On the one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, potential solution to economic inequality? Maybe?
On the one hand, I feel very sorry for the guy. On the other hand, I don't think you make that kind of money in "search engine optimization" by actually being useful to the users of search engines.
I was starting to feel sorry for him until I got to the point in the story where he loses confidence in the first psychic, so he starts "shopping around" for a new one.
Office conversation:
"Does anyone know the name of a good SEO consultant?"
"Surely you just google "SEO consultant" and whoever comes up top must be the best?"
I assume 2 is Gob?
On the one hand, I feel very sorry for the guy. On the other hand, I don't think you make that kind of money in "search engine optimization" by actually being useful to the users of search engines.
This. I mean, fuck psychics, and this guy was clearly ripe for manipulation. But then again he made his money from manipulation, so I can't say I'm sorry for him to lose it. The emotional stuff, though, that's harsh.
5 is right. This guy isn't gullible in the innocent sense, he's someone who desperately wanted to live a particular story and eventually found someone he could pay massive amounts of money to to help him do that. This is a kind of gullible, obviously, and a really, really common one. But I don't know if it's the one that lets anyone off the hook for things. By the time he was really invested with the second psychic I'm betting it wasn't just the things she was saying she was doing that was the appeal it was how much he was giving her to do them (because it shows how serious he was about this woman/how dramatic the circumstances/how far he went for love/whatever).
On some level I can't help but wonder if the psychic's defense isn't going to be something like "Look it says 'for entertainment' and he came looking for me and I think it doesn't actually count as fraud if no sane person would come close to believing this stuff".
I was reading somewhere that for the Nigerian scammers, the obvious implausibility of the whole thing is a feature and not a bug. Because they are looking for one, big score and being completely inane screens out more of the people who might wise-up after giving a few hundred dollars. I had thought psychics were usually after smaller amounts from large numbers of people, but maybe not.
He should have stuck with an ethical psychic, like Miss Cleo.
I see that bank called him for confirmation on the biggest payment. I wonder if that was just standard or some kind of Patriot Act thing or if somebody in the bank figured out something really stupid was happening or what?
I was reading somewhere that for the Nigerian scammers, the obvious implausibility of the whole thing is a feature and not a bug.
That was linked here! I love that strategy.
Anyway, when I thought of "big score" for a psychic, I had been thinking of something like Winona Ryder in Reality Bites money, not big techie money.
I see that bank called him for confirmation on the biggest payment. I wonder if that was just standard or some kind of Patriot Act thing or if somebody in the bank figured out something really stupid was happening or what?
All of the above, surely. Aren't all payments over $10k reportable, and hence likely to trigger some sort of Know Your Customer/anti-money laundering activity?
I know they have to report them, but I didn't know that they had to call you and say if you were really sure about this.
I'm torn. I'd be happy with saying "he deserved it" if we were talking about, I don't know, an arms dealer or a tobacco company executive, but SEO optimization? It seems roughly as useless and parasitic as advertising and some kinds of lawyering. If we write off people like that, my job starts to seem pretty useless too.
On the other hand, a lot of people manage to ruin their lives with crazy behavior who don't have $718,000 to start with. I get that misery poker and "I'm not going to talk about Paris because people are getting killed in Lebanon" is deprecated, but this story is not actually as weird as it seems.
Is there a glib name for that "I'm not going to talk about Paris because people are getting killed in Lebanon" phenomenon, by the way? I think there is, but I don't remember it. It's like being holier-than-thou but more specific somehow.
It's a variant of concern trolling, isn't it?
16.last: it seems such a boneheaded position to take, apart from anything else, because it would be trivial to go back through the feed of someone making the argument and find them ignoring a sinking ferry in Indonesia or an airliner crash in Africa or a massacre in Pakistan or a mass shooting in Ohio or whatever.
And it's particularly odd in this case because the bombings in Beirut killed significantly fewer people than the attacks in Paris. "How can you mourn this huge tragic thing while ignoring this smaller and therefore less tragic thing?
Is there a glib name for that "I'm not going to talk about Paris because people are getting killed in Lebanon" phenomenon, by the way? I think there is, but I don't remember it. It's like being holier-than-thou but more specific somehow.
I think it's a form of whataboutery. A term that I believe was coined during the Irish Troubles to describe the predictable pattern where any partisan would respond to criticism of their side by asking why you aren't concerned with the excesses of the other side?
Related, definitely. I associate it with LGM; that kind of "aha! now let me explain at length why your instinctively compassionate human reaction makes you unspeakably evil!" thing.
