Granny Fraud and Facebook

Mrs. Buce reports that her excer-swim classs this morning was all agog about "Granny Fraud," as in "hello Granny, please send $10,000 and please don't tell Mom and Dad"--the call coming, of course, not from the child, but from some rapacious lizard in a sunlit piazza halfway round the world.   The consensus seems to be that it's goin' round: everybody in the pool seemed to know somebody who (or whose sister, or cousin, or girl-the-nephew-is-engaged-to's brother) has fallen victim to this crude and venerable scam.*  The unanimous consensus: it's Facebook.

Is there a rash of Granny fraud?  Possibly.  I get 71 Google hits, which I guess is not quite zero in Google numbers, but it is pretty close to vanishingly small.  And not all of them are on point; at least one seemed to address granny defrauding Medicare, and at least one, the  fraud of (alleged) President Steve Dunham Barack Obama's granny in concealing the (alleged?) President's true parentage.**  Of course not every report will use the snappy monicker.

But if there is an epidemic of granny fraud, is the internet, and particularly Facebook, to blame?  Possibly, but how?  I have 100-odd Facebook friends; I can't think of any whose profile says "here is the name of my Granny, and here is her phone number."  What, exactly, does Facebook offer a troller not offered by conventional sources?  I think the range of possibilities includes these:

1) There's an epidemic of granny fraud.
2) It is caused by Facebook.
3) There's an epidemic of people who see an event they don't like and blame it on a technology they don't understand.
4) 1) and 2)
5) 1) and 3)
6) Other

I guess 3) can stand alone, but not 2). Are there other possibilities?
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*Actually, Mr. and Mrs. Buce do know a recent victim: we could give you particulars if we were so disposed, which we are not.

**Sarcasm.  But at the risk of getting sidetracked, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he did pass as "Steve Dunham" in some company, and some point in his life.   This fact does not, in my mind, rise to the dignity of a Constitutional infirmity.  

There'll Be an App for That

Garance Franke-Ruta writes (in The Atlantic):

Heck, after Weiner, I'll bet more men take up the practice of sending photos to women than are scared off by his example. 

Very likely, with the qualifier that the practice surely isn't all that new.  What I hear, it was fairly common back in a simpler time for the knuckle-dusters down at the watering hole to snap Polaroids of their tackle and ship them off to selected friends--perhaps as a guessing game, with valuable prizes (to my everlasting sorrow, I was never invited to participate).  Chances are the recipients were the same ones who livened up the office Christmas party by Xeroxing their butts.

Note that I succeeded in getting two brand names into the previous paragraph, tagging this as a kind of technology story.  Which suggests that somebody, somewhere, even now as we speak, is trying to figure out a way to monetize The Anthony and repackage (heh!) it as--as what?  A computer game?  An alternate reality?  An aggegator?   Yes, an aggregator sounds like just the thing.  Think about it.  No, don't bother, someone is doing that for you.

Up anf Out in the Silicon Valley

Great piece in Tech Crunch tells you what you perhaps already suspected about the Silicon Valley--this is no country for old men:

Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.

And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000?  Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”.  As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

Link, and I see that as of this writing, there are 256 comments, so it seems to have struck a nerve.  But I think you can perhaps broaden and deepen here.  Just in general, if I hire an old guy, I hire a guy with his mind fully formed and perhaps also with a web of distractions.  If I hire a kid, he is more gullible and malleable, more willing to pull all nighters not merely because he has the stamina but because he doesn't really have anything else in particular to do.   An older guy is just instinctively going to say "I'll be the judge of that," and as the boss, who wants all that judging?