As the first real heat wave breaks over the Cat Sanctuary...
So many days I looked at the kitten Dora and thought "She's not going to live. Heavy-duty medication for internal parasites might help her but she's not going to grow big enough to take it."
So many days, after that sort of morning, Dora was still bubbling and squeaking and bouncing about with big brother Diego at the end of the day. There was something special about those two. All healthy kittens just like to play with anything and anybody, but Diego seemed to notice that as the biggest kitten in the litter he was the one the smallest kitten trailed after, raced, chased, tried to copy, tried to out-wrestle. He seemed to be careful about playing with Dora. If their other brothers wanted to play more roughly than he did, he'd show them the rough stuff. Dora would stay in a game--chasing a stick, e.g.--up to the limit of her strength. Sometimes she walked away from a game with me. I never saw her walk away from a game with Diego.
So on Saturday morning, when Dora woke up bright and early, bounced out of her box in the office without waiting to be carried, and rushed out to do her part to keep her aunt Silver's lactation cycle going, I expected she'd rush up with the three tomkittens when the kibble was put out for breakfast. Right?
Wrong.
The Professional Bad Neighbor drove up and sprayed poison somewhere. Sheer spite; he has to know by now that John Hinckley might have a better chance of getting a real estate deal around here than he would. I sneezed for a few minutes. When the time came to go out and dispense kibble, the tomkittens' eyes were watery, the mother cat Pastel looked bleary-eyed too, and Dora was nowhere to be found. I called her, specifically. Dora didn't always actually come when called but she did always notice being called. But surely she wanted breakfast? I called her again, and Serena, my non-demonstrative cat, came out and jumped onto my shoulder and purred and licked me. Then she jumped onto my knees and purred and cuddled. She even chomped my hand a few times in the friendly way she did when she was the office kitten, before she grew up and decided chomping humans was not a game worth playing.
She knew.
There are still a few Vespulas on the porch. The trouble with squirting alcohol and Listerine, instead of spraying poison, is that although you can saturate fungi with Listerine you have to kill insects by ones. There never were many on the porch and, when I see that they no longer even post guards around what they were starting to make a nest, I keep hoping that they've decided to move somewhere else. Even for wasps the Vespulas seem stubborn and stupid, though. I keep squirting and thinking that, although they seem to have been introduced to our ecosystem at the same time as two other unwanted species that might have moved in from other parts of the neighborhood, at least they do seem to be making a dent in the mosquito population.
What has this to do with Yougov? Hopefully I say, nothing at all. It is to be hoped that the things that made last week unpleasant are separate and discrete inconveniences. But it can be hard to tell. It remains to be learned whether the Bad Neighbor's pranks are just free-floating malice--he was one nasty little brat of a boy who's grown up to be a nasty brat of an old man--or are associated with any other haters' ill will toward me personally.
I've often posted about Yougov, the survey site. Always before I've posted good things. Good things can be used for bad purposes.
Yougov has a very good reputation--in the United States, anyway. (I've read that some of its foreign branches had bad reputations.) They don't send out spam or sell your address to spammers. They pay what and when they say they'll pay for the time you spend taking surveys. They deliver good, representative cross-sections for market surveys, product (including celebrity-image-as-product) ratings, and opinion polls.
An election year naturally generates lots of opinion polls.
This year I've noticed a problem with the election-related polls. "To verify that you are a registered US voter," the survey authors whine, "what is the address where you are registered to vote?" Why are no warning bells going off in Yougov's office? They don't need to verify that people are registered voters. They want to know where people are registered to vote in order to manipulate election results. This can be done by legitimate means, like selecting campaign ads, press releases, and news broadcasts to appeal to the interests of voters in different districts. Or it can be done by less ethical means, like mailing out disinformation about where and how to vote, or sabotaging digital voting machines...or physically interfering with people's being able to vote.
I think Yougov needs a policy requiring that only office, school, post office or other mail drop addresses should ever be allowed on surveys. If people don't have a place to receive mail that is far from where they live, they should program their computers to remove anything that's not recognized as a workplace or post office address from the system, perhaps replacing it with a line like "Never type anyone's home address into a computer." That's a basic common-sense precaution, like "Roll up windows, lock doors, and find another place to leave children or pets, when you step out of the car."
And they need one reminding their clients: "Any attempt to identify individual voters, such as asking even for a post office address that might be associated with voter registration information, will be reported to the police as evidence of possible involvement in election tampering and/or voter harassment."
("No such!" a client will wail. Truthfully or truthily. "All we want to do is talk to the swing voters and make sure they know what Our Candidate has done about the issues A, B, C, and D..." There used to be a place to do that in a perfectly legitimate, ethical, even mutually enjoyable way. Twitter used to be its name...before censorship. We badly need uncensored social media where people can chat and debate about whatever interests them, on their own time, in real time. Meanwhile, the crucial thing you must not do, if you want to communicate with people, is try to get information about them before you have given them--and verified that they were interested in having--the same information about you.)
Following the attempt to murder a campaigning candidate last week, I think Yougov needs to tighten the restrictions on questions that can be asked on election-related surveys. No, you don't need to know whether surveys are being taken by registered voters. Deal with it. The ones being taken by children are at least being taken by people who talk to voters. It is better to work with information that might be provided by children than it is to have information that might be used by someone who wanted to murder a candidate or his supporters.
"But it can only hurt 'conservatives' if mature property owners, who are presumably all 'conservative,' are allowing surveys to be filled in by their illegal Mexican housekeepers, who..."
Basta ya! In the first place I do not have a housekeeper, Mexican or otherwise, but if I did she would be legally authorized to work in the United States. And she would probably be a radical Christian, and we'd probably have talked about the religious reasons to support some causes the "conservatives" try to claim, and some the "liberals" do. And whether she was a legal temporary resident, as it might be a student, or a natural-born citizen of Virginia, I'd encourage her to use or acquire a legal right to vote. It's a vicious and outdated stereotype that anybody in any demographic group intentionally depends on cheap illegal foreign labor. Most of the mature property owners I know don't hire housekeepers until we acquire a disability that qualifies for a pension. Then they hire US taxpayers with, if anything, a preference for young relatives of people who want to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland and say the federal government shouldn't do pensions. Or else the really pathetic ones prefer to hire people who look like the types they used to want to date.
In any case a criterion for any housekeeper I hire is that she must be able to explain why raising the minimum wage is likely to hurt her more than me. She's free to vote for whichever presidential candidate she thinks is most likely to avoid war, no questions asked, but she needs to be immunized to that specific political lie.
Anyway, back in June I was "selected for a survey" purportedly about how people read and react to different kinds of tweets on Twitter.The survey claimed to need access to my Twitter account to assemble a selection of "fake tweets," several of which I recognized as old tweets, from people I follow or used to follow.
If I'd had my wits about me I would have said no, right there, because that amounted to authorizing a stranger to impersonate me. For all I know the person may be a scammer and may be using my Twitter identity to ask my Tweeps for money. Some poor idjit, undoubtedly the son of one of the legendary Nigerian scammers though I don't know whether he's still in Nigeria, has been using the name "Elon Musk" to try to ask me for money. I should probably report him but he is such a laugh...
But at the time I thought, well, none of us use Twitter much any more anyway....
So this survey proceeded to show me old tweets from individuals I followed for more than an hour. Since the contents of most of these tweets were clearly news stories from bygone months or years, and the survey said that whatever respondents "liked" or "retweeted" would show up on our Twitter pages, I made sure to pick only pictures, jokes, or quotes that hadn't gone out of date. People who followed me on Twitter used to know they could expect to see pretty flower pictures, no matter whose flowers or when they had bloomed.
Then the survey switched to a selection of old tweets from corporations I used to follow. Aye, there's the rub. The corporate accounts I followed were cut down, first, a few years ago, to newspapers and the BBC. Then after the "Trusted News Initiative" I cut out them, too. So the survey was picking old news stories from newspapers. Oy. It might have taken all night for newspaper accounts to have posted a half-dozen tweets that hadn't gone out of date. Newspapers do occasionally post an evergreen article about "How to Clean Behind the Refrigerator to Keep the Refrigerator Working Longer" or "Bird Species That Are Occasional Visitors to Local Parks," but I kept scrolling past tweet after tweet about stories that were no longer news. "Where to View the Solar Eclipse," for pity's sake. I might have retweeted that if the system had allowed me to type in a comment like "The story's old but the picture's still cool," but it didn't.
I started scrolling down whole screens full of tweets I was not about to retweet. There had to be an end somewhere. I started taking the survey at nine or ten o'clock and it was well past midnight when I finally pulled up something other than unusable tweets about no-longer-news stories. It was a sarcastic demand that I prove I was still human. In all that time I suppose some people might have been able to program a bot to scroll through the fake tweets for them.
Then the survey closed. Say whaaat? Yougov surveys are worth a predetermined number of points that add up toward giftcards or, if you do online banking, deposits into banks. This was supposed to have been the one that paid for my next yarn shopping spree/ It hadn't even added the points to my account!
I sent Yougov a strongly worded e-mail, that night, and got on with my life. I received no reply from a human at Yougov. Over the next two or three weeks I took a few more surveys and clicked through a few screens to request a giftcard. The system was set up to encourage people to request digital e-cards. I don't buy things online, so I sent them another e-mail requesting that they just put the card in the mail as they've always done before, and mentioning that this would be a good time to add a substantial payment for the bogus survey.
That got a human reply. "What survey was that? When?"
Since I'd e-mailed Yougov from within their system I didn't even have the copy of the e-mail I sent them. More to the point, at midday today, was that it had taken from 7 a.m. to midday for their e-mail to open because my Internet connection seems about two-thirds dead. It has ever since that storm, a week ago last Friday. By last Friday I'd checked the company web site for an explanation of why it was taking them so long to restore full connectivity. The company site gave no indication that they were aware of a problem. Whole towns lost connection for a day or two after the storm, which was understandable, but apparently during the week everyone else's connection had been restores except mine.
Mine is still failing to open the regular Windows "network & internet access" screen, just flashing a condescending little warble about how the company "tested and verified that you are able to access some web sites." Some web sites. Right. Enough for the copy editing job, which is what I've been doing with most of my online time during the past week, but not enough for serious research, not enough for listening to the "vlogs" of various blind bloggers on my list, not enough to get e-mails open within one hour...
And so it inevitably occurred to me that there might be a reason for this.
I can think of more probable reasons. I can think of trees with limbs that I've been telling company employees they needed to prune for many years. The first limb I'd cut, just to test this theory, if I were a young man with a truck equipped with a lift and provisioned with saws and suchlike, is on a walnut tree just below the house, above the road, easy to reach from a lift mounted on a truck and just about impossible to reach from the ground. Then I would follow the line and prune the others.
I can think of a Professional Bad Neighbor who may or may not have bothered wiretapping either the old telephone line or the Internet connection line, but certainly had both means and motives. I've reported the sounds of suspected trespassing to the police before.
But until one of those possibilities is confirmed, and I emphasize that I hope it's just a tree limb or two that the young men can get rid of in an hour or two, I can't rule out the possibility that someone who wasted so much of my time worming about in my Twitter account might have been hostile enough to have traced the Internet connection to the house, also. For the purpose of interfering with my vote.
I like Yougov. I've liked Yougov for a long time. I don't like thinking that they're to blame for anything worse than attracting boring surveys. (:Which of these brands have you ever bought?" "None of them. I don't buy that kind of thing. I don't hang out with people who do." "Which of these brands do you have a good impression of?" "Aaarrrggghhh." The kind of thing that must be expected if you eke out an Internet writer's pathetic income by taking surveys online.)
I still think Yougov need to be reminded of the potential danger to them in allowing clients to snoop into the identities, locations, ages, of survey respondents. I want them to think long and hard about the possibility that they've allowed people with criminal intentions to find out where I live, and then I want them to redesign their system so that, if a client tries to sneak in a question like "What is your date of birth?" in a survey, the computer flashes red for thirty seconds and then displays a message like "You may not attempt to identify individuals taking these surveys. You are allowed to ask in which decade respondents were born."
Or they could simply say, "For any question you ask the respondent, the respondent is entitled to a verified answer to that question by you. So, if you ask for anyone's address, your real name and home address must be displayed in full-sized type above the quesdtion." That tends to motivate people to withdraw any inappropriate questions, online, in a hurry.
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