Encounter with scammers

So I wanted to buy some gloves. I Googled around for a while looking for a good price on warm leather gloves and found these—good customer reviews, and only $9 plus shipping. I was a little confused as to why an outfit called "Dr. Leonard's Online Healthcare Catalog" was selling winter gloves, but, you know, lots of retailers eventually branch out from their original niches. And I was kind of nonplussed by the fact that they misspelled "Thinsulate™"—was it a typo, or a cheap knockoff that's actually called "Thinsualte"? But at $9—a quarter of the price of other comparable-seeming gloves I could find—I figured it was worth a shot. The gloves arrived pretty quickly, are labeled as (correctly spelled) "Thinsulate", and quite comfortable and warm; I couldn't be happier with them.

This past Friday I learned how Dr. Leonard's Online Healthcare Catalog manages to make money by selling $40 gloves for $9: ( they're scammers! )

The gloves are pretty great, though!

Helping older Pennsylvanians

The Pennsylvania Lottery's slogan is "helping older Pennsylvanians every day"—most of the money the state makes off the Lottery goes toward senior centers, Medicare, and other state programs that benefit people over 65. This is the focus of a lot of the ads for the Lottery.

I find this a refreshingly honest and decent way of framing a state lottery. Lotteries are often described as "a tax on people who are bad at math", and advertising that frames it as "you could win big!" is sort of unethically playing into that aspect of the lottery, since the expected value of a lottery ticket is usually way under 50 cents on the dollar. But advertising it in terms of "here's what we do with the money you spend" is basically making it into a subspecies of Charity Raffle, which seems ethically unobjectionable—instead of advertising it in terms of "you could win big!" it's advertised in terms of "you could donate money to a cause you care about." So... well done on that, Pennsylvania Lottery.

And they've also stopped making ads with that obnoxious puppet marmot. So... doubly well done, I guess.