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Friday Fun Thread for September 23, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Give me your best wild scam ideas.

Inspiration: My very elderly grandmother with pretty bad dementia got a wedding invitation from a very distant relation of her second husband. We had no idea who they were, not even vaguely, and she obviously didn't remember because there are days she doesn't remember my brother-in-law. My grandmother decided to send a check for $50 because that's what you do when you're invited to a wedding. My mother ultimately did figure out who they were, but in the meantime I thought to myself: this is a gold mine!

Send wedding invitations with fake first names (no last names) and pictures of nice young white couples to random nursing home residents. Don't send the same one to more than one resident at the same nursing home, mix it up, but there are 15,000 nursing homes with almost two million beds in the USA so you've got options. Not to mention active living retirement homes you could send to! Always set the wedding at a destination that is far and inconvenient, to prevent anyone from RSVPing yes, but most old people won't travel anyway. Old people with memory loss will be quite likely to say "Well, I don't remember them, but what if I do know them and then I stiff them and they're offended? I should just send them $50 to make sure I'm not rude. Didn't my dead friend/business partner/cousin/whatever have a daughter named something like that? Maybe it's her! I should just send $50."

If you got $20 out of 1/15 of the nursing homes in the country five times a year, you'd be hitting six figures.

I've heard about people doing this with extremely wealthy, famous people. Just send an invitation and wait for the assistant to send you a "can't make it but thanks" gift. Dunno what the success rate is, but it's funny

I still like the classic. Pick a number greater than 2 we'll call n, find a large number of people where the number exceeds 2^n, and n binary events that are believed to be impossible to predict. Give one prediction to half the people and the other to the other half. Remove from the pool everyone who gets a wrong prediction.

Repeat with the next event, until you have a population who has received multiple correct predictions. Sell them your next prediction.

I wonder if it could be updated using a website and cookies normally used for ad targeting to differentiate the populations.

this thread is not for anything Culture War related

That means keep CW posts in the CW thread.

Bruh, I was simply responding to the prompt.

Bruh, respond to the prompt without culture warring.

Bruh the definition of culture war is overly broad. You have Hall Monitor-itis. Take a break!

No. It's amusing how many people think "jannie"and "hall monitor" is some sort of sick burn, but that's exactly why we're here, to keep threads from degenerating into shitposting and bad faith trolling. You ignored an explicit and very clear rule, and there is no way you can argue in good faith that what you were referencing wasn't trying to score some CW zinger-points.

You're free to start a discussion with @ZorbaTHut and the other mods to talk about how you think "No Culture Warring in the Friday Fun Thread" should or shouldn't be enforced, but you are not free to ignore the rules and whine when you're pulled up short.

I didn't ignore the rules. I answered the prompt honestly and directly.

I cited the rule you broke. You can argue all you like that you weren't ignoring the rules, but you ignored the rules. "Honestly and directly" does not mean you didn't ignore the rules. You are free to continue ignoring the rules and insisting you didn't ignore the rules, but if you persist in ignoring the rules, predictable consequences will follow.

More comments

Prostitution masqueraded as amateur porn studio. Sex with clients is filmed, no face is shown, and the video sold at high cost on some website. Client pays money to studio to provide the filming and space, but has ownership over video. The result is just prostitution, but completely legal, and sufficiently anonymous. You wouldn’t be able to regulate this without regulating the entire amateur porn industry.

Marc Randazza does a bunch of first amendment lawyering, including for porn companies, and says this is a dumb scheme that would fail really fast.

This would be awfully risky, especially for the "studio". Neither courts nor juries are quite that stupid.

tbh I'm fine with the requirement for registration and regular tests if it's not "amateur" stuff.