Monday, March 30, 2009

 

Lost something in a New York Cab? A Craigslist cautionary tale

Please forgive me for not mentioning actual names here. I think that if I do so, I could be targeted by an unscrupulous pig of a man. And anyway, I don’t for a moment think this character is the only such scammer on Craigslist, which PayPal told my friend is infested with these creeps.

A friend, who I will call Eve, largely because I don’t know anyone named Eve, lost her iPod in a New York taxi. She scoured Craigslist lost and found ads before placing her own one. Within hours, she received an email suggesting a great website where she could post a lost and found ad. Eve went to the site, placed her ad and hit enter…… and was taken directly to PayPal. There had been no prior suggestion of a charge and to her embarrassment, Eve, a smart but jetlagged and very upset woman paid the $19.99.

Within 2 hours, she tried to cancel but the owner of the site refused. So reported the guy to PayPal and stopped payment with her bank. And this guy opened up a complaint against her with PayPal.

In the meantime, I posted a fake ad on Craigslist, and the same person who contacted Eve contacted me. My best guess is that the person sending the emails is either the female alter-ego of the scammer, or someone working for commission. I googled lost and found in New York and the website didn’t come up. So anyone who has found something in a New York cab will not be looking at this “great website”

A couple of days later, not wanting to give up, Eve posted another ad on Craigslist, suggesting she would be willing to pay a reward. A guy answered, asking how much the reward was. She was a bit flabbergasted that the guy who responded was all over the Internet, a self-professed entrepreneur, but was asking for a reward!

After a couple of back and forth emails, she asked the guy how much he wanted and if he could please tell her the serial number of the iPod he found. His last email simply said “Goodbye”. This scumbag didn’t have an iPod, but just wanted the reward money.

And here’s the kicker. One of his enterprises, is as ‘web master’ of the phony lost and found site. So not satisfied in taking money off of desperate people on his website, this asshole also tries to rip people off for reward money1

People, I can’t stress this enough. If you are pointed to a website by someone responding to your online ad, and that site wants you to pay, DON’T DO IT! It is a scam! Trust what PayPal said. Craigslist has it's uses, but it is infested.

Eve was assured that this creep will be prosecuted. But I can tell you that his website is up and running. And 17 people were scammed out of $19.99 today alone. None will find what they lost with this add and nor will you. Be warned!

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

 

Really stupid CNN poll; really stupid people responding

I searched and searched this evening, but couldn’t find the poll that is the subject of this blog entry. Pity! I would have posted the link so you could have seen it for yourselves.

To paraphrase:

Question: If big banks are allowed to go bust, will it

a) Be catastrophic for the economy
b) Be a lesson for the big boys
c) Make no difference at all

I thought it was obvious which of these options would gain the most votes. Viewers of Fox Spews Channel could only possibly vote one way, as that channel and its never ending parade of non-thinking, knee jerk conservative moron pundits, pummels people with how they should think. I have seen these so called economists popping up elsewhere also. Their views are designed to get them time on television and should not be taken as truth. Truth must be researched and not accepted from one argument or another.

Actually, this poll is very stupid. If big banks are allowed to fail, FDIC insurance will have a lot of money to pay out. This will ultimately be paid for by all of us. Such a failure would also shake the stock markets around the world, most likely knocking somewhat more than 10% off the value of the world economy in the first day with smaller drops to follow before some sort of stabilisation. Is that catastrophic? Not really. Is it just a lesson to the big boys? Idiots would like you to think so, but that would be true trickle down economics. Because after the big boys pay, so will we all.

The results when I viewed the poll were:

a) Be catastrophic for the economy 25%
b) Be a lesson for the big boys 60%
c) Make no difference at all 15%

So 15% of people who felt moved to respond to this poll think that if Bank of America fails, it will make no difference to the economy; to them; to anything. Absolutely mind boggling!

60% follow the conservative nonsense doctrine. Give the big boys a slap. It will end there. We won’t feel pain, or if we do, at least we hurt them.

I wonder why anyone at all felt moved to vote in this poll that was designed to incite; a poll with one exaggerated option and two that are put there for people to prove their ignorance. Well, 75% of those who were proved to vote, were only too anxious to prove their ignorance. I wish people would think for a change! The makers of Tylenol and Excedrin would probably see a huge spike in sales if that happened.

Am I surprised by these results? Let me answer that by telling you about a poll that was released on Lincoln’s Birthday.

When asked if President Lincoln or fellow birthday boy Charles Darwin made a bigger difference in the world (that’s the world, as in America, Canada, Britain, Nigeria, Russia, China, Japan, India…….), 60% of Americans said................................................. Lincoln.

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Monday, March 09, 2009

 

Possible no-cost, effective stimulus? You be the judge.

At a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a guy named Larry, who is a successful money manager. He sent a proposed stimulus package to President Obama’s people that I believe is a decent starting point for discussion. Here’s what he proposed:

1. Everyone can get a pre-charged Visa or Mastercard with up to half of their last year’s tax paid on it. People who paid little or no tax are allowed $1,000.

2. You must use it or lose it by the end of the year. Uses can be to pay off other credit cards or spend wherever the cards are accepted.

3. You pay it back within 5 years at 5% per annum interest.

The benefits, as he states, are:

1. People will spend money they don’t currently have available, or

2. Pay off higher interest debts, thus lessening their monthly bills

3. Money spent goes into the economy, creating jobs

4. The new jobs are taxed, so the country further benefits. In most States, this also results in State Income Tax

5. Money spent incurs Sales Tax, which helps States

6. After the Government pays at the most 2% interest for the money, it makes a profit on the deal.

7. To pay for the initial outlay, special Bonds are made available to potential wealthy investors, at the 2% rate discussed above. This is quite a bbit higher than any guaranteed, no-limit investment currently pays.

What I think:

I see little fault in this other than, it would be wrong for the country to profit on the interest from these loans. It would already profit from increased Income Taxes. So I would suggest decreasing the interest rate paid by individuals to 2%.

The benefits could be immense. The economy would be stimulated; employment would increase; Federal and State tax income would increase. The overall cost of the program would be zero.

What do you think?

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Friday, March 06, 2009

 

Universal Healthcare: Some basic common sense

I understand that a considerable percentage of the population is against Government mandated Universal Healthcare on the grounds that this will increase their tax burden. It seems like a reasonable assumption, and after all, Conservative politicians, pundits and journalists have been quick to put forth this notion. But it is extremely misguided, as I will demonstrate here using simple common sense, coupled with a few facts – something in short supply among detractors.

First, and most obviously, anyone who is insured currently pays higher premiums than they would if everyone was insured. This is because when an uninsured person gets sick enough, they are given treatment. And the costs are not swallowed by altruistic healthcare concerns. They are passed on in the form of higher costs to those who pay.

In the same vein, the cost of running public hospitals is passed on in the form of taxes. So it is untrue that we currently pay nothing for the uninsured.

From there, the picture becomes somewhat more difficult, as HMOs and other insurers will seek to maintain their profit margins. They will surely launch a propaganda war that will have considerably more to do with maintaining their stranglehold and their profit margins, than actually telling it like it is. So how is it?

My doctor told me that the numbers of young medical students opting for Internal Medicine (your family doctor), have dwindled alarmingly due to drastically reduced earnings potential caused by imposed Healthcare Insurers maximum payment schedules, and the nightmarish and very costly bureaucracy that each must navigate in order to get paid by the insurers. It is fair to deduce from this that the standard of general care has gone down in recent years as doctors face the stress of cramming in more patients to make their practices financially viable and that this standard is set to further decline as less new doctors come in to replace an aging population of MDs.

Also, insurers pay a lot of people to try to disqualify claims. To put it another way, money that might otherwise be spent on healthcare, is being spent on wages of people whose job it is to make sure that as few claims as possible are honoured, and that as many as possible of those that are honoured, are paid at a reduced rate.

So what happens if we have Universal Healthcare? The big machine put in place to make sure claims are not paid, will no longer be needed. A nice little side benefit of this for those of us who already pay premiums, is that there will be no more nasty surprises in the mail informing them that a procedure they thought they were covered for was partly or wholly disqualified. Another logical effect is that doctors will have more time for doctoring, giving them the choice between increasing their patient intake and reducing their total working hours – in case you are not aware of this, their total hours worked are considerably longer than those to which they are available to you. A less stressed doctor may well be a better doctor. Think about it! Maybe, just maybe, a few more med students can be tempted into this very necessary field?

Hospitals too, will need less clerical staff. Perhaps some can be retrained as medical assistants?

But what will the biggest benefit be? As the machine is drastically reduced, a far larger percentage of healthcare dollars will go to……. Healthcare! And if hospitals are paid for everyone they treat, there will be no hidden costs in their charges. As an analogy, every store you go into factors a percentage of the price of their goods to cover for shoplifting and pilfering. If everyone paid for everything, the price would come down.

While I’m not going to try offering you numbers, I hope I have conveyed to you that the cost of Universal Healthcare will not be close to what its detractors would like you to believe.

Of course, any savings that will be used to help fund Universal Healthcare will be a drop in the bucket in comparison to potential savings if people were taught that in most instances, diet is more effective in preventing and lessening illness than expensive drugs, physician care and costly operations – something that many pressure groups not limited by any means, to drug companies, will fight tooth and nail. But that is a whole different, larger and darker subject, and multiple possible future blog entries.

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Tuesday, March 03, 2009

 

Rush Limbaugh is a moron

He wants the stimulus to fail. He accuses any Republicans who are working to make the rescue package work, traitors to the Republican Party. This from someone who called people who did not agree with the Iraq War ‘un-American’! This, from a man whose party caused this fucking mess! The word hypocrite falls so far short of adequate as a description for this man.

Does he not realise that in order to fix the mess his darlings caused, drastic action is needed? If not, exactly how stupid is he? Does he not realise that if the stimulus fails, America goes down the tubes for the next several years and there will be no money to pay back the national debt, which will push taxes up, the dollar down and unemployment, business failures and house and car repossessions to previously unknown heights? Or that the car and building industries will be decimated?

He thinks he should want President Obama’s policies to fail because he is a Republican. But he is nothing more than attention seeking, egotistical traitor. Who can want his or her country to fail!!!! I have honestly never heard anything like it.

People who don’t need truth, memories or history in order to form opinions listen to this man! It doesn’t matter that they too are idiots. I’m sure his employers love the publicity and probable increased ratings. Hopefully the spike will be temporary, as I trust that most Republicans realise you don’t have to root for your country to fail while still sticking to your political principals. Time for the clown to leave the radio and join the circus.

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