1. "We will tell Donald Trump if you don't vote. You can't afford to have that on your record." Actual mailer sent to Republican voters.

2. I never really cared much if other people cracked their knuckles until my kids started compulsively cracking all their toes, their necks, their, fingers, their scalps and ribs compulsively and constantly. Now I've become sensitized to it and it's driving me up the fucking wall. Especially the toe-cracking because they can somehow do it over and over and over without a refractory period. JUST STOP.

A compilation of people playing an 80s-esque song and asking their parents how they would have danced to it, back in the 80s:

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I'm slightly too young for quite this specific swingy dance style, but maybe you turned up the heat in this era? Anyway, it's super endearing.

The general shape of this story is predictable, but it's a good reminder that identity theft remains common and there's often a mismatch between well organized perpetrators and people responding on a haphazard or case-by-case basis. It's frightening; I know that I take basic security precautions but mostly just hope that I'll be okay.

A quick glance at recent transactions jolted me out of my sunny mood. Sandwiched between the payment I'd transferred to my dog walker and the 29 cents I'd earned in interest was a very bad and incomprehensible number. Three days after the wedding, $5,000 in cash had been withdrawn from my checking account -- but not by me.

And not near me, either. I live in Greater Boston, and the money was withdrawn 200 miles away, at a Bank of America branch in Saratoga Springs, New York. Apparently, a teller had handed over a stack of bills to someone impersonating me. In experts' lingo, I'd entered the "identity crime ecosystem," a mix of theft and fraud.

...

The theft and misuse of personal data devastates victims' finances and peace of mind, causing extreme stress and anxiety. In 2023, people reported losing over $10 billion to fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which takes in reports from consumers about problems they experience in the marketplace and stores them in an online database available only to law enforcement. And people filed more reports about identity theft -- accounting for 19.2 percent -- than any other type of complaint. Identity fraud and related scams profoundly disrupted the lives of nearly 40 million Americans in 2023, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, an advisory services firm in the fraud and security sector.

For the past two years, I've worked to determine exactly who and what lay behind this crime, using resources available to me both as a victim and a reporter. To hear experts describe the situation, it can feel almost hopeless. "Here and there, there are arrests, and law enforcement will brag about it," says David Maimon, director of the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group at Georgia State University. "But any arrest is a drop in the ocean."

[The bank manager at the branch where the fraud occurred] escorted me to her office where I spilled out the whole story. "How did this happen?" I asked. She studied her computer screen for a few minutes, then reported what she was deducing: Someone had actually come into the bank and spoken to a teller, presented a driver's license, and then correctly answered some authentication questions to validate the account.

The manager called the bank's fraud department herself, but fared no better than I had -- same long wait, same bad music, same cheerless recording intoning "all of our representatives are helping other customers." Finally, she told me she also needed to help other customers, and handed me the phone so I would stay on hold. Half an hour later a voice came back on the line, and I waved down the manager. It turned out the bank was still investigating, except now they said 60 to 90 business days.

"This is ridiculous," the manager said, bristling. She made another call, this one to a vice president in Albany. He promised to "escalate" it immediately.

Three days later -- two and a half months after the theft -- the stolen $5,000 was back in my account. I was relieved, and enraged. Why had it taken so long? What if I hadn't driven almost 400 miles round trip to Saratoga Springs and caused a scene at the bank?

And now I had something new to worry about: Fraudsters apparently had a driver's license with my name on it. And this was very, very bad, as I would come to find out.

Heebie's take: The author seems perfectly lucid, but the fact that she's 65 and these scams often prey on older adults does come up. That is the part that feels particularly terrifying to me - I have some sense that I'm plugged in enough to avoid most of the avoidable fraud occurences (and I'm not too arrogant to believe they're all avoidable), but I also can't imagine being able to stay this aware over the next 40 years. It's so awful that so many old people are sitting ducks to just get swindled out of savings and into that hellhole of anxiety.

I kind of assumed that the system-wide answer would come from the banks and credit card companies - that they'd just skilled at cancelling everything and letting their customer have their money back, and then investigating it on their own time or letting insurace companies run an investigation. That seems naive of me now.

Mossy Character writes: Same as it ever was.

Heebie's take: And not in a fun way.

Also the article doesn't let me copy/paste, so I'll just let you click through.

I was thinking about loss aversion, and how we categorize it as a bias or a fallacy. After all, you have all these experiments where the expected value in whatever experiment is $100, and yet you get inconsistent behavior from these silly mortals, depending on what amount they start with!

It occurs to me that it's not really a bias or fallacy so much as an artifact of the peculiarity of measuring everything in terms of currency. Not to be too on-the-veldt about it, but for the vast majority of human history, most things are really not fungible.

The biggest example is relationships. Your kid is not fungible with another kid. You don't really want your neighbor's kid anywhere as much as you fear the loss of your own kid. Loss aversion is ridiculously obvious in this context.

But also, take any possession which is complex and managed over time. Take your domicile. As you invest time in it, it gains value, because you fine-tune your ability to manage it and keep it operating smoothly under a range of weather conditions. If you rig some experiment where the expected value is "keep your own domicile intact" but one strategy requires you to risk losing half of it, and the other strategy allows you to gain an extra half-of-a-house, why on earth would those be parallel situations?

In conclusions, labs are unrealistic. Thank you.