I love my analog watches too dearly to give them up for a smart watch.
However, I just realized that analog watches also have "power users", and I am definitely not one of them.
My favorite watch (excuse me, "chronograph") has a stopwatch with lap memory, a tachymeter, support for multiple time zones, and a bunch of other features I have not thought about since the week I purchased it.
I don't really know how to use it all. I just like the watch.
Was going to reply that I would probably consider myself a power user of my Casio W-736. Features I use:
- Check the time (many times daily)
- Count-down timer (many times daily)
- Stop watch (weekly)
- Check date (a few times per month)
- Secondary time zone (rarely, since the people I care about are in the same time zone or 6h behind and easy enough to convert in my head)
I've had a fitbit in the past but had a hard time with having to charge it regularly, which often resulted in forgetting it at home. The added features did not outweigh the risk of being without it every now and then.
This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.
I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.
Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?
Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
> Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors
I live in the Netherlands, and I get several spoofed crypto-scam calls every day. I have also stopped picking up the phone for numbers I don't recognize. My own telephone number has been used to call others for a while, so I would get tons of "sorry I was busy, what did you call about?" return calls from random people when clearly I had not called them at all.
As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?
This feels very much like an example of "this should be run by the government" rather than letting this be run by companies.
> As far as I know, the only reason spoofing is even possible, is so that call centers in other countries can pretend to be calling from a local number, which.. why is that even a feature?
It is very common for each individual phone in a call center to have a direct inward dial number, but when they dial out they want the main support contact number to be displayed so you can get routed appropriately and not harass their tech support employee.
I'm curious, is that a landline or a mobile number?
Because I have two mobile numbers the country to the right of you and have gotten perhaps one marketing/scam call in the last decade. And those numbers have been used for 2FA for plenty of websites so surely must have leaked by now.
As an American myself, I get multiple spam calls every day. Combine that with the fact that I am part of the generation that doesn't really do phone calls, and easily 95% or more of the phone calls I get are scams. Recently, for the past year or so, its mostly been the personal loan scams, but it changes over time. I clear out my voice mail box about once a week and almost always have 20+ messages using that same script.
To note, this isn't just banning random scams: calls coming from a known entity, but abusing their existing relation to push marketing calls also fall under this law.
For instance your main bank calling you for "special offers", even as you've already explicitly told them you don't want any marketing calls, would be candidate to punishment under this rule.
I live in the U.S., have a U.S. phone number, and get maybe one spam call every six months. (Spam texts about once a month, with the exception of before elections, when it’s more.) I wonder what causes the difference. Do I have a newer phone number that isn’t on as many lists? Or is my carrier filtering calls before they get to my phone?
I briefly activated a second SIM on an MVNO that gave me a new number, and that one previously belonged to an old woman who got spam calls roughly every ten minutes. Clearly there is an issue here, but it doesn’t affect everyone equally.
I think its just luck of the draw. I find that the scam calls come in waves. I'll get several of the same scams, latest being spoofed calls from Google, every day for a week or two and then they'll stop completely for months. I haven't had any in a while now. Currently getting a ton of scam SMS.
From what I can tell over time it seems to be random initial chance + random chance as your number gets shared with the 3rd parties you interact with. There are a few things one can do, like never pick up when it is a spam call, but at the end of the day there is still the element of chance to it.
I went a good 5+ years without spam calls/texts. Lately I've been getting the occasional scam recruitment text every 1-2 weeks for some reason. Hard to say why exactly, but hopefully it fades away and I get the peace again.
Is it possible someone had your number before it was yours, and that they were a hot target for spam?
My US phone numbers over the years[1] have normally been very quiet, but I've had a couple that were quite spammy.
[1]: I've been switching providers/MVNOs every time I've found one with a better deal -- for decades. I never, ever port the old number, so I've had a good number of them.
I heard a family member's spam call that used Trump's voice to personally ask for a donation. It made me wonder how many people might fall for that, especially people in cognitive decline. And the call was spoofed from their area code which is a dirty way to get people to answer.
It simply shouldn't be possible to spoof a call. Or spoof an IP packet origin.
The US hasn't failed anything, you're acting like politicians neglected to acted when they're doing exactly what telecom companies want: ensure they have no accountability.
Please don't forget neoliberalism is the actual economic policy of the US for the last 50ish years; with deregulation being a core tenant of neoliberalism.
I've always found it somewhat ironic that the people who are least familiar with the actual research on the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to be the most confident in discussing it.
This is actually an easily solvable problem. In fact, most of the world has already solved it by not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors similar to the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
This is not specific to Silicon Valley. It's human nature.
People take the "vibe" from a work and assume the vibe is the meaning. Look at how things like Fight Club, The Punisher, and Wall Street are viewed in the general culture.
The Great Gatsby is a famous cautionary tale of the danger and pointlessness of unchecked pursuit of wealth. It's studied widely in US high schools. When the movie came out, all over the US people held "Gatsby Parties" which were 1920s themed parties focuses on ostentatious displaces of wealth.
No matter how profound and important the message, most people won't look beyond the vibe.
> frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind
Everyone experiences this. Please don't be frustrated by it.
The mind wandering is part of the practice. In fact, that instant where your mind has been wandering and you "snap out of it" is perhaps the most valuable.
That little skill carries over into real life. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel that flash of anger, your mind will catch itself and you'll just let it go and get on with your life.
A good article about a genuinely great and important book. One quibble.
> Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.
I don't think they think that. People this powerful who choose to surround themselves with fawning sycophants are undoubtably being told daily that the whole world is understanding and routing for them in their "perfectly reasonable response to these vicious attacks."
However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.
> This is a detailed study performed by experts. Do you believe they would overlook such obvious explanation?
Yes, they could have possibly overlooked things that appear to be obvious in retrospect. Happens all the time because it may or not have been the focus of the paper, or the time constraints may have not permitted this level of research. This is why we usually have multiple papers, each building on each other over time, on the same data sets/topics.
Said experts do not seem to have included this core analysis in the report.
Since housing starts are more likely in areas seeing rapid housing price appreciation, and construction employs many illegal workers, you could make just as strong of a case that increased housing costs drive unauthorized migration rather than the other way around.
That's why it's so hard, and so important, to disentangle correlation and causation.
However, I just realized that analog watches also have "power users", and I am definitely not one of them.
My favorite watch (excuse me, "chronograph") has a stopwatch with lap memory, a tachymeter, support for multiple time zones, and a bunch of other features I have not thought about since the week I purchased it.
I don't really know how to use it all. I just like the watch.