeymoon, our home was burglarized. Of course, our home at the time was in “the better part of the ghetto” (as it was called by its denizens) which was a high crime area, for both property and violence against persons. Since then, about 40 years, we have elected to live in low crime areas and have experienced no such things. Yes, small data set, but larger data sets support the “location, location, location” principle.

The chief measure one can take, though, even more important than choosing a relatively safe location, is to make an attitude adjustment, and make regular attitude checks. Practice little things like thinking through how you would break into your own home. Fix that. *heh* Be aware of what is going on in your community, in your neighborhood. “Keep your head on a swivel” is not just something for guys in combat.

1Stats are hard to come by since so many different definitions and circumstances are applied/recorded, but FBI stats from 2009–yeh, I know, a lifetime ago *heh*–indicate that in that year, 5 people (note, not “households” which would be a far smaller number) in 100,000 experienced a home invasion in that year.

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Well, That’s Just Life

Just about no matter where I go on the Interwebs (a few bloggers aside), I have from time to time been chastised by poorly-read folks for my vocabulary. Hey, lazy-asses! I work HARD to dumb it down for you!

Thatisall.

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Say What, Paul?

II Timothy 3:1-9:

3:1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: (2) For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, (3) unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, (4) traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, (5) having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! (6) For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, (7) always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. (8) Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; (9) but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.

This really seems like a case of “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” because when I consider what is known about people throughout history, this seems pretty. .. normal. *sigh*

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Sweet Puppy!

That doesn’t _always_ work out all that well. . . I had a guy get really incensed with me when his ABPT preferred my company to his. . . and behaved better for me, as well. *shrugs* (I’ve only ever known one really “bad” dog–an inner city feral husky mix who terrorized a neighborhood. . . until he was stopped. *sigh* Coulda been a good dog, at one time. . . )

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Amazon’s Prime Shipping Was a Nice Idea

But it’s bullshit, now.

Example: a “Prime” order placed Monday, August 7 and acknowledged in email that day by Amazon is “expected” to ship today. . . August 10, and arrived on Monday, August 14.

That’s been pretty typical for “Prime” orders recently, and yet Amazon still says,

Of course, generating a shipping label three days after the order was received and acknowledged and “expecting” it to ship. . . soon, gives Amazon the disingenuous escape of falsely claiming it’s fulfilling its 2-day shipping claim, because it’ll only count Friday and the following Monday, while the package is expected to arrive one full week after it was placed and acknowledged.

Oh, well. It’s free shipping. I guess one can only expect what one pays for, eh? (Although, I thought that was the point of paying for a “Prime membership.”)

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?

Or is this “Déjà vu all over again?” *heh*

Now the guy who “wrote the book” on safe passwords has changed his tune and is now advocating using long passphrases.

The thing is, I’ve advocated this sort of thing off and on for years, here at this lil Third World County blog, because it’s an easy-peasy way to have long, complicated “passwords” that are easy to remember. I’ve even posted hints on how folks can “crack” my “passwords”

Hint: many of them are based on, but deliberately do not accurately reproduce, verses from 16th-to-19th Century art or folk songs in any one of six languages, and frequently run well over 64 characters. None of them spell all the words out correctly, and many do not use any of the actual words at all. Go ahead. Crack ’em. For me, they are easy-peasy to remember, though, ‘cos I can just “sing” the songs in my head as I type the passphrases, and because I am an “Odd,” the substitutions I use make sense to me but would seem almost psychotically delusional to “Normals”–or computers.

(Example of “Odd” perceptions/views of reality not directly related to my passphrase substitutions: numbers and mathematical functions have colors, shapes, and positions in 3D space for me. It’s how I “see” mathematical solutions without following steps in formulas. In a similar vein, word substitutions in art/folk song lyrics in foreign languages are “colored” and “shaped” by how I see and hear the words in my mind’s eyes and ears. So, easy to recall, for me, difficult to reproduce for any Normal or logical process.)

So, as I have said, have fun cracking my passwords. I’m sure there are some really Odd folks out there, somewhere, who’d enjoy doing just that. 🙂

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Silly Question

In a paragraph about noticing and recalling details, a writer asked,

“If someone asked you the last time you wore something blue, you’d be hard pressed to give an exact date and time, right?”

Wrong. I usually wear blue jeans. When I wear a suit, I usually wear a blue Oxford shirt with it, or a white Oxford shirt and a tie, almost always with some blue in it, to pick up the blue in the suit (yeh, after years of having a closet full of suits, sport coats, etc., I have pared things down to a couple of sport coats–one of them navy blue–and one suit, mainly just for weddings and funerals). Slacks and shirt? Usually a blue shirt.

This one would be easy-peasy.

Now, the last time I wore yellow. . .

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Understanding “Gender”

To properly understand the many different fantasy “genders” that have come about in recent years, a trip down etymology lane might be helpful:

“gender (n.)
c. 1300, “kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits,” from Old French gendre, genre “kind, species; character; gender” (12c., Modern French genre), from stem of Latin genus (genitive generis) “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species,” also “(male or female) sex,” from PIE root *gene- “give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups. ”

When speaking of _mankind_**, then, one can speak now of three specific “genders”:

male
female
batsh*t crazy.

The last class is the catch-all for all the delusional folks who are in denial of reality and claim to be some weird fantasy “gender.”
___________________________

**”mankind” here is a poke in the eye to snowflake “batsh*t crazies”

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The Reasons I Do Not Carry a Handgun

Sure, I have the right to carry openly or concealed (and I have), but there are several reasons why I do not normally, habitually, carry a handgun on my person.

I’m gettin’ old, folks. Arthritis and difficulty quickly transitioning between near and far make sighting/aiming and firing a handgun an exercise in “maybe accuracy,” and that’s just not good enough to assure NOT hitting what I do not want to.

I also live in one of the safest places in the world, safer from physical attacks on my person than almost anywhere else in America that has people in it. *heh* That means that others around me are also pretty darned unlikely to experience physical aggression initiated against them (by anyone other than law enFARCEment ossifers, that is).

Sidebar: perhaps one of the reasons it’s so safe here in America’s Third World County™ is that firearms of all kinds outnumber inhabitants by quite a healthy margin, and many folks do carry a handgun both openly and concealed. Gives me warm fuzzies. 🙂

The only reason I might carry a handgun, given my circumstances, would be if I were to go out walking in “snake country” or “feral pig country,” and in that case, I’d probably need to carry a S&W Governor loaded in alternate chambers with .410 gauge shotshells and .45 long colt (each for a different contingency). The .410 (loaded with birdshot, for snake use) would pretty much obviate concerns about really fine aiming, though I’d just have to hope for decent enough luck if a feral pig got his mad on.

Still, even in such cases, I’d probably prefer to keep my head on a swivel and note issues well enough in advance to back away from a venomous snake or take to a tree in case of a feral pig.