Tag: villainy

Incomprehensible reply to fraud report

I get that daily monster.com update for jobs that match my keywords. Not because I’m actively looking for a job, but because I want to know what’s going on my field. Usually it’s a stream of boring but totally doable gigs which makes me feel more secure. Occasionally it’s amusing or alarming. And, far too often, there are things that aren’t jobs but are instead trolls of some advertising for-pay job services.

These are almost always labeled something like “Work from home for major companies” and have every single location as their “home”, and some other obvious giveaways. A couple of years ago they were constant, and I gave up flagging them because I figured Monster was just selling those slots because the job market was slow.

Today I saw one, clicked through to look at it, and saw the usual website ad troll rather than a real job. This time I reported it as fraudulent through Monster’s own system, which is hard to find at first. I received the reply you see below. The last paragraph makes no sense at all and I would appreciate translation.

Content Title
Report site abuse

Discussion Thread
Response (Anisa P Varghese) 07/05/2006 05:40 AM
Hello substitute,

Thank you for contacting Monster Customer Central.

substitute, there are regulations and terms of use that must be met in order to post on the website. There is also screening for all postings listed on the website. Although this is true it is possible for a small amount of fraudulent postings to appear on the site. We have a department dedicated to locating, tracking, removing, and prosecuting when these issues do arrive. If you notice any specific fraudulent listings on the website please forward information in regards to those listings to this Email address or to “siteabuse@monster.com” (this will send directly to our Fraud prevention team). We will immediatly research and remove postings that are fraudulently posted on our site.

I would like to inform you that in some job posting when we click on the apply online button it takes us to the website of the company that posted the job. In such cases we need to set up an account in that web site for entering into the site to post for the job. The case you are referring to is also a similar one. I suggest you to create an account in the webpage you get and move forward and post for the job.

If there is anything else I can assist you with, please advise.

Have a good day, substitute !

Warm Regards,
Anisa Varghese
Monster Customer Central.

The news

This morning my phonepagerthing beeped with a message from emergencyemail.org: Bird flu in Canada, second case. That seemed appropriate. Their mission is to send me things like fire and flood warnings, DHS freakouts, declarations of war, and other items of urgent and frightening interest, and I think bird flu on the same continent as me is a good call.

I then went to my email and saw a CNN News Alert in my inbox. I figured it was the same thing and clicked. Nope: Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger to be cited for failure to wear a helmet, not having a proper license at time of his June 12 accident.

I looked at CNN’s home page. Nothing at all about bird flu there. I went to Google’s News home page: nothing about bird flu on the home page. A search came up with ~130 stories, most of them about exactly what the emergency email people paged me with: two cases of bird flu in North America.

I wonder if there were actually direct threats from poultry producers to news organizations, or just the implied one of advertising loss? Because this kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

latest aristos playing at shepherds fuck entire country

You know what you really don’t want if you live in an impoverished sub-saharan African country? Well, obviously you don’t want flies laying eggs in your eyes or dysentery. One other think you don’t want is asshole famous rich people deciding to have a child there becauses it would be special.

Go find yourself at the Beverly Hills Hotel and let Namibia alone. Or just write a check. Jerks.

Please panic now about everything and do as we say

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/05/terror/main1683852.shtml

It starts:

U.S. officials believe Canadian arrests over the weekend and three recent domestic incidents in the United States are evidence the U.S. will soon be hit again by a terrorist attack. Privately, they say, they’d be surprised if it didn’t come by the end of the year, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart in a CBS News exclusive.

Then they go on to say that terrorists are committing robberies in order to finance terror attacks, and list a couple of incidents in which various bad guys had what seemed to be political terrorism objectives.

The fun is all in the last sentence, though:

The next attack here, officials predict, will bear no resemblance to Sept. 11. The casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first, they say. But it’s coming — of that they seem certain.

