They dont steal your ID by cloning your passport, they steal it by getting just enough Personally Identifying Information to be able to start up credit cards and other loans that are tied to your credit history, without your knowledge. By the time you find out, they’ve run all the credit lines to the max and then you have to go around to all those companies and prove you didn’t make all those charges. Then you have to get all of your account numbers changed, because you don’t necessarily know what the hacker has compromised.

Most of the information necessary for opening accounts is on your driver’s’ license. Pretty much the only thing it is missing is your SSN. And in some cases, a valid state license number can be used in place of that

Let me guess, you’ve never had your identity stolen, have you?

It’s less about verifying ID, and more about trusting them to be responsible with the documents.

If they have a human assess the ID right away, and delete the file once that person’s identity has been assessed, that’s probably safe. But let’s face it, they probably store it somewhere, and when they inevitably get hacked now everyone’s driver’s license (with their state ID number, address, and DoB) is for sale on the dark web. There is enough info on your State Drivers’ License to open credit accounts, particularly if you forge some documents as well.

Right, I was surprised to see anyone (on Reddit, of all places) saying the BBB was relevant at all, but there it was. maybe they were trolling? She didn’t want to expend the effort to find out.

This actually happened to someone I know, with PayPal. She got a spammy looking thing several years ago from PayPal for email validation, that she didn’t request, and like a good Netizen she ignored it. Recently she decided to migrate her PayPal account to that email, only to find that original PayPal account was somehow still active, in spite of being unverified. Requests to change the password go to someone else’s phone (which they ignore), and PayPal has no process to fix it. They can’t delete the account from being associated with that email, even though they know the email is unverified, and that email can’t be used to verify another account.

Nobody knows how to get PayPal to fix it. One Redditor claimed to get attention by filing a complaint with the San Jose BBB, but that seems to be too much effort.

I agree with you about not wanting to share a government document with a shitty social media company. But companies that tie your account to your identity are going to insist on this moving forward. You have a right to complain, but don’t be surprised if they insist. Their walled garden, their rules.

As a US Citizen, I have found that sending them an image of a US passport card is a decent compromise. The card itself is only useful for travel at land borders, but counts as Federally-issued ID. It has your name, nationality, passport card number, and date of birth, but not your address. The picture isn’t really good for much. And, perhaps most importantly, all the ICAO stuff that is normally on your passport page is on the back of the passport card, meaning that a picture of just the front doesn’t have all the info. Bonus points if you are old enough to have an expired one, then the card number will be useless.

There is very little damage a identity thief can do with just a passport card number. You are probably at more risk with your DOB being there. But, due to COPA, they probably have your DOB anyway. People can’t even book flights with it, as passport cards are only for land crossings.

History is written by the victors, though.

“Because the purpose of hearings are to try and figure out how we can do better so that next time if and when we all faced with a pandemic we’d be better prepared and we could benefit if mistakes were made; we identify them and we try to correct them for the future,” he added.

Fauci said that, and I’m sure thats why prior Congresses held hearings like this, but I’m sure he knows that the reason why this hearing was called was specifically to make those performances. MTG was put in that committee specifically to say those things while Fauci was in the room, in an election year.

But, since Fauci is a bit of a politican as well as a scientist, he knows he can’t just say that. So he goes and says something that at least suggests to people how weird this all is.

The article touched on it briefly, but the main difference between the two is ideology. Hitler had rather extreme views on race and religion that dominated his policies, and forced the mass slaughter of millions. Trump’s views might appear just as extreme, but they’re rooted in his own ego, not his ideology. He is a White supremacist, yes, but not necessarily because he believes all Whites are superior. It’s because he is White, so he must be superior and the rest of them come along for the ride, as long as they think like him. It also enables his movement to potentially embrace anyone, regardless of background, even people from backgrounds he disparages; all you have to do is pledge loyalty to Him, and you are in. You become “one of the good ones”, as long as you can ignore the occasional casual racism and misogyny.

Think of the Trump employees during the trial who spoke about how the Trump Org was a big family and they felt valued there, even while corroborating the State’s evidence against him? I think they did that on purpose, because they know as long as you flatter him he will tune out the rest.

Trump’s ideology is centered only on himself. So, politically, this makes him a bit harder to pin down. He can take multiple policy positions at once, sometimes contradictory, and as long as he is at the center of it all they are all logically consistent as far as he is concerned. And it takes effort to find all those inconsistencies. Why not just accept what he has to say?

As far as I know, the Supreme Court can’t get involved in a state matter until all appeals in that state have been resolved, and even then won’t take up the matter unless there is some connection to Federal law (and that connection was raised at some point in the trial by one of the parties).

But this court might invoke the ancient rite of “Because I said so” to justify letting Trump off the hook, I suppose.

I was hoping it was gonna be about https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Summer_Games

Hey, I can play this game, too! The real inflation rate is closer to 150%. Source: Bitcoin was $27k last year, now it’s $67k

My source sucks, but so does yours

Elon will donate a few mil to his campaign, and Tesla will end up being the only company allowed to sell them.

Back in the day, if a borrower didn’t have a 20% down payment banks would issue the first loan for 80% of the value, along with a second, shorter length loan for the difference between a 20% down payment and whatever the borrower could come up with for a down payment. It seems absurd, but in retrospect it was all part of the subprime lending push to write as many loans as possible, and sell them off. Two loans = twice the money!

Then, when the rug got pulled out of the lending market in 2008 there were a lot of programs to consolidate (and even forgive) loans for people with predatory loans on homes they lived in. It sounds like these people were told over the phone their smaller loan was “taken care of”, which could mean many things. It could mean the loan was forgiven outright, or that the loan was rolled into a refinanced larger loan (which now had enough equity to avoid PMI, saving the homeowner money without actually forgiving any balances), or simply that the loan was deemed paused for some number of years. So, they continued to pay the first mortgage, while the second one was in some sort of limbo. Clearly the lender did something to it, since the homeowner received no statements, but it didn’t go away entirely like the homeowner was led to believe.

I don’t mean to shift blame here: clearly, their original lender didn’t process that paperwork properly, and ended up selling the original second loan to a shady company that deceptively hid the loan to make it seem like it was in default, while the homeowner had no legitimate way of knowing it was still there. But what we should learn from all this is that nothing is ever official until you receive it in writing. If those homeowners had received and kept any documentation their loan modification, that showed the actual status of that second loan, it would be a lot easier to tell that shady lender to go pound sand. And whenever anyone from a bank tells you absurdly good news, ask for a followup letter and keep it forever.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

Israel is rumored to have tactical nukes that are much smaller yield than the large ICBMs we hear about all the time. Super destructive force in only 1 or 2 km blast radius, which would even fit inside a small area like Gaza. Of course, in addtition to devastating Gaza, there would still be fallout and issues over Israel, and using them in this manner is definitely Not OK. However, I can believe that there are some deluded people in government (both in Israel and in the US) who would view that as acceptable.

Trump does that anyway, he doesn’t ask for permission

It’s all covert stuff for a reason. He knows that Western countries won’t respond with nukes against covert actions, especially if those covert actions are indirectly meant to prop up the pro-Putin parties in those countries.

The real problem is the zero-sum mentality underlying the Conservative movement under Trump. Everything is a contest, and when the other side wins, your side loses. There is no room for competing views about America, views in which we all benefit. Any policy which doesn’t directly benefit their side must be harmful. There must be in-groups that include them, and out-groups that include people they disagree with.

DEI, if done right, recognizes the benefit they people of all backgrounds can bring. There’s no inherent discrimination against white people, but rather an acknowledgement that we can all benefit from diverse viewpoints. Sometimes you have to go out of your way to find those people, because the “system” may not be tuned to finding them.

Trump, though, cannot acknowledge that there can be policies that benefit everyone. There are winners and losers, and he sees himself as the ultimate winner. He will do whatever he can to make sure he stays winning - and it might be more important that his perceived enemies are seen as losers.

There are lots of Federal agencies under the Executive Branch, The heads of those agencies are often political appointees, who are appointed directly by a President and are not expected to remain in their roles if the party in power changes. However, the actual work is done by career civil servants, who are hired based on merit and not their political connections.

Conservatives see this as a problem, because these career civil servants may have been hired by prior administrations, and they see every appointment by the opposition as tainted. They want to wreck the merit-based system that these people are hired under, subject all career government workers to loyalty tests, and fire the ones who don’t meet those tests.

This is, of course, a recipe to decimate the functioning of these agencies and make them totally ineffective. But that’s the whole point. This “deep state” they keep railing about are simply people who put their commitment to the country over their commitment to any one party or one President. So they must go. And it will shrink all these agencies in the process, which they see as a win.

This is an analysis from a Liberal advocacy group but I think it is an accurate description of what these chuckleheads are really up to:

https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/analysis/faq-the-conservative-attack-on-the-merit-based-civil-service/