Discussion about the small-town Missouri school teacher who was discovered to have an account on OnlyFans.
“I’m So Tired!” — Lily Von Shtupp (Blazing Saddles, 1974)
“‘Exhaustion’ has been a recurring theme lately. It’s mostly due to a serious but correctable medical condition.” —Me in last week’s newsletters.
Let me explain.
Or, the Continued Challenges of Artificial Non-intelligence.
I was in Denver last week for the first in-person meeting of my online entrepreneur mastermind group since Covid. One point of discussion was to use “A.I.” large language models to proofread articles.
What happens when you talk to an artificial intelligence language model about the value of something it can’t actually do? Thinking, I mean.
Last Week’s Blog Post asking that readers Be Smarter about phishing emails was read thousands of times, but apparently not by one long-time reader who sent me (yes, he sent it, not malware) an email with the subject, “O. M. G. -----The Darwin Awards are out!”
“Phishing” is when scammers send you an email that’s trying to trick you into revealing information, or installing malware on your computer or phone. And a lot of you are falling for it.
How do I know?
by Paul Myers
©2022 by Paul Myers, excerpted with permission from his Talkbiz News newsletter.
Now and Then Premium Subscribers ask which I prefer, credit cards or Paypal, with the intention of using whatever costs me less. I’ve always appreciated the thought, and always said to use whichever works best for you, since by some weird coincidence, Paypal charged the same fees that card processors do — 2.9 percent of the total charged plus a 30-cent processing fee.
“Irresponsible Advice from a Man with No Credibility” is what podcaster Joe Rogan said would be the title of his next book, and was the slug on a story about the Spotify controversy in this week’s issue:
This week’s newsletter has two items that prompted deeper commentary, starting with the Headline of the Week:
Probably the Most Thorough Interview I’ve been subjected to happened in mid-June. It took journalist Simon Owens (who writes with great insight about the “Creator Economy”) until today to distill his notes down …to only 4,000 words! He was boggled that True was able to start, let alone survive, in the ancient days of the Internet, when there were no tools to do what I’ve been doing since 1994.
| Claim |
| In August 2021, Snopes’ co-founder and CEO David Mikkelson was revealed to be a serial plagiarizer, sloppily violating copyrights of other publications in an attempt to make the site look extremely proactive in uncovering news. |
| Rating |
 True |
We start with a story from this week’s column:
I Am Guilty of posting “Hate Speech” on social media …according to Facebook’s algorithms and whoever (or whatever) reviewed that declaration when I appealed.
In This Episode: A story in This is True struck me as an astonishing example of Uncommon Sense, so I thought I’d tell you about it to see some really out-of-the-box thinking, and provide some practical advice that could save your life. Here’s a hint: no one thinks they’re going to get lost and need rescue. Yet there are tens of thousands of rescues every year in the U.S. alone. What will increase your odds of being safe? Uncommon Sense.
An academic’s “history” of “Florida Man” makes some startling — and completely wrong! — claims about how the “Florida Man meme” got started online. No, it wasn’t in 2012, or even the “mid-2000s”!
Years Ago, I’d Get Early Notice of public tours coming up at my old workplace, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and tip off readers. It’s a lot easier to get that info in recent years so I haven’t bothered, but then …Covid. No tours. Except these days, the quality of “virtual tours” has increased so much that you can actually “go” places that you can’t go even if there was a public tour.
It’s absolutely possible to fight back against spammers …if you think about what would actually work. Pull up a chair by the fire and I’ll tell a story about how I did it this Christmas week, and turned The Grinch into a reformed marketer.
The First-Ever Viral Video (which, naturally, was of the “weird news” variety!) was shot a half century ago today. This is its story, with a higher resolution video than most have ever seen.
An item in this week’s newsletter is the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper problem: how bureaucrats so love to kill the messengers. First that item, from the 9 August 2020 issue — the Headline of the Week: