Links - 16th May 2020 (1)

This App Automatically Cancels and Sues Robocallers - "DoNotPay, the family of consumer advocacy services meant to protect people from corporate exploitation, is launching a new app aimed at helping end our long national nightmare surrounding robocalls by giving you a burner credit card to get their contact details then giving you a chatbot lawyer to automatically sue them. We are all used to robocalls at this point—they are the number one consumer complaint to the FCC. Their emergence has been explosive: according to a report by First Orion, a company that offers caller ID and call blocking technology to phone carriers and customers, in 2017, they accounted for only 3.7 percent of all calls. By 2018, that number spiked to 29.2 percent and on track to hit 50 percent of all calls by the end of 2019. By now, the United States receives the eighth-most spam calls globally with Americans suffering an average of 18 robocalls each month. Over the past year, there have been a few attempts at stemming this growing tide, but to no avail. The FCC has made increasingly aggressive moves to stop this “scourge of civilization”, both empowering major carriers to block robocalls while threatening legal action against companies assisting robocallers. The recently passed TRACED Act also grants the FCC new powers to pursue and punish illegal robocalls. Now, federal fines can reach as high as $10,000 per call and requires major carriers to adopt new technology that will alert consumers to incoming robocalls.  Every solution, however, will be undermined by the fact that the United States has a multitude of problems preventing robocalls from being seriously curbed including the fact that carriers have trouble distinguishing between next-generation robocalls and copper wire phone calls and that telecommunications industry has been slow to adopt caller ID authentication, meaning spoofed robocalls are even harder to spot.Enter DoNotPay Founder and CEO Joshua Browder’s Robo Revenge app—unique from every other app looking to protect you from robocalls in that it can get you cash while stopping them completely."

The best apps to block robocalls on cellphones - The Washington Post - "It’s happening because the Internet made it incredibly cheap and easy to place thousands of calls in an instant. But we don’t have to just bury our heads in the spam and take it. While lawmakers debate what to do about the robo-scourge, engineers have cooked up clever ways to make bots work for us, not against us. Verizon just started offering free spam-fighting technology like AT&T and T-Mobile, if you sign up. The right app or service on your phone can make it safer to say hello again — or even exact revenge... YouMail replaces your phone’s existing voice-mail service, and uses software to identify when robocallers leave messages — like Shazam for spam. That helps it quickly crowdsource the identity of new robocallers and block them from other phones... My favorite part: YouMail tries to trick known robocallers into taking you off their lists by playing them the beep-beep-beep sound of a dead line... For some, dark times call for dark measures. The $4 per month RoboKiller, which ranked second in my speed test, takes over and fingerprints your voice mails but adds a clever twist — “answer bots.” They’re voice-mail messages that try to keep robots and human telemarketers on the line listening to nonsense.Answer-bot options range from President Trump impersonators and extended coughing sessions to someone doing vocal exercises. Even better, RoboKiller will send you an often-hilarious recording of the interaction. (It only uses these recordings when it’s sure it’s a spam call.) Another service, Jolly Roger, doesn’t sell itself as a robocall blocker but takes this auto-generated-annoyance idea a step further by actively trying to game the spammers’ systems, such as when to press 1 to speak to a human. It calls this tech “artificial stupidity.”... Time robocallers spend with your bot might be minutes they’re not calling someone else, so you can think of it as community service."

The Frankfurt School and the Allure of Submission - "For Erich Fromm, author of Escape from Freedom, the mistake many liberal theorists made was to presume that people actually want to be free. At a conscious and public level, they will of course protest that this is the case. But at a deeper psychological level, he argued, there lies a yearning to escape the burdens of liberty. This is in part because, from a very early age, we are inculcated with a sense of dependence on authority figures, ranging from our parents to the state. These are often not malicious forces, and may indeed be motivated by love and the child’s interests. But many of us fail to ever truly outgrow this dependence on various forms of authority to provide us with a sense of direction and purpose. Many of us submit to these authorities because pleasing them provides a profound sense of meaning to life. Gratification of authorities associated with the super-ego becomes a source of pleasure, as we push aside our own desires and submit to the imperatives of our culture or political system. Without such an attachment to authority we feel we are thrown into adulthood with no sense of direction or purpose in life, forced into the most horrible situation of all: having to choose our path for ourselves. This necessary part of individuation (that is, the process of becoming an individual human being) and maturity is extremely alienating and difficult... The authoritarian personality, therefore, wants the power to control existence, but also to be freed of the agony of deciding what to do with that control. Choice just presents more chaotic possibilities, and the authoritarian personality wants no part of such responsibilities. They therefore search for a form of order to which they can submit, which often takes the form of a totalitarian movement... Nor does the authoritarian personality want anyone else to have freedom. This is because if other people are free to do as they please, they too are capable of bringing disorder into your life through actions which you cannot control... Jews were simultaneously presented as both sub-human and in control of a vast conspiracy to control the globe. They were both insignificant and a massive threat to German hegemony. Any reasonably individuated person would notice this contradiction and insist that no rational person can accept it. But in a society where even thinking in a manner which did not conform to the interests of the totalitarian party could result in one’s imprisonment and destruction, who would dare express such opinions?

Kimmie Louisa on Twitter - ""Parasite" had a 100% Korean cast, including male director, no disabled, no people of colour and no LGBT role.So much for Hollywood "diversity""
"it's a Korean movie made in Korea by Korean people what did you expect other than Koreans"
"He expected scarlett johansson"
"LMAO (love that it's a critique on multiple levels)"

Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace - Posts - "Rage Against The Machine reunion tour: pay $100 to come listen to us sing about how awful and exploitative capitalism is."
One can justify this the same way Ayn Rand fans justify collecting social security. Which is great, because those are the people on the other side, so they can twist themselves into knots explaining why alleged hypocrisy in one case is fine but not the other

Sonny Bunch on Twitter - "grabbing a spherical ice cube out of my sub zero freezer to keep my woodford reserve cold before i turn on my sixty inch tv in my climate controlled home to watch a brilliant movie about the depredations of capitalism"

A foreigner’s life in Beijing without access to Alipay or Wechat Pay is like a fish out of water. Here’s my experience - "According to Alipay, its international version should also support other functions within the app that automatically transfer money to merchants, such as when ordering food and hailing a cab, much like Uber. But I have found the system has not fully opened itself up to foreigners and I still cannot access any of the mini apps, or their individual functions. Being locked out means you don’t truly experience the quirks or intricacies of every day life in China.This week, Alipay extended its reach and entered the automotive market, announcing an agreement with Chinese electric car start-up Xpeng Motors for the development of an in-car payments system for services such as battery charging facilities and entertainment apps.Meanwhile, WeChat Pay seems to be preferred and is slightly more widely accepted. It is the go-to payment method for cab drivers, and some restaurants do not accept Alipay. WeChat too has announced it will now support international credit cards, allowing access to dozens of services, including e-commerce and ride hailing. But I’ve only encountered a “busy service” notification during several attempts to set it up... Going cashless is not just about using Apple Pay on a coffee run. Chinese payment service providers have created ecosystems featuring mini apps that allow users to do absolutely everything through one system – transferring money, paying the water bill, buying a lottery ticket, paying for the weekly grocery shopping and having dinner delivered to your doorstep. Although each has their own individual app, many also require Chinese bank accounts, or are linked back to WeChat or Alipay.For a tourist visiting for a week or two, Alipay’s international version is convenient and means no cash needs to be withdrawn. But if you’re here for any longer, like me, it still feels like there is a barrier between you and the “real” China. No food deliveries from the hundreds of Meituan motorbikes that zoom past each day, no testing out Luckin Coffee, Starbucks’ domestic rival, and – most disappointingly – no zipping around on a Mobike... Most annoyingly, particularly as I am coming from the land of abundant taxis in Hong Kong, it is hard to hail a cab on the street. The majority are pre-ordered either via mini apps, or on individual apps linked to these payment systems... As an outsider I have lost money. When change for drinks did not materialise, I caught the eye of the bartender, who simply shrugged. The indication – tough luck, we do not have any cash to give you. But I have gained a taxi ride and one of my five-a-day. When I tried to pay back a friend, who used WeChat Pay for our taxi fare, she backed away almost in horror: “Please, I don’t want cash!” When a cafe did not have the right change for my order, the staff gave me extra broccoli instead. People talk of China as being advanced in adopting mobile payments apps, while other societies lag behind. But the reality is it is a necessity to use WeChat Pay or Alipay amid a dearth of other options. Hong Kong, in contrast, accepts debit cards, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, mobile payments and cash, which might also explain why it has not adopted mobile payment systems so rapidly."

US congressman Ed Case says he’s ‘an Asian trapped in a white body’, sparking an online backlash - "Case spokesman Nestor Garcia clarified that the congressman was commenting “on what his Japanese-American wife sometimes says about him”. Garcia also noted that Case is a returning executive committee member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus."
Maybe if society ever bows to trans mania, transracialism will come into vogue as liberals look for a new cause

Chinese S’porean woman recognised her Chinese-ness after strange men hit on her in Europe - "The Straits Times forum page is a treasure trove of the wackiest half-past-six writings that Singaporeans have ever formulated and decided to put down for posterity’s sake and other people’s consumption... the ST forum letter writer Lee Siew Peng (Dr) is known to write highly incendiary elitist letters to the press.In Sept. 2011, she wrote to the forum page about — you guessed it — her engagement to a Caucasian husband"

How George Yeo And Sumiko Tan Invented The Singaporean Heartland - "As late as the year 1990, Dr Ahmad Mattar, then Minister for the environment, was still calling Marina Bay Singapore’s ‘commercial heartland’.In 1991, however, its meaning suddenly changed.According to Common Ground, Multiple Claims: ‘Representing and Constructing Singapore’s Heartland’ by Professor Angelia Poon, we have Mr George Yeo to thank for this evolution. In 1991, during a Q&A session at NUS, he used ‘heartlanders’ to describe the ‘roughly 600,000 Chinese-educated residents of public-housing’ with a household income of less than $5000 per month. He characterised these heartlanders as PAP supporters mainly concerned with ‘bread-and-butter issues’. They don’t care about ‘less tangible matters such as the elected presidency’ and will continue to support the ruling party ‘provided it delivers material prosperity.’... Unsurprisingly, the first Heartlander ever documented is also a PAP supporter, who believes ‘these opposition people’ will say anything to get elected... For reasons lost to history, the term ‘heartland’ went (the 1991 equivalent of) viral and entered our vocabulary. Soon, Ministers began using the phrase in earnest and so did SPH journalists. They shed the ‘air quotes’ of 1991, and began writing about the heartland as if it were a place that really existed outside of George Yeo’s political imagination... Knowing that middle-income HDB dwellers might feel fucked over by their plans to make Singapore into a global city, our politicians attempted to salve the butthurt by conferring symbolic ‘honorary’ ‘title’ of heartlander... In his view, the heartland was not created as a means of rebranding economic apartheid, but as a means of protecting the HDB community from ‘potentially destabilizing values’ and the ‘influences of globalisation’. Just as Marina Bay Sands sought to ‘contain’ the vice of gambling, the HDB heartland was created to preserve a value system based around ‘inward-looking safety’, ‘family values’, and ‘local orientations’. It serves, in essence, an ideological condom. That’s why we turn a blind eye to Orchard Towers but howl with outrage when sanctioned vices like prostitution or gambling are found in Toa Payoh. There is one set of moralities for the heartland and another for the more liberal, outward-looking “city centre”."