IphtashuFitz

president or secretary of a recognised organisation

What constitutes a “recognized organization”? That sounds rather open to interpretation…

There are actually tools that can unmask spoofed calls and show the true number that a call originates from. I’ve never used them personally, but I worked in computer telephony years ago so I have an understanding of how these tools work.

Caller ID was created so that a company like a bank that might have 100 or more telephone lines could program them so they always show up as “1-555-ACME-BANK” if they wanted to. So it’s trivial to set Caller ID to whatever you want.

But there’s another identification baked into calls that goes way back to the days when long distance calls were expensive and charged by the minute. The telephone companies needed to ensure the calling number was passed along from one phone carrier to another for billing purposes, and since it involved collecting money you can be sure it was accurate and unchangeable. This is called Automatic Number Identification (ANI).

Typically ANI is only passed between phone companies, or over high capacity phone circuits like T-1 lines, so it’s not sent to the person receiving the call. But there’s a feature available to most mobile phone plans that, combined with ANI, can provide for a way to do just that.

Depending on your mobile provider there’s likely a way to forward calls you explicitly ignore to another number. This only happens when you click to ignore/disconnect the call, and not let it time out and go to voicemail. When you sign up with one of these unmasking services then you set up your phone to forward these calls to their service. Then, if you get a spoofed call or even one where the caller id says unknown or unavailable, you click to ignore it. The call gets rerouted to the unmasking service, which has access to the ANI data. It reads the ANI number, replaces the Caller ID data with the ANI, then immediately routes the call back to you again. This time it will show you the number the call originated from and would be billed to.

Tesla Model Y owner here (never again, either). I hate the touchscreen, and also hate the way they’ve shoehorned functionality into the button/scroller controls on the steering wheel to try to address complaints.

When I first got the MY, the only way to control things like the wipers was through menus in the touchscreen. A software update introduced the ability to control them from the steering wheel controls, but even that “solution” sucks. You have to press & hold the control down while simultaneously scrolling it with your thumb. And most times you can’t scroll it from all the way off to all the way on in a single motion, so you press, scroll as much as you can, release & press again then scroll the rest of the way. A real PITA.

Wouldn’t surprise me at all, but even that would be a limited & unreliable resource. It would also require getting inmates to the farms, warehouses, etc. and keeping tabs on them while they work. That would be a logistical nightmare…

If slaughter houses, chicken/egg farming, fruit picking, packaging, etc. comes screeching to a halt due to these raids then those employers stand to lose a ton of money as the food goes bad while they scramble to try to convince Joe MAGA to come work for them for a fraction of minimum wage.

Well he’ll probably try to kill both Medicare & Social Security so he’ll see it as a net positive…

Thrown into private prisons then forced to work in those farm fields as a way for the private prison industry to make more profits.

Lots of houses/apartments in places like Boston, etc. have old, drafty windows that landlords don’t bother to improve. Lots of hardware stores here sell kits containing double-sided tape and sheets of a special type of plastic. You surround the window with tape, place the plastic over it, then use a hot hair dryer to shrink the plastic until it’s snug. You can hardly see the plastic if you do it right, and it does a great job of dealing with drafts.

That looks like it might have been an off switch for a very high voltage circuit. They tend to require a lot of effort to open or close, and I once saw the breaker for a 6 story office building break in a workers hand as he tried to engage it. Years of never being used can make such circuit breakers very iffy when the time comes to try to use them.

Personally I wouldn’t trust any sort of payment from that guy. I’d accept payment but still refuse new business from him until about 6 weeks after payment is received. That should provide ample time to verify the check doesn’t bounce, etc.

My wife & I just spent a week in London, where there are plenty of cars but very little off-street parking. We saw a significant number of EV’s ranging from Tesla’s & other cars, to taxis, double decker busses, and the occasional truck/lorry. We spotted one or two Tesla super charger stations as we made our way around the city, as well as a very small number of public parking spaces along roads that had either chargers or just outlets to plug chargers into.

What little I saw certainly didn’t seem like a lot, but they clearly seem to have some sort of grasp on the situation given the number of EV’s we saw…