Okay. So, they’re now reserving the option of pulling out any Very Bad Day that might have some tenuous connection to Islamic extremists and calling it a terrorist incident. If some career criminals who got Muslim names in prison rob a store in a mall and there’s a big ugly shootout, or if some mentally unstable loser with a connection to Islam runs over a lot of people on a sidewalk, or if any number of medium-spectacular crimes occur that they can tie to “terror” in any way, it will be more evidence that we should be afraid and that we should give up yet more liberty.

And the news calls this an “exclusive” and runs it unchallenged. Bleah!

Memorial Day: Lions led by Donkeys

From Lions Led By Donkeys

The problem is, these yahoos have managed an ugly trick. They have turned criticism of the policies of Bastards in Suits into criticism of The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. This, of course, is completely wrong, as one can easily tell the difference between the Bastards in Suits and The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. One group is in Suits, and Not Getting Shot At, while another is in Uniform, and Getting Shot At. Please, try to grasp this. Not the same.

[…]

The first war I read about extensively was World War I, where I encountered the magnificently British term “Lions led by donkeys.” If there’s a more apt description of our current thrill-ride, I can’t think of it. Here’s the thing: you folk on the other side of this particular argumentative aisle may like the Donkeys. You may trust the Donkeys. But never, ever forget the goddam difference.

Some people even seem confused on how we are criticizing the Bastards in Suits. The Bastards have a job to do. They are not doing it. Period. Tommy Franks recently trotted out the classic bit of misdirection, attacking critics of Donald Rumsfeld.

“I don’t care about your politics. I don’t. Don Rumsfeld is an American patriot.”

Yes, well, that’s lovely. But we’re not criticizing his patriotism. We’re criticizing his job performance. One of the great mysteries of the last six years was how and when the Bush Administration turned public policy into Special Olympics. “Oh, I know Donny knocked over all the hurdles, but HE LOVES THE RACE, so you SHUT YOUR FILTHY, CYNICAL MOUTH.” Jesus H. Christ.

The problem is, there is no single word in English for a man risking absolutely nothing, who demands someone else risk absolutely everything. I’m sure there’s a word in German — they are a whizzer with those kicky compound nouns — but none in English for that precise combination.

So, for now, we must let “chickenhawk” be its placeholder.

Thanks to the Aardvark.

spread it.

In Margaret Visser’s excellent Much Depends on Dinner, the history of margarine is related.

A cheap butter substitute terrified the dairy industry. As margarine became widely available commercially, the butter people did everything they could to stop it. They bought laws that taxed the stuff and enforced prominent labeling. In at least once place they required that margarine be placed apart from other groceries in a special closed off “Margarine Zone” of the market so that people would be humiliated to go in, revealing that they were cutting costs. And most of all, the color of margarine was regulated. It couldn’t look like butter, so the yellow coloring was either totally absent or in a tiny dot in one corner of the bag of goo so that consumers had to knead the package for some time to get it all yellow before putting it in the fridge. To this day, margarine cannot be butter-colored in some places.

What was the result? Today margarine is everywhere that butter is sold. There is still very good money to be made from butter. There is also good money to be made selling margarine and similar substitutes. Everyone knows the difference. The butter industry was not destroyed; they just lost some market share. Had they invested in the margarine business at the beginning most of their loss would have been stopped.

The Internet is margarine to a long list of industries. The music industry stands to lose retail distribution, which is not only a great place to add marginal costs but the place where their unpleasant friends in organized crime collect their money. The movie industry likewise loses its chain to theatres and all the incidental revenue there. Anyone with a job that ends in “Agent” who doesn’t work for the government is threatened.

The car dealers might be threatened too, but they’ve already got laws in every state in the U.S. restricting auto manufacturers to selling only through dealers; they’re in a stronger position than the dairy farmers.

Wine distributors are trying to “margarine” wineries with specious laws as well, because they find themselves disintermediated.

It might be good for business people who feel threatened by these changes to spend an hour with Visser’s book and take a lesson from margarine.