Blocked Number, Forwarded, Dissemination and Not Picking Up

With a smart phone, there are so many ways to connect and communicate with.

Examples are text, WhatsApp, Facebook, Email, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Messenger, voice call and voice message. The last two means are increasingly in disfavour or less used, especially with those under 40 years old. Every individual can be contacted in all these separate ways - and may inadvertently miss important communication simply because he or she had no time to or simply does not check every such channel on a regular basis.

Many have turned off audio or visual notifications as their regularity can raise our stress levels, due to the sheer volume of messages, mostly unimportant, received.

Twitter encourages wording a short message quickly, perhaps with not much forethought and with a risk of messaging in the heat of the moment. Traditional letter writing may be passe but usually allows our minds and emotions to have sufficient time to settle down first.

Snapchat allows you to display images for a short while, while you can keep a long running gallery of images in Instagram. Both play on our visual responses and a picture is really worth more than a thousand words.

What is posted in cyberspace is there forever, even after the act of deleting them. The smart phone makes it so easy to post. Just reflect on Facebook, utilised by so many who are brought to grief many years later with mutterings of long ago when they were younger, not so wise and more outspoken.

Every major and minor workeable invention of humankind has been subject to perpretations of fraud, deceit and abuse. Sad but true. 

Social media crimes cover the spectrum from finance to love to taking advantage of another person in various other ways. Traditional telephone landlines have already been used to manipulate on the pyschology of call recipients. So now the same bastardly approach is utilised to target social media recipients.

It can be as simply starting with the phone callers blocking out their identities or phone numbers. Therefore the recipient sees a Blocked Number on his or her phone. I am reduced to being filled with uncertainty, higher risk and hesitation to answer in such a situation.
What do you reckon you would do in a similiar scenario? Why would people block out their phone numbers when calling you?

It may be nothing sinister. Not so long ago, a previous generation picked up the landline phone naturally when it rang, with no means of knowing who called.

Yet many now do not pick up such calls. The logic now is that if it is urgent or valid enough, the caller will contact you in other ways.

Many who pick up calls with a Blocked Number can be confronted with unknown and menacing voices from the other side, a kind of Twilight Zone of experience. Worse are initial seemingly kind voices trying to eventually solicit personal data, or play on the inherent kindness and trust of innocent and well behaved citizens of our society.

Threats and scams made include a veil of extortion, a play on our potential greed (the strange caller promises of monetary gain in exchange for your personal data) and auto recorded voices stirring up fear and discontent. Seduction techniques include grooming target recipients to develop an emotional attachment to the caller to eventually extort or make the recipient part with money.

The first premise for responders like us is to quickly realise that there is no level playing field when dealing with such callers. The key response is to realise it is a dangerous game, every word of your voice can be recorded and you can fight back by contacting the entity or company the call is claimed to be made from.

This serious situation started with marketing calls made at dinnertime many years ago, with call staff pressured or induced to make hard to earn commissions at call centres. More people these days do not have a landline at home, so such calls and even more risky ones have now moved to the smart phone, which supposedly accompanies the owner everywhere.

Risky and manipulative calls and contacts are used increasingly by specific political parties to literally drive their message to the masses. These can result in fake news being disseminated by people whom you know share similar strong views with you. Think of WhatsApp. We have to really think more for ourselves and respect our own intelligence, especially when facing a barrage of cleverly modelled news communicated so easily and fast on your hand held daily companion.

This over use of such approaches have turned many people off, until they limit the use of their increasingly expensive phones. 

The inherent expectation held by many that you are always by your phone has to be smashed. Even if that smart phone is on your side, there should be no expectation of users checking their phones all the time. The quality of life is enhanced when I begin to only check my smart phone at limited stages of the day.....unless it is a phone call.

If it is urgent enough, do make a normal phone call or drop by for a face to face meet up.

The easy and instantaneous delivery of videos and images can be a two edged sword. They can result in pleasure and pain - and definitely a running out of storage space on your hand held device.

Weren't we told before that hacks and non-benign viruses can be spread through email attachments, whether in text, picture or video, many years ago? Now WhatsApp offers that risky channel.

It is said the dangers are elevated the more captivating and well made the WhatsApp messages are. Just like being at a snake oil show, we as the audience must increase our caution when we are faced with loud content, less signs of validity and no acknowledgement of source ( usually "forwarded").

Do not be a used party in spreading a wildfire we may regret or really do not want to be part of.

#yongkevthoughts

Partitioning

Partitioning involves moving populations, dividing and conquering human beings.

The governments of the USA, Canada and Australia historically moved indigenous peoples into reservations, in a version of containing and corralling groups, minimising their cultures and not allowing them to fully participate in the fabric of the nation.

This involved not only physical partitioning, but emotional, social and economic alienation.

During World War 2, Americans of Japanese and German ancestry were interned in specially set up camps, after they were forcibly removed from their homes.

The human pysche of nations can go to extremes in times of war, religious divide or when there is competition for resources.

Partitioning was both a strategy and solution deployed when decolonisation swept the world in the mid 20th century. The worst consequences of such political and socio- religious partitioning was experienced in south Asia in 1947, when the Mountbatten Plan gave rise to the modern nations of India and Pakistan - a million people, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, died in the ensuing mass migration between the two newly formed states, due to man made hunger, inter religious fighting and social violence.

The colonial British deployment of divide and rule to manage diverse ethnic groups
within their colonies also arose in Malaya, which lay the seeds for continuing racial discrimination even today in a nation that is overly conscious and emphatic of racial and religious differences. The Afrikaners imposed apartheid in South Africa, which officially ended late last century, but still casts a shadow on inter ethnic relations in today's Rainbow Nation.

In both the Malaysian Federation and the Republic of South Africa, partitioning of hearts and minds to the exclusion of more significant things has not been optimal or beneficial for both societies.

Ireland saw the partitioning of their island due to religious and political factors intervening from London. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA saw the unnatural partitioning of Germany, which recovered and reunited after the fall of Communism in Europe.  

Europe has seen a chequered history of changing boundaries and territorial partitions, think of Yugoslavia before 1990 and new nations arising after 1990 - but Italy was federated on the late 19th century and the EU was created in the late 20th century.

The most intense and yet unresolved conflict resulted from the creation of Israel in 1948 from a partitioned Palestine. The heady mix of entrenched cultures, beliefs and geopolitical interests add to a cauldron of shifting military balances, outside interference and historical alliances and enmity.

Russia remains unpartitioned. Yet Koreans remain separated geographically and politically between North and South. Vietnamese reunited as one nation after the French and American Wars. Thailand was never partitioned and colonised.

Partitioning can mean being reunited, but at what cost?

Social Media Messages and News - Stop First to Think

It is usually in our human nature to share experiences, knowledge, news and information.

One may expect human beings to gather around physically and face each other to do so, but this is no longer necessary.

They come in various forms in our contemporary world. We need not even speak to each other, but transmit almost instantaneously what we share in graphics, videos, pictures, text and more. Such startlingly efficient sharing communication is enabled by code, artificial intelligence, analytical cookies, wi-fi, gateways and monitored channels.

We do so with rising expectations of the quick and easy. The convenience can come with a cost.

We learn to lower our trust levels when messages in whatever format can be tampered with an intent to manipulate.

Racial, religious and political matters are especially vulnerable to be disseminated with an intent to arouse our deep set emotions, stir our beliefs and shake our convictions.

Hence the rise of the risks in whether things shared are authentic.

What are the signals that alert us to a higher possibility of receiving mischevious, false, compromised and tampered messages?

1. Messages featuring provocative negativity or over rated hope on an uneven emphasis.

2. Messages with no ownership and attachments with no trace of a time stamp.

3. Messages with sensational graphics and tone of voice over.

4. Messages with images that cannot be authenticated and so can be put out of context.

5. Messages from unknown and highly dubious websites.

6. Messages that test your inner instinct of being too good to be true, or make you want to authenticate further.

7. Messages from parties known to slip through fake news to you.

8. Messages sent instantaneously to groups of recipients can signal higher risks.

9. Messages from unknown or untraceable parties and yet claims to originate from famous persons.

10. Messages that intensify matters when every one should step back and calm down.

Each of us can just respect and utilise our own level of intelligence to avoid being sucked into furthering the progress of social media messages that cause problems if shared.

Step back from a message received if the first gut feel is bad on a suspicious message.

Always question the agenda of the party who shared the stirring message to you.

You can be the only person to break the chain of such suspicious messages. In the end, it is best not to respond.

Haphazard and Hopeless in Haymarket

Rough edges, sudden bumps, grey blotches.
Unfriendly fences, bored workers, negative vibes.
Paths keep changing, dust in the air and no one cares.
There is a warzone for quiet battles, long delays in completion and accumulating hidden costs.

The character of a once vibrant place has been degraded.
Its denizens wander like zombies, the throbbing soul of the earth beneath scarred.
The promise, the beauty and the delivery as seemingly hopeless now as snow on Sydney streets.

"Haphazard and Hopeless in Haymarket"
Laying new tram tracks, Sydney 2017-2019

When You Next Eat Out

It is lovely when a food outlet has a staff member asking you how the meal went. This has been the practice in many mainstream establishments in the greater Sydney basin, but to observe it being carried out in a Chinese Malaysian culinary outlet recently was most welcome. 

On the other end of the spectrum is the increasing tendency of Chinese restaurants, whether for dinner or yum cha, to ask for tips when a customer pays the bill at the counter. The staff member unabashedly asks the customer in the face. We are not the USA. Customers are willing to pay tips but not when pressured. Tips given are a voluntary token of appreciation for good service, not to burden customers who already pay a higher average cost for dining or lunching in Australia.

Are the tips collected shared amongst all staff members working that day or evening, or are they scooped up by the boss owner?

And then there are now tips asked for in Uber services - are these for the driver with still a percentage cut for the company?

The restaurant trade is not easy to run and there are heavy rental and high labour costs in a market as small as Australia's. Food outlets do provide much appreciated employment and income for youngsters and young adults who are forced to work on a casual and part time basos, to pay for costs of living and study.

Many of the kitchen and wait staff who labour to provide us a satisfactory dining experience are said to not even receive the official minimum pay per hour, not to think of superannuation. 

The bane of many eating and food businesses are high costs of franchise, venue rental, renovation requirements in shopping centres and the seasonal nature of revenue spikes. Although some capital cities have become more vibrant at night, the absence of night shopping (except for one or two evenings a week) does not encourage regular daily dining revenues. 

The operational costs of cafes are set off by getting volume in coffee and quick breakfasts in early mornings. Very few cafes are open after sunset, except in family run businesses in immigrant suburbs.

So called fine dining places do charge more than a quid for creative and unusual dishes, a remarkable setting and with excellenr wait service ( with more than the question of how your meal went). Corporate and government credit cards do go to pay for such establishments, with the ultimate costs borne by business customers, taxpayers and a rising cost of living for all.

#yongkevthoughts