21: Indeed. If a death in your own family affects you more than any random death on the planet, you're a moral monster.
No one has yet mentioned the irony of the guy making money through SEO, then losing it all, then going to the New York Times with this damning story under his own name while trying to rebuild his life. That's quite a train wreck. 16.2 is really right, though.
On the other hand, a lot of people manage to ruin their lives with crazy behavior who don't have $718,000 to start with.
So are you proposing some sort of government program to hand out cash for people to ruin their lives with?
Typical liberal.
The 1% ruin their lives like this, everyone else ruins their lives like that.
16: I certainly wouldn't say he deserved this based on how he acquired his wealth; that doesn't even enter the equation for me. But this guy takes the "a fool and his money are soon parted" principle to its ultimate extreme.
I mean, shopping around for psychics with a money-is-no-object mindset is functionally equivalent to emailing random people in Nigeria and asking "Might you by any chance be a wealthy prince who is experiencing difficulty getting money out of the country? Because I can help you with that . . ."
Speaking of complete idiots, I think I might have just downloaded a virus into my firm's computer something by clicking on a fake story about an anti-masturbation dolphin mascot named "Fappy" being arrested at Sea World for masturbating. Should I even call the office manager and have to tell this story, or just wait and see what happens?
Waiting is no good. Log on to a different computer and try the same site.
16: I want to promote the Fallacy of Relative Privation as the proper name. It looks like it will have to find its way into a reputable print source if it is to retain its wikipedia page.
... is not something Fappy would say.
fake story about an anti-masturbation dolphin mascot named "Fappy" being arrested at Sea World for masturbating.
You know, this is a lovely story that needs to become real.
I can't decide whether the fact that dolphins can't reach their genitals with their flippers means that a dolphin would be a poor choice as an anti-masturbation mascot, or the perfect choice.
Be the change you want to see in the Sea World.
To be clear, this doesn't violate an office policy since we have to look at weird and salacious stuff fairly routinely. I just don't want to have to explain myself.
Huh, Fappy has a Facebook account. Seems legit.
I don't think this guy is even unusual among psychic "victims", apart from having a shitload more money than most. There are a lot of people who go to psychics casually as harmless entertainment (that they may or may not take very seriously--although I think regular customers must generally take it at least somewhat seriously), and then there is some subset of people who become obsessed with it and go bankrupt or come close. Not even so different from or necessarily all that much more superstitious than people who lose everything over months/years of gambling in the belief that they are "due" for a big win. And that's even less uncommon.
34: Don't underestimate the resourcefulness of Fappy's kin.
The tricky part is how do you assign a billing code.
I, for one, oppose the program for amputating peoples' arms at the elbow to prevent them from masturbating.
I agree. For it to be effective, you have to amputate at the shoulder.
I always thought this Joni lyric was a bit odd:
"There's a gypsy down on Bleecker Street
I went in to see her as a kind of joke
And she lit a candle for my love luck
And eighteen bucks went up in smoke."
I mean, I guess I get that her resentful tone is about her love luck, but she has the tone of someone who feels cheated, even though she claims she only went as a joke.
For $100,000, I'll build a gold bridge to your arms.
This seems relevant (from Oct 2013):
A jury found a Manhattan psychic guilty on Friday of swindling two women out of $138,000 in a case that probed the fine distinction between providing an unusual service and running a confidence scheme.
I mean, yes, this poor guy was obviously massively foolish. But that doesn't mean Christina isn't guilty of a massive con job.
34. You do what you gotta do. PROBABLY AS NOT SAFE FOR WORK AS ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET.
I can't help but think that by the time they got to golden bridges and bringing people back from the dead that the entirely normal losing lots of money to psychics phenomenon was well in the rearview mirror. The same kind of psychological effect, sure, but the difference in degree has got to be pretty serious.
Also you should absolutely tell the office manager about it before it gets discovered otherwise and liveblog the conversation.
The story linked in 46 is also pretty great, although it seems more like normal human idiocy. I do love the details of her scam though:
She convinced Ms. Saalfield to give her $27,000 for safekeeping as an exercise in letting go of money.
The quote in 49 is amazing. Straight out of a comedy sketch.
Wow, what an incredibly broken man. The psychics seem like a sideshow.
47 is alarming confirmation that dolphins are horrible people. Also, in the right hand column Youtube is recommending a supercut of monkeys masturbating. The fact that someone made this is confirmation that humans are horrible people, too.
Also, someone made a video entitled "Asking hot girls if they masturbate." So pretty much the killer asteroid can't come soon enough.
The sheer lunacy of what they say when scamming people may be completely intentional, come to think of it. It's a brilliant combination of escalating the ridiculousness of what they're doing so that by the time it gets really exploitative the person would have to admit to themselves, or the police or lawyers or whatever, that they had actually sincerely given someone thousands of dollars on a pretext so dumb that there's no way of admitting it wasn't reasonable that wasn't simultaneously admitting that they were possibly the stupidest person on earth.
If trends continue, by 2018 there will be a video available of hot girls masturbating.
So pretty much the killer asteroid can't come soon enough.
Sadly, according to the comets I've dated, I have the opposite problem.
The dolphin in 47 surely said, "I'm gonna rip off your head and fuck your carcass." Shoulda listened, little fish! And isn't that pretty much what Ackerman said right before they fired him from TNR?
Reasonable reliance is an element of a fraud claim in most places. Outlandish requests have a built in defense, it would see,.
Of course not. A truly hot woman would be virtuous, and a virtuous woman would never masturbate, let alone on video.
All my ISIS friends agree with all my Mormon friends about this. It's all they talk about, in fact.
Update: I informed the office manager but without identifying the website. They are checking for viruses somehow.
All my ISIS friends agree with all my Mormon friends about this. It's all they talk about, in fact.
So, unlike the rest of us, they virtuously avoid whataboutery? Or is it not so?
I suspect ogged is making a universal quantification joke.
I think Rob's suggestion that instead of whataboutery we call it FORPing is a good one. It's a lot quicker to type and also funnier looking.
It's good to have a distinction between "what about all the bad things your side does" (fwicked the original meaning of whataboutery - Northern Ireland, the Levant) and "what about all the other bad things in the world you're not talking about".
64 was a setup for a punchline that I can't seem to pin down, but maybe one of you geniuses can save it.
(The dolphin porn version of "Finding Nemo" would of course contain the line "Fuck you, clownfish!")
Quietly applauding 70.
63 Did you click on the link in 47? Your office manager and/or IT is going to think you've got some strange* dolphin masturbation fetish.
*As opposed to a perfectly normal dolphin masturbation fetish.
49, 52: But the money was just resting in her account!
28/36/63: Coincidentally, I just plugged a camera into my work computer and got a window saying that my unauthorized access has been logged. Uh oh.
I know it's against the rules to plug stuff in to the computers like that around here, but I figured this would be OK because it was straight out of the box. (And, in fact, I didn't get the alert until I turned the thing on.) There can't possibly be anything harmful about it, right? But I didn't consider the possibility of monitoring software. Well, that was more than an hour ago and security hasn't come for me yet, but still, oops.
73: I'd say we live in dystopian 1984 but it's already 2015. At least use the camera to livestream video when Security comes to take you away...
73: When you get to prison, just walk up to the biggest guy you see and go all Holly Holmes on his ass. That way they'll respect you.
It must suck to be the biggest guy in prison these days. I mean, before that was a cliche it was probably great, but now you have to wonder how that goes for him.
74: Eh, it's a branch of DHS, the security is a tiny bit more justified than it would be in some offices. Still stupid but a tiny bit more justified. And as I've said, there are problems at work. I'm not worried about getting in trouble for the camera particularly, but straws and camel's backs and all that.
: When you get to prison, just walk up to the biggest guy you see and give him a headless fish to masturbate with.
I figured this would be OK because it was straight out of the box.
You do realize the box came straight from China, right?
This sounds like (and maybe is? I'm not reading deep) the same case that The Toast ran this one some time ago.
It must be, but that the woman didn't just reject him but up and died sure doesn't fit with the emotional labor thesis very well.
I suppose it still is emotional labor, but very different from explaining that she's not into you.
Paying $700,000 for a gold bridge to a dead person does seem more reasonable than doing the same for a live person who is avoiding you.
Dude I work in contemporary art--I've seen people pay more for less.
Now, whatever Michelle paid Christina to help fake her death, that was honest work.
That dolphin really did mastueebate with that decaputated fish.
Dolphins are total pervs. This one of the few things I remember from an ecology course I took over the summer one year in college to satisfy a biology requirement. They are just total, total pervs who will get it on with anything and everything.
I can respect that. Who here hasn't masturbated wth a decapitated fish? I just wouldn't have guessed dolphins were so smart.
The final countdown, oh
It's the final count down
The final countdown
The final countdown
The final countdown
Oh
bam bar da ben ba. Look at these pathetic Google search results.
81 - But after she died she was reincarnated as a different woman of approximately the same age that he tried to talk to but who apparently got weirded out by what must have been odd and very specific questions and told him to go away!
This was, apparently, what made him think that something fishy might be going on. I'm not sure why, though, because from the story it sounds like that was pretty much the reaction that the first woman had to him as well.
Paying $700,000 for a gold bridge to a dead person
Ack! I'm sorry, but I can't help feeling some sympathy for this man, even as I readily concede that it's a bit ridiculous that anyone could make $700K as an SEO consultant. He was (still is, it sounds like) obviously in a very dark place; and he almost certainly should not have given this interview (I guess he thought it might help his case? but I doubt he was thinking clearly). I cringed when I got to the point where he acknowledged that he had needed his mum: I wanted to rewind the tape, and go back to point at which he could decide whether or not to give this interview (Don't do it! But if you must do it, please don't do it while under the influence of alcohol ... But it was too late, of course: he had already done it).
I have a special moral revulsion toward vultures and vampires who prey upon emotionally fragile people who are in a tough spot, or a dark place. Which is just a secular way of saying 'there is a special place in H*ll' for such predators, I guess. Not feeling much sympathy for Ms. Delmaro, or Christina, in other words. I hope her operation is shut down completely.
It's interesting reading the memoirs of thieves and conmen in the Nabat series, they're so devious and astute about human psychology when they're ripping people off, and then when they've got the proceeds, what do they do? Mostly drink and gamble it away in a big spree. Obviously, there's an element of compulsion there, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that both of the psychics have or will blow all that money themselves.
and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that both of the psychics have or will blow all that money themselves.
That they would spend the money themselves, and on their own selves, is in fact my baseline assumption. I would be very surprised indeed to learn that they had donated the bulk of their ill-gotten gains to the local food pantry, or to some other worthy initiative or charity.
Give a man a headless fish, be can masturbate for a day. Teach a man to behead fish, and he can masturbate for a lifetime.
Masturbating with a decapitated snake, on the other hand, may leave you requiring invasive medical treatment.
OT: this is pretty interesting from Kevin Drum - not so much the overall scores, but the disparity within countries.
(Short form: couple of honesty tests; you ask people to toss a coin unsupervised, and tell them that if they get heads they get $5. Then you give them a quiz that you can't do without googling, tell them not to google the answers, and if they get a perfect score they get $5. So if the coin-toss gives an overall score of over 50%, there's some cheating happening; likewise if the quiz gets a lot of people scoring top marks.)
Some countries cheat more than others; but it's strange that the same country will have a lot of people who don't mind lying about the result of a coin toss, but wouldn't dream of cheating on a test (Japan, the US) or vice versa (Turkey).
97: Color me completely unsurprised at China winning the cheatstakes. 85% is huge, though.
97: those aren't percentages of cheaters, they're normalised scores so the highest score for each test is 100. China's estimated percentage dishonesty on the coin toss is more like 70%, according to the actual paper.
Another interesting result is that churchgoers are more dishonest than non-churchgoers. Although, of course, they're categorising them based on their own reported church attendance, so it might just be that people who lie about going to church also lie about other stuff...
Somebody did a study asking people about church attendance then staking out the parking lot. This came up in an ethics in research lesson somewhere along the way. I don't remember the exact results but I do remember the study had fewer ethical issues than the one where they tracked down closeted homosexuals and interviewed them in their own home.
101: yes, there was another rather clever one that used two separate surveys: one asked "how many times do you attend church" and then another, a bit later, asked the same people to report how they had spent their time over the last month or two. Quite a disparity.
NMM to FHM
Fish Head Masturbation? Who will tell the dolphins?
102: It's pretty hard for even people trying to be honest to give consistent retrospective reports to different, but related, sets of questions like that. To know for certain, you need to sit in a parking lot and write down license plate numbers.
104: Erstwhile king (insert one-eyed joke here) of the lad mags in the UK. At one point it sold 700,000 copies a month.
Just another victim of the creeping Islamification of Europe.
Way more than 700,000 fish heads are sold in a month.
So, I'm at the airport. I took the bus here and while riding a woman with only a twenty boarded. No change on the bus and a fare of $3.75 so she shouts asking for somebody to break a twenty. I have $19 in change, which I shout back. So, she gets $19 and I get $20 plus $1's worth of vague unease about the extra dollar. I go through security and have breakfast (if the twenty was fake, it's now McDonald's problem), read emails, etc. Then, while walking to see what the bookstore has, I see her. So, I give her the dollar that I now have. Now, I have $14.34, a full belly, and a vague unease about whether that was more creepy than thoughtful.
