First Looks category archive

The mopes call you on the phone with a recorded message that your bank’s ATM records have been compromised and give you a number to call.

When you call that number, they talk your information out of you, then raid your account.

More information here and here.

Acidification

Described as “the other carbon problem,” the slow decrease in the pH of ocean waters across the globe is blamed mostly on the burning of fossil fuels and the release of excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

(snip)

Increased acidity means that shellfish, from the tiniest to the largest species, have trouble making their shells from calcium carbonate, a victim in the changing chemistry of the oceans, the experts said.
That threat has watermen worried about future impacts on crabs, oysters, clams and other commercial stocks that grow shells or rely on small shellfish for food, said Wayne Creed, an Eastern Shore fisherman, writer and consultant.

The story goes on to point out that some climate change deniers claim that acid is good.

Apparently it is, if you like algae blooms and dead zones.

They must be taking some other kind of acid, the kind that alters reality.

One of the myths treasured by the rightwing is that private industry always does a better job than government “bureaucrats.”*

It just ain’t so, but it does funnel a lot of government money in private hands:

Consider the bomb-sniffing dogs: The Navy contracted out their training. The dogs failed the tests after training (they couldn’t sniff bombs); after thinking about it a while, the Navy decided to buy the dogs and train them itself:

The task probably seemed innocuous enough when a small team of U.S. Navy personnel accepted it last fall. They would trek out to a private security contractor in Chicago to pick up 49 dogs, then transport them to a nearby military base.

But what they found when they arrived was shocking, according to internal Navy e-mails: dirty, weak animals so thin that their ribs and hip bones jutted out.

(snip)

In fact, the Navy said later, at least two of the dogs did not survive. Several others were deemed too sick to ever be of use. Nearly a year after they were supposed to have begun working, the remaining K-9s still are not patrolling Navy installations as intended.

The contractor says the Navy owes it $6,000,000.00.

I hope the guv’mint protected itself by including in the contract a performance bond.

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*As if large private companies somehow do not qualify as “bureaucracies”; case in point: try calling Verizon for a telephone repair and see how long it takes to reach a real live human being.

It took me an hour and six phone calls–Verizon dropped two of them and three others ended up in Menu Hell. Once I got to them, the real live human beings were polite, knowledgeable, and efficient (afterthought: probably because they were hungry for human interaction), but Verizon’s 800-number horror show is one of the reasons I would not contract with Verizon for anything other than basic land line service.

Odds bodkins!

2 B R No B=?

Cramming is back:

Increasingly complex bills for cell phones and conventional phones have made it more tempting to try to slip in charges that customers might not notice.

This week, the FTC filed charges against two San Francisco brothers, accusing them of fraudulently billing people for services supposedly provided by numerous companies with names such as GoFaxer.com, Global YP and Inc21. A federal judge issued an injunction halting operations by the businesses while the men await trial.

Crammers use a wide variety of ways to stick consumers with charges they never approved.

More of that fee hand of the market that righties are so fond of talking about.

Souls are lined up to enter Heaven. As each one enters, St. Peter gives the soul a harp.

On the other side of things, other souls are lined up to enter Hell. Each one receives an accordion . . . .

Read more »

This one comes and goes; the callers claim to be calling from Canada.

A 93-year-old New Castle County man received a call Wednesday afternoon from a man purporting to be his grandson Ian, county police spokesman Senior Cpl. Trinidad Navarro said.

The caller said he was in Canada on a fishing trip with friends when they accidentally trespassed on an Indian reservation and were arrested. They needed $2,000 to get back to the United States, the caller said.

When the elderly man told the caller that he didn’t have any money, the caller hung up, Navarro said.

He then telephoned his daughter to find that Ian wasn’t in Canada but at work.

The blogger whose writing was worthy of his nom de blog has passed away.

Via Mithras.

After the earthquake in Chile:

Sure enough, water in a monitoring well in Christiansburg, near Virginia Tech, rose at least 4 inches and then dropped about 2 feet as energy waves rippled through the Earth. But Nelms, a groundwater specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Richmond, saw something unexpected, too.

“The weird thing about this one was we saw it in wells we normally don’t see response in,” he said, looking over water level charts called hydrographs. “There’s one out in Clarke County that we’ve never seen anything like this in, but there’s a little blip up.”

Business Week quotes Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as reporting that the whole thing was earthshaking:

“The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

Business Week story via GNC.

From the BBC:

Officials say the residential scheme at Port Fairy, 300 km (186 miles) west of Melbourne (Australia–ed.), will not go ahead because of safety concerns.

There is growing fear in Australian coastal areas about storm surges and possible inundation from rising oceans.

The Victoria state government’s decision was based on a projection that sea levels will rise by 80cm (11.8 inches) over the next century.

Chinese temple art: