Hasta La Gadget!

After decades of being hobby-less, I am happy to announce that I now have a hobby: I report scammers on dating websites.

It might not be as fun a hobby as, say, collecting stamps or crocheting decorative covers for cushions, but it is rather satisfying nevertheless, in a flapping flies kind of way.

I came up with this hobby when I discovered a phenomenon I had not been aware of: romance scams. This was when I had just started experimenting online dating. I had no idea that the dating sites are not only havens for love seeking souls; they are also jungles of predators that want to take an advantage of the love seeking souls.

There is hardly anyone more vulnerable than a middle-aged divorcee. Many of us, though heartbroken and lonely, still entertain hope of finding new love. It takes guts to expose your deepest desires in an online community that many consider a bit dubious. Those who swallow their pride and do it anyway are like gazelles pasturing on a savannah, easy game for vicious hyenas.

When I started my adventures on the online dating scene, I was very naive. I also did not know how far the scammers would go to catch their prey. Most of them are amateurs, of course, making their profiles rather entertaining to read, for instance when you procrastinate and are temporarily fed up with the usual kitten eats a banana in a bathtub -videos.

I have come across all sorts of oddities. You might wonder how a person can get through a medical school with a dysphasia so serious he cannot construct one proper sentence in readable English. When I read these profiles, decorated with red flags to a point that red is all I see, the evil side of me goes rogue. Once I asked a “brain doctor” what was his take on consciousness. After a while I got a detailed account on the topic – freshly copied from Wikipedia. I know because I checked. Aaaw, cute, I thought. He thinks he can get away with such a little effort.

The sad truth is that they often do. Otherwise scamming would not be such a huge industry as it obviously is, given that around 80 percent messages I receive come from wherever they fabricate the fake profiles.

But not all of the scammers are lazy, though. Once I bumped into an Italian architect who had a fancy website. It was late at night and my eyes were tired so I almost swallowed the story. Next morning I took a closer look at the beautiful photos of his various glorious interior design projects. I googled the images and learned that they were all downloaded from different real estate agencies´ websites. His “team” consisted of professionals working all over the world in different companies. I was in awe. He was a scammer but he scammed with style.

Who are these people? Nigerian gangsters? Russian Mafiosi? Machines? Robots? Aliens?

The following example is from a real message that entered my inbox at OkCupid.

“i am an Italian man living and working here since 3 years , i work here as an architect and i am into building constructions and Interior designs , i am widowed and i have 1 son he is 18 years , and he lives and schools in the united states. my hobbies are cooking , swimming, skiing , camping , golfing, wine tasting and a lot more , i am a one woman Man, and i am not into playing games. i am a good and romantic man searching for true love ,.please tell me about your self . how long have you been using online dating? any good experience ? i will be waiting to read from you soon”

I mean, really!

The scammers have changed the way I look at love. While once upon a time I probably did regard words such as “true love”, “soul mate” and “romance” in high regard, these concepts now seem hollow to me. The scammers have soiled the words I have held sacred.

However much I detest romance scamming, I still think that it is the poor buggers that need our sympathy more than the people they try to fool. That’s why I report them. I try to save them from themselves. They need to be told that money really is a meagre price for one´s soul.

If I ever was to meet a scammer in person, I would give him a hug. I would say it´s going to be OK. And then we would meditate together, to access that place within, where there is only goodness and love. He probably would continue scamming even after that but I would feel so much better. Forgiveness is such a powerful mood booster.

If you come across a scammer, here´s what I suggest: welcome the experience as a great opportunity to practice Metta, loving kindness meditation. Send wishes of love, wellbeing, prosperity and kindness to the poor souls who, for one reason or another, have ended up making bad decisions. Remember to send those wishes to yourself, too. Make peace with what is. And then go on with your life. Love will find you eventually, and that is something no one can take away from you.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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As a financial advisor, I often work with clients who are concerned about how they are going to fund both their children’s education and their own future retirement. While the balancing act of saving for college and retirement can be difficult, I always say to my clients: “You can take out a loan for a college education, but you can’t take out a loan for retirement.” When it comes to education, we all want to do what is best for our children, but the emotional pull that parents go through in this savings process can be a challenge. At the end of the day, however, the reality is that saving is the primary way to fund your retirement.

So, how do you reach both goals with a finite amount of savings and resources? Do you focus your efforts first on maximizing your 401(k) contributions so you can take advantage of an employer match? Or do you speed up your children’s college savings account contributions? My belief is that it’s neither one nor the other; instead, you should take a holistic planning approach. This includes setting a target amount of money that you would want to save for your child before sending them to school. It also involves mapping out a thoughtful plan, factoring in how many years you have until your child goes to school and understanding how much should be saved each month at a conservative interest rate. Knowing that college savings could be an 18-year process, it’s important to create a strategy that doesn’t undermine your retirement savings.

I’ve recently been working with a couple who has a goal of retiring in the next five years. In our last session together, the wife asked me if there was an opportunity to retire earlier than the original plan as her job was becoming too stressful to manage. To help answer this question, we began to look at their projected retirement cost analysis.

As it turns out, the couple had significant debt that they had not disclosed to me in our discussions over the years. This debt was accumulated through a home-equity loan and a loan on a 401(k) plan, both of which were taken in an effort to finance their children’s education. The reason they did not disclose this information is because they thought it would have been paid off by their retirement. However, their ability to retire relied on their children paying them back for the education loans. When I asked how that payback plan was designed, including the amount and the timing it would be completed, the wife became upset as they had not yet received any funds from their children to support them in this plan. While the children had both graduated and were now working on their own, they were not in a position to fund both their daily needs and pay their parents back on the student loans.

Sometimes as a financial advisor, we have to get into challenging conversations with our clients. In this example, I had to say, “While your two children are just starting out and should be expected to live on a tighter budget, you can’t afford to ignore their debt and make it to retirement at the current pace.”

As a parent, you’re likely always putting your children’s needs before your own. So, what do you do? In this case, I advised my clients to have an open discussion with their children. While it was difficult for both kids to hear about mom and dad’s financial situation, it was a reality that needed to be shared to get everyone working toward the same goal. Once that conversation was held and everyone was on the same page, my clients and I could sit down and begin to do some serious retirement planning.

While having an open conversation about finances with your children is important to any plan, there are also strategies you can use to support the retirement and college savings balancing act.

First, it’s always good practice to start saving as soon as you can. When your child is born, if possible, open a 529 plan or similar college savings account. While you’re working to fund this account — in any way that you can, from birthday checks to annual bonuses — you shouldn’t neglect your retirement savings. As you advance in your career and your earnings potential, a larger paycheck may help you contribute to a 529 plan and your retirement account simultaneously.

I also encourage parents to get their families involved in saving for college. All family members, such as grandparents, can make contributions to 529 plans as gifts for holidays and birthdays. Rather than purchasing the latest toy or game that will soon be forgotten, money placed regularly into a college fund when a child is young can add up to a substantial financial gift when freshman year rolls around.

In their later years, as your child is searching for the college of his or her dreams, be sure to look at the available scholarship funds associated with the schools under consideration. It’s also important to start connecting with each school’s financial aid offices to learn more about their aid packages. Scholarships and financial aid should be considered in tandem with your current savings throughout the planning process. It’s also important for children to know how they might be able to contribute to their college fund, whether that means taking on a summer job or planning to work during college. Through the process, remember to acknowledge that less expensive schools, such as your state’s public colleges and universities, may also accomplish your child’s education goals.

College is one of the most important investments you and your family will make, but it shouldn’t be achieved at the expense of a successful retirement. Both are important components to a sound holistic financial plan. I encourage parents to walk this fine line carefully, creating both a disciplined and balanced strategy as well as having open and candid conversations.

Securities and Investment advisory services offered through Voya Financial Advisors, Inc., member SIPC. Neither Voya Financial Advisors nor its representatives offer tax advice.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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“You have to find the traces of fear and silence that are visible, whether it’s in the furrow of someone’s brow or in the water as it flows down an aging torso.” Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer talks about the making of his beautiful and hair-raising Oscar-nominated documentaries.

While Oppenheimer’s two most-well known films focus on perpetrators living with impunity, his work generally centres on questions of the nature of being and time, an interest that led him to study theoretical physics and cosmology as a young man. “Gradually I discovered that these were philosophical questions – not precisely physical questions, but metaphysical questions.” Filmmaking, for Oppenheimer, is a way of continuing this exploration of how we experience the world, an attempt at creating a “life practice” that examines how we perceive and feel ourselves in the universe.

In the Oscar-nominated film ‘The Act of Killing’ (2012) Oppenheimer challenges former Indonesian death-squad leaders to restage their mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish. Oppenheimer explains: “These performances of the present day lies, fantasies, stories, scripts that the perpetrators tell themselves so they can live with themselves” are what make up the film and become the basis of what the director sees as a new approach to non-fiction filmmaking in which everything is simultaneously real and fictional.

Joshua Oppenheimer (b. 1974) is an American producer and director, who has studied at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as Central Saint Martins in London. Oppenheimer has been Oscar-nominated twice – for ‘The Act of Killing’ (2012) and ‘The Look of Silence’ (2014). For these two documentaries he has furthermore received several prestigious awards including a Panorama Audience Award, the European Film Award for Best Documentary, a Robert Award, a BAFTA for Best Documentary, the Grand Jury Prize at the 71st Venice International Film Festival and the International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI). Other movies include ‘The Globalization Tapes’ (2003) and ‘The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase’ (1998). He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Joshua Oppenheimer was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærksen at Cinemateket in Copenhagen, Denmark in April 2016.

Camera: Simon Weyhe
Produced and edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana

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When I first saw this posted in a Badass Teachers Instagram I thought it was a joke. It was a little funny, but really too ridiculous to believe. Maybe we will have avatars in a science fiction world, but why here and now when we can train and evaluate teachers working with real students in real schools, the kind of real students they will actually have to teach.

But I turns out it wasn’t a joke. The Educational Testing Service, searching for a way to compete with the Pearson/SCALE edTPA actually proposes to replace students with avatars in teacher certification exams.

In previous posts I have complained about the Pearson/SCALE edTPA. New York State requires that certification candidates complete four exams either created or administered by Pearson. Three are written exams and one involves the complex edTPA portfolio submission. edTPA was created at Stanford University by a sub-division called SCALE and is administered and graded by Pearson. Originally it was intended as an evaluation of experienced teachers approaching tenure, not as an evaluation of student teachers. Essentially SCALE, Pearson, and New York State decided to replace student teacher evaluations by university field supervisors and cooperating teachers with an electronic portfolio, supposedly to ensure higher standards. The SCALE/Pearson edTPA electronic portfolio includes lesson planning, a discussion of student teaching placement sites, videos of candidates interacting with K-12 students, their personal assessment of the lesson, and documentation of student learning. While each piece by itself makes sense, the package, which focuses on just three lessons and can be sixty pages long, takes so much time to complete that it detracts from the ability of student teachers to learn what they are supposed to learn, which is how to be effective beginning teachers who connect with students and help students achieve.

edTPA is bad, but the ETS Avatar is much worse. Just because technology makes something possible, it does not make it a good idea.

According to the ETS website, “What makes the ETS® NOTE assessment series truly ground breaking is that it is an innovative assessment program designed to evaluate a prospective teacher’s ability to translate their knowledge of content and of teaching into effective practice in the classroom. Created by ETS in collaboration with TeachingWorks, the NOTE assessments are intended to fit with the work of state education systems and educator preparation programs. This new, innovative assessment series will measure a teaching candidate’s readiness to teach in ways that are representative of real-life teaching experiences.” Supposedly it “Provides a rigorous, on-the-spot assessment that evaluates candidates seeking initial teacher licensure.” Instead of real life teaching practice, student teachers will be tested on “real-life scenarios” in “virtual classrooms with interactive avatar students.” ETS claims “The use of virtual classrooms not only supports greater standardization of instructional contexts and settings for candidates, but also eliminates disruption to classroom activities, curriculum and student learning that occurs in schools.”

But schools are not standardized because students are not standardized. Students are human beings, not avatars. A major part of learning to be a teacher is learning to respect and deal with students as human beings. Big parts of teaching are connection, concern, empathy, judgment, decision-making, and adjusting to “disruption to classroom activities.”

There is a very funny scene in the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon Cooper is learning to drive using an online program. After a series of crashes, his avatar ends up driving onto the second floor of a mall. They meant it as a comment on Sheldon, but it is also a good comment on the efficacy of learning to drive through an online program.

Do we really want teachers tested on avatars teaching our children? If it were a joke, it would be a little funny. But as a real proposal it is frightening. This project, and maybe every ETS project, should be shut down.

Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

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For the first time, a Republican presidential candidate has named a woman as campaign manager. It’s a bit late — Susan Estrich and Donna Brazile got there decades ago on the Democratic side. Still, I keep hearing that it’s a mark of progress, which will appeal to women voters, that Kellyanne Conway is Donald Trump’s new campaign manager.

I can’t agree.

The fact is that the Trump campaign is so steeped in misogyny that appointing a woman as campaign manager won’t be nearly enough to convince women to vote for him. Especially a woman with Conway’s extremist views.

Consider this, from an article in Jezebel:

To get a sense of Conway’s perspective on gender and the “gender gap,” take the speech she gave to the Conservative Women’s Network in 2011, an event co-sponsored by the very conservative Clare Boothe Luce Foundation and Heritage Foundation. In the speech, Conway bemoans feminism as “gloom and doom,” and argues that “femininity is replacing feminism as a leading attribute for American women.” She then continues with some familiar talking points for conservative women, namely that hating men (“the revulsion towards men in your life”) is “part and parcel of the feminist movement.” She also shares some helpful fashion tips like, “If women want to be taken seriously in the workforce, looking feminine is a good place to start.”

Kellyanne Conway has made a career out of trying to help far right-wing candidates get votes from women, despite the fact that they consistently promote anti-woman policies. Her roster of clients includes Todd Akin, the former U.S. Congressman and failed Senate candidate. As readers may recall, Akin justified criminalizing all abortions, including when the pregnancy results from rape, this way: “It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

After Akin lost the election, Conway counseled Republican conservatives to simply stop talking about rape — not that they should rethink their wildly unpopular ideas to ban all abortions under all circumstances. She likes to say, “we need to address women from the waist up,” meaning, stay away from discussions about reproductive health care. But if she thinks evasiveness will fool women voters, she should think again.

While Conway has been the most visible public face of the Trump campaign in recent days, appearing on TV almost as many times as her boss used to, reportedly the political strategy is being shaped by Breitbart’s Steve Bannon (the darling of the white nationalist “alt-right” crowd) and disgraced former Fox News chief Roger Ailes (who stands accused of horrific serial sexual harassment).

According to Politico:

“Kellyanne is not a campaign manager in the traditional sense of the word. She got the title as part of combat pay,” said one source involved with the discussions. “She’s the candidate manager, which considering how tough it is to manage someone like Donald — who has the temperament of a 12-year-old who always gets what he wants — is a far harder job.”

By all accounts, Conway is smart and talented. But to bring women voters on board, she will need to do a lot more than manage her candidate. The problem is not simply how he comes across — although certainly it is a huge drawback that he is seen as a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic man with the emotional self-control of a spoiled child. An even greater problem is that this spoiled child has truly terrible policy ideas.

• Trump opposes sensible gun regulations, even though the risk of a domestic violence homicide is five times greater when there is a gun in the house.
• Trump’s idea of child care assistance is to give big tax breaks to the wealthiest families, leaving those who need help the most — women in lower-income categories — with little or nothing.
• Trump’s advice to women who face sexual harassment at work is to go find another career.
• Trump wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ending the requirement of full coverage for birth control, bringing back coverage denials for “pre-existing conditions,” and forcing millions of women and their families to lose their health insurance altogether.
• Trump supports overturning Roe v. Wade, even though according to a recent survey 53 percent of people who identify as pro-life say they want Roe to remain the law of the land, and acknowledged that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women seeking abortions.

No amount of spin can overcome this reality: Women voters are all too familiar with the authentic Donald J. Trump; that is why they reject him. At the end of the day, they are as turned off by his anti-woman policies as by his calling women “disgusting,” “bimbos,” and “fat pigs.”

We can all be happy for Kellyanne Conway that when the history of this campaign is written, she will be remembered as a pioneering Republican who broke an important gender barrier. But that doesn’t give her a pass on matters of judgement, policy or philosophy.

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