Not creepy at all, unless you asked her for a date at the same time. It'll be a good story for her to tell.
No, I did not.
109 should have been a joke involving "fish wrapper."
OT, but that other place tells me that Becks and MattF hatched another Unfogged baby this morning.
103 is very elegant
101: I have a sociologist friend whose first words, when we were introduced, were: "They lie, you know. They fucking lie all the time" -- she was doing a project on church attendance. People who think they ought to go to church consistently overestimate the amount they do so, on the same principle, I imagine, that almost everyone is an "above average" driver.
Similarly, the figures for church attendance in Nigeria are no more reliable than any other Nigerian statistic, which is kind of cheering because it means there are millions fewer bigots in the world than we supposed.
I'm not sure which of the New Atheist Satans it was* who said this, but they pointed out that for the most part people don't so much believe that some or other religious tenet is true as they believe that believing that it's true is a virtuous and noble thing, like giving money to the poor or standing up for what you believe in. It's not that being a member of a religion has to do with whatever the religion goes on about or even going to church so much as it is aspiring to the ideal of someone who does those things (and no one is perfect). So questions about church attendance or religious beliefs or that kind of thing are liable to get you responses that look less like questions about how often you go to the supermarket and more like questions about how kind you are to other people, how brave you are, etc.
*I think... Dennett?
The interesting question is whether any society can hold together without some similar object of hypocrisy. Even if you take pure Randians most of them probably, thank God, overestimate their own selfishness because they think they ought to -- or, to put it another way, because they think that being a completely selfish bastard who cares nothing for anyone else is something that their society demands of them.
The interesting question is whether any society can hold together without some similar object of hypocrisy.
"The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."
I'm getting spam from a guy who says he can get me credit for the peer reviewing I've done. I've reviewed one article in the past dozen years. I like the current system where nobody knows that.
120: that works until everyone's a philosopher.
For the record, when I attended church, I almost literally never missed*. And since I stopped, I've literally never attended (except weddings & funerals, and damn few of those). From a Catholic POV, at least, I can't imagine treating it as non-obligatory.
I don't know why you think that sounds defensive. Perhaps you're the one feeling defensive.
*in the great blizzard of '93, the bishop actually told people that they had a dispensation to stay home, but I still walked to the cathedral. My classmates made fun of me, saying, "Even the Big Hat Boy says you can stay home." Then I walked to future-BOGF's apartment and cooked some fish, which in retrospect may have been a mistake.
122: In the land of philosophers, the one-eyed welder is king.
101,102: Has anyone studied whether atheists lie about how often they don't go to church? Someone should secretly follow Richard Dawkins around on Sundays and see whether he quietly slips into church when he thinks no one's looking.
123: Conversely, I think my family did, back when we went to church. I know that we sometimes went to a church that was only open seasonally, because it was closer to home both geographically and socially. I'm not sure we went to any church in its off-season in certain years. Even if we did I doubt we always transitioned from one to the other seamlessly without missing a week or two.
a church that was only open seasonally
For the last time, Boston fans, Fenway Park is not really a "church." Get over yourselves.
The Rev. Ortiz will be giving his last 81 sermons next year.
123: That's how I was raised and I can't really compare since when I'm attending church now it's something I force my atheist self to do because I think it's important for the girls. When Lee and I were still together and we had all three girls I was managing not even once a month and I've only gone once post-breakup. I probably need to make it a mandatory monthly thing to cut down on the whining when it happens, but they only have one service and it's very inconvenient in terms of Selah's nap. On the plus side, you don't have to skip food before it or anything like that, and if you show up late or leave early it's also no big deal.
Isn't there some joke about abstemious Christians along the lines of if you leave one alone with alcohol and expect some of it to disappear, but leave two or more with alcohol and no one has a drop?
There was an extraneous and in my last comment; please offer it to Paris.
Because ze french, zey will be grateful for an offered 'and of today
130: Never go fishing with just one Baptist. He'll drink all your beer.
101,102: Has anyone studied whether atheists lie about how often they don't go to church? Someone should secretly follow Richard Dawkins around on Sundays and see whether he quietly slips into church when he thinks no one's looking.
I've probably been to more church services than most nominal Christians in the UK, having gone to a school founded by a bishop which had its equivalent of daily assemblies in a chapel with hymns and prayers and all that.