Fake Payday Loan Reform

Missouri and Utah are among the states in which legislators are proposing fake payday loan reform, per "States’ Attempts To Reform Payday Lending Are Often Just Smoke & Mirrors." Here's an excerpt:

Sen. Mike Cunningham, who sponsored the Missouri bill . . . says it will protect consumers from some of the practices payday lenders have utilized for so long. Missouri’s proposed reform comes less than two years after a group called Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity helped put an end to a ballot initiative that would have allowed Missouri residents to vote for or against capping the state’s interest rate at 36%. The current proposed bill does not feature any kind of rate cap, meaning interest for a typical two-week payday loan can balloon to more than 1,000%.

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Telephone scam – Man claimed he is from Microsoft and needs to fix my computer

Five minutes ago, I received a phone call from a man who claims to be "David Johnson" who said he's working from Microsoft. He had an accent that I was unable to identify, but I assumed he was from India. His phone number showed up on my cell phone as "212-414-155" (that's right - -- it's missing a digit). He told me that MY computer has been throwing out error messages that are being received by the Microsoft Server, and that we need to fix the problem. I led him on a bit. He said to hit the control key plus r, and that this is the beginning of the fix. I asked for his phone number. He wouldn't give it. He repeatedly said that he's working with Microsoft, not FOR Microsoft. He wouldn't give me his supervisor's name. I repeatedly asked for his PHONE NUMBER so I could call him back (I wanted it to report him to Microsoft). He wouldn't give it. I offered to add Microsoft to the call, and he got evasive. My assumption is that he was trying to have me give him access to my computer by installing monitoring software. I eventually called him a "criminal," and told him he was despicable, then ended the call. I recorded most of the conversation. Beware . . . . I'm including a link from Microsoft regarding phone scams.

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The importance of picking one’s partner carefully

Huffpo quantifies the meaning of a romantic relationship:

When you choose a life partner, you're choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you'll hear about 18,000 times.

Intense shit.

So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?

Instead of doing serious research, most of us do our search haphazardly, falling prey to the availability heuristic:
In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down -- our dating choices are "98 percent a response... to market conditions and just 2 percent immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what's on offer that night." In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might to be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.

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