You’ve got a naive definition of ‘normal’.

I’d say that the vast majority of people who stumble across a curated Andrew Tate clip and think that the very carefully selected soundbite resonates with them are “normal.”

That’s the issue with deeply personalized targeted marketing. People get presented with a representation of something that isn’t accurate. Instead, it’s tightly tailored to be agreeable, which can result in “normal” people forming positive sentiments towards things that they’d absolutely disagree with if they were presented with a truthful representation.

If someone is swayed by instructions to kill themselves, they are, be definition, consuming content they desire.

That’s a bad argument. Marketing is one thing, manipulation is totally different.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with marketing in general, but marketers with access to enormous amounts of private information blur the line between advertising and manipulation. Using people’s private information to each individual exactly what they want to hear about a candidate without regard to the truth is absolutely something that we should be concerned about.

Dude you had to bring up Fry’s, every time I think about that place a single tear rolls down my cheek.

Walking into that store used to feel like waking up in Christmas morning.

if I want to buy some obscure gadget from a Chinese company

Buy it from aliexpress for 1/4 the price.

Are those guys really any better than Amazon?

For sure. They’re not all great, but they’re all better than Amazon if you’re looking at things from a worker treatment or anti-monopolistic standpoint. I’ve never heard of best buy workers pissing in jars because they can’t take a long enough break to go to the bathroom.

This is just false. That thing you’re buying from Amazon? Just go to the manufacturer’s website and buy it directly. Or if it’s a no-name thing like a generic charging cable, just buy it from literally any other generic [category] retailer.

My wife and I got sick of paying for prime, so we decided to try going a couple months buying as much as we can directly from the brand’s website. It’s easy. Customer service is way better, selection is way better, I don’t have to worry about getting fake crap. Only downside is that shipping usually takes longer, but that’s a small price to pay.

Amazon sucks.

You have no idea what you’re talking about, if you think people here are bad you must be the most fragile little snowflake who ever lived.

Go curl up and jerk off in your safe space.

/s for those who weren’t sure.

You’ve thoroughly demonstrated yourself to be entirely devoid of any real knowledge or experience in this area, and yet you’re continuing to pontificate. You’re clearly enjoying the sensation of having an audience to which you can monologue from a place of ignorance ad nauseam, and I’m depriving you of that. Trust me, you may not be intelligent enough to tell, but I’m doing you a favor. Like averting my eyes when the mentally ill transient defecates himself on the streets. He may not know it, but it’s a mercy not to observe someone in such a state.

Please, feel free to continue. And I’ll continue doing you the kindness of allowing you the uninterrupted company of the only person ignorant enough to think any of your unfounded claims are intelligent.

Not gonna read all that lol you are a goofy little guy aren’t ya.

At its root, it is a TEST

No, at its root, this is an educational article meant to teach about recognizing internet scams. It includes a quiz designed to help you determine your natural reaction to many popular scams, along with information about best practices for how to identify them.

This differs from a test, which is designed to quantify your current knowledge on a topic. Sure, the article used a quiz as a teaching aid, but the results of the quiz aren’t the point and don’t matter. Which makes it super weird how you and others are getting so butthurt about thinking you deserved a perfect score, but we’re robbed by an unfair test.

Unless specified any TEST provides in the question the information to determine the answer

This is a foolish assumption outside of the context of academic examinations. There’s no reason to assume that’s a requirement on an online quiz, where many of the explanations of the answers specifically tell you that the best way to identify some scams is to verify information with authoritative sources.

You and I both know if we create a test phishing email with no mistakes, it’s not a failure if people click on it. It’s a failure on our part for creating a BAD TEST.

The best test phishing emails realistically emulate actual phishing emails. Intentionally adding errors only serves to train employees to catch bad phishing attacks. Regardless, I’m not sure what your point is, since every one of the scam examples here does contain either verifiably false information, or obvious scam indicators.

The entire concept of reparations for slavery is that non-black people will be forced to pay black people money, either as a one time lump-sum payment, or an open-ended pseudo-UBI. Some suggestions include mandated documentation of ancestral slabery, but the most popular ones don’t. The vehicle for this payment would be either increased taxes, or redirection of taxes.

If you’re not talking about race-based redistribution of wealth, you’re not talking about ‘reparations,’ which is what this thread is about.

This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.

This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.

The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.

Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.

For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.

Downvoting because “tard”

Don’t apologize brother, it’s easy to get carried away in the zeal of spreading the gospel of the wash’ed ass.

Okay so your comment about “waddling from the toilet to the bidet” is all someone needs to read to know that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Detached bidets exist, but nobody is buying them for $45 on Amazon.

The type of bidet that people are talking about here are ones that attach to your toilet. You twist a knob to activate the sprayer, which hits where it’s supposed to hit without you having to move.

You don’t waddle anywhere. It takes 5 seconds to wash. You use one wipe with 3 squares to dry, which is hopefully at least a few times less than you use when you dry wipe. You absolutely feel cleaner afterwards, because you’re using water to remove the shit instead of smearing it around with dry paper.

The problem that it solves is that you don’t have to walk around with an unwashed ass. Maybe having a disgusting unwashed ass isn’t a problem for you. Maybe if you got shit on another part of your body, you’d just wipe it with some TP and call it good. I’m not judging. Seems weird as hell that you’re trying to shame people who would rather use water to get the shit off, though.

I’m the CEO of an anti-phishing training corporation that services multiple Fortune 500 companies and has a yearly revenue of over 10m USD (I can also share unverified credentials to make myself seem more credible).

Someone could potentially build a website that makes their phishing attempt seem more credible, and maybe they could get that website ranked highly on Google (even though that is far from straightforward for a website presenting fraudulent information to do), but that’s a total red herring. The article didn’t recommend that people Google for a single random website that confirms the questionable information, the recommendation was that you should check multiple authoritative sources.

You are absolutely wrong. Not surprising that you’re (ostensibly) able to scam the technologically illiterate with such bad information, a little ironic that your scam involves getting them to think that you’re teaching them how to avoid scams.

Only thing keeping on my disk is fusion360, so annoying to have to deal with booting into windows just to use a single piece of software.

I haven’t had this happen in years, maybe it’s my config? I’m using GPT on a UEFI system (in UEFI mode), with systemd-boot.

I do remember having tons of issues back when I was using grub on an MBR system using legacy bios emulation.

The correct thing to do if you got that email would be to try to verify the information that it presents. Is Geek Squad Academy a real thing? How much does their antivirus cost?

Which is exactly what the article says to do, and what you should have done before answering the question. Of course the getting the questions right doesn’t matter, but the question and explanation are an excellent example of what they’re trying to teach.

Also, the grammar was just a little bit funky in that email. Could just be that the geek squad email writer has funky grammar, but it’s definitely a red flag that should make you want to double check the info in the email.

You (and half the people in this thread) are totally missing the point here.

No where does the article say that you’re supposed to be able to tell if it’s a scam or not just by looking at it. In fact, in multiple places it says that you’ve got to Google use a credible source to externally verify some information to determine that some of the examples are scams.

The point of the article is to teach people how to recognize scams, it would be totally useless if it imposed the constraint that you can’t look for context. If you’re actually trying to recognize scams IRL, you should be doing exactly what the article says and looking for authoritative corroboration of any information in the potential scam.

Yeah, but the point is that if you open a web browser and look that settlement up, you’ll find a ton of authoritative sources that link back to that URL.

The point of this wasn’t to see if you could tell if each thing was likely to be a scam in the context that you would genuinely run into them.

If my grandma approached me with the class action website and asked if I was a scam, I’d tell her “it looks really suspicious, let’s see if we can find anything from a credible source that will link to this website.” Which is exactly what the article tells you to do. Of course nobody could just magically know if a screenshot of a webpage is scam just by looking at it.

The other options all either give you enough information in the screenshot to be able to Google a couple things and say “it’s a scam” confidently (class action, geek squad), or they’re full of super blatant red flags (Zelle bike).