Telltale

 A  LinkedIn posted that I'd made pointing out some of the telltales of faked profiles prompted a simple enough question: "Why would anyone prey on someone that is looking for a job?"

There is, of course, a simple answer, "Money," but there's also a somewhat more nuanced answer: A painful, but recoverable, financial loss for someone in the United States or Europe can be a life-changing amount of money for someone in a poor country, and many of the random frauds that pop up on LinkedIn originate in just such poor countries.

There is a steady background hum of fraudulent activity on LinkedIn, a lot of it really minor; people shilling for companies that promise to get people jobs, offering résumé reviews/writing of dubious value or pointing job seekers to fake "recruiter" profiles. Things that LinkedIn, perhaps of necessity, is somewhat tolerant of, so one doesn't have to look very hard to find it. And that means that most of it is, in the grand scheme of things, unsophisticated. Much of it is boilerplate, and that means that it usually has telltales that something isn't right.

Which is all fine and good, but seeing a telltale, and knowing what it is are not the same. And this is where LinkedIn could be doing a better job for its users. As a run-of-the-mill social media platform, LinkedIn lives or dies by time on site and posts viewed, and so posts encouraging posting are common. But most people who use the site don't come there simply to read posts... they're social selling, looking for a job or trying to make connections. And fraudsters attempt to insert themselves into those activities. The occasional post informing people of what to look for would be useful to them, and it would let would-be thieves and con artists know that the site is on to them.

Guess What's Back

Remember SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19? Well, if you don't, National Public Radio wants to remind you.

"Just like all previous summers since the pandemic began," the NPR website notes, "COVID-19 cases are ticking up again, even while other health threats make more headlines."

Yes, and?

The accompanying story is okay, but doesn't offer much in the way of information that a reader or listener could directly act on. So the whole thing comes across as "Hey! This virus is still around out there!"

Which, in the absence of any concrete information about what people should, or should not do, makes the story seem more like a trivia piece than a useful news story. I understand that the NPR audience, being somewhat on the leftward side of the political spectrum, was more invested in the social measures that were in place to combat the spread of the disease back in 2019 and 2020, but there's no action for them to get behind now. And so the story takes on an air of "here's one more thing to concern yourself with." And I'm not sure what that does for anyone.

Validity

There's a fairly expansive ecosystem on LinkedIn, and I suspect social media in general, that seeks views, likes and other social media currency by offering a steady stream of unabashed validation to all and sundry. Such as the following:

I find the trend of people placing their names on these bland aphorisms to be interesting. Do they really expect to be credited for coining these shopworn phrases?

What I find to be interesting about this is the implication that one's "value" is an objective number, and that people for whom it's not self-evident are incorrect or not worth someone's time. But as I encounter the world, there's nothing objective about value. Some people value certain things, or people, and other people don't.

And for someone like me, who understands all value to be instrumental (as in a means to an end), it stands to reason that what one wants or needs is what determines how valuable something is. I wouldn't pay $175 for an NFL ticket. Not because I don't see it's value, but because I'm not interested in watching football games live. But if a ticket landed in my lap, I'd ask around to see if anyone wanted it, and happily sell it to them, because they'd rather have the ticket than some amount of money, and I'd rather have the money than the ticket. Our whole economy is based on this sort of exchange.

But people find this idea, that they have a certain value, and other people should be able to see that, as validation. Which is why these sorts of things how up in my feed: someone I know had "liked" them for found them "insightful." Which is fine. But it doesn't work for me. For me, the choice of place comes down to people who are doing something where I can offer them some assistance. Which I think works better, people tend to be more open about what they're attempting to do.

Unsolved

I was listening to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, about how opposition to (hyperscale) data centers cuts across the otherwise entrenched partisan divide between Democratic and Republican voters. It was something of a follow-up to a story in The Verge from Gaby Del Valle about the broader opposition to these large data centers.

There wasn't anything really out of the ordinary in their discussion; the idea that dislike of generative automation and the data centers that house it crosses political boundaries is pretty much common knowledge at this point. But one thing did stand out for me. Host Nilay Patel asked Ms. Del Valle if there was something the technology companies could do to blunt the opposition, basically, could they buy the communities off in exchange for acceptance. The response:

I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”

She then went on to note that what she believed communities wanted was some level of community input into the process.

It seems to me that changes to zoning laws is something that communities can do to have a greater level of control over what goes on in their immediate vicinity; in other words, it's a solution, or at least part of one, to the problem that these places feel they have. And it was left out of the story for being "extremely dry and very technical."

Part of me wants to use this as an indictment of modern media, leaving out the part of a story that people could actually use, because it didn't come across as "sexy" enough. But that presumes that Ms. Del Valle made the wrong call on that, and I'm not certain that she did. Her intuition that readers of The Verge would have simply tuned out if she'd gone into those details may have been bang on the money. The news media is a business, and whether that business is ad-supported or funded by subscriber dollars, boring stories are deadly. And solutions to problems, especially solutions that would take a fair amount of effort, are not known for bringing in eyeballs.

Although, to be sure, it's not clear that what The Atlantic's Derek Thompson calls "solutions journalism" is being attempted often enough for there to be a large enough sample size to really figure it out. This could simply be a situation where no-one wants to be the guinea pig.

Everything Becomes Crabs

I was listening to the podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, and their fourth segment was about one Jiang Xueqin, otherwise known as "the Chinese Nostradamus." During the discussion and interesting point was made; that left to its own devices, every crazy conspiracy theory eventually winds up being anti-Semitic.

While there's quite a bit of evidence for this axiom in North America, and, I suspect, in Europe, I wonder how well it holds up worldwide. While Mr. Xueqin is Chinese, his family moved to Canada when he was young, so I'm not sure that he's representative of the nation is a whole, which strikes me as not really having a history that lends itself to the sort of pervasive anti-Jewish prejudices that constantly seem to meander through the industrialized West.

I suppose that this could be considered a corollary to the question of whether there's some sort of messianic figure that people in East Asia think they are if they have serious mental health issues. While there are a decent number of documented cases of people coming to the conclusion that they are the returned Jesus, it seems that this wouldn't really be the case in non-Christian countries.

In any event, I do wonder if there is some or another out-group in that part of the world that people feel are conspiring against the common good, in the way that Jews are often said to be here. Or if the entire idea of some grand cabal is itself confined to the United States and the like. I would be unsurprised to find that there is some research on the topic, but even before Alphabet decided that Google search was just too useful, I lacked the skills to track